25-Year Friends

An unforgettable post by Mark Pilgrim about loss, and what it means to really be friends with someone:

A 25-year friend is not just “a friend for 25 years.” It’s not the passage of time that matters as much as the “of course”-ness of it all. Of course I want to hear about your breakup. Of course you can come over anytime. Of course I’ll help you move. Of course you’ll be my best man, and I yours. Of course we’ll be each other’s godfathers. Of course you’ll “lend” me some money when I hit hard times. 25 years of “of course.”

Letter III in Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, a book I’ve been talking about a lot, is about that very thing:

But if you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.

Also:

Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself.

How many people do you really have like this in your life that aren’t related to you by blood? One? Two? Think about how many friends you have with whom you don’t actually have an According-to-Hoyle friendship, then, perhaps, reconsider how you use that word.⌘

The Terrible Master

In retrospect, it’s funny that I linked to the David Foster Wallace “This is Water” speech the other day because I was absolutely certain, at the time, about which parts of it were immediately applicable to my own life and which parts weren’t. I’d independently and very recently come to terms with the discipline involved in not letting the banal, petty frustrations of day-to-day existence become a fixation, but I completely glossed over the part that explains 95% of my (admittedly first world) problems: I have a tendency to completely over-intellectualize (and, in doing so, sabotage) everything I care deeply about. Conversely, I tend to succeed with flying colors when doing things I care very little about but do anyway out of obligation.

Let me be clear: this is a shitty, frustrating mindset, one that is both unconscious and automatic, and one that cannot continue if I’d like to feel neither shitty nor frustrated. It prevents me from making art that I care about, contributing to discourse (both public and private), and feeling completely fulfilled when I go to sleep at night. It has ruined relationships, stopped other relationships from blossoming, and invited endless amounts of undue (first world) stress into what has otherwise been a privileged (relatively speaking) and drama-free existence.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls this mindset “The Resistance.” He wasn’t the first to articulate this idea, but he was arguably the best, and Internet thought leaders like Merlin Mann and Seth Godin have since run with the baton, discussing at length the ways The Resistance serves to keep us alive but prevents us from ever feeling alive.

The Resistance is frequently referred to as the Lizard Brain, which itself is a reference to an actual physical part of the brain near the brain stem that we share in common with all other animals, one that is chiefly concerned with survival. Godin puts it best when describing the Lizard Brain’s tertiary concerns: “I’m hungry. I’m horny. Get me out of here.” In other words, it doesn’t give two shits about the speech you have to give or that article you have to write; If anything, it turns these otherwise mundane tasks into frightening exercises of life and death importance. Anything The Lizard Brain sees as a threat to your ability to have sex and make copies of yourself sets off Drudge Report sirens. Unfortunately enough for you, that’s most things that don’t involve lying under a table in fetal position.

That, and not attention to detail, is the real reason I spent a half hour on the first paragraph on this post and nearly gave up instead of getting on with it and coming back later; It’s why I shut down a marginally successful music website back in 2006 despite the fact that it had only brought me good things; It’s why the archives of this site (from 2009) were taken offline. The Lizard Brain wants me to believe that the stakes of making things for 37 other people to read are too high, when in reality, there are no stakes.

There’s a Ludwig Mies van der Roh quote that made the Internet rounds a while back that goes, “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” To that end, the Lizard Brain responds, “Bullshit, van der Roh. You’d better be both original and good if you ever want to see your family again. Everyone’s going to laugh at you, and you are going to die.” It’s a voice as real and as vivid as the heart beating in my chest.

The Lizard Brain is indeed a Terrible Master, but there’s good news: It can be defeated, just like the one described in Wallace’s speech. To do so, you must first start at the very beginning and recognize that it exists.

This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording

The incredible Audiobook version of the late author’s now canonical 2005 Kenyon College Commencement speech. Humane, philosophical, and full of wisdom.

(If you don’t want to spend $4, the text is now copywritten and out of the public domain, but Google is your friend here.)⌘

Requisite Social Media Something Something Post

If you’d like to subscribe to The Elements of Lifestyle, a blog about coming to terms with what it means to be an adult, the two most direct options are the feed and the  e-mail list. Either option will deliver the latest articles and links to your inbox of choice.

You can also become a fan on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. Both options will alert you to the latest articles, but following me on Twitter comes with added wordplay and dick jokes, which is kind of like a bonus.

That’s all for now. As always, if you’d like to contact me directly my e-mail address is ryan@elementsoflifestyle.com. I don’t allow comments here—call it a “feature”—so if you’d like to talk about something I’ve written, that’s probably your best bet.

(I promise this is the first and last time I’m going to do this.)

On Escaping a Purgatory of Your Own Making

The fallacy of self-imposed happiness milestones

“I’ll be happy if I’m at such and such a place in my life by the time I’m 30, provided I’ve had X number of memorable experiences.”

How many times have you heard a friend say that? And how many times have you said that? That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on oneself. For as much as it would be nice to travel, have your work life figured out, and be cranking out kids by the time you’re of a certain age, what alternative do you leave yourself if you fail except for misery?

I heard a friend say as much the other day, and it became clear that what she needed was not a lifetime of “experience” or the clairvoyance enough to know how the rest of her life would unfold—what she needed was a philosophy.

Your quarter-life crisis can become an adulthood Bermuda Triangle if you let it. If you gaze at your own navel long enough, chances are you’ll miss just how special and hopelessly improbable it is just to exist at all, how special it is to have friends and family that actively tolerate you and to live in a country that affords people a genuine opportunity to make of their lives what they will.

Our Founding Fathers enumerated a handful of rights that they sought to protect, among them: the right to pursue happiness. But let’s be real: happiness is not the end goal. It’s the game. If you’re not happy right now, you’re doing it wrong, and that’s on you.

From Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, pp. 59:

The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others. Whoever has said “I have lived” receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning.

Negative Visualization

I won something recently—a contest I had entered at the behest of my friends in February or March and forgotten about until last Friday. Now, what I won is not of particularly great importance, other than to say that it was neither life-changing nor insignificant.1 It was important enough for me to tell my friends about, at any rate, and for a two or three day stretch this weekend they were more excited about it than I was.

On Friday, someone asked why I wasn’t more excited to have tentatively won a contest, and I replied, in so many words, that it was because I had only tentatively won a contest. Though it wasn’t evident in the fine print, recent circumstances in my life may have precluded me from winning (or so I figured) because I had essentially already acquired by myself what I was to have won. I would find out for sure on Monday, and until then, I wasn’t going to allow myself get too excited one way or another.

I knew that at best, winning the contest had the power to turn this into a pretty good year. At worst, being disqualified would have no measurable impact on my life whatsoever. (Like I’d mentioned, this was something that was not even on my radar until the moment I was told I’d won.) Either way, it was going an anecdote for the rest of my life—I never win contests, let alone enter them—and I’d be happy about it on Monday, if happiness were indeed warranted.

Negative visualization is a Stoic technique meant to temper negative emotions, or, put differently: the process of asking yourself, “What’s the worst that can happen?” When you consider how something might make you feel in a worst case scenario, you can determine in advance if that feeling is at all rational or productive. Often times you’ll find, like I did, that the cost of something not working out in your favor is exactly zero: you’ll get to live the same happy life you were living before. Other times, you’ll become all the more appreciative of everything you have right now.

This was the first time in my life that I applied negative visualization without proactively telling myself to do so, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t almost as excited about that as I was the whole “winning the contest” thing. By coming to terms with the outcome before it was known, disappointment was no longer in the realm of possibility. Raising a pretentious beer in celebration, however, remained totally viable—after all, I had won a freaking contest.

  1. Let’s just say it was significant enough to complicate my tax return. ↩

Making Mountains Look Like Clichés

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in Letters from a Stoic, pp. 75-76:

A change of character, not a change of air, is what you need. Though you cross the boundless ocean, though, to use the words of our poet Virgil, “Lands and towns are left astern, whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings.” Here is what Socrates said to someone who was making the same complaint: “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.” How can novelty of surroundings abroad and becoming acquainted with foreign scenes or cities be of any help? All that dashing about turns out to be quite futile. And if you want to know why all this running away cannot help you, the answer is simply this: you are running away in your own company. You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you.

This passage stood out to me for a couple of reasons:

  1. Supposing for a moment that its wording were more informal, is there any doubt that the above advice could have been written today? Indeed, a letter between friends1 written 2000 years ago has shown us that life in ancient Rome seems eerily familiar to that of today; the same problems that exist today existed then.
  2. The same problems that exist today existed then.

That last point is huge. For as much as it validates that our worries are indeed real, it also makes them smaller in a way: it demonstrates that everyone shares them regardless of time or place, a realization that can both empower us and serve to considerably deflate our anxieties. All of a sudden, things that used to seem like mountains look more like molehills.

This sort of personal growth is something typically reserved for post-mortem analysis after something hasn’t gone to plan. Take, for instance, your first job out of college. When you’re young and green, anyone with the slightest bit of experience can seem like a genius, and that can be downright imposing. Six months later, when you find yourself feeling more competent than 80% of your co-workers, you can’t help but look back and laugh, “I lost sleep over these people?” If only you’d had the wherewithal to consider that everyone feels the same way starting out, you might have channeled that energy into doing something far more productive than worrying.

Indeed, when you gain the ability to diffuse these situations before they happen, nothing makes you feel like more of a powerhouse adult. That’s a Big Move, to be sure, but let’s be real: it’s damn hard to do. First, you’ve got to apply the necessary amount of practice and discipline. You’ve got to keep failing until you don’t.

The real reason I cited that passage is because I happened to stumble across it at the exact moment that I needed to read it the most.

When I’m upset with myself for one reason or another but can’t quite put my finger on it, I’ve been known to do drastic things. Typically, this involves me buying myself a new gadget, but at times it’s taken on far less benign forms: I’ve broken up with past loves over this sort of thing; I’ve even moved apartments. I’ve both figuratively and literally run away from my problems, and my problems have followed me wherever I’ve gone. This is something that my friends have noticed, no doubt, but it’s something that I had not stopped to consider until very recently, when I was going through just such a rut.

The thing is, my problems, when I stop to actually consider them, seem pretty insignificant. And that just makes me feel like a jackass.

You might be wondering, then: “Hey Ryan, why are you offering advice when you yourself seem to suck so badly at life?”

That’s easy: You suck at life, too. Everyone does. As you get older, you start to realize that everyone is a failure in their own spectacular, wholly original sort of way. But I have great news: not only does this realization turn you into a more compassionate human being, Jesus Christ does it really take the edge off of things.

From Letters from a Stoic, p. 72:

“SO you’re giving me advice, are you?” you say. “Have you already given yourself advice, then? Have you already put yourself straight? Is that how you come to have time for reforming other people?” No, I’m not so shameless as to set about treating people when I’m sick myself. I’m talking to you as if I were lying in the same hospital ward, about the illness we’re both suffering from, and passing on some remedies.

  1. Some would argue that Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic is more than just a collection of “letters to a friend.” Written during a prolific period near the end of his life after retiring from public service, Seneca, knowing his days were numbered, spent many of his waking hours putting his thoughts to paper, hoping they’d “be of use to future generations.” (p. 18) While this sort of self-awareness informs his writing, it stops far short of tarnishing it with ego, in part because his advice has proven to be so utterly timeless. ↩

Start with The Why

When interviewing for a new job, chances are you’ll be asked a series of questions that you haven’t had to consider since the last time you interviewed for a new job; you might even be asked something that you haven’t had to think about since college.

If your brain’s not in interview mode, you might struggle at first to arrive at concise answers and instead ramble on for a bit about your experience as a way of at least showing the interviewer that you understand what she was asking and that you’re not full of shit.

This is The How, and people don’t care so much about The How. They know what you’ve done because they’ve seen your résumé. Hell, it’s why they brought you in for an interview in the first place.

The How still matters, but interviewers want to see that you know The Why first, as in why the question matters and what the question means. Start with The Why, and save The How for the end of your answer.

If someone asked you why a frying pan has vertical edges, you wouldn’t explain to them that you made eggs for breakfast. You’d start by saying that its shape increases the surface area available for frying and keeps oil in the pan. If there’s still time after that, feel free to talk about the awesome breakfast that you had.

B.E. A.G.G.R.E.S.S.I.V.E.

Dave Holmes:

Pretend you’re giving it all up and going back to school in a year. Act like you have one year to make it work before you give up and try something else. What haven’t you done? Where aren’t you being aggressive enough? Go do it and embarrass yourself with your pushiness—after all, you’ll be doing something else in a year anyway, so who cares what people think? Push until you feel uncomfortable, and then double it.

Evergreen career advice for anyone wanting to leapfrog corporate bureaucracy—or simply get ahead—or anyone unafraid of being called arrogant.⌘