Category Archives: Modernization

A Minimalist Life

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I’m easily distracted. In church on Sunday, I couldn’t help but think about minimalism. As one part of “Scout Sunday” the pastor asked past and present scouts to recite the scouts’ values. They did okay until about the ninth value. Twelve?! That’s about nine too many. And when I should have been concentrating on the sermon, I was thinking about this quote from a minimalist Londoner who just built a home.

People do comment on our tidiness, but I find it fascinating that they find it fascinating. If you have a thing of beauty, like a piece of architecture, and then you fill it up with things, then you somehow diminish it and you cannot really appreciate the space you live in. We have exposed the things we really love, like the photography and the books.

One group unnecessarily complicating things, one homeowner purposely and thoughtfully stripping things down to their bare minimum.

People associate minimalism with life simplifying projects, whether recycling old clothes, shredding unnecessary office papers, or decluttering a garage, but it can be a helpful organizing principle for all of one’s life.

Minimalism is about embracing limits that others mostly ignore. The starting point is the ultimate limit, one’s mortality. Minimalists are more mindful than most that their time is limited; as a result, they tend to be more interested in the quality of their life experiences than accumulating lots of money and possessions.

Minimalists believe stripping things down is liberating—whether electronic data, personal commitments, and friendships. Consider each.

Electronic minimalism. This one’s tough because digital clutter can be neatly contained within a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. If you’re like one of my offspring, your desktop may be proof of that. To practice electronic minimalism, create folders for loose documents, and use folders within folders. But first, delete as many unnecessary, out-of-date documents, bookmarks, and email messages as possible. I DIG that electronic wadding up and shredding of paper sound my MacBook Pro makes whenever I empty the trash. Like a Pavlov dog, I’m motivated to trash things just to hear the sound.

“Zero email inbox” is a futile, overly perfectionist goal, but if you typically have more than 20-40 messages in your inbox, delete more often and create and use more folders. Same with website bookmarks. Delete those you haven’t used in a long time and put the the remaining ones into folders. This makes it easier to avoid mindless web surfing. Same with applications. Some people have over a hundred apps. I find that odd because the fewer you use, the easier it is to quickly and easily access them. Maybe some mega app users would say they use folders and don’t have a problem, but most people probably use 10% of their apps 90% of the time. Why not just remove most of the 90%?

Electronic minimalism is based on the premise that fewer docs, email messages, website bookmarks, and applications makes it easier to find things, get one’s work done, and then enjoy life off-line.

Scheduling minimalism. As an introvert, and often to the GalPal’s regret, this one comes relatively easily for me. This is the countercultural practice of not committing to many activities—whether one’s own, or a partner’s, or one’s children’s. It’s saying to oneself, “I’d like to attend that event, participate in that weekly activity, or go on that trip, but I’m okay missing out on that fun because the busyness trade-off isn’t worth it.” Obviously, “too busy” is a subjective concept. The key is to know your particular physical and social limits and to intentionally err on the side of underscheduling.

Interpersonal minimalism. This is the related, countercultural practice of purposely focusing on a limited number of close friendships. I’ve written about the quality versus quantity of friendships conundrum before here. Young people’s embrace of social media has made this type of minimalism especially rare. Many high school and college aged young adults have a thousand plus Facebook “friends”. Interpersonal minimalism means focusing most of your friendship activity on people who you interact with face-to-face on a weekly basis.

Stripping down activities creates momentum which leads to additional ideas for simplifying not just one’s garage, but one’s life. In what other aspects of your life has less proven more?

[My favorite book on minimalism—Francine Jay’s The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide]

January 2013 Awards

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Tweet of the month. “Of course I’d be willing to let the Postal Service continue to dope if it would speed up mail delivery.” Nikolas Kristof

Sports stat of the month. Bench Points—Clips 41.7, Lakes 26.5. Bench Rebounds— Clips 20.4, Lakes 13.4. Bench Assists—Clips 8.7, Lakes 5.4. Bench Steals—Clips 3.8, Lakes, 2.0. Bench Blocks—Clips 3.6, Lakes 1.1.

Unanswered question of the month. Did Beyonce lip sync her National Anthem performance?

Sports loose-end of the month. The likelihood that the Sacramento Kings will move 619 miles north before the start of next season.

Bush league sports move of the month. Azarenka’s “injury” timeout against Sloane Stephens in their Australian Open semifinal match.

Worst losses of the month. Gold—Seahawks 28-Falcons 30. Silver—Butler 64-GonZAGa 63.

Gracious loser of the month. Sloane Stephens.

Best basketball quote of the month. “If you have to bounce the ball three times and flip it and twist your arm before a free-throw, it probably means you can’t shoot ’em. Wynton Marsalis’ youth basketball coach.

Anti-swoosh event of the month. The European Tour’s Abu Dhabi golf tournament where Swoosh Senior (Tiger Woods) and Swoosh Junior (Rory Mcllroy) missed the cut.

Multibillionaire quote of the month. “I like today what I liked fifty years ago. . . I was happy when I was in my twenties, and I don’t see a reason to change things.” Warren Buffet

Parenting essay of the month. Coming Home: Returning to parenting after 16 months on the campaign trail. John Dickerson, Slate Magazine.

Book release of the month. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Television shows of the month. Gold, Portlandia Season 3. Silver, Downton Abbey Season 3. Bronze, 30 Rock.

Movie of the month. Tie. Silver Lining Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty.

Word of the month. Tradecraft.

EXPLICIT cold ass honkey music vid of the year month. Thriftshop by Maclemore & Ryan Lewis.

Insight of the month. Michael Apted, documentary filmmaker on 56 Up. “That was a very important lesson I learned throughout the decades on the film, that I can’t project my version of happiness or success or ambition onto other people.”

Unappreciated health danger of the month.

Tired

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I used to be more like Bill Gates, my sister, Jon Kitna, and my wife. I wanted to help people improve their lives. Volunteer time in my community. Change the world for the better.

Now, Stoic sensibilities make it unlikely you’ll see me in a street protest near you. When I read essays like Gates’ recent one titled “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems,” I marvel at his ambition. Twenty years ago I could have written a decent essay with that same title, but not now.

Saving any subset of the world requires endless teaming with others. Which makes me wonder. Or makes me worry. Being an introvert, and having taught for three decades, am I bumping up against my optimal number of lifetime interpersonal interactions?

Just because my gray-bearded self is less activist than my younger self, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m more selfish. I still care about teaching well. And I’ve enjoyed helping other teachers refine their craft this academic year. And I hope this blog occasionally entertains, informs, or enlightens. And I vote (in most elections), try to encourage my family and friends, help old ladies across the street, and never litter.

I don’t begrudge the World Changers anything, I just don’t feel as much camaraderie with them as in the past. This isn’t flattering to write at all, but compared to the past, I’m more accepting of many of my community’s, country’s, or world’s long-standing problems. More content to study and try to understand the root causes of problems. When I try to tap some sense of righteous indignation, all I get is Buddhist detachment. More honest and authentic. Less a role model.

No, I was not the male lead in Silver Lining Playbook, but I can understand your confusion.

No, I was not the male lead in Silver Lining Playbook, but I can understand your confusion.

What Lance Armstrong Can Say to Oprah to Make Things Right

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Nothing.

Apart from a simple “sorry for the long-standing deception,” Lance doesn’t owe me, or any professional cycling fan, anything.

Why do we continually delude ourselves to think we know the entertainers, athletes, and politicians we follow? That we’re in some sort of relationship with them? That when their moral failings become painfully evident, that they let us down?

Remember Tiger Woods awkward, post-rehab, public confessional in some Florida hotel conference room? The one with his mom in the front row. The one where he said he “kinda got away from his Buddhism (one of my favorite understatements of all-time)?” What was that all about? Tiger didn’t pledge to be faithful to me or you or even his corporate sponsors.

The bright light public confessional is all about limiting the damage to one’s personal brand, and by extension, earning potential. To reset as a human being, Tiger would have been far better off listing all the people he had hurt and then seeking each person’s forgiveness outside the media spotlight.

At 41, Lance is in trouble if he needs advice on how to reset as a human being. I’m offering it anyways. He won’t follow it because he doesn’t read this blog regularly enough, and like all of us, he’s highly skilled at rationalizing his behavior. He tells himself, “If it wasn’t for my success, Hamilton, Landis, Andreu’s wife, and even my masseuse and others involved with the sport wouldn’t have made nearly as much money.” In his mind, his accusers are indebted to him.

Forget Oprah Lance. And forget your athletic career (triathlon has a long ways to go before it reaches “fringe sport” consideration). Resolve to be a more kind, empathetic, and truthful person. Take time to make a detailed list of everyone that you’ve directly hurt as a result of your words, actions, and privilege. People who you repeatedly lied to. People you bullied on and off the bike. People whose reputations you trashed. People whose businesses you ruined. Then come clean in a written mea culpa, a no holds barred confession. In it, take complete responsibility for hurting those people as a result of their truthfulness.

Send it to the New York Times. Then buy however many plane tickets necessary and travel to see everyone on the list. No matter how much it cuts into your triathlon training. Seek their forgiveness as personally and privately as possible.

Do that and the tide of public opinion will begin to turn. But don’t do it for that reason. Don’t even do it for your children or your legacy. Do it to reset as a human being, for the sake of human decency, to live the second half of your life in a more kind, empathetic, and truthful manner.

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Columbine, Blacksburg, Tucson, Seal Beach, Aurora, Newtown

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The National Rifle Association has gone silent, hoping that we conclude there’s an inevitability to gun violence, call it an unfortunate cost of Second Amendment rights to gun ownership. That’s the exact reason we can’t become desensitized to the steady stream of incomprehensible violence.

We have to spend the next few months insisting that our Congressional representatives take the actions that Michael Bloomberg and Diane Feinstein described on Sunday’s Meet the Press.

We have to learn to think about mental illnesses like physical illnesses and advocate for more accessible and affordable care for the mentally ill.

We have to insist on people’s rights. To go to school, to go shopping, and to go to a movie without fear.

We have to resist the urge to arm more people. On the same Meet the Press, Bill Bennett (pundits should be like yogurt and have expiration dates) said we should probably have an armed security guard in every school. I thought of that when I walked into my YMCA Sunday afternoon to workout. The doors open for anyone and the membership check-in is about 30 to 40 feet inside the building. I passed 20+ people before having to show my membership card. Sometimes when the line is long, I just slide in behind it and head to the locker or weightroom. So unless we’re going to install TSA-like security at every YMCA, mall, and theater, I don’t see armed school guards as a solution. I recommend Jim Fallows position on this and his most recent Atlantic piece on the shootings (and Goldberg’s which he references).

We have to ask why, according to Mother Jones, since 1982, males are responsible for 61 out of 62 mass murders with firearms across the country. What does the fact that some young men more than young women want to physically injure and/or kill others say about our parenting of boys, our schools, and our culture? What changes in our parenting, schools, and culture are needed?

Lastly, an impassioned debate among two female writers—I am Adam Lanza’s Mother and Don’t Compare Your Son to Adam Lanza.

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Veterans’ Day—Be Very Careful

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I woke up yesterday to a Daily Olympian headline that read “Attacker ignored cries of ‘We are children,’ Afghan witnesses say. The article described the trial of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians and wounded six more in a nighttime rampage on March 11th.

After skimming that news article, I started pancaking while listening to a story on National Public Radio about the Obama administration’s 300-person Al-Qaida Yemeni “kill list”. A few years of pilotless drone bombings later, there are around 1,000 members of Al-Qaida in Yemen.

To many military readers and listeners those stories were more evidence of the media’s anti-military bias. The implication being we’d all be better off if the media just reported on all the good the military does.

Then I went to adult Sunday school where Melinda, our young intern, was leading a discussion on our church formally becoming a “military friendly” congregation a designation that requires meeting a few criteria. I like Melinda. Married to a three tour Iraqi war veteran, she’s personable, articulate, and  a huge NASCAR fan.

She shared a story about a veteran who returned to a church that strongly condemned him for his wartime activities. Understandably, people were dismayed. Melinda added that now he is among the “most anti-Christian people you’ll ever meet.”

It’s more common she said for churches to fail veterans through a debilitating silence, which they interpret as negative judgement. Logically then, the only option is to proactively and positively embrace military veterans and their families.

I did the unthinkable. Asked a question. Unless my attorney has a better one, my defense is maybe the maple syrup went to my head. You would think I would have learned by now that you can’t question the military, especially on Veteran’s Day. The bumper sticker “Dissent is patriotic” is what liberals wish was true. You cannot question the size of the military, military strategies like the drone program, or even the effects of war on its victims without raising the ire of the pro-military super majority.

The default thought process is you can’t question the military because we’re all indebted to them for our freedom. Unquestionably, that’s been true in the past. Between 1941 and 1945 we were indebted to all Allied forces for our freedom. Apparently, once true always true. The specific thinking being that current military campaigns against Yemeni Al-Qaida or Iraqi insurgents keeps the U.S. safe from foreign invasion and/or terrorist attacks, preserves our constitutional government, and makes it possible for dovish bloggers to question the military. To question is to be ungrateful for their sacrifices including extended separations from their families, risk of serious injury or death, and endless challenges upon return. The ancillary question is “What have you done for your country?”

I told everyone that I understood the aforementioned church silence of which Melinda was critical because I interpreted it as confusion which I share. A few people pushed back because it’s not even okay to be confused. You have to be all in, all the time.

Our military, I added, is fueled by nationalism which doesn’t factor into the New Testament. More specifically I asked, “How do we embrace the Beatitudes, which I think are the essence of the gospel, and the U.S. military whose values are often antithetical to the Beatitudes?”

Some of the Beatitudes from Matthew Chapter 5:

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.

Had there been one large cartoon cloud above everyone’s heads, it would’ve read, “No he didn’t!”

Melinda replied confidently. Too confidently. “Lots of military are anti-war. My husband is anti-war.” The message being that one has to separate individual members from the actions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines more generally. On the surface that’s sensible, but as could have been predicted, a few people questioned my question, and Melinda elaborated. The gist of her message was it’s okay for people in the church to be anti-war as long as congregations are pro-military.

The inherent tension in that seemed lost on her. It seems to me, truly anti-war servicemen and women would not re-enlist or they’d band together to change the military’s culture and mission.

We need anti-war military personnel to take the lead in creating a new military. A multilingual one that is steeped in the social sciences. One that’s smaller, less misogynist, more knowledgeable about world religions, more transparent, and more adept at winning the hearts and minds of people intensely wary of American power.

There’s little hope for reinventing our military without impolite questions and uncomfortable moments in adult Sunday schools around the country. My hope is some of you will join me in breaking the silence and daring to be impolite.

The Great National Happiness Rat Race

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Just one of many money phrases, sentences, and paragraphs from a recent NYTimes blog post by Ruth Whippman, a Brit living in California. Whippman beautifully articulates what I’ve long thought. She leads with an Eric Hoffer quote, “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

Notable nuggets:

Despite being the richest nation on earth, the United States is, according to the World Health Organization, by a wide margin, also the most anxious, with nearly a third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety problem in their lifetime. America’s precocious levels of anxiety are not just happening in spite of the great national happiness rat race, but also perhaps, because of it.

Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he wrote that “pursuit of happiness” line, a perfectly delivered slap in the face to his joy-shunning oppressors across the pond. The British are generally uncomfortable around the subject, and as a rule, don’t subscribe to the happy-ever-after. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy, it just seems somehow embarrassing to discuss it, and demeaning to chase it, like calling someone moments after a first date to ask them if they like you.

Evidence of this distinction is everywhere. Blindfold me and read out the Facebook statuses of my friends, without their names, and I will tell you which are American and which are British. Americans post links to inspirational stories, and parenting blogs packed with life lessons. (British parenting blogs tend to be packed with despair and feces.) My American friends post heartwarming messages of support to one another, and often themselves, while my British cohort’s updates are usually some variation on “This is rubbish.”

Even the recent grand spectacle of the London 2012 Olympic Games told this tale. The opening ceremony, traditionally a sparklefest of perkiness, was, with its suffragist and trade unionists, mainly a celebration of dissent, or put less grandly, complaint. Still, this back door approach to national pride propelled the English into a brief and unprecedented stint of joyous positivity — lasting for the exact duration of the Games. For three weeks I was unable to distinguish my British friends’ Facebook statuses from those of my American ones.

The transformation wasn’t absolute of course. . . . Our queen, despite the repeated presence of a stadium full of her subjects urging in song that she be both happy and glorious, could barely muster a smile, staring grimly through her eyeglasses and clutching her purse on her lap as if she might be mugged.

Cynicism is the British shtick. . . . By contrast, in America, happiness is work. Intense, nail-biting work, slogged out in motivational seminars and therapy sessions, meditation retreats and airport bookstores. For the left there’s yoga, for the right, there’s Jesus. For no one is there respite.

While the British way can be drainingly negative, the American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.

Happiness should be serendipitous, a by-product of a life well lived, and pursuing it in a vacuum doesn’t really work. This is borne out by a series of slightly depressing statistics. The most likely customer of a self-help book is a person who has bought another self-help book in the last 18 months. . . . Every year, with remarkable consistency, around 33 percent of Americans report that they are “very happy.” It’s a fair chunk, but a figure that remains surprisingly constant, untouched by the uptick in Eastern meditation or evangelical Christianity, by Tony Robbins or Gretchen Rubin or attachment parenting. For all the effort Americans are putting into happiness, they are not getting any happier. It is not surprising, then, that the search itself has become a source of anxiety.

So here’s a bumper sticker: despite the glorious weather and spectacular landscape, the people of California are probably less happy and more anxious than the people of Grimsby. So they may as well stop trying so hard.

 

Why is Team Chemistry So Elusive?

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Why do so many married couples divorce? Why are so many homeowners’ associations riddled with conflict? Why do so many parents involved in youth sports organizations butt heads with one another? And why is group decision-making so problematic for school faculty and other workplace teams?

Because everyone of us brings imperfect interpersonal skills to our teams. Multiply my social shortcomings and quirks with yours and the next women’s and the next guy’s and it doesn’t take long to understand why positive team chemistry and enlightened group decision making is so elusive. Every team of two or more are dysfunctional in different ways and to varying degrees.

Also, every team has an uneven mix of what I refer to as “Vertical” and “Horizontal” members. Verticals have little patience for processing others’ feelings, talking through differences of opinion, and consensual decision-making. They’re often quite comfortable with someone above them making unilateral decisions. In contrast, Horizontals prefer consensual decision making and the sometimes extended discussions they require. They’re sensitive to other members feelings and often distrust superiors to make unilateral decisions.

When a couple, community group, or workplace suffers challenges that result in hurt feelings, Verticals emphasize focusing on the present and “just getting back to work”. Before returning to work, Horizontals feel compelled to work through what went wrong and attend to team members’ hurt feelings. Trying to negotiate these different orientations becomes another challenge in and of itself.

So every team member is screwed up in his/her own way. And eventually, crises put extraordinary pressure on the team’s decision-making processes. Then some team members want to talk things through, others don’t, and those different perspectives add fuel to the fire. Is it any wonder that lot’s of couple’s divorce, the CIA and the FBI don’t get along, and some work environments turn toxic?

And there’s more. Many teams—whether couples, community organizations, or workplaces—aren’t nearly thoughtful or intentional enough about fostering understanding of one another’s unique contributions to the team effort and the mutual respect that engenders. Instead, a mutual sense of being misunderstood and under-appreciated spreads.

Add to that the fact that teams rarely, if ever, build in time to talk openly and honestly about decision-making processes. Which the Verticals are cool with, but not the Horizontals. For the Horizontals, when there’s little to no opportunity to reflect on decision making processes and surface the occasional hurt feelings, meeting fatigue sets in.

These multi-faceted challenges often overwhelm teams’ collective interpersonal skills. Which results in more resentment. Team members succumb to passive-aggressive behavior, not talking in meetings but complaining bitterly out of them, and walk around with invisible backpacks on, into which they repeatedly stuff hurtful exchanges from the near and distant past. Eventually, in the interest of self-preservation, they retreat to their own corner, cubicle, classroom, office. Making team chemistry even more elusive.

And now I should probably do what all bloggers are supposed to do if they want to grow their readership—help readers. Instead of bullshitting you though, I’m going to be honest. On this Sunday evening, my insights into team chemistry and decision-making dysfunction greatly exceeds my feel for promising fixes.

But I know for a fact that some of you are team leaders who know more about building and maintaing team chemistry than I do. And some of you are members of healthy teams who can offer helpful suggestions on how to maintain team chemistry—whether a couple, a small organization, or a ginormous company. Your turn.

Stop Trying to Control Things Outside of Your Control

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William Irvine, in A Guide to the Good Life, explains we’re susceptible to negative emotions like anger, fear, grief, anxiety, and envy because of our evolutionary programming. Each of those negative emotions increased our earliest ancestors’ odds of survival, so overtime, they became engrained in us. For example, early humans who weren’t afraid of lions were less likely to survive long enough to pass on their genes. Similarly, those that didn’t worry incessantly about having enough to eat were less likely to survive long enough to pass on their genes.

Irvine explains the good news. Since we can reason, we can understand our evolutionary predicament and take conscious steps to at least partially escape it. For example, the pain associated with a loss of social status isn’t just useless, it’s counterproductive. We need to learn to “misuse” our intellect to override the evolutionary programming that makes us susceptible to negative emotions.

In short, Stoics pursue tranquility. The major impediment to tranquility is our evolutionary programming. Tranquility and inner joy is achieved by “misusing our reasoning ability” via repeated practice at using specific Stoic psychological techniques.

For example, we must overcome our evolutionary tendency to worry by determining which things we can’t control. Irvine labels this the “trichotomy of control.” Once we identify those things we have no control over, we can use our reasoning ability to eradicate our anxieties related to those things. Doing that improves one’s chances of gaining tranquility. To better understand the trichotomy of control, take a piece of paper, and using a ruler or folding it, make three columns. Label the first “absolutely no control”, the second, “total control”, and the third “some control”. It’s easy to quibble with “absolutely” and “total”, but work with me.

Here are some possible items for each column just to get your wheels turning. No control—the weather, the eventual death of loved ones, our own gradual physical decline, and how fast a competitor might show up at your next race. Total control—to eat nutritious food, to exercise daily, to get adequate sleep, to marry or not, to have children or not, to vote or not, to wear boxers or briefs. Some control—to shape your children’s values, to reduce your commute, to make your work environment more pleasant, to protect the environment.

It doesn’t take long into this exercise to realize the lines between the columns should probably be dotted since there’s often blurring. Not as fancy sounding, but a continuum of control would be better than Irvine’s “trichotomy”. The whole point is to learn to let go of everything that makes up the “no control” anxiety-producing end of the chart or continuum. Accept the fact that if you live in the Pacific Northwest it’s going to be overcast for seven or eight months of the year. And there’s going to be an incessant light rain for those seven or eight months. I originally wrote, “incessant, annoying light rain,” but that’s the exact point. Only things we have some or a lot of control over should have the potential to annoy us.

One last example of learning to let go of those things beyond one’s control. One night last week I asked Seventeen what she was swimming in the meet the next day. “The 50 and 100 free I think.” Internal dialogue. “What?! That’s what the beginners swim. That’s embarrassing for a fourth-year co-captain.” Actual response, “Really?!”

Parenting fail. She could feel my disappointment. In a bathtub (too much information too late alert) partially filled with very warm water, I replayed our brief exchange in my mind. I realized I could give in to negative emotions and be frustrated that she doesn’t approach high school athletics they way I did or the way I think others should or I could recognize that she’s an independent young adult who can choose not to train until the season and who thinks of athletics first and foremost as another way of having fun with friends.

It doesn’t matter whether she swims a slow 50 or a fast 500. Positive parenting rests upon unconditional love. Post bath I attempted a recovery. “I’m really looking forward to watching you swim the 50 and 100 tomorrow afternoon.” “Good!” she said in a way that communicated forgiveness. All was well with Seventeen. And the world.

How to Live?

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That’s the question my writing students and I are focusing on this semester. I can’t think of a better age to craft a philosophy of life. Most of them are on their own for the first time in their lives. Having to make many, many more decisions by themselves and find their way.

William Irvine, philosophy professor and modern day Stoic, argues you’re likely to waste your life away without a well thought through philosophy of life. Here’s his argument.

You have three choices in how to live. One is “unenlightened hedonism” in which you thoughtlessly seek short-term gratification. Think Faber College, 1962.

A second is “enlightened hedonism” in which you seek to maximize pleasure in the course of your lifetime. People practicing this philosophy of life will spend time discovering, exploring, and ranking sources of pleasure and investigating any untoward side effects they might have. Then they’ll devise strategies for maximizing pleasure.

Regarding hedonism, Irvine writes, “In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability.” He adds, “There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.”

But I digress. The third and final choice in how to live is to carefully think through what you most want out of life and then organize your life accordingly. Not the goals you form as you live day-to-day, but one “grand goal in living”. Of the many goals in life you might pursue, which one do you believe to be most valuable?

Most people have trouble naming their grand goal in living because our culture doesn’t encourage thinking about such things. Instead, it provides an endless stream of distractions so they won’t ever have to. To their credit, some people swim against the stream of distractions by journaling, taking digital sabbaticals, enrolling in my writing seminar, and going on silent retreats.

If determining a grand goal of living isn’t challenging enough already, it’s only half the battle. The other half is developing effective strategies for attaining it. These strategies will specify what you must do, as you go about your daily activities, to maximize your chances of gaining the thing in life you take to be of most value.

This is where Irvine says Christian pastors and the ancient Stoics differ. Most Christian pastors, Irvine argues, focus on what people must do to have a good afterlife. Pastors, he says, have far less to say about what people must do to have a good life. That’s why, he notes, it’s tough to distinguish among the religious and non-religious.

For his own philosophy of life, Irvine chose to update Roman Stoicism for modern times. Stoics claim that many of the things we desire—most notably fame and fortune—are not worth pursuing. Instead they developed strategies for achieving tranquility and inner joy by eliminating negative emotions like anger, grief, anxiety, fear, and envy.

Eight years ago, when I was on sabbatical, I took time to write a guiding paragraph that I can’t find anymore in my computer files. I can remember most of it, but it’s okay I misplaced it, because it’s time to update it. And then reference it way more regularly.

If your curious about my philosophy of life, just eavesdrop on me as I live my day-to-day life. Because actions, of course, speak louder than words.