How We Should Live

Let’s begin with a thought experiment.

Suppose you are 15 years old and you ask a mentor, your mother, a teacher, a coach, what you ought to do with your life, where you ought to live, what skills you should learn, what ideas you should believe. 

No. That’s too farfetched, even for a thought experiment, isn’t it?

Well then, suppose you are a precocious 15-year old who actually gives a damn, for completely arbitrary and unknowable reasons (insert other handwavy thought experiment justifications here), what a mentor, teacher, mother or coach has to say. Suppose you ask those advisors what you should do with your life.

One of two things is likely to happen next. Either your mentor, mother, teacher or coach will say to you, “you have your whole life ahead of you, you could do anything, live anywhere, learn anything, believe anything.” 

Or they will tell you some mixture of what they think is best to do in the world and what they think might be best for you. Your mother will remind you of how important family is, your teacher will encourage you to reach for a good college, your mentor might recommend joining the Rotary (again, we’re stretching belief here. What 15 year old has a mentor?), and a coach will give you outdated advice on how to do strength and conditioning. Teachers prefer to be surpassed by students, mothers want better for their children than they have, coaches want better athletes than they are themselves, and mentors (hopefully) want mentees who flourish and thrive. 

But what makes either of these avenues of advice any good?

What exactly should you want? Should you want to travel the world? Or should you want to be a homebody?

And should you listen to the advice of your advisors? Would other advisors give other advice? How can you tell whether the advice is any good?

By what means do we assess how we should live?

This is the puzzle of what makes a certain avenue of life worth living. In this series of short essays, I’m going to explore the nature of this problem in two modes. The first is whimsically wandering through the landscape, smelling the flowers, noticing oddities about meaning and ethics and goal setting. This mode is driven by pure curiosity, the mode of the (gauche and problematic) British botanist seeing the Amazon rainforest for the first time. We’re here to draw what we find, name it with little regard for its local name, and try our best to describe what it is like to be in foreign territory. In the second mode, I will hunt this puzzle down in an alley,  beat it up and mug it for everything it's worth. This puzzle has gotten away with too much, been unexamined too long, and by the gods, I’m going to make it pay. The second mode demands rigor, it demands a mechanistic understanding of how we decide on the oughts of our lives. 

If this project is a success, this dualistic methodology should get me, and anyone else following along, to a point where we have a much clearer idea about how we should think about our lives and advise others on their lives. It should turn us into expert advisors and skeptical advice-takers. It might even clear away the fog, the puke, and the sludge that accumulates around big decisions. If we don’t know our purpose now, we will have the means to discover it. If we do know our purpose, we will have the means to sharpen it. That’s the promise of the project and I sincerely hope we can find our way through.

So then, let’s pick up our diaries, our pith helmets, our brass knuckles and leather jackets and see what we can find.