Category: Life Lessons

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Life Lessons

Life Is Unfair: A Guide to Existential Meaning

This really is unfair.

I spent last year working on myself—figuring out how to relax, how to unhook from things that were bothering me. I read The Happiness Trap and Feeling Great, and I was well on my way to cleaning up the issues in my life.

But now that things are cleaned up, I have a big problem—one that everyone has to deal with at some level—the existential question of, “What should I be doing with my life?”

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to freedom.” It’s a quote that seems a bit glib—the kind of thing an aloof Frenchman in post-WWII Paris would use to pick up women in a cafe. But it’s an incredibly powerful idea.

We normally think of freedom as a blessing. We live in the USA. Freedom is our birthright—as American as mom and apple pie. But we tend to view freedom as pushing back the things that we don’t want to do. However, freedom also means we have to decide and be responsible for the life that we lead.

And that’s terrifying.

As I tried to answer this question, I’ve discovered that there are three levels of the answer, each one more abstract and fundamental.

Level One: Big E Existential—The Goals That Give Life Direction

This is what we normally think of when we think of existential questions. Am I accomplishing the things I want to accomplish? Am I doing things that really matter in the long term?

I like to use the model from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In ACT, the answer is simple: figure out what you want to do and then spend your time doing it.

I use a Bullet Journal for this.

It gives me a simple way to plan for the future and make sure I stay on track, making sure that I’m spending my time on things that matter.

It also helps me understand that I’ve used my time well and done things that are aligned with my values. You see, I have an awful memory. Without my Bullet Journal, when I look back and think about last week, I often can’t remember what I did. I’ll feel this existential void like I hadn’t done anything at all. And when I feel like I haven’t done anything that matters, I panic and overcorrect. I hyperfocus on some new project or goal. I feel like I need to fill this huge emptiness with something bigger, something important. But this whipsawing between projects means that I accomplish even less—leading to a vicious circle where I actually am getting less done. With my Bullet Journal I have an accurate accounting of what I’ve done and see if I’m living my goals. If not, I can just slowly adjust and point back at my goals.

But here’s what I discovered: even when my Bullet Journal showed me I was accomplishing my goals, something still felt missing. That’s when I started to understand the second level.

Level Two: small e existential—The Moments That Make Us Real

There’s another type of existential meaning that’s just as important but harder to pin down. It’s about being seen. It’s about the small moments each and every day where someone recognizes who you really are. It’s about existential validation—that feeling of truly being seen because someone recognizes the authentic you.

I learned this from someone on my team—actually a combination of people on my team over the years. Let’s call them Jamie. Jamie was very competent but since graduating from college a decade ago, they’d never been given a chance to grow, leaving them with a feeling that they weren’t good enough. They even told me they wanted to work on their self-confidence.

At our first team meeting they introduced themselves. “Hi, I’m Jamie,” they said, in a monotone voice. “I’ve been at the company for 5 years. And well, that’s about it.” They finished quickly because they didn’t want to waste other people’s time—because they’d been trained that they weren’t important.

So I worked with them—starting with that introduction they made. It’s a short little speech but it sets the tone of how other people will think of you. I had them practice it at the beginning of each 1:1 meeting we had. I did my own intro as an example.

They quickly started to get it. They started to own their story, be proud of themselves, and the work they did. They stopped looking like a shrinking violet and blossomed into a beautiful flower.

After a few months, they wrote, “Thank you so much for working with me on my self-confidence. Your support, not just one time but over many meetings, made a significant difference for me, both professionally and personally. You really listen to me and tailor your guidance to what I really need. You don’t understand how rare that is in a manager—at least in my experience. I’m so privileged that I can share my problems with you, knowing that you’ll come back with solutions that will really help me out.”

Watching Jamie transform taught me something about myself. All my carefully tracked goals couldn’t compare with that moment of genuine connection. When Jamie looked up from the practiced introduction with such pride—I’d made a ding in the universe.

But even this wasn’t the full picture. Because to truly be present in those moments—to really see Jamie and be seen in return—required something deeper.

Level Three: The Self Underneath It All

All of this comes back to an idea that’s part of many traditions—that there’s a true transcendental existence underneath everything else. Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about this as transcendentalism, this idea of touching something deeper in yourself. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls it “The Creator.” Religions call it a soul.

The point is, there’s something inside people that’s bigger than us. It’s really hard to explain cognitively, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the difference between going through the motions of life and actually living life.

ACT therapy calls it “the self” or “self-as-context.” It’s the underlying you that’s really there. So in ACT, you’re not anxious, you’re noticing the feeling of anxiety. You don’t feel like a failure, you’re noticing the feeling of shame and sadness that you didn’t accomplish something. That true you is always underneath, always there noticing the things that happen in your life and making decisions about it.

Here’s what I’ve learned: this deeper awareness—the ability to step back and notice what’s happening—creates the space where I can make the right decisions. Without it, my Bullet Journal becomes list of To Do’s and mentoring others becomes a task I should do for my annual review. But when I’m grounded in that self that notices, I have room to choose. I can decide to do things that align with my values as opposed to just respond to my anxiety. I can genuinely connect with the true self of other people. That space—that pause between noticing and reacting—is what makes the other two levels of meaning possible.

But when I’m grounded in that deeper self—the one that’s just noticing—everything changes. I can look at my journal without judgment. I can be with Jamie without trying to fix anything. I can just be present with what is.

You can try this for yourself, if you know how to meditate. Try meditating and noticing some things. Then ask yourself “Who is doing the noticing?” It’s quite an experience if you can get it right.

This may seem clinical and exhausting, but it’s actually the opposite. It allows you to be truly present in the moment. This is the only way to not be buffeted by the outside world and do things that you think are important to you.

So here’s what I’ve learned: existential meaning isn’t one thing. My Bullet Journal gives my life direction. Those moments with Jamie remind me I’m not alone. And that deeper awareness—the self that notices—makes both of those work without turning goals into obsessions or connections into performances. The easy thing is to avoid the question entirely, to let other people’s goals fill the void. The harder thing—the thing I’m still learning—is to live on all three levels at once.

Sartre said we are “condemned to freedom.” We are condemned to responsibility and making choices. Albert Camus had a different take on existential suffering—that it’s all futile. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote about the Greek king condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity—only to watch it roll back down each time he reached the top. But Camus concluded, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Even though Sisyphus was condemned to never achieving his goal, he didn’t have to be unhappy. He could find meaning in the struggle itself. That’s what these three levels give us—ways to create our own meaning through the goals we pursue, the moments we’re seen, and the self that does the noticing. It’s still unfair that I had to figure this out. But at least now I have a map.hat I had to figure this out. But at least now I have a map.

Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

An Open Letter to Atheists

I’m writing this for one particular friend, but thought the rest of you might enjoy it.

As an atheist, you probably think of religion like Richard Dawkins. He talks about religion this way. Imagine someone tells you there’s something incredibly important hidden in your backyard. You start digging. When you don’t find anything, they say you’re not digging deep enough. You keep digging. Still nothing appears. Eventually, the hole gets so big and destructive that you’ve ruined the entire yard. Yet you’ve convinced yourself that digging is virtuous.

The problem is that Dawkins views religion in a particular way. He sees it as an end in goal—a claim about what’s literally true about the universe. And a lot of people think of religion that way. But that’s not what religion is, at least not for me.

Here’s my short answer: Religion is a means to an end. What end? The end of being a better person. It’s a framework for asking the right questions about how to live, a way of making the ordinary sacred, and a path toward holiness that neither science nor art alone can provide.

Let me explain.

What God Is (To Me)

As Rabbi Harold Kushner often said, when someone told him they didn’t believe in God, he would ask them to describe the God they didn’t believe in—and usually found he didn’t believe in that God either.

For me, God isn’t a man in the sky who created the world in seven days. I believe in Rabbi Kushner’s God —a God who represents the best of what we can become, who calls us to be better.

You know that old story where several blind men encounter an elephant for the first time? Each touches a different part—one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another touches the leg and thinks it’s a tree, another feels the ear and thinks it’s a fan. Each has grasped part of the truth, but none can see the whole.

That’s how religion works, because god is literally impossible to fully understand. But it does a good job of helping us grasp at least some of the pieces, like feeling the elephant’s foot here, its trunk there. It’s not God, but a representation of God.

God is the sacred beauty we encounter in the world. It’s the courage that shows up when life gets hard. The kindness we didn’t know we had. It’s the connection I feel to my grandparents, even though they’ve died—that transcendent feeling, that awesome sense of having my grandparents inside me. When I read that God brings life back from the dead, it’s not about resurrection but this amazing ability for our essence to live inside others.

God Is Not Science. God Is More Like Poetry.

I once had a conversation with a wise high school Principal. I asked him what the most important thing for high schools to teach was. I thought the answer was obvious: the ability to read and analyze things, to think critically and move ideas forward. This would help people make money, make good decisions, and be productive members of society.

He had a different answer. He said the most important thing was for kids to read books and understand other people’s points of view—to get inside other people’s heads.

That’s the core difference between Dawkins’s view of the world and mine. Science tells us what we know. Poetry tells us what has meaning. Religion gives us a path toward holiness—a way to get there that neither science nor poetry alone can provide.

Camus wrote that “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” He meant that fiction helps us build empathy, showing us what it’s like to be someone else. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a “me” as well.

Religion works the same way. The stories may not be literally true—the world wasn’t made in six days, and Noah didn’t actually gather every animal on earth. But these stories are doing something more important than conveying facts. They’re helping us understand how to live, how to connect with each other, how to find meaning.

Just knowing the facts is different from really understanding them. Acquiring wisdom is putting your facts together in the right way. That’s where religion comes in. Religion helps provide a framework and a way of seeing the world that goes beyond the facts. It helps you expand what it means to be a human being.

What Religion Does (That Nothing Else Can)

Religion offers things that neither science nor poetry can. Poetry is still individual. Religion is about groups of people coming together.

One of the most important things religion provides is a framework for the most important lifestage events—births, deaths, marriages, and coming-of-age ceremonies. These are essential to being human, and you really can’t find them anywhere else.

I saw this firsthand at Ari’s bar mitzvah a few months ago. What could have been just another birthday party became something sacred. When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—a holy joy. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.

Harold Kushner sums it up nicely when he says, “The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time. To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.

Religion also carries wisdom that endures. Yes, there are principles and rituals and things that seem silly and traditions we’ve inherited across millennia. You might ask, “Do we really need all of this stuff? Can’t we just keep the stuff that matters?”

The problem is, that as hard as we try to do this, it just doesn’t seem to work very well. Take Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis from 2006. It’s a great book that tries to link the wisdom of the ages with modern psychogy. Even though the book is only 20 years old, the wisdom of the ages stays constant but many of the views in psychology have been upended.

In Judaism, we’re constantly revising and changing and arguing. That’s the core of the religion—the endless debate, the wrestling with text and tradition and each other. It’s not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions, together, and trusting that the tradition carries wisdom even in the parts we don’t fully understand.

What Really Matters

So what do we do? Last year, I was sitting around thinking and remembering those wonderful college days when we would just sit around and have these profound conversations—the kind that stretch late into the night because you never want them to end.

Then one Shabbat, while Abigail and the kids were busy, I went to shul alone. I planned to meditate, reconnect with friends, and recharge. I ran into my friend Joe, and we started talking.

When they kicked us out after lunch to clean up, we kept going on the street. I didn’t want it to end, so I offered to walk him home. “Otherwise you’ll never get there,” I joked.

At his apartment, Joe invited me up for a drink. We talked for hours—exactly the kind of conversation I’d been craving.

We talked about how many people view religion as a burden rather than a benefit. Many people view religion as a burden, something they can only do “when they have time.” They are running around, working, or going to the kids’ soccer game, but they never quite have enough time for religion.

Yet when you really examine it, going to shul matters deeply. These are the things that really matter in life. Religion is about getting closer to God every week—pausing, thinking about becoming a better person, seeing friends, and engaging in the wisdom literature. These are the things that actually matter.

At some point, we both said at the same time, “This is living!” Not excelling at sports or getting a promotion. We’re conditioned to think those activities were more meaningful, but they’re not. This—sitting together, wrestling with big questions, connecting deeply with another person—this is what really matters.

Categories
Life Lessons

Getting Over Hidden Addictions

We all know addiction is bad for us. But when we hear the word, we think of drugs, alcohol—maybe gambling if we’re feeling expansive. Few of us think about being addicted to food, or YouTube, or productivity itself. Those don’t sound dangerous—just human. But there’s a quieter kind of addiction too, the kind that hides behind good intentions, entertainment, or routines. Spotting those is hard. Getting rid of them is harder. But if you can, life opens up in surprising ways.

However, in his book Feeling Great, David Burns discusses four hidden addictions that are worth overcoming.1

1. The Addiction to Being Special

This one hides behind ambition and self-improvement. It starts as the drive to do something meaningful, to be good at what you do, to make a mark. Nothing wrong with that—until it starts eating you alive.

You begin to measure everything: your success, your relationships, even your joy. You compare. You optimize. You chase that fleeting hit of validation that says, “You’re not just good—you’re better.” And then you need another hit, and another.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “special self.” It’s the moment you realize you don’t need to be extraordinary to have value. That maybe the most radical thing you can do in a world obsessed with attention is to stop performing and just be.

If you’ve ever burned out on trying to “live up to your potential,” you’ve felt this. The relief comes when you finally drop the act. When you stop chasing applause and rediscover what it feels like to just enjoy something for its own sake.

Try this: Do something purely for the joy of it—and tell no one. Don’t post it, don’t share it, don’t even mention it. Just live it.

2. The Addiction to Safety and Control

This one feels virtuous. It’s disguised as responsibility, as “being organized.” You make lists, double-check, plan ahead, rehearse conversations in your head. It feels like you’re managing life—but really, you’re managing your anxiety.

Control gives the illusion of safety, but it’s a treadmill. The more you control, the more fragile you feel. Because underneath it all is the fear that if you stop trying, everything will fall apart.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “fearful self.” The breakthrough isn’t when you finally feel safe—it’s when you realize you don’t need to. That you can live with uncertainty, and even thrive in it.

The monster you’ve been running from—the unknown—isn’t trying to hurt you. It’s trying to invite you.

Try this: Leave one small thing unplanned today. Let the email sit. Don’t overexplain. See what happens when you let the world unfold without micromanaging it.

3. The Addiction to Being Right

This one hides in plain sight. It’s in every argument where you “just want to be understood.” Every moment you feel that if only they’d listen, things would be fine.

We all tell ourselves we’re reasonable people surrounded by idiots. But if every disagreement you have feels like déjà vu, the common denominator might be you.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “angry, blaming self.” He has patients keep a “relationship journal,” writing down exactly what was said in a conflict and how their own response might have made things worse. It’s humbling work. You start seeing how often your attempts to “fix” or “clarify” are really attempts to control.

When you stop trying to win, you realize how many arguments are just two people asking, “Do you see me?”

Try this: In your next disagreement, aim to understand, not persuade. Ask one genuine question and listen to the answer without planning your rebuttal. You might be shocked by how fast things soften.

4. The Addiction to Comfort and Escape

This one’s sneaky because the world encourages it. Comfort is the new religion. We “treat ourselves,” “unwind,” and “disconnect”—usually by connecting to something else. We fill every empty moment with noise.

The pleasure-seeking self isn’t evil; it’s just scared. It’s the part of you that can’t stand stillness because stillness might mean facing something real. That’s why the scroll never ends, the fridge door keeps opening, the show auto-plays.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “entitled, pleasure-seeking self.” He found that addiction isn’t mostly about pain—it’s about narcissism. The belief that we shouldn’t have to feel bad. That discomfort is an error in the system.

But the truth is that meaning often lives right underneath discomfort. When you stop numbing, you start noticing. You realize that boredom isn’t emptiness—it’s space.

Try this: The next time you feel the urge to distract yourself, don’t. Wait sixty seconds. Name what you’re feeling instead. It might surprise you how quickly the urge passes.

The Hard Part

These addictions don’t look like addictions because they feel like virtues. Striving, planning, arguing, relaxing—what could be more normal? But beneath them is a single impulse: to protect the idea of who we think we are.

The real addiction is to the self itself. Without it, you give up the scaffolding that’s been holding you up—your ambitions, your opinions, your comforts—and you think, What’s left? But what’s left is the part of you that doesn’t need scaffolding. The part that simply is.

It doesn’t feel good at first. It feels like loss. But it’s the kind of loss that clears the space for everything that matters: peace, love, connection, joy.

In other words: You don’t need to so more or do it better. You just need to stop running.

Other Books with Hidden Addictions

Footnotes

  1. In the book, Burns doesn’t describe them as addictions but the four great deaths. ↩︎
Categories
Life Lessons Technology

Can Something Be Too Convenient?

Can something be too convenient? That’s a question I’ve been grappling with for years.

You see, I’m a product manager. My entire job is built on making things more convenient for customers. In tech speak, we call it “removing friction.”

That’s the Silicon Valley playbook: find pain, remove friction, scale up, cash out. Mobile payments eliminate the pain of carrying cash. Delivery apps eliminate the pain of calling for takeout—no more language barriers, no more phone tag, no more getting your address wrong. Dating apps eliminate the pain of rejection. And in each case, you make the system smoother, faster, cheaper. The user wins. The investor wins. Everyone wins.

Until something breaks.

Friction and Resilience

A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services’ main data center in Northern Virginia—US-EAST-1—went down. For hours, the internet itself seemed to wobble. Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out that this wasn’t just a glitch; it was a parable.

In theory, the internet was built to be resilient—decentralized, redundant, and nearly indestructible. But over time, everyone put their data in the same place: the cheapest, easiest region. The system that was supposed to be distributed became dangerously centralized.

As Thompson wrote, “the true price being paid for global efficiency is [lower] resiliency.”

The smoother we make things, the more brittle they become. And the more dependent we are on a single, frictionless path, the more catastrophic it is when that path fails.

That’s not just an engineering story—it’s a human one too.

What Convenience Does to Us

I’ve watched this pattern play out in my own life. The more convenient things become, the less I can tolerate even the smallest frustration. Waiting in line feels intolerable. A phone call that requires me to deal with another person—especially when I’m frustrated and want to just get something done—feels like a huge imposition.

People are inherently inconvenient. They misunderstand me. They have different goals than I do. They make mistakes. That’s what makes them people rather than machines.

What we call inconvenience is often just engagement with the world. Dealing with the tiny annoyances of everyday life—lines, neighbors, phone calls, mistakes—builds the muscles of empathy and flexibility. These little failures and frustrations are what keep us human.

If you smooth out every human interaction, you risk smoothing out what makes life worth living.

You can see it in dating.

Faith Hill’s piece in The Atlantic describes how fewer teenagers are getting into relationships. Many say love feels “too risky” or “too much work.” They prefer “situationships”—connections without commitment, emotions without vulnerability. It’s the frictionless version of romance.

But that friction—the awkward silences, the heartbreak, the vulnerability—is what makes connection real.

We’ve come to see friction as failure. Waiting, misunderstanding, uncertainty—all feel like bugs to be fixed. But these “bugs” are what teach us how to adapt.

The beauty of life is that everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context. Every interaction forces you to adjust your own. It’s inconvenient, but this is what living is all about.

Addiction to Convenience

In his audio series Inconvenient Truth, Oliver Burkeman makes an observation that stuck with me:

“It’s like we’re constantly trying to outrun any difficulties in our lives. Yet, the smoother we make things, the worse the remaining difficulties feel. No matter how quick and easy things get, you never stop being inconvenienced. It’s just that your standard of inconvenience shifts along with technology and the new reality. The goalposts keep moving, and maybe there’s a societal delusion that we can outrun our instinct for inconvenience.”

Oliver Burkeman, Inconvenient Truth

That’s the heart of it. We’re addicted to convenience—not because it makes us happier, but because it feeds the illusion that we can finally escape frustration.

And companies know this. Amazon has built an entire business model around the fact that customers always want more. As Jeff Bezos puts it, customers are “beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied” even when they’re happy—which means there’s always another pain point to solve, another bit of friction to remove.

Addiction always starts as a solution. It works at first—it makes life easier, smoother, more efficient. But over time, it hollows us out. The less friction we experience, the less resilient we become. Waiting in line, calling a restaurant, talking to a stranger—these once-normal parts of life now feel intolerable. We’ve built a world that promises we’ll never have to feel discomfort again.

We don’t call this addiction because it looks like progress. We call it “innovation.” But the underlying pattern is the same: every shortcut erodes a bit of our tolerance for reality.

It’s tricky because that’s what I’ve been trained to do at work. But I’ve realized that just because I have access to all of these tools of convenience, that doesn’t mean I need to use them all.

The Magic Dial

If convenience is an addiction, how do we break ourselves of it? The best answer, of course, is to consult a psychologist. But I’ve been reading psychologist David Burns a lot over the last few months, and he offers a framework that’s helped me think about this differently.

Burns is one of the founders of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and one of his most important tools is what he calls “the magic button.”

Here’s how it works: Burns asks patients to imagine he has a magic button. If they press it, their problem disappears completely. A person with social anxiety would never feel anxious around people again. Someone with perfectionism would stop caring about mistakes entirely.

At first, almost everyone wants to press the button.

Then he asks them to think about it more carefully. If you press the button and your social anxiety disappears, you might also stop caring about how you come across to others. You could become insensitive, oblivious to social cues. Your anxiety, while painful, is also trying to protect you—it’s what makes you considerate, what helps you read the room.

The very thing that causes pain also carries something valuable inside it: care, conscience, awareness.

What people really want, Burns says, isn’t a magic button. It’s a magic dial. They want to turn their anxiety down from an 80% to a 10%—not eliminate it entirely.

At work and in life, we’re thinking too much about magic buttons, when what we really need are magic dials.

I don’t want to eliminate all inconvenience from my relationships. I want enough friction to stay engaged, to stay flexible, to keep building those muscles of empathy. I want to be inconvenienced by my kids when they interrupt my work, because that interruption reminds me they’re real and present and need me.

The beauty of being alive is this constant reworking of context, this endless recombination of perspectives. It’s messy and inefficient and sometimes exhausting. But it’s also what makes connection possible. It’s what makes love possible. It’s what makes us more than just nodes in a perfectly optimized network.

Life is inconvenient because people are inherently inconvenient. Everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context—different assumptions, different experiences, different ways of seeing the world. Every interaction requires me to adjust, to translate, to meet someone where they are.

That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.

Categories
Life Lessons Uncategorized

I’m Not Who I Thought I Was

For most of my life, I carried around a fixed idea of who I was: Smart. Impulsive. A little weird. “This is just who I am,” I’d tell myself, as if it was literally set in my genes. But this year, after reading some great books on psychology and working with a life coach, I’ve learned to start letting go of that story of a fixed me.

Nothing made me realize how unstable the concept of “I” really is quite like breaking my ankle. There’s nothing that represents “me” more than my body, and I had this revelation lying on an operating table watching a doctor prepare to cut open my leg and screw a metal plate into my ankle. This wasn’t a doctor wrapping my arm in a cast—this was hardcore carpentry on my body.

When I woke up in my cast and started moving through the city, I realized how interconnected the world was and how reliant I was on it. I’d always thought of myself as independent, self-contained. Now I saw how much I depended on everything around me.

I thought people would be annoyed by me. But it was actually the opposite. People went out of their way to help—holding doors, offering to carry things, scanning for ways to make my life easier.

Then there were the products. I was delighted to find that companies made devices exactly for my condition. If I needed to get to work on the subway, I could use a Knee Rover, scooting along by pushing with my good leg. If I needed to do the dishes, I could strap on the iWALK and feel like a modern-day peg-legged pirate.

But each of these devices made me far more aware of the world around me. I started noticing things differently: where the stairs were, where the scooter couldn’t go. On the Knee Rover, I learned about sidewalk slopes—not just forward and backward, but left and right. Suddenly, the infrastructure of the world—the parts we usually ignore—became visible.

What I’ve come to realize is that the world isn’t made up of individual people so much as the interconnections between them. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls it “interbeing”—the idea that we don’t just exist, we “inter-are.” Remove the surgeon, the Knee Rover, the helpful strangers, the sloped sidewalks, and there’s no “me” to speak of.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote something similar: that we become real, become someone, not in isolation but in genuine encounter with others. Every person who held a door, every designer who thought about accessibility, every stranger who made eye contact and asked if I needed help—they weren’t just helping me navigate the world. They were part of what made me me in that moment.

Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

The Best Birthday Ever: Ari’s Bar Mitzvah

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.

This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Rabbi Harold Kushner says in his book To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

Ari’s Moment to Shine

First of all, I need to give Ari all the credit in the world. He stood in front of everyone—family, friends, our entire community—and led the service, read Torah, and delivered his d’var Torah with a voice that was loud, clear, and thoughtful. This was his moment, and he owned it.

For his d’var Torah, he worked with our friend Doron. They studied together for many sessions as Ari figured out what he wanted to say. Doron pushed him, as his study partner, to dig deep and find his own meaning. His Torah portion, Nitzavim, was almost impossibly perfect for the occasion. “You are all standing today,” it begins—and there was Ari, literally standing before us, taking responsibility for his own Jewish life. He taught us that the Torah “is not in heaven”—it’s not distant or unreachable, reserved for angels or scholars. It’s here with us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in the way we walk, think, and act.

He illustrated this lesson with his own observation. At Camp Ramah, he noticed that the song during the Torah procession was much faster than at Habonim. At first, he thought it was just a different tradition. Then he realized: at Habonim, you walk all the way around the shul, so you need a longer song. At camp, with a smaller space, the song had to be faster—like how the Jeopardy music is exactly 30 seconds because contestants have 30 seconds to answer.

He owned this whole line of thought—taking the general lesson that we need to adapt Judaism to our context and making it his own, all within the framework of Jewish tradition. He was proud of his thinking, and everyone was impressed. The Cantor even cried. This is the kind of thinking of an adult.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched Ari take responsibility for this work. He studied hard for his Torah portion, showing up week after week to prepare. He volunteered for his mitzvah project, packing care packages and writing cards for American soldiers overseas through an organization honoring Stu Wolfer, a Jewish American soldier killed in Iraq who worked with my wife. As Ari pointed out, real tzedakah costs something—it comes from the prime hours of your day, not just leftover time or money.

Ari’s best moment happened at an unlikely point. The Rabbi made a joke during the service. It was kind of an awkward joke, as he’s a new Rabbi and didn’t know the community that well. In fact, this was his first large event. He said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You became a bar mitzvah when you turned 13.” Ari, genuinely surprised, did this very physical double-take—hands to his head, “Oh my God, you’ve blown my brain!” The whole crowd cracked up. That humor, that ease in front of everyone, helping the Rabbi co-lead the congregation—it was pure Ari.

The Power of Ritual

What does it mean for a 13-year-old to become a man? He still can’t drink, vote, or drive. But rituals serve a purpose—they take ordinary events and make it holy.

I used to scoff at the idea of birthday parties: “Why celebrate? It’s just another day.” But I’ve realized that a birthday is an opportunity—it’s a vessel, an opportunity you fill with meaning. It becomes a moment for people to focus their energy on you, to make it special.

A bar mitzvah is a birthday party on steroids. It’s one of the few times in life when friends and family will fly across the country to mark an occasion.

When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—joy with purpose. It’s about sanctifying life itself. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.

The Gift of Presence

In addition to having God’s presence, we also had the presence of all the people who came to celebrate. Those who traveled from out of town, those who participated in the service, and even those who simply woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled out of bed, and came to shul.

This collective energy is what fuels a simcha. As William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Each person who shows up is making a choice about where to direct their time and attention—and that choice matters.

The pandemic taught me just how much. Suddenly it became easy to “attend” a bar mitzvah or funeral virtually. You could drop in on an event without changing out of pajama pants, maybe playing Angry Birds when things got boring. No travel required, no time lost, no real inconvenience.

But something essential was missing. These virtual gatherings felt hollow, and it wasn’t just the technology’s fault. What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time.

This is when I finally understood something I’d always dismissed as a cop-out. In the days of the Temple, we gave animal sacrifices. Today, we’re told, the sacrifice we bring is our time. I used to think this was just a convenient excuse for the absence of ritual offerings. But now it makes perfect sense.

Time is the most valuable thing we have. We each have limited time on earth, and how we spend it defines our lives. When people gather to celebrate together, that collective sacrifice creates something sacred. As William James also wrote, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.

I went into Ari’s bar mitzvah expecting to feel proud, but I experienced so much more. When my friends and family give their time—the most precious thing they have—to sanctify a moment in Ari’s life, something shifts. I’m not just throwing a party. I’m participating in something ancient and sacred, bringing God into the world one shared moment at a time. No wonder words felt inadequate.

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Life Lessons Meditation

The Imperfectionist

I have a secret: I’m not perfect. I’ve stopped trying to be. Why am I telling you this? Isn’t a blog post supposed to help you become a little more perfect? Not this one. This is about giving up the constant struggle for perfection, and in doing so, leading a better life.

The Imperfectionist is the title of Oliver Burkeman’s blog. These essays are compiled into his book Meditations for Mortals, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The title sounds simple, but it has a very British double meaning. I originally thought the word “mortals” was referring to ordinary people, but it also refers to the finitude of life.

I’d been searching for a book of daily meditations—something that could set my day off on the right note. This one has truths I’d always sensed but couldn’t name. I’ve read the whole thing back to front 3 or 4 times this year, for 10 minutes each day while my tea steeps and the house is still silent.

Before this, he wrote columns for The Guardian about productivity, convinced that if he just found the right system, he’d finally get everything done. But each trick only bred more tasks—the emptier his inbox, the faster it refilled. Doing more didn’t bring calm; it just changed the game of whack-a-mole. Eventually he saw that the goal wasn’t to finish his infinite list but to change the way he thought about it. His solution: treat your to-do list like a river, not a bucket—something that flows endlessly past you, from which you can dip a few meaningful things, and let the rest drift on by.

The book draws on wisdom from across centuries—Stoics, Buddhists, existentialists, and even comedians—and packages it all in clear, modern language. It answers many of the key questions of life like:

  • What should I do with my life? Carl Jung says: discover your life task—the thing your deeper self is already moving toward. You don’t choose it; you uncover it. The work isn’t to decide what to become, but to listen closely enough to become what you already are.
  • How do I keep from feeling overwhelmed? Create a done list. Instead of staring at what’s unfinished, notice what you’ve already done. It’s as simple as not deleting the items on your to-do list once they’re completed.
  • What if my life could’ve turned out better? Maybe it could have—but then it wouldn’t have been yours. Simone de Beauvoir marveled that out of hundreds of millions of chances, one sperm met one egg and became her. Change even a tiny detail, and you disappear.1
  • What should I do when I feel completely lost? As comedian Mitch Hedberg put it: “If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house.”

Burkeman even has BBC radio shows exploring these ideas further. I particularly enjoyed An Inconvenient Truth,2 where he argues that convenience culture is a bit of a fraud. Companies try to convince us we need their products to remove life’s inconveniences. He uses the example of a hypothetical baby care app that raises your child without any hassle. Would anyone actually want that? Of course not—because inconvenience is where life is lived.

Each morning, as my tea steeps, I still listen to one meditation and let it settle. I still make mistakes—I get frustrated, I leave tasks undone, I make mistakes. But now I see those things differently. They’re not failures. They’re just life as a mortal.

Note: Much of Burkeman’s work is available for free on Spotify and/or the BBC.

Footnotes

  1. This one is from Burkeman’s book 4000 weeks. ↩︎
  2. Note that you have to listen to these from the bottom up because the most recent episodes are on top. ↩︎
Categories
Human Behavior Life Lessons

Happy All the Time?

One of my wife’s favorite books from growing up was Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. It stands proudly on our bookshelf like a little totem to childhood optimism—a promise that somewhere out there, happiness could be a permanent state if you just figured out how to arrange your life correctly.

For a very long time, I believed that too. I even had a section on my website called “Happiness and Inspiration.” I thought that if I read enough, optimized enough, meditated enough—whatever the adult equivalent of eating my vegetables was—I could eventually arrive at happiness.

But this year, I realized I was chasing the wrong goal.

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Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

A September 11th Memorial: Firehouse

Every September 11th, the memories return: the falling towers, the smoke, the senseless loss. This year, I discovered it just a block from my apartment, in the pages of David Halberstam’s Firehouse—written by a neighbor I’d never met.

Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lived nearby and was searching for meaning after September 11th, just as I am now. He spent two and a half months with our local firehouse to write a memorial not just to the firefighters who died that day, but to the firehouse itself and to all the firefighters in New York.

On that day, the New York Fire Department lost 343 men. Our firehouse lost two entire companies—the 12 men of Ladder 35 and Engine 40—one of the worst losses in the city.

Halberstam takes us inside the firehouse, into a culture normally kept private. It’s an insular brotherhood of men who eat together, live together, play sports together, and help repair each other’s houses. While we see the public face of firefighters—the men running into the Twin Towers when everyone else ran out—we rarely see what lies beneath. As Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the firehouse, says, “People think they know what we do, but they don’t really know what we do.” They don’t understand the real danger of being in a burning building when there’s a collapse and the exits seem blocked.

The swagger of a firefighter isn’t arrogance—it’s earned. Take the captain’s code: first in, last out of every fire. It’s a point of pride that sets them apart, especially from police officers. While cops climb the ladder toward desk jobs and safer assignments, firefighters advance toward greater danger—lieutenants get closer to the flames than probies, captains closer than lieutenants. It’s a confidence born from their unique relationship with risk, which explains the firehouse joke: “If firefighting were easy, the cops would do it.”

“I have always admired acts of uncommon courage on the part of ordinary people,” Halberstam writes comparing them the heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War that he covered decades earlier. They live in a world of good and evil, where the good guys fight against a purely destructive force. As Angie Callahan, the wife of fallen Captain Frank Callahan, said, “Where else can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do—deeds that save lives?”

To give you a taste of the book, here’s how Halberstam describes Captain Frank Callahan and the two traits that define great firefighters: staying calm and doing the right thing.

Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

It’s a mindset most of us can’t imagine—being paid to suppress fear while everyone else is allowed to feel it.

Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

But Halberstam reveals that heroism in a firehouse isn’t just about the dramatic moments. It starts with something as simple as washing dishes:

The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won’t do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a hairbag. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

This September 11th, I’m thinking less about the towers that fell and more about the men who ran toward them. Halberstam’s Firehouse reminds us that heroism isn’t reserved for history’s darkest moments—it’s practiced daily by ordinary people who’ve chosen extraordinary lives. They’re still out there, still running toward danger, still doing the right thing.

The inside covers of Firehouse feature black and white photographs of the chalkboard frozen in time—exactly as it appeared on September 11th.
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Life Lessons Meditation

What I Wish I Learned in College

Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters.

On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, “Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It’s not about other people judging me—it’s about me judging myself. Am I doing enough? Am I worthy of having gone here?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I have that too. It’s called Yale-ing.”

That was it exactly—the quiet, constant self-surveillance that comes from trying to measure up to an imaginary, idealized version of yourself. Yale searches for the most driven, unconventional, obsessive people it can find and gives them space to run. What looks like drive from the outside is often anxiety on the inside—a constant need to prove themselves again and again. They’re insecure overachievers.

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