Category: Life Lessons

I love weird words, especially the ones with strange histories.

This one comes from Ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer who later died getting too close to Vesuvius, tells a story about Apelles, the most famous painter of his day, who liked to hide behind his paintings while they were on display and listen to what people said about them. A shoemaker walked by and pointed out that a sandal in one of the pictures had the wrong number of straps, and Apelles fixed it. The next day the shoemaker came back and started in on the leg. Apelles told him, from behind the painting, that a cobbler shouldn’t judge above the sandal.

The line became the maxim ne sutor ultra crepidam. Eighteen hundred years later, William Hazlitt wrote an open letter to William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, and called him an ultra-crepidarian critic. Gifford had been apprenticed to a shoemaker as a boy. This was Hazlitt using his knowledge of Latin to insult Gifford as just a shoemaker’s apprentice.

I know what it feels like to do this. In high school my hand went up before the question was finished. My reasoning was that either I knew the answer or nobody else did, so I may as well take the chance, because I might be right. I never thought about the rest of the class, that they might know it too, or that one of them might have an answer I didn’t.

I had opinions about foreign policy and the national debt, and I’d tell anyone who cared to listen and many who didn’t, even though I knew nothing about them.

I was the smart kid. I was the one with the answers. Even if I knew nothing about the topic.

I got to Yale and found out how much I didn’t know. In high school I’d always been the best in math. In college it was different. My uncle, who’d been a math major at the University at Albany, told me once that he was good at math until all the numbers went away, and I took it as a joke. It wasn’t a joke. In college there are classes like real analysis, complex analysis, and abstract algebra that don’t have numbers in them, and the people who could do them were so much better at math than I was.

Serge Lang taught analysis. He was one of the top professors in the department, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he’d written the textbooks these subjects were taught out of, more than forty books in all. His courses were understood to be incomprehensible to everyone but the true math people, and he was, by all accounts, very good at teaching them.

He also kept files. A friend of mine worked on them. I never knew what was in those files. I knew that she’d go, and that they worked hard, and that among the math people it was a prestigious thing to have been asked.

The file I knew about was from 1986. Lang had mounted what the Times called a one-man challenge to keep Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, out of the National Academy, on the grounds that Huntington dressed political opinions in equations. Lang called it pseudoscience, a language that gave “the illusion of science without any of its substance.” Huntington said the equations were shorthand. It didn’t matter. He was voted down twice, the second time on the floor in front of five hundred members.

All of this looked a little bit funky to me, but he’d written the books and won the prizes, and my friend was in the room, and I assumed a man that smart must be onto something.

A few years after I left, I was reading about Linus Pauling on the internet. My grandparents were always sucking on vitamin C drops, in the winter or whenever anybody had a cold, because of Linus Pauling.

He’d won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, the only person ever to win two on his own. In 1970 he published a book saying that large doses of vitamin C would prevent colds. Later he said it would treat cancer. The science didn’t back him up. Reading it as an adult, what he was proposing was a crackpot theory. Two Nobel Prizes, and the thing my family knew him for was wrong.

Lang seems to have done something similar. In the last twelve years of his life he’d decided that HIV hadn’t been proven to cause AIDS. He published articles saying so in Yale Scientific in 1994 and 1995, which means he was already writing them while my friend worked on the files. He protested Yale’s hiring of AIDS researchers and wrote letters to the administration about the university’s role in what he saw as a conspiracy. He died in 2005 still believing it.

Pauling and Lang weren’t stupid and they weren’t lying. They kept opining on topics well past where their knowledge ended. A chemist knows where chemistry stops. A man who’s been told for fifty years that he’s the smartest person in every room doesn’t have a stopping place, because being smart was never about any one thing. That was the identity I’d built too. Not a chemist, not a mathematician, just smart, and smart doesn’t come with a sandal.

It’s been a long time since I was the kid who put his hand up every time. Now I’ve learned that I can get more from listening to someone than from talking, because I already know everything I’m going to say. The other person is the only one in the room I might learn something from.

One of the most interesting ways I’ve approached this is in a group when they ask for questions. My first instinct is to raise my hand and ask something I want to know. What I try now is to ask a question I have that I also think most of the room wants answered.

Appendix

Here’s a weird appendix I just had to add. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx says:

“Ne sutor ultra crepidam.” This nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam engine, the barber Arkwright the throstle, and the working jeweler Fulton the steamship.

Kark Marx, Das Kapital

To explain this a bit, Marx is saying, “In our time, we don’t need to stay in our lane anymore. Look at the people who did great things out of their lane.” Watt trained as an instrument maker (though Marx called him a watchmaker), and was fixing a broken model steam engine for a university when he redesigned it and made it useful. Arkwright was a barber and wigmaker who built the throstle or water frame, the machine that mechanized spinning and made him one of the richest men in England. Fulton apprenticed to a jeweler as a teenager, painting miniature portraits for lockets, before he ever touched a steam engine, and he’s the one who made the commercial steamboat work.

In seventh or eighth grade there was a science teacher, who I’ll call Professor Plum. I never had a class with him, and I never spoke to him, but everyone knew him by his hair. He had maybe three strands left, combed over his head like a Quonset hut. We would talk about him as he walked by, “Does he know how absurd this looks, that he’s standing up there pretending he’s not bald?”

Around the same time I was playing gin rummy with my grandmother on the patio of her apartment in West Palm Beach. She was in her seventies and had been dyeing her hair blonde for as long as I’d been alive. At some point between hands I asked her, “Why do you dye your hair? Why are you pretending to look younger than you are?” She hadn’t asked me. I just said it, with the certainty of a middle schooler who had recently discovered honesty. She considered it and said, “If Robert doesn’t want me to dye my hair, I’m going to stop dyeing my hair.” She loved me so much, but she shouldn’t have taken fashion advice from a seventh-grade boy.

And she did. She kept going to the salon. She just stopped getting the color. Her hair came in a shocking white, and she wore it in a classy hairdo, and I thought it looked good. It looked honest. It also made her look her age, where the blonde had probably bought her a decade. For years I thought I gave her good advice. Why not be honest?

About a decade ago, I was in a conference room full of people, bored, while someone droned on. I found myself looking at a friend of mine. From behind, he had a large bald spot. In front, his thinning hair was propped up with thickener and mousse, so that straight on he had a full head of hair, and from the side you could see how it was assembled, like the fake fronts of buildings on a movie set.

The seventh grader in me asked the old question, “Does he know?” And then I understood that in the morning, when he looks in the mirror, he sees the straight-on version, and that he was doing this for himself as much as for anybody else. It made him feel good. I didn’t say anything. I realized there was nothing to say. What mattered was the man he saw in the mirror. How he looked to the rest of us came second. Reality came third.

It’s not that I got the facts wrong on that patio. It’s just that it was the perspective of a kid who loved his grandma. What I missed is that the world is made up of more than facts. It’s also relationships, and the way we see ourselves and each other. The blonde was doing something for her, the way the mousse was doing something for my friend. But I hope that when she looked at herself in the mirror with her white hair, she was proud of herself, and thought, “My Robert likes me looking like this.”

About a month before my son graduated from preschool, I was walking through the park, thinking about the last walk that I would take. I wanted to really experience it, because it would be the last morning walk through the park. I wouldn’t have this opportunity to drop him off and have this nice walk through Central Park. Then it occurred to me that on the last day, it might rain, or I might be running late. So I figured I should really celebrate the second-to-last day instead. But then I thought about it more, and that second-to-last day might not be so nice either. In fact, every day might be a nasty one, so my best strategy was to treat today as the last day I’d get to do this. So every day after that, until the last day of class, I tried to experience each one as if it were the last.

I was letting myself experience today, rather than waiting for some future version of it. I was acknowledging the little death in things. Everything ends, even the small things. This particular morning, with my son at this particular age, in this particular preschool, would never come back in exactly this form. It’s like Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice. The rivers are always flowing, and never quite the same river as they were a moment ago. The same is true of most of what we move through. We tend to fight that, to treat the world around us as stable and permanent. But when we accept that things are always moving and changing, something loosens. There’s more room to actually experience it.

Someone I know had a near-death experience not long ago—the real kind, the kind with a hospital in it. No one should ever have to be in that kind of circumstance, but there was a positive side to it. What she described afterward wasn’t fear. People came to see her, showed who they really were, and ordinary days came back handed over as a gift rather than an assumption. Things she used to walk right past, she suddenly couldn’t stop noticing. Irvin Yalom, who spent his career as a psychiatrist thinking about exactly this, put it plainly, “Though the physicality of death destroys an individual, the idea of death can save him.”

You don’t need a hospital to get there. Harold Kushner has a story about the Garden of Eden that changed the way I think about this. We tend to hear it as crime and punishment. Man eats from the tree of knowledge, man is sentenced to die, man is expelled from the garden. But Kushner reads it differently. Knowledge is the thing that makes us individuals, and only individuals die. A herd of cattle is interchangeable, one steak the same as the next, one egg the same as another. We’re not. Each of us is an individual, and we can’t be replaced by someone else. The same goes for each experience. It’s special, and can’t be replaced by any other one.¹

I’m not obsessed with death, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a hobby. What I have noticed is how hard we lean the other way, how much of ordinary life is arranged around pretending that things are stable and will never change. We behave as though the mornings come in an endless supply, and the supply being endless is exactly what makes any single one of them feel cheap. The real danger isn’t death so much as wasting time,² letting the days just go by, watching them pass without ever being in them. That’s a far worse existential problem than we tend to admit.

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, had a name for one shape this takes.³ He wrote about the “purposive” man, forever shoving the value of his life out ahead of himself into the future. This fellow doesn’t love his cat, Keynes said, but his cat’s kittens, and not really the kittens either, but the kittens’ kittens, and so on to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is never jam today, only the standing promise of jam tomorrow. You can pass a whole life like that, boiling the jam and never once eating it, saving the good morning for a last day that keeps backing away from you. Better to appreciate the cat you actually have today.

William James, one of the earliest psychologists, said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” He doesn’t say what happens to me. He says what I agree to notice. By that count, most of what crosses in front of us never becomes our life at all, because we never noticed it. The more I attend, the more I’ve lived. The mornings I walked through on autopilot are gone in a way the bright ones simply aren’t.

I don’t remember my son’s last day at that preschool. It didn’t matter whether it rained. What matters are the Tuesdays somewhere in the middle, and those days were awesome.

Footnotes

1. It’s worth noting that no one would actually want to live in the Garden of Eden, beautiful as it sounds. Without challenge, without loss, without anything being particular or finite, it would be unbearably dull. The Twilight Zone made this point in a 1960 episode called “A Nice Place to Visit,” in which a criminal dies and wakes up getting everything he wants. After a month of winning every hand and having every wish granted, he’s going crazy with boredom and begs to go somewhere else. His guide’s response: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place.” ↩︎
2. When we waste time, we often call it killing time. And if time is all we really have, then killing it is a pathological thing to do. ↩︎
3. From Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, a 1930 essay in which Keynes imagined a future where the economic problem had been solved and people would finally be free to figure out how to actually live. The purposive man is his example of the mindset that gets in the way. ↩︎

Similar Article

“Making the Most of This Ugly Year” makes a related argument from a different angle. Written during the pandemic, it uses the same Twilight Zone episode to argue that challenge and impermanence are what give life its texture. If this essay is about accepting that things end, that one is about finding the beauty in the ugly year that forced the lesson on us.

Walking around Yale’s Old Campus in the late 1990s, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t leave for decades. I’m exceptional. Everyone at Yale is exceptional. There’s a line they used to tell us in some form or another, “You can graduate from Yale and become a garbage man, but you’d better be the best garbage man in the world.”¹ The assignment was clear. Live up to your potential. Don’t waste it.

It’s not Yale’s fault. This idea had been ground into me since childhood. I grew up in the self-esteem moment of the 1980s, where every kid was told they could grow up to be president. Yale just supercharged it.

There’s that feeling of “I am special” that we all have. Alfred Adler, the great twentieth century psychologist, talked about this as inferiority, the universal sense that we are not yet what we could be.² The danger of inferiority, Adler said, is when we turn it into a pathology, something we think is wrong with us. That’s what was happening to me. I kept chasing this amorphous potential that was always somewhere out ahead of me.

The specialness was a real problem for me. For example, I had a real problem with the dishes. For years. Standing at the sink with my hands in soapy water, I would feel something close to physical pain, because every minute scrubbing a pan was a minute I was not using my specialness to the greatest of its potential. Some part of me believed, quite seriously, that I shouldn’t have to do the dishes. I had too much potential. I was so much more special than other people. This wasn’t a good thing. My sense of what was important was clearly out of whack.

My kids have a word for the rest of the people in this kind of story: NPC. Non-player character. The bit characters in a video game who say their one line and stand around waiting for the protagonist to walk past. It’s one thing when it’s in a video game. It’s another thing when you take that concept and move it into real life.

Adler called the alternative Gemeinschaftsgefühl. There’s not a good English translation for this word. English translators generally render it as community feeling, but Adlerians just leave it there, untranslatable. The concept is something like the felt sense that you belong to the world and the world belongs to you, that other people are real in the same way you are real, that the goodness of a life shows up in how you participate rather than in what you accumulate.

It’s worth knowing some of Adler’s history. He converted to Christianity from Judaism, not because he wanted to, but because Vienna at the time was known as one of the most virulently anti-Semitic cities in Europe. At the same time, the Haskalah movement was giving Jews an intellectual framework for secularism, a way of stepping back from religious observance and traditional Jewish life in order to integrate into broader European society. After converting, Adler kept what he found important in Judaism, the moral architecture of community and obligation, and tried to turn that into something powerful in the secular world. Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a feeling or a concept more than something we can really pin down. No wonder it reads as mystical.

Here’s what it looks like when someone gets it wrong.

A rabbi in the neighborhood really hates Donald Trump. She can’t resist working it into her sermons, into her remarks on the holidays, into the moments when a congregation gathers and looks up at the bimah hoping to be lifted somewhere. This past Purim, her comments about Trump hit a bit harder than they needed to. People were upset. A group of congregants asked to meet with her, and several of them, including some who had been members their whole lives, told her plainly that this was not okay. Her response was that she hated Trump and that, as the leader of the congregation, she wanted to express her opinions and educate the people in her pews.

She’s right that she’s allowed to have her opinions. She’s a person. But she’s also a rabbi, and a congregation is not the place to bring your individual self and your individual hatred and use the bimah as the amplifier. A congregation is one of the few places left in modern life that exists to do Gemeinschaftsgefühl, to be a community feeling itself into being together.

There are moments when hatred is warranted. Some things deserve it. But most of the time the better answer is love and understanding. That’s what Adler was pointing at. That’s what community feeling actually means in practice.

I’ve been trying to do something like this at home with my kids, and it’s harder than it sounds. The temptation is to guide them to the person you think they’re supposed to become, to give them the benefit of all of your experience, to help them lead the best possible life for them. We all want what’s best for our kids. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish wrote a book in the 1980s called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, and the whole thing, four hundred pages of it, is just one idea. See the kid in front of you as a person who has their own interior life, and respond to that person, not to the parenting outcome you want. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. It is also extremely hard.

When I support them instead of correcting them, when I see them as people rather than as parenting outcomes, something shifts. They are growing. My job, as far as I can tell now, is closer to what you do with anything that grows. Pay attention to what it needs, get out of its light, help it become resilient enough to make its own choices.

This is what life is really about. Most of life is the boring, everyday things, and the question is what we do with them. Whether it’s the rabbi at the bimah, or me at the sink with the dishes, or my wife and I at the dinner table with our kids, or the people I work with on a Tuesday morning. The question is how I bring Gemeinschaftsgefühl into every one of those rooms. How I create environments where people get to be people, at home, at work, at shul, wherever I am. How I spread some sense of loving and caring to more people than I did yesterday. The aim is building a better world at home, at work, and even with people I meet in the elevator.

Footnotes

1. This line sounds very much like it was lifted from Martin Luther King, who said something close to it in a 1967 sermon. Whether Yale knew that or not, I can’t say. ↩︎
2. My way into Adler this year was Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s two books, The Courage to Be Disliked and The Courage to Be Happy, which present his ideas as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man. ↩︎

On the value of trading things you can’t buy.

I was flying out to California last week for the Collaborative Gain conference and ended up next to a guy who was actually reading. He wasn’t scrolling or multitasking. He was on a Kindle, deep in his book, and stayed that way for a long time. He looked about thirty. That kind of focus is rare enough to make me take notice, like a the way a startup CEO might be wearing a hoodie and a Rolex.

So I did what I usually do when something interesting is sitting three inches to my right. I waited for a natural break and asked him about the book. It was a novel, and he seemed a little embarrassed to be reading fiction. I figured out why when I asked him what he did. He’s a Navy SEAL.

Turning thirty, eight years in, Team 5, based in Coronado just south of San Diego, which turns out to be one of the two main bases for SEALs in the country. The way he talked about it was very matter-of-fact, the way a plumber might tell you he does mostly commercial work these days. He loved his job and he loved his teammates, though he couldn’t tell me anything about what he actually did.

He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and met his wife there. She’s still a Merchant Marine. He did ROTC and was on track to be a commissioned officer, then realized that if he actually wanted to be a SEAL, he had to give up the officer track and enlist. He also liked the idea of picking up specific skills, or quals as the SEALs call them. One of his favorite quals was as a SEAL medic, battlefield doctor.

Now he’s applying to Navy med school. The Navy has a program where they run you through a two-year pre-med, then send you through med school, then you do your residency as a Navy doctor. Add that to the eight years he’s already done and the time on the other side, and he hits a twenty-year pension right around the time he finishes residency. He’ll walk out as a doctor with a pension.

I asked him what kind of medicine. He said, “Anesthesiology would be the smart move, but I kind of want to be a trauma surgeon.” I said something about trauma surgery being brutal, long hours, not the money of the quieter specialties. He shrugged, and said, “Yeah, but I’ve got an ego. I’m a SEAL.” He knew it was just his ego talking, and was probably going to go with anesthesiology.

Trauma surgery and anesthesiology seemed like such different things, but to him they were pretty similar. Trauma surgery was easier than you’d think because it’s like battlefield surgery with no one shooting at you. He was impressed with battlefield anesthesiology, because those guys have to intubate someone who’s just been blown up. I asked about the residency part, the famous thirty-six-hour shifts. When was the last time he’d been up for twenty-four hours straight? He said, “Friday. I was up until four to finish a qual and then took a flight at seven.” That thing med students find crushing and horrible, he does it for fun on a weekend.

At some point I realized that he might have a challenge coin. My son Blake and I collect challenge coins. We pick them up during Fleet Week at the Intrepid, and it’s become a small family thing we do together. I even have one from a space launch. So I told him about our family project. He rifled through his bag for a minute with a half smile on his face, and pulled out a SEAL Team 5 coin. The actual handoff was awkward on my end. He tried to pass the coin to me, and I blanked on how this is supposed to work, which is palm-to-palm during a handshake, the coin pressed discreetly into the other person’s hand. He handled it gracefully and gave it to me again, this time with the handshake, the way it’s meant to go. There’s something I love about that tradition, the idea that a coin carries a unit’s history and you hand it to someone as a kind of keepsake for the experience behind it.

I had a few copies of my book in my carry-on to sell. I gave him one. He tried to wave it off and told me I should keep it if I needed it, that he was happy to give me the coin anyway. I told him no, this was the fun part. We’d both just handed over something we were proud of, something we’d earned. His coin took eight years of service. My book took five years of evenings and weekends. Neither one was the kind of thing you could buy.

I’d spent the whole flight being amazed by this guy. The focus, the career, the quals, the staying up until four on a Friday because that’s just how the week went. Everything about his life was something I couldn’t comprehend doing. And then I was standing there holding his coin, and he was standing there holding my book, and it hit me that the admiration ran both ways.

He reads fiction because he just can’t get into non-fiction. He told me his living room has a giant bookcase, and he only puts books on it that he actually loves. If he reads something on his Kindle and it matters to him, he buys the physical copy to put on the shelf. He took a non-fiction book from a stranger on a plane and was genuinely glad to have it. I can’t be a SEAL. He can’t write a book. We’d each spent years making something the other person couldn’t make, and for a couple of hours over the middle of the country, we happened to be sitting close enough to trade.

We took a picture after we got off the flight. Me holding the coin, him holding the book. I’ll keep that one to myself, because posting a photo of an active SEAL online seems like exactly the kind of thing a SEAL would prefer I not do. I’ll admit I also took a surreptitious shot earlier in the flight, which in retrospect was an extremely stupid move. The man is a trained operator whose professional skill set includes noticing things, and if he’d caught me and cared… well let’s be thankful he’s such a nice guy.

If you want to learn more about challenge coins and the traditions behind them, 99% Invisible did a great episode on the subject.

David Allen wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and became a kind of secular priest for ambitious, overwhelmed professionals. His central claim was almost absurdly simple. Get things out of your head and write them down. He wasn’t just pitching better organization. He was promising you’d feel calmer, think more clearly, and be more present with the people around you. He called the result “a mind like water.”

When I first heard this, I was drowning in work. I tried it, and it made me more relaxed. But I kept wondering why making lists made me feel better. The answer is a simple principle called the Zeigarnik Effect.

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist. In the 1920s, she was sitting in a Berlin café when she noticed something odd about the waiters. They could hold an absurdly complicated order in their heads while it was still open (twelve people, substitutions, dietary restrictions) and then forget it almost instantly once the bill was paid. She went back to her lab and confirmed what she suspected. We remember unfinished tasks far better than finished ones. The brain treats incomplete work like an open file on your desktop, staying active and demanding attention until it gets saved or closed.

Maria Ovsiankina noticed something similar. Open loops don’t just stay active in memory. We also feel a strong pull to return to them. The Ovsiankina Effect is why it’s so hard to stop in the middle of something once you’re engaged, and why interruptions feel so grating even when they’re minor. We remember the open loop and feel compelled to close it.

And that’s what I notice in myself. Whenever I start a new project, pick up a new book, or start a new text conversation, that’s a new open loop. Often these unfinished things would scream, “Hey! Look at me!” By the end of a busy day, the tiredness I feel isn’t just physical. Every loop I opened and didn’t close is still there, demanding to be dealt with until I do something about them.

That’s why I could get a mind like water just by writing things down. Writing something down closes the loop for a while. My mind can stop circling. The list holds my open loops so my attention doesn’t have to.

The most obvious thing I learned is that the number of open loops matters. Right now I’m reading a book I actually want to finish, and every instinct says to start the other one on my shelf. But if I do, I’ve just added another loop pulling at me from somewhere I can’t quite see. If I really want to finish the first book, the answer is to wait. I’ve made a commitment to the first one, and splitting the loop makes both harder. In the end, the answer is to close some loops before opening new ones.¹

When I’m in the middle of something I love, the open loop isn’t a burden. Everything is in alignment, like a brigade of tiny soldiers who were all wandering in different directions suddenly snapping into formation and marching together. My mind is going to be obsessed with this thing anyway. It becomes the single most important thing in the world, and if I do anything else, it’ll just be a distraction. It’s what keeps me thinking about it in the shower, wanting to talk to everyone about it, working on it the moment I have ten free minutes. I’m in a flow state, and the incompleteness is what keeps it going. Then, when the loop finally closes, everything settles into a beautiful harmony—at least for a little while. When I finish a book, it becomes a memory, which is why I try to write about books while I’m still in the middle of them.

The thing I keep coming back to is how much better everything feels when I’m actually inside one thing. Not managing ten things, not half-finishing six of them, just present with one open loop that I care about. I’m trying to keep the loops few and stay inside the good ones. That’s as close to a mind like water as I’ve managed to get.

Footnotes

1. Software engineering calls this keeping your Work in Progress (WIP) low so one project doesn’t distract from the others. ↩︎

There’s this thing that happens on crowded sidewalks in New York. Two people are walking toward each other in a rush, both trying to navigate around the other. One steps left, the other steps left. One corrects right, the other corrects right. And suddenly you’re doing this little dance with a stranger, each of you making it worse by trying to fix it.

I heard something recently that reframed the whole thing for me. The problem isn’t that people are clumsy or oblivious. The problem is that two people are both trying to control the same thing at the same time. Both are trying to help. And it creates a gridlock where they both end up blocking each other. One of them has to let go.

So instead of trying to solve the problem and evading the other person, I tried something different. I started doing nothing. I slow down slightly and let the other person choose. They make a move, I follow, and we’re past each other in a second. The hard part is that slowing down feels wrong. Every instinct says to move, to fix it, to be the one who figures it out. Standing there, barely moving, while someone walks toward you feels almost rude. But that discomfort is the whole point. The moment I stop trying to solve it, it solves itself.

And the failure mode, the case where both people let the other choose, seems like it would be horrible—no one would move. But actually it’s fine. We drift past each other slowly, a little awkwardly, and nothing bad happens. No collision, no real delay. The worst outcome of doing less turns out to be pretty manageable.

But it’s not just about sidewalks. I was talking to a friend recently who said, half-joking, that he needed to do less. He meant it as a complaint about being overloaded. I took it as a goal.

Oliver Burkeman makes a version of this argument in Meditations for Mortals. He pushes back on the idea that importance and difficulty are the same thing, that if something matters it should feel hard, and that easy means you’re not really trying. He offers a different question: what if this were easy? Not as a feel-good slogan, but as a way of living. What if you built your life so that the default was things that felt natural and really wanted, and the hard stuff was something you looked at deliberately and decided was worth doing.

I’ve been trying to live this way. I’m doing less and holding things more loosely. I’m noticing when I’m doing that sidewalk dance inside my own head, overcorrecting, making things harder than they need to be. The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop treating caring and straining as if they’re the same thing. When I’m doing something because I want to, I’m better at it. Not because I’m more focused or disciplined, but because I’m not fighting myself the whole time.

Getting out of the way is a skill. Whether it’s on the sidewalk or in my own head, I’m still learning it.

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.