Transcriber: Trang Phạm Reviewer: Trina Orsic
Why do people read books?
Some people read to relax.
Some people read for entertainment.
But when I started reading seriously, that was definitely not the case for me.
I remember my passion for reading coming right after I graduated high school
at a time when I felt very confused about life.
So I started reading everything I could get my hands on:
philosophy, religion, literature,
all with the clear goal of finding answers to the question:
How should I live my life?
But after a few months of doing this,
I realized that not only was I not finding any clear, definitive answers,
but that the more I read, the more confused I got.
The reason was that no matter how much I read,
I kept going back to two big ideas about life that I found really compelling.
My problem was that they were in total contradiction with one another.
The first was from the Dalai Lama, and his idea was to lose your attachments.
The second noble truth of Buddhism
says that attachment is the root of all suffering.
And this made a lot of sense to me.
Life can be an emotional rollercoaster,
most of the time because we’re too attached to too many things:
cravings, expectations, desires, wants and needs.
Every time we get attached to something,
the possibility of suffering is right there along with it.
The Dalai Lama was right, I felt,
if only I could lose my attachments
and learn to be more content and peaceful,
like those monks on the mountaintops.
How much happier would I be?
The problem was that there was another idea
which seemed to be just as powerful
which totally contradicted this.
And it was best put into words by Charles Bukowski,
the drunken writer who’d get into wild adventures
and write this amazing literature about them.
And he says,
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
You know, we may have attachments,
but it's also true that we go through life uninspired and disengaged sometimes.
We have all this energy
and often we just don’t know how or where we should channel it.
To find something I was truly, genuinely passionate about
to the point of actually being willing to sacrifice for it, let alone die for it.
If only...if only I could be more authentically passionate
and find a purpose, a direction for all this energy
like Bukowski did with literature.
How much happier would I be?
So lose your attachments
and live with passion.
But if we lose our attachments, aren’t we also losing our passions?
And if we live passionately, aren’t we also attached,
clinging to that passion,
just signing up to more suffering down the line?
As I said, I was confused.
And, no amount of reading that I do on top of this would help
because I just keep coming back to this fundamental contradiction
over and over and over.
And when we have a big question,
it’s really tempting to reach out for one big answer
to just come in and plug it shut.
But questions and answers aren’t always neatly matched like this.
Sometimes the issue is with language.
Sometimes it's an underlying tension or a deeper misunderstanding.
Things can get really messy really quickly when it comes to these bigger questions,
and so more often, it’s more productive, I find
to start by settling for much smaller, more imperfect, indirect clues.
A big question is almost like a moving puzzle in 3D.
And over time, little clues can start accumulating
and slowly start delineating an answer.
Sometimes, instead of being answered, the question gets disentangled altogether.
In my case, I had to wait almost 20 years
for three smaller clues to resolve this tension for me,
this apparent contradiction between wanting a more calm
and inner peace on one hand
and wanting more genuine passion and engagement on the other.
The first clue came from Stoic philosophy,
and it's what Stoics call the dichotomy of control.
It's a simple insight from Epictetus,
who writes that happiness and freedom begin with
a clear understanding of one principle.
Some things are within your control and some things are not.
Now, this sounds very simple,
but it’s often really hard to apply in real life.
How often do we pour energy into
and stress about things we don’t really control?
The stock market, inflation, wars, what other people think of us,
you name it and we stress about it.
Simply removing or detaching ourselves from those things
can really improve our state of mind.
And in a big, changing, complex world,
there are bound to be more things we don’t control than things that we do.
And so the first clue came in and created a kind of a bias
for the acceptance, the detachment that the Stoics and Buddhists write about.
The second clue came from the lesser known field of wisdom studies.
It comes from the work of a late great scholar at USC, James Birren,
one of the founders of the Field of Gerontology,
who spent decades systematically studying what creates quality of life
through this quality that all cultures call wisdom.
Birren taught that wisdom is almost like a dial
that’s ultimately about knowing when you should overcome
or transcend a limitation
and when you should simply accept a limitation.
So this takes the idea of the Stoics, the idea of the dialectic,
dialectic of control, and makes it a little bit more dynamic.
Just because you don’t control something today
doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to control it tomorrow.
If you can actually improve something,
something you genuinely care about for good reasons,
something that can help you or someone else,
then there’s an opportunity for action and for transcendence of your limitations,
even if this comes at great effort.
If you really can't improve on something or if it's not that important to you,
then instead there’s an opportunity for acceptance,
even to appreciate it for what it is.
All of our major decisions in life can be approached using this simple dial.
Just pausing and asking ourselves,
Can I or should I strive to improve on this?
Should I overcome this?
Or is this just something that I have to learn to accept?
And we should only act on things that we can or really want to engage with,
and only to the degree that it really means something to us.
And finally, the third clue came when I look past the question
and at the underlying state of the confusion,
at the emotions I was feeling when experiencing this contradiction.
Big existential questions aren’t just purely logical problems.
They're also tied to emotional states.
And in my case, that state was one of self-conscious anxiety.
And there’s a growing body of solid research in psychology
showing that anxiety is strongly tied to what researchers call
obsessive self-rumination.
Simply put, being too self-conscious.
People who are extremely anxious and even depressed
tend to spend more time thinking about themselves
and have a hard time switching their attention
to things outside of themselves.
This is probably why when they start putting their focus outward
on helping others or on a larger mission or purpose in the world,
this is often so therapeutic to them.
This third clue is really, really big.
It suggests that our energy,
our passion, our attachments should be directed as much as possible
to a purpose or cause beyond ourselves,
like helping someone else, solving a problem,
contributing to society in some way.
But it also showed that there was an overlap
between the “lose your attachment” idea
and the “die for your passions” idea.
The common element is that we need to lose ourselves
before we can find ourselves.
When people are passionately engaged in something they really care about,
they often report getting lost in the moment.
They’ll lose track of time
or they’ll momentarily lose their sense of self,
like people who describe being in a mystical state or in a flow state.
And when we really deeply accept something,
we withdraw ourselves from a situation that may not need us in the first place.
We become more aware of the world as it is,
untainted by our desires, our fears,
our need to control everything around us.
In this case, stress disappears
when we let go of this need to control everything.
In one case, we lose ourselves
to acceptance and even appreciation for the world as it is.
in the other, we lose ourselves when we focus our energies
on something other than ourselves, on a broader purpose.
We can almost see these as two different tools or strategies
we can use to deal with the same basic underlying problem.
One is an active tool
that takes our energy and flows it from ourselves into the world.
The other is a passive tool that directs our energy inward
and allows us to find peace and appreciation.
In both cases, the problem they solve is holding onto our ego consciousness
and making everything about ourselves.
In the end, there wasn't a contradiction,
but rather two different angles to tackling the same problem.
Deep down, I find joy and also a little bit of humor in the idea
that the Dalai Lama and Bukowski didn’t really disagree.
I think that deep down
they both knew that to develop a healthy sense of self,
calibrated to the world in an authentic and realistic way,
we had to first lose the needy, clutchy,
delusional and overly self-conscious versions of ourselves first.
In other words,
we have to lose ourselves before we can find ourselves.
And there’s no contradiction in that.