Tick Tock...
September 5, 2024
TW: death, loss
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
My intention in writing this essay, as is the case with much of what I share on my website, is to nudge anybody reading into the driver’s seat of your own life. To wake up from the slumber most of us are in and recognize just how precious our time in this body is. To cast aside external and internal shackles, return home to our own joyful hearts, and get busy living before it’s too late. Toward this aim I’ll take several complimentary approaches by sharing personal experiences, various tools and strategies, and a set of tentative metaphysical views as a broader framework within which the other stuff can fit into. Just take whatever may be useful and leave the rest.
I also want to acknowledge that being able to think about this is certainly reflective of privilege. However, most people have at least some power to change their life for the better (to varying degrees of course, and with different amounts of effort required). In all likelihood you do too. My hope in writing this is to awaken more people to this fact and encourage using whatever blessings we do have to make life more wonderful for ourselves and others.
At around 7 years old, I became quite concerned with mortality. I would lie awake at night wondering if there would be anything more than eternal nothingness when I died. I wasn’t so worried about my life being in immediate danger; it was moreso the inevitability of death sooner or later that terrified me. This nagging dread persisted to varying degrees for many years and was a big part of why I chose to study philosophy and neuroscience in college. I wanted to learn more about metaphysics and the mind in hopes of finding a way to assuage this fear, which I’ll say more about toward the end of this essay.
One upshot of thinking about this as a child is that it gave me a sense of urgency from early on that I’ve learned to harness in mostly positive ways. In recent years, I’ve spent time visualizing the end of my life to help further instill a sense of how precious and important my time is.
One interesting experience while walking along a ridgeline in Switzerland in 2019 gave me some valuable insight. It was a visualization that came to me without any conscious intention, and felt more significant than just idle mind-wandering. I saw someone who may have been myself in old age lying in a hospital bed close to death. He was giving advice to younger people gathered around him. Drawing on regrets about how he had lived, there were two main points he wanted to get across. 1: Give your life everything you have. Everything. 100% dedication to living the absolute best life you possibly can. Anything less than complete devotion to this is an abominable waste of precious time and life force. And no bad faith efforts – i.e. working hard or expending energy in some narrow domain as a cover-up for not moving in the direction that though perhaps difficult is what you know to be your most authentic path. 2: You are solely responsible for your happiness. What matters is the conscious experience you create for yourself. Don’t wait for or rely on anyone to bring you happiness, and don’t let anyone take it away from you. Your happiness or lack thereof is all on you. Which isn’t to say don’t value relationships with others, but do always remain grounded in yourself.
At some point I snapped out of this vision and thought to myself, “wait a minute...I just had these insights about how to live a life from the perspective of my dying self, but I’m far from dead! So implement these things NOW! Instead of letting them be regrets to be used for advice for future generations, set an example! At the end of my life, be able to show those gathered around me what to do instead of only being able to tell them what not to do. Use the time and energy and capability I currently possess to act with urgency on my future self’s wisdom.”
A couple years ago, I did an exercise where I thought ahead to my own funeral and asked myself what I hoped to be true about how I had lived and what people there would be saying about me. A few things became apparent. Most simply, I want to have experienced every ounce of joy available in my lifetime. I also hope that I’ll have made many other people’s lives better by helping them uncover and live from the light within them. This is how I hope to live on in people’s hearts after I’m gone. Additionally, it’s clear to me that anything I might have built or accomplished from a place of ego/striving/comparison will mean absolutely nothing to me at the end of my life. How much I’m able to keep this in mind certainly varies depending on the day. But without exception, whenever I’m able to return to a place of stillness, it is clear that the only “metric” I care about for any sort of accomplishment is in terms of wellbeing— for others and myself.
Two recent experiences powerfully shifted these ponderings about mortality from the theoretical to the visceral: a grizzly bear encounter in May 2022, and locating a man’s body on a mountainside in November 2023.
In May 2022, I drove for a week from Utah to Haines, Alaska. From there I took a boat to Juneau and then a flight to Yakutat, a remote town in Alaska accessible only by air or sea. My plan was to carry two weeks’ worth of supplies to a nearby beach and set up camp across the water from some of the most impressive mountains in North America. A local guy saw me hauling my gear down the road from the tiny airport and offered to drive me into town. He asked why I had come to Yakutat and I told him I wanted to go camp on the beach to photograph the mountains. He very kindly helped me obtain supplies in town and then drove me out to the beach. Before driving away, he asked if I wanted to take his pistol for protection against the animals living there. I declined the offer as I had no experience using firearms. He let on a sense of concern and said to contact him if I needed anything while I was out there. As he drove away in his truck, I started feeling the magnitude of the environment I’d chosen to plop myself into. The 8 days I ended up spending on that beach felt like a strange fever dream. Like a hallucination that was somehow more real than ordinary reality. Days blurred together and linear time fell away as the high-latitude sun went around and around in an oblong oval, never dropping very far below the horizon, making only a half-hearted attempt at nightfall for a few hours each night. Hulking masses of rock and ice towered above the ocean as far as the eye could see in either direction. A strip of sand strewn with driftwood lay between the ocean and a dense, eery forest occupied by wolves and bears. Bird calls mingled in the air with the perpetually crashing surf. Bald and golden eagles nested in the trees at the edge of the forest. Other birds flew in formation across the water and divebombed for fish. Merging more with the natural world with each revolution of the sun, I slept sporadically and attempted to capture a sliver of this place’s essence through my camera’s viewfinder while remaining highly vigilant for grizzly bears. One night as I was sitting in the sand in the 1:30am twilight, I turned my head and saw a dark shape slinking along the beach toward me and my tent. Realizing it was a grizzly bear, I instinctively froze and ducked before gathering the wherewithal to assess the situation. The bear didn’t seem to have noticed me yet so I grabbed my canister of bear spray and walked the other direction. After a few hundred feet I could no longer see the bear but was still extremely vigilant and decided it would be best to walk further away and not to return to my tent for another few hours until it was fully light out. After walking for half a mile, I saw the bear again (I’m assuming it was the same bear but don’t actually know for sure). I instinctively froze and ducked again, and then tried to walk away hoping it still hadn’t noticed me. This time though it clearly saw me and was walking right toward me. My perception of time ground to a halt during what was likely just a couple seconds. All the sensory perceptions and thoughts and takeaways from the experience were sort of just there together all at once. My thinking sped up and my awareness sort of split – part of me grounded in the situation doing whatever I needed to do to maximize my chances of safety and part of me calmly observing my responses and absorbing various lessons. As the bear took a few more steps towards me, my heartrate skyrocketed. I looked left and right along the beach to see whether my path was clear on either side, thinking it was possible this was a second bear and that the bear I saw by my campsite was still to my right. It was clear that I was completely on my own, just me and the bear on this beach, with nothing but my behavior and a can of bear spray at my disposal. I felt this distinct sense that what I did in the next couple seconds may determine if this bear was going to attack me, and the fear coursing through my body sort of transformed into hyper-efficient calm calculated action. The amount of fear to get me so completely dialed in and laser focused was going to help me here, panic was not. Also, it was like a veil on ordinary reality was lifted for a brief but timeless moment outside of ordinary temporal bounds. The gravity of the situation penetrated and consumed my entire awareness. Everything that wasn’t real was stripped away, including Abraham as in a sense of self distinct from the bear, rest of the landscape, earth, cosmos, and existence in the broadest sense. All distinctions fell away. It was all just one thing, indescribably vast and beautiful. Simultaneously, another part of me managed to run through the decision tree I’d put together beforehand in case of a bear encounter and act accordingly. Trembling with primal terror and not knowing for sure whether I’d be alive in another minute, I stopped trying to sidestep away, stood my ground, and slowly waved my arms above my head, speaking to the grizzly bear in a calm and respectful yet firm voice, saying, “Hey bear. Hey bear. I’m a human. I’m a human.” To stand my ground and speak calmly in these circumstances went against every impulse screaming at me to flee or cower. The bear stopped, stood up on its hind legs for a moment, and then turned around and trotted away back into the forest. Relieved but still totally on edge, I decided to keep walking further away from my camp. Shortly after, a dense layer of fog rolled in off the ocean, completely enveloping the beach in a matter of minutes. It was a remarkably eery experience, with the faint blue twilight just barely penetrating the fog. My inner dialogue went something like, “fuck shit I’m alone on this goddamn beach in the middle of the night in the middle of fucking nowhere in Alaska with roving bears and enveloped in fog with horrible visibility.” The temperature was in the high 30s, and I had enough clothing on for safety but not comfort. To make matters worse, the large pieces of driftwood strewn all over the beach looked like they were moving in the swirling fog and faint twilight. My mind kept transforming the driftwood into phantom bears. I stayed right by the water line, constantly scanning for bears and every so often doing jumping jacks to warm up until sunrise.
The takeaways I drew from this experience are numerous. This type of situation is what the human nervous system is largely designed for, where my life is really at stake and the outcome depends partially on how I act. I saw how good my nervous system is at keeping me safe, and I was in awe of how I responded to the situation. It grounded in raw visceral experience what up until then had been mostly theoretical for me in neuroscience labs and classrooms, about how the nervous system protects itself and how so many fear/trauma responses make perfect adaptive sense. Here are some things I instinctually did without even thinking or trying, that did in fact improve my chances of survival. Hypervigilance. Fleeing. Energizing my entire body and awareness in an instant. Heightened senses and complete engagement in the present circumstances, while filtering out everything else that was irrelevant, like what I was reflecting on just a moment before first seeing the bear. My thinking sped up, and it was really interesting how I was able to modulate the fear and incorporate rational thought about the research I’d done. Seeing all the pieces of driftwood as potential bears was a perfect real-life version of the classic example often given to describe the negativity bias phenomenon: a caveman who hears rustling in the bushes is more likely to survive and pass on their genes by reacting every time as though it were be a tiger even if 99% of the time it is just a squirrel. This experience on the beach stripped away pretty much everything about modern life and took me to an environment not so different from the one in which the human nervous system evolved. It was apparent in the moments the bear was walking toward me for the second time just why the human drive for attachment is so critical. Without modern conveniences, the only protection early humans had from predators was other humans. So bonding and maintaining connection with fellow humans, especially caretakers as a young child, is an absolute priority, regardless of if it’s at the expense of authenticity and connection to oneself (I’ll say more on this in a bit). The nervous system will readily turn against itself to preserve connection with others when the alternative is to be left alone and killed by an apex predator. It’s the correct tradeoff. Intellectually this all already made perfect sense, but in the moments as the bear walked toward me and my heart began thumping like a bass drum at probably 200 bpm, I gained a vastly deeper appreciation of why avoiding this outcome greatly outweighs all else as far as the nervous system is concerned.
Additionally, the knowledge that my time is limited became visceral. Undeniable. I know it in my bones, rather than just intellectually, that sooner or later my life will in fact end. Furthermore, as the bear walked toward me, a primal source of strength and self-preservation emerged from the depths of my being; when I started speaking to the bear it was if someone or something else was talking while I sat back and watched. There is so much I still want to do and experience and share with others, and facing the potential outcome of getting mauled on that beach illuminated how badly I wanted to stick around for these things. I also found out what I was capable of in the face of real fear, real danger. The resolute determination I feel in regard to the various things I care about has been massively amplified ever since. By sharing this I hope to convey (to as great a degree as is possible through writing) this visceral understanding of just how precious and urgent each human life is.
One morning in November 2023, I was at a trailhead parking lot getting ready to go scramble up and down a 13,900’ mountain in the Sierra Nevada when a few people came over and asked me where I was headed. A member of their family had gone missing the day before on the same mountain I already planned to climb, and I hurried off with extra survival stuff hoping to somehow find him and help keep him alive. I ended up being the first to find his body that evening at the bottom of an icy couloir on the high slopes of the mountain. When I spotted him I knew in all likelihood he was gone but checked for vital signs just in case. His head was badly injured and he probably died on impact. I spent a profound few minutes sitting with him, gently placing my hand on his back and speaking some words out loud for both his and my benefit. With both of our bodies right there on the mountainside, the customary barrier between life and death felt thinner. The weight of this tragic loss hung in the air, and this mountain range that I loved and knew so well suddenly felt cold and indifferent. I started scrambling down as it got dark with temperatures quickly dropping. A few hours later when I made it back to the trailhead I broke the horrible news to his wife, mother, and sister in law, and shared GPS coordinates allowing the Search & Rescue team to recover his body before an approaching storm buried everything in snow for the winter. Later that night I burst into tears on the phone with my wonderful partner, and began processing the experience with her and a therapist’s support over the following weeks.
I’ve been able to get to a pretty good place with this experience but I still think about it fairly often. It certainly left a strong impression on me. It served as another powerful, visceral reminder of how precious and fragile our time on this planet is. A reminder that the bodies encasing our consciousness are delicate and sooner or later will inevitably cease to function. Even so, we are each endowed with a supply of life force or creative impetus within us, a desire for joy and connection, that wants to be expressed during the window of time we do have. Brushes with death can remind us of the finite nature of this window and ignite what was perhaps only a buried ember, illuminating a latent yearning for something we had trouble pinpointing but on some level knew was there waiting for us. Direct brushes with death aren’t the only way to do so. Reflecting on the finite nature of this window can be a tool for much of the same. I’ve tried to use these experiences as jet fuel, doubling down on spending my supply of life force on what I deem to be worthwhile while letting all other clutter fall away. We simply don’t have the time to do otherwise if we want to be free of regret at the end of our lives.
To reach the end of life and look back with regret seems one of the most tragic things. Whenever the time comes, I want to know that I gave my life everything I had. That I gave my life the credit it deserves. Regret is so much heavier than the effort and discipline it might take to do so. For additional fuel in this vein, I might recommend listening to the audiobook version of Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. I found the last chapter of the book especially powerful and have listened to it countless times. I don’t completely agree with his opinions and I have no desire to exactly emulate the direction of his life, but he has done remarkable things from a place of unspeakable disadvantage.
Some thoughts recorded while walking to the base of Mount Everest
There’s an important point I want to take the opportunity to clarify. What I’m advocating for is a resolute determination and focus toward the experience of joy. In my view, a life fully lived has little to do with racking up accolades, approval, or material success. It is about the joy and satisfaction of knowing myself completely, finding freedom within, learning to blissfully reside there, and then making my life an outward expression of this. It is about being proud of and at peace with every aspect of my being. Though some degree of structure and discipline are probably required in order to get there, I’m not really talking about a hard-driving, rigid, achievement-oriented thing. Just for example, today I spent a few hours swaying in a hammock, thoroughly enjoying listening to the wind while watching chipmunks jump between tree branches. It was delightful.
Relatedly, I think a lot of stuff in the self-help space is often presented in a way that isn’t particularly helpful. Viewing desired goals or changes as a directive, as something we “should” do or “need” to do or “have” to do, is often counterproductive (I also think “should” and these related concepts quite literally make no sense upon philosophical examination, but that’s an entirely different rabbit hole for another time). Acting from a place of “should,” or from a place of trying to address some perceived deficiency or inadequacy by harshly whipping myself into action, is unlikely to be very enjoyable or sustainable. For any goals or intentions you have, see if you can attach them to a bedrock motivation that you feel complete conviction about. For me, even if something is touted as a super beneficial self-help practice, if the payoff doesn’t outweigh the opportunity cost in terms of expected utility, I’ll skip it entirely. Believing that I need to do X usually breeds internal resistance and shame and other unpleasant feelings. Rather, I try to always ask myself if I want to do X, all things considered. There are no rules. It's just about if I want to or not. In this way, I try to make it such that quite literally everything I do is motivated by simply wanting a more joyful existence for myself and others. Then it just becomes an engineering problem for how to make that happen given the particulars of who I am and the circumstances around me.
Most of us spend a huge portion of our lives on things we don’t like doing but feel like we have to for various reasons. When scaled across decades, doesn’t this rob us of an unfathomable amount of joy and vibrancy? How much better might our lives be if, instead of acting from a place of fear, shame, or obligation, we made choices from the sole motivation to contribute to life, to make life more wonderful for ourselves and others? In his book Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg offers an exercise to move in this direction of radical agency. What do you do in your life that you don’t experience as playful? List these on a piece of paper, all of the things that you tell yourself you have to do. List any activity you dread but do it anyway, because you perceive that you have no choice. After making this list, clearly acknowledge to yourself that you are doing these things because you choose to do them, not because you have to do them. Insert the words “I choose to” for each item on the list. See if any resistance comes up in admitting to yourself that you really are choosing to do each of these things. Then add “because I want” to the end of each item on the list. Personally, I can’t stand the process of preparing food. It feels like a waste of time, and there are so many other more interesting things I’d rather be doing. When going through Rosenberg’s exercise for myself, I wrote “I choose to spend time cooking food because I want to be healthy and strong throughout my life which will facilitate joy and reduce suffering in all manner of ways, and the monetary cost to buy already-prepared food of equal nutritional value is not worth it to me right now.” All things considered, cooking food is in fact what I want to do. For some things on the list it will probably become clear that whatever reason you are choosing to do the thing is not sufficient (where the downsides outweigh the benefits) and you can just stop doing it or find a better way to get the same underlying need met. Be especially wary of things you do for extrinsic reward or the approval of others. For other things on the list it may become clear that it is worthwhile to continue doing. Upon recognizing this, perhaps you can now do so with a different more playful energy grounded in the awareness of its life-enriching purpose.
We don't need to wait for anyone's permission or blessing to spend our precious remaining time on this planet in the exactly ways that make the most sense to us. Don’t go with the flow, because this flow of external influence and expectation will probably carry you straight into a deep murky cesspool of dissatisfaction. It might be the way of least resistance, but the resulting state of latent self-alienation isn’t worth it. Think very carefully about any decision that could spread you thin, paint you into a corner, or over-leverage yourself into an existence you aren’t happy with. Take ownership over how your life is structured, and recognize the choice and agency that are almost certainly there to some degree.
I think it is valuable to recognize that everything has an opportunity cost. This is an inherent fact of our existence whether we like it or not. Trying to live more joyously and authentically will come with some sacrifices and discomfort, but so will not. Simply decide which set of tradeoffs you truly prefer. Also, recognize that indecision and avoidance in its many forms are decisions. Indecision just means resigning yourself to a set of tradeoffs as the chips may fall, which is highly unlikely to the most preferable set of tradeoffs. It is easy to get decision paralysis when we try to find the one “right” answer before taking action. In reality there are usually plenty of great answers that will yield far better outcomes than doing nothing.
We are generally pretty well attuned to the potential downsides of making a decision and taking action, but much less so with the (often more certain) downsides of indecision and inaction. To challenge this bias, consider writing down a detailed list of what will happen if you don’t take action. Specificity is important when making this list. What will it cost you if nothing changes? For example, if you stay in your current job or relationship? Project out for different time periods – 6 months from now, a year from now, 5 years from now. If you take no action and nothing changes, what will it cost you and the people you care about? What will your life look like and how will you feel about it? Write it all down, then use this list as fuel to overcome the forces of psychological inertia and take uncomfortable action if it is called for.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always be where you’ve always been. There quite possibly will never be a better time than right now to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. "Someday" may never come. I'm not necessarily advocating for impulsiveness with no plan at all, but it likely won’t get any easier as time passes. In 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, you would probably give up almost anything to be how old and how healthy you are right now. Nothing happens just by thinking about it and wishing. Dreams are just nice ideas without action. Imperfect action beats a perfect plan every single time. Just start with something, no matter how small. There will always will be reasons, perhaps even fairly good reasons, not to do the thing. But don’t resign yourself to a state of affairs you aren’t happy with just because something is in the way, whether it be internal or external. Something will always be in the way. If you want a particular outcome badly enough, you might just find a way to go through the resistance and make it happen regardless. Whatever is in the way can go fuck itself. The vast majority of obstacles can be figured out one way or another. Almost anything can be learned for free or relatively inexpensively online, in books, and by talking to people. If you want something to be different than it currently is, pause before giving up at the first bit of resistance. Suspend the assumption that nothing can be done until at least looking into it enough to fully confirm that this pessimistic outlook is true. In my experience, it’s incredibly powerful to first get extremely clear on why the thing matters to me and then simply withhold the assumption that it can’t be figured out. With that, confidence becomes largely irrelevant. With any significant plan or goal, doubt is very likely to creep in. Doesn’t matter. This is just how the process usually works. We can analyze the root of the self-doubt but often it is a lot more helpful just to go straight through the core of it (provided we have a plan that is at least decently well thought out— fear certainly can alert us to actual present-day dangers). We like to think we will take action once we have more confidence, once we feel better and have more energy than we do now. But this is backwards in most cases. Confidence and energy result from action, not the other way around. You can be scared shitless and still act in alignment with your most audacious goals, and you just might also start feeling a lot better once you do.
It can be a helpful exercise to write down in detail every single thing you are afraid might happen if you do the thing you are considering doing. Get it all down on the page, every single fear, every single external and internal consequence you are worried about, no matter how big or small some of them may seem. Clearly defined fears tend to be way easier to manage than the vague sense that something bad might happen. It may also turn out that some of the fears are highly unlikely to come to fruition and don’t actually apply to the current situation. Other fears might be equally likely to come to fruition whether you do or don't take the action, so you can disregard these in deciding whether to take action. For the fears that are in fact relevant to the current decision, you can then try to use the skills and resources available to you to problem solve them away. It’s certainly possible that some very valid fears will still remain and that the downsides of the action under consideration outweigh the upsides, but now at least you have clarity rather than an indecisive state of limbo stemming from unexamined assumptions.
Something that paralyzes many people is the fear of failure, of making a mistake or doing the “wrong” thing and being perceived negatively by others. A common, often subconscious, strategy to avoid this is to not take action at all. If we make ourselves small, don't take up space with our needs and wants, never exercise our own agency, don't make decisions or take action, and take the path of least resistance by going along with whatever those around us are doing, then we can’t be wrong! If there’s a chance that we might not be able to do something perfectly right away, better to not even try. This may have been an excellent strategy at one point, particularly in childhood if making mistakes led to punishment, criticism, rejection, withdrawal of love, or other consequences. Support from others is absolutely critical for survival especially when we are young, so this strategy is the nervous system quite literally trying to keep us alive by maintaining acceptance and approval. That’s how much is at stake, explaining why it can be such an intense, overwhelming, subconscious emotional response. From an evolutionary survival perspective, the response needs to be strong enough to freeze the mind and body and redirect behavior. When we learn for whatever reason that unabashed self-expression – simply being ourselves and feeling good about who we are – is at odds with receiving love or meeting others’ expectations, we come to believe that we don’t belong just as we are and naturally turn against ourselves in order to maintain connection with the people around us, especially if they are caretakers we depend on when we are young. Fear, self-criticism, and shame in various forms then step in to perpetuate these protective behavioral modifications by keeping us small and disconnected from ourselves; if we stayed connected with ourselves we might be more likely to resist unfairness and act in ways that bring about more of the same interpersonal consequences. These patterns of self-suppression and disconnection manifest physically too. Our nervous systems are doing all of this to protect us, as the grizzly bear encounter in Alaska so thoroughly showed me. However, these protective mechanisms can become very limiting and even contribute to more pain and rejection later on. So, what to do? It might work to just take action anyway and go through the internal resistance. To override the fear by calling to mind the importance and the urgency of whatever it is you are considering doing. Much of this essay is geared toward this strategy. It is straightforward and works more often than you might imagine without risking over-intellectualizing. However, this may not be the most helpful approach for everybody. It could prompt even stronger avoidance, shutdown, and self-criticism. Sometimes force simply begets more force, which is common when two (or more) parts of ourselves are trying to help us in conflicting ways and end up at odds with each other. Pushing against protective mechanisms when a part of us doesn’t perceive that it is safe to change may just further polarize the inner landscape, since the protective mechanisms already trying so hard to keep us safe by avoiding social consequences will have to become even more active to remain effective in the face of our effort to override them. Establishing a baseline level of safety – the confidence that I will ultimately be ok even if things are very uncomfortable – is often a critical step. The value of safety as a first step to change cannot be overstated. A book by Michael Gervais, called The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You, describes in more depth the fear of people’s opinions and tools to work through it. Here are several approaches inspired by this book and elsewhere:
• Start small, with controlled mini-experiments where you are confident there will be no major negative consequences. Maybe go out and do something slightly odd in a public place to intentionally draw attention onto you. Maybe nobody will care, or maybe some people will stare at you with a bit of confusion or judgment. While continuing to do the thing, observe whatever feelings are arising in you while also maintaining the awareness that you are still safe and nothing terrible is happening. Incorporating breathwork or really just about any emotional regulation technique during the process can be helpful for further mitigating the fear response in a lasting way. See how you feel after this little experiment and ask yourself if it was as bad as you imagined it would be. Doing something strange in public is just one of countless possible examples. Whatever it is, start with something that feels fairly manageable and ramp up to things that feel more and more anxiety-provoking. The fear may start to lose all its power when you do this, especially if you are able to approach this in the spirit of compassionately teaching your nervous system new possibilities.
• We tend to think we are much better at knowing what is going on in other people’s heads than we actually are, even with those closest to us. You might become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. Almost nobody is paying much attention to whether you make a mistake or do something socially awkward. And the few who do probably don’t have your best interests at heart and aren’t worth keeping in your life anyway. Judgment and unkindness are truly just a reflection of their own relationship with themselves and their own limitations. If you wouldn’t trust their advice and you don’t want their life, why care about their judgment? You already know they aren’t a reliable source.
• Most people will probably actually be more drawn to you and respect you more if you put yourself out there, make bold choices, and be yourself. It’s attractive. It could even provide some people the encouragement they needed to do the same. Be yourself, so the people looking for you can find you.
• Go to the body. Contact and awaken the embodied life force within you that is yearning for expression using somatic practices designed to do so. Let it start to course through you, enliven you, and cast aside the shackles inhibiting the true expression of you. This might just galvanize your body into action more powerfully than any intellectual approach. Here is one striking example that you might wish to do some version of. If doing this sort of thing or any other type of bodywork/somatic practice feels overwhelming, it might be important to ask for internal consent from all parts of yourself and work to establish a baseline level of safety, both physical and psychological, before proceeding.
• Think of somebody you deeply care about such as your best friend, and take a second to bring to mind how much their wellbeing truly matters to you. If they were in the exact same situation you are in, what you would wish for them? What would you suggest they do? Now take your own advice.
• Reflect on a situation where you hold yourself back out of fear of failure or negative perception from others. Try to pause and identify the beliefs underneath this impulse to hold back. See if you can catch the narrative and then examine it. Even if you do mess up and people judge you harshly, so what? What is it that you are afraid might happen? Keep asking this until you are able to trace back to something that feels foundational. Bringing a belief into conscious awareness and clearly articulating it is a major step towards shifting it. Sometimes this alone is enough, but sometimes more work is helpful. There are various approaches to shifting beliefs, with the most effective I know of being a modality called Coherence Therapy described pretty thoroughly in this paper and summarized on page 28.
• In doing the above exercise, we might find that underneath the fear of other people’s opinions is the fear of triggering a harsh, overwhelming inner voice of shame and criticism. Often, the reason that rejection from others is so painful is that it highlights our own woundedness and confirms our worst fears that we are flawed, inadequate, and unlovable. This inner voice is sometimes what we are really trying to avoid. Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is one modality well suited for working through shame and self-criticism while restoring connection to ourselves. The books No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz and Self-Therapy by Jay Earley offer good introductions to IFS.
• Experiences that are particularly traumatic or painful tend to leave a lasting impression on how we see the world, often disconnecting us from ourselves and teaching us that it is unsafe not to act small. Processing these experiences, although sometimes incredibly difficult to do, can profoundly diffuse their intensity and reduce how much they subconsciously drive behavioral patterns. What will be most effective for processing these experiences certainly depends on many factors, but EMDR and IFS are two modalities designed for this. It is generally a very good idea to have the support of a professional when working with traumatic memories.
The approaches listed above are not mutually exclusive. I think it can be incredibly powerful to take the bold action and go straight through the resistance, while also listening to and reassuring the scared places inside of us that need it. I think there is an important interplay between validating and holding compassion for what is present, and encouraging emergence from limiting habits and patterns.
Another common reason why people stay in ruts for a long time is risk aversion, essentially the tendency to avoid uncertainty even when the less certain path has a higher expected payoff than the more certain path. One suggestion is to do the exercise described earlier about dwelling on the costs of inaction across multiple timeframes. Also, have you actually fully considered the upside of going for it? How wonderful might it be if you faced the uncertainty and the thing you are considering trying actually works? It can be hard to fathom the scale of the upside from a place of stuckness. Even in the event that you try and fail miserably, would you really prefer reaching the end of your life never having at least tried? Another helpful exercise is to define the worst case outcome. What is the big disastrous thing you are most afraid might happen? If it really came to that, would you truly be unable to deal with it or to find at least a partial solution? If we can accept the worst case outcomes or find workarounds to avoid them, the action under consideration essentially becomes fail-safe. We might not always be able to fully mitigate risk, but it becomes a lot easier to take action when the worst case outcome is just a relatively minor setback. Sometimes what we are truly most afraid of is not the actual outcome, but the possibility of failure and the subsequent judgment from other people (or perhaps worse, the harsh self-criticism and internalized shame that becomes activated). For this, see above.
Another way to flip around how we view risk is to consider the upsides and downsides of our actions across eternity. At risk of sounding completely off my rocker, allow me to propose a more nuanced version of Pascal’s Wager. The following isn’t a perfectly rigorous argument, but I think the best available evidence points to a non-trivial likelihood of consciousness persisting after death in some fashion at least sometimes. There are compelling testimonies corroborating this from adept meditators, yogis, psychedelic users, and people who have had near death experiences. There are also strong philosophical positions at least compatible with this. As someone who has spent years looking at the hard problem of consciousness from various angles, I don’t believe consciousness reduces to physical brain states. No field of science currently has the ability to address the hard problem of consciousness, and in principle never will, I believe, unless we substantially modify how we define science. The Dalai Lama said, “What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. An example is consciousness itself. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions.” Personally I am more sympathetic to dualism or even idealism than to physicalism. The best arguments for this conclusion I’ve come across are from philosopher David Chalmers. Dualism and idealism certainly don’t guarantee that consciousness persists after death, but seem far more supportive of this possibility than physicalism. The notion of interconnectedness/interpenetration, commonplace in Eastern philosophies and rigorously argued for in the book One: Being an Investigation Into the Unity of Reality and of Its Parts, Including the Singular Object which is Nothingness by Graham Priest, offers a metaphysical framework perhaps also supportive of this. If the totality of existence is essentially one unified thing, and everything is contained in everything else in a Net of Indra style reality, perhaps it becomes easier to see how consciousness doesn’t go anywhere when we die but just transforms, so to speak. Jumping to quantum mechanics, the Observer Effect perhaps offers evidence that consciousness is more fundamental than material reality (though there is a whole lot of bullshit out there presented under the guise of quantum mechanics to be wary of). I certainly don’t know the true nature of reality and I’m not really sure how likely life after death is, but all I’m aiming to argue thus far is that the probability of consciousness persisting after death is meaningfully greater than zero. Next, I want to propose that the events of this lifetime may have bearing on what this post-death consciousness is like, if it happens at all. This belief is a major feature of pretty much every world religion – take that for whatever it’s worth. In my eyes, it seems at least plausible, as in greater than zero probability, that the state of our consciousness leading up to death influences what happens next. Buddhist monks going into the state of tukdam at the time of death might be one example. Finally, consider the possibility that consciousness after death could be eternal, or perhaps timeless if our consciousness sort of “pops out” of temporal bounds. As long as the probability is greater than zero for all of what I’ve argued for above, then there is an infinity multiplier for the expected utility of our actions. The math of an expected utility calculation sort of breaks down when dealing with payoffs across eternity or non-temporally, but the potential wellbeing (or suffering) to be had in this realm dwarfs whatever is going on in this lifetime. So, what type of actions are likely to yield the most preferable outcomes upon dying? Honestly I’m not sure yet and I expect to continually update this essay as I learn more. But I do have some guesses. Very roughly speaking, the best I’ve got so far is developing our hearts and minds through meditative and contemplative practices, transforming the barriers and defensive layers obscuring connection with our true nature. So I’d encourage organizing one’s life in a way that is maximally conducive to this. The good news, I think, is that adopting a rigid, Puritan style, self-domineering approach undermines the whole endeavor. I think that maximizing one’s own expected utility across eternity converges probably converges pretty closely, if not perfectly congruently, with being maximally joyful and compassionate in this lifetime. If we are connected with our own true nature of interconnectedness and sameness, which I suggest is a critical piece in hedging our bets for the afterlife, compassion for both ourselves and other beings naturally flows with no special effort required. As described in depth in The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, our own wellbeing is inextricably linked to others’ wellbeing. This argument can be made in terms of both psychology and metaphysics. With this understanding, the distinction between serving self and serving others begins to vanish. If we are closed off to the interconnectedness and sameness we share with other beings, we are disconnected from our own true nature. It’s much harder for significant spiritual growth to take place from there. How we engage with others, whether we are playful and compassionate with other beings or confer harm, always comes back around in some form. Violence to others is at the same time violence to self. Look at someone like Donald Trump or Dan Bilzerian. Personally I would hate to inhabit either of their conscious experiences despite the fact that there are nearly fully indexed in terms of things like power, money, fame, and sensual pleasure. They seem deeply miserable. Anyway, let me try to tie all of this back to risk aversion and the internal resistance that so commonly impedes us from taking action to get unstuck and make positive changes in our lives. If we are stuck in circumstances that aren’t serving us and we don’t choose to try to do anything differently, we are perpetuating disconnection from ourselves by abandoning our needs. From this state of disconnection, spiritual development is severely limited. The parts of us that lean toward risk aversion and maintaining the status quo tend to be the same parts of us that believe it is unsafe to be the full expression of who we are: love, expansiveness, light, joy. Broadly speaking, these qualities are what many contemplative practices aim to cultivate. So if we try and forge ahead on a spiritual path without unburdening these parts of ourselves from their protective roles, there will probably be internal pushback and polarization, slowing or halting our spiritual pursuits. And whatever expansion does happen is unlikely to permeate back into our ordinary everyday life in the ways we hope for (a sign of spiritual bypassing). The safe, comfortable paths that keep us small and stuck, even if they are slightly safer in this lifetime which is debatable, won’t allow us to get very far in the domain of spiritual development. It’s all coupled. Putting this all together, the risk of not taking uncomfortable action is a less enjoyable existence for all of eternity. The risk of taking uncomfortable action certainly depends on the circumstance but likely doesn’t have an infinity multiplier attached to it. The upside of taking uncomfortable action includes internal freedom and perhaps a more enjoyable existence for all of eternity. I don’t see any upside of not taking uncomfortable action besides temporarily avoiding discomfort. So the way I see it, going for it and giving your all to making your life as wonderful as it can be is the more risk averse option— it has both lower risk and higher upside than the alternative. For all of these reasons, sincere spiritual seeking serves as a forcing function toward a life aligned with our true nature, toward things like joy, compassion (for self and others), freedom, and authenticity in this lifetime. Simplicity and health can be added to this list as well. If our lives are busy and cluttered, we will have less time and energy to devote to spiritual and contemplative practices. Taking good care of our health and vitality is critical too. Referring to the importance of taking care of our bodies, Ram Dass writes, "if you destroy the temple in which you must do the work before the work is finished...you lose."
Even if you disagree with the entire previous paragraph on metaphysics and consciousness, I implore you to remember how precious your own life is and give it the credit it deserves! One main purpose of this whole essay is to jumpstart things by providing enough yearning to even consider in the first place that it might be worthwhile to undertake the project of getting unstuck and coming home to ourselves. While it can open up a truly delightful existence, it’s often a surprisingly demanding process. So the more fuel and support we are equipped with, the better. Nobody can do it alone.