#39 How to find your life's purpose
plus: the last link roundup of 2022
Hey friends, comments off on this one since I can’t moderate them, as mentioned last week I’m in silent retreat this week.
This is the first time I’ve missed a family Christmas to specifically and aggressively meditate, and while that’s definitely sad, it’s changed the entire feeling of this month in a tangible way. I’m relaxed, I can breath, I don’t feel like I’m missing out or forgetting something important or not measuring up or like, worrying that my house is decorated worse than Beth’s or something. I asked for no gifts. I gave everyone in my family money. I didn’t buy a tree I’ll bitch and then bitch about the wastefulness, or put up a single decoration. I won’t be attending one party. It’s an actual opt-out, and it’s turned out to be a life improving move.
Something I’ve been thinking about the past few years, since losing what I thought was my “divinely inspired” life’s purpose, is What Now. What’s the point of an existence, of being here at all, if there’s not some really special thing you’re doing that makes meaning out of your taking up space and precious resources. In an interview Emily and I did with Liz Gilbert on our Quitted podcast earlier this year, I was talking about this exact thing, and what Liz said in response was one of the best framings I have ever heard on the subject of “having a Purpose” and probably the best wisdom I came across all year. (If you want to listen to the whole conversation, it’s available here and here in two parts.)
I was in California for speaking and I had some free time in the afternoon. So I went for a walk…and…the key part of this story is that I was free. I had free time. So this never would have happened if I didn't have free time…So I was just wandering around with nothing to do, no purpose…and I looked across the street and I noticed that there was a gentleman standing at the top of a very tall ladder…repainting his sign on his awning of a storefront.
I have really good ladder safety skills because I grew up on a farm with a jackass father who used to do such fucking bullshit with ladders and chainsaws…and his daughters, and…his wife, like it was just such nonsense. And so I like grew up with a mother yelling at me like, oh, hold your father's ladder, you know, so I have this reflex. When I see somebody being reckless on a ladder, I was trained to not let people fall off ladders…So I crossed four lanes of traffic and I held the man's ladder for about half an hour. And…this is the important part: I had nowhere else to be. I had nothing else to do. So I could just sit there for half an hour holding this stranger's ladder. And then when he started to come down…I just gently peeled off and walked away and he never saw me. I never saw his face. He never knew I was there. And as I was walking away I thought what if that was the entire purpose of my life? It's just as good a fucking guest as anything.
We don't know what's going on here. I don't know the master plan. What if the whole reason I was given incarnation was because they needed someone in Sector Seven, Region 14, you know, Avenue, whatever, six 2.0 100 hours to hold this dude's ladder because he was essential to the ongoing evolution of something. And like: I had to grow up on that farm with that jackass misbehaving father and his ladders to be present to that moment, and just hold the ladder. And what if I had served my purpose in that moment? And now I am free? What if everything else I did in my life was just killing time till they need to meet and hold the ladder.
…You can't prove that that wasn't my life's purpose. And because you can't prove that that wasn't my life's purpose, then we should just give up on the whole question of life's purpose. Because it can't be proven. It's just a theory that we all spread to each other like a virus to make each other sick.
So now I'm more in the line of like, do the next right thing. You know just do the next right thing when you see somebody on a ladder that's shaky hold it, there, your work for the day is done. There's garbage on the ground pick it up. A dish needs to be washed, wash it. I don't know. Like that's it. What if that's it? You know?
That is Liz Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love which has sold, I don’t know, a billion copies, that was the catalyst for people like me to leave their jobs and live in Italy and you know, skip Christmas to meditate in a frozen tundra for 40 hours—a person whose “purpose” most of us could guess has been clearly and obviously filled—saying perhaps the whole reason she’s here at all is to hold some guy’s ladder.
I’m leaving this here today, as we move through the remainder of this year and encounter God knows what, with the possibility that the entire reason we are here could be justified through the things we so often deem banal or unimportant within the context of this culture. Holding a ladder. Being kind on the phone to the customer service rep. Buying the guy outside the 7-11 a pack of his favorite cigarettes. Holding a door. Not honking back. De-escalating an aggression instead of returning it. Leaving a tip for a server that seemed intent on ruining your meal. Finding ways to deliver grace or kindness that will absolutely go unnoticed but might possibly shift the course of our entire evolution through events we could not begin to imagine. These examples might be really specific and they are; they’re ones from my own life the past few weeks, things that are both hard in the moment and also things I think of, often enough, as so small compared to what some people do with their lives, like reporting from a war zone or winning a Nobel or whatever. I guess I’m saying: I know that a lot of what I think makes my life important, or will make my life important, is often enough just frivolity; and the things I’m reflexively likely to deem frivolous or too small to matter are actually what make my life important.
I think we often forget we’re just these tiny little cells of a universal body; and that what we might think doesn’t matter in the long run, what little choices we make day by day, fall through some crack and it’s only the big grand things that matter.
I don’t think it works like that at all.
With a lot of love and a lot of tenderness as the days near their shortest.
18 Things Right Now
One of the best books I’ve ever read that won’t make next week’s list because I read it in 2020 was The Molecule of More. Needed to slip this in somewhere since we’re in like the height of dopamine season
My all-time favorite holiday advice: learn to disappoint people
Mood: Wichita Lineman by Glenn Campbell, Who Knows Where The Time Goes by Nina Simone, Brokendate by Com Truise, Vesna by DhakhaBrakha (via Chris La Tray)
In November, for ‘fun’, I spent a day reading the Wikipedia page on postmodernism, clicking through nearly every single link. I know this wasn’t like, say, sitting in a library poring over microfiche. Still, I was on a search for why I feel so exhausted by almost all the discourse that exists right now, how empty and complaining most of it feels, how completely devoid of joy or hope or delight or whatever most conversations—including the ones I initiate—can feel. So I started there, and it led me to this quote on postmodern art by Camille Paglia:
The end result of four decades of postmodernism permeating the art world is that there is very little interesting or important work being done right now in the fine arts. The irony was a bold and creative posture when Duchamp did it, but it is now an utterly banal, exhausted, and tedious strategy. Young artists have been taught to be "cool" and "hip" and thus painfully self-conscious. They are not encouraged to be enthusiastic, emotional, and visionary. They have been cut off from artistic tradition by the crippled skepticism about history that they have been taught by ignorant and solipsistic postmodernists.
Even though she was talking about art, and not necessarily postmodern discourse or philosophy, it still rang true and it’s stuck with me since. In that vein, this article I found via Terry Nguyen in yesterday’s Dirt, hit. “Life is still beautiful, it’s culture that’s in the duldrums”
Related: I’ve already recommended this episode of Philosophize This! on The Society of the Spectacle and Guy Debord in a previous edition, but if #3 interests you (why does everything feel exhausting and blah, etc.), I think it’s worth listening to. If you want to go even deeper, here’s a 2022 entertainment roundup that acknowledges the meh
I try to meditate every day and I have a better experience when I do it with other people, even over zoom. (I go deeper, time moves faster, etc.) Two great meditation resources if you’re craving sangha and can’t make a live sit: (1) zen daily sit with everyday zen foundation (every weekday morning at 7:30am PT, 30 minutes)1; (2) Thursday night 30-minute sit + 1 hour Dharma talk with Insight Meditation Community Berkeley. These are both cherished resources, and donation based.
Alcohol: Teen alcohol use rebounds post pandemic; Answer: Yes, not drinking; 68% of American’s don’t know of the link between ethanol and cancer; 1/2 of people killed in auto accidents had drugs/alcohol in their system; when we read things like this keep in mind it’s not always only about less people using drugs but less damage inflicted through second-hand drinking; alcohol is a terrible mix with ADHD.
This podcast with Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, whose research on psychedelics spans decades and includes over 400 papers, on Psychedelics and Mortality (1 hour 45 minutes) was simply exquisite. I deeply appreciated how the show started not with the typical psychedelics will save us all everyone try them now bullshit, but a rather stern warning of the downsides of using them and the respect they deserve, which usually gets swept aside in most discussions for reasons I understand (see: decades long ban/war on drugs/fear mongering). I appreciated the nuance discussed around roll-out (decrim/legalization/wide available use after medicalization/trials). I appreciated both these men tackling a deeply complex subject. The first half is free, the entire episode is paywalled but you can request a years long subscription by emailing support@wakingup.com if you cannot afford it.
We might be living within a new epoch (!!) which explains a lot
As suggested by Lisa Olivera, this is better than scrolling instagram
“here’s my advice: read a book again and again and again, learning something new about it each time. read it five times before you open another one.” This entire article on conscious consuming. As someone who reads like she’s trying to win a competition, I want to also share that I make myself return to previously read works again and again to get a deeper understanding (this goes against my nature, but its how I actually learn). Three that topped that list this year: When Things Fall Apart; The Wisdom of No Escape; A Brief History of Everything
Tech + social media: One of my nieces, who is twenty, deleted her socials a while ago and is procuring a flip phone. This piece by Jason Chatfield on leaving social media, sent to me last week after I talked about Sam Harris deleting his twitter, was great. The most read article I’ve published on Substack is on the same subject. In that article, I listed a number of resources in a footnote (favorite books, etc.), and I’ll re-post those resources in a footnote here2.
Related: A lot of what exists about leaving social media is often written by white men, and specifically white men who aren’t, say, an independent artist whose entire living depends on sharing their work via social media (for instance, Cal Newport is a tenured professor; Jaron Lanier has a computer science degree to fall back on; both have multiple books published.) It is not the same thing and I appreciate Marlee Grace for their continued discourse on this tension. You can support their work by subscribing to their newsletter, or purchasing one of their wonderful books or their course on starting a newsletter. And basically let’s just support independent artists and makers so they don’t have to use Instagram maybe.
(1/3) The Adderall shortage could lead to a repeat of the opioid crisis (an avoidable, government sponsored shortage leads to individuals looking for stimulant medications outside the regulated market)
(3/3) If #16 sounds like extreme rhetoric, take this example: “Jail has always been a place where people have gained sobriety…you need a place where we can put people where they cannot leave”—Sam Quinones, author of the Least of Us and Dream Land, actually said this which is truly some kind of national Freudian slip on how subhuman we view people with addictions
The last three things being said: I believe in humanity, now more than ever. I believe in a benevolent universe, in a vastness beyond comprehension, that love is how the story ends, in all of that. Merry holidays!
Please make sure you are familiar with sitting zen before jumping in; even though it’s on zoom its a sacred space. Read the website fully to understand codes of conduct, you can take an intro class online through most zen centers or everyday zen; this will require some effort, more than using an app, which is part of the point.
The best books I’ve read on the subject: Irresistible; Deep Work; Stolen Focus; The Molecule of More (I’ve read most of them at this point but these are ones I liked most). Laura McKowen wrote about it for the NYT as an addiction, Lisa Olivera wrote about what she gained from taking a step back from IG and so to did my podcast co-host, Emily McDowell; Brenè Brown is on a three month hiatus and with 4.4 million followers, this in of itself is a commentary. There are books on books on books about the damage it does and 346,000 hits on Google Scholar for the term “harms of social media”. “Social media break” has become a fixture of the cultural zeitgeist, a term when searched in quotes has over 800k hits. Every single one of my friends who uses Instagram as part of their livelihood knows intimately: the cost to your mental health, the fuckery of the algorithm, the love/hate but mostly hate relationship you develop over time, the feeling that you cannot escape it—that you must make it work no matter the cost.