Dear Sheldon,

I still don’t know right now if we’re going to be able to call you “Don” for short, because I don’t know how this story ends. After all, I wanted to name you after your great-grandfather, a staunch liberal from the Bernie Sanders mold. (If you don’t know who he was, I am sorry and I will explain old-school Democratic Socialism to you next time we sit down.) Right now, I’m just not sure if any name that hearkens back to President Trump will be acceptable in polite company while you come of age. We can only hope.

Speaking of hope, we still have about two months before my all-time favorite President, Barack Obama, leaves office. If he is able to impart the gravity of the office of the Presidency to a man who has never demonstrated a willingness to listen, then I will note it as the greatest accomplishment of his eight years in office. It is surreal, indeed, that President Obama’s legacy may rely on him scaring President Trump into taking the job seriously, especially after the immense disrespect Trump showed by repeatedly questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship during his campaign. (Again, if you never learned about any of this, either you’re reading my letter before you’re old enough, or we truly have turned into a totalitarian state. I hope it’s the former.)

So, why am I writing to you now? Well, I wanted to do it in the moment, because this election may go down in history as one of the most important junctures in human, let along American history. It’s just surreal, watching history unfold before you. I needed to try to preserve that urgency, that raw emotion that will settle down in time, so that I can try to impart you with my feeling of awe and existential dread. If a car crash were slowed down, spaced out over a week, and you just got to examine and contemplate it over and over as you watched the glass shatter and the plastic crumble, that would be an apt metaphor for the electoral experience of November 2016. (I digress, but I sincerely hope you find it impossible to relate to my archaic, early-twenty-first century metaphor about car crashes, because I doubt you’ll ever experience one. Remind me to show you a picture of your father actually manually driving around Grandma and scaring her by going too fast.)

So, President-Elect Trump. I never thought I’d say those words. I bought a “Make America Great Again” knockoff hat on eBay when I thought it was all a joke, and I even put down money on an election-betting website on Hillary Clinton to win. I kept having nervous second thoughts, but I thought that competitive Magic had taught me to ignore those “irrational” gut feelings that didn’t line up with the math. Well, I was wrong, and now we’re likely going to see a very different America from the one I anticipated you growing up in.

You see, East-Coast, college-educated, dare I say “elite” folks like us had a vision for the future. We were going to science our way into Utopia. Elon Musk was (and maybe still is) going to put the first manned rocket on Mars, we’d limit global warming by inventing carbon-sequestration technologies and solar power, and we’d even cure aging with the right cocktail of compounds and supplements. Bigotry, parochialism, and maybe even organized religion as a whole were supposed to slowly wither away to the fringes of society, and rationalism was supposed to usher in a new age of tolerance and prosperity. I guess the wheel of history spins both ways, huh?

Look. You know from history class (or from our various conversations over the years) that many Presidents were fairly awful human beings in their personal lives. Kennedy was a philanderer, Johnson was a bully, even Jefferson had numerous children by his slave, Sally Hemings. Trump was just the latest in a long line of Presidents who simply didn’t act with moral rectitude (or much of a sense of compassion) in his personal life. The only difference was, he proudly displayed his moral failings as evidence of his diametric opposition to the forces of “political correctness”.  His base, or “target market” as they term it in business settings, loved it. Many Americans, however, found it hard to come to grips with this brazen callousness on the part of their leader, especially after the quiet dignity of Barack Obama.

I don’t need to tell you, President Trump should never be an example for your behavior, and you know well that we give everyone in our lives respect, and treat them equally no matter what. Judge people on their actions, not on their backgrounds, and recognize that everyone has the freedom to live their lives as they choose. That, not an idealized re-telling of a mythical, prosperous Middle America, is what makes our country truly great.

I am writing to you now, as well, because I believe that history is cyclical. Obviously I have a bias towards Western history, as that is what I know best, but you are a child of the new Counter-Enlightenment. The original Counter-Enlightenment was a backlash to the 18th Century rush towards rationalism, towards using the scientific method as a metric for all policy decisions, both public and personal. It invoked populism, conservatism, and nationalism that eventually led to the overly charitably-named Romantic period. Needless to say, the wars and suffering that marked this period only fully concluded in 1945.

Well, now the European Union is weakening with Britain’s departure, and President-Elect Trump has made overtures to the dismantling of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so two of the pillars of post-WWII rationalism and globalism are currently under immense stress. Should they break, we will undoubtedly slide back towards the same nationalistic, anti-science, anti-progress forces that brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the first half of the 20th century. Even if you don’t grow up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud (and as of right now, I am optimistic that you will not), you’ll certainly grow up in a world much less certain than the one I grew up in.

In the heady days after a consequential election, it is obviously very easy to fall victim to the same irrational fear that drove President Trump’s campaign. My fear is different from his supporters’ fears, of course, but that in and of itself does not make them rational or legitimate. Only careful examination and analysis of what Donald Trump has said and done, and is likely to say and do, will vindicate the left’s fears. You know well that our family tries to be careful not to make hasty, unexamined decisions based on emotion rather than facts. What do I fear the most, and what reasons do I have to consider them legitimate?

Well, in order, here are my biggest concerns.

1: Mere months after President Obama’s administration helped bring the United States into the Paris Climate Agreement, President-Elect Trump plans to appoint a notable climate change skeptic to head the transition over the EPA. I believe that the chances that humanity overcomes the global warming crisis in my lifetime have dropped significantly, simply from listening to Trump’s claims that “global warming is a hoax designed by the Chinese to make America less competitive” combined with his actions to essentially castrate the EPA. This will affect all of us, and it means your world is a lot gloomier than I’d hoped.

2: President Trump has received massive support from Russia, an autocratic state with Vladimir Putin as dictator in everything but name. His actions on this front have been non-existent, of course, because he isn’t President yet, but there is reason to be concerned. If NATO is to collapse, the resulting nuclear proliferation certainly increases the risk that you will see a nuclear weapon detonated over a human population center in your lifetime. Understandably, that concerns me.

3: President Trump has enabled and emboldened certain marginalized hate groups and hateful rhetoric to poke their noses into mainstream conversation. There is a concept called the “Overton Window”, which basically describes how extreme you can get in your viewpoints before you are laughed out of a public discussion. Talking about “the genocide of the White race” as a response to the increasing diversity of the United States was once basically taboo. We’ll see if under President Trump, that kind of talk gets normalized. It worries me that the people who do discuss these sorts of things are likely to incite violence, and if the United States experiences its first lynching in decades under Donald Trump, now you’ll know why.

4: I’ll lump my distaste for President Trump’s remarks about and actions towards women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBT community together in this one. Vice President Pence may end up determining significant amounts of policy, as President Trump is a political neophyte and has no experience crafting policy. This is troubling for those who thought that LGBT and abortion rights were essentially a foregone conclusion after two landmark Supreme Court cases, Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. Mike Pence has voiced his disagreement with both of these court decisions, and for all the hateful rhetoric President Trump enables, the most concerning part of his administration will be watching the attempts to dismantle these rights. If you live in a world where gay marriage is not granted the same legal recognition as heterosexual marriage, now you know how unnerved we felt on the eve of its destruction.

I’ll keep the mushiness to a minimum, because I am sharing this with my friends, and I don’t want to embarrass you. I know I’d be embarrassed if my dad shared something like this to Facebook, and I’m doing this before you’re even around to voice your opinion! I am beyond excited to meet you, to grow with you, and to help you become a person of consequence in the world. Now that President Trump is a reality, that excitement has been moderated with a healthy dose of worry, because you are likely to enter the world in a uniquely turbulent time. I hope that I am equal to the task of raising you, and I hope that you will continue the endless campaign for knowledge, reason and progress, even in a time where it seems like everything is moving in the opposite direction.

Your Father,

Ben Friedman

I sat there in the backseat as the dented old SUV slogged through some forgotten corner of West Virginia, off the Interstate and in search of gas. Run-down old farms turned to run-down old trailer homes as we rolled through what turned out to be the town center of Pliny, WV, and the solitary gas station that marked the town’s only sign of activity. And of course, right there in the window of the convenience mart, a “Make America Great Again” sign sat squarely between two fading advertisements for cheap domestic beer. Now, the gas pumps at this station didn’t take credit cards, so we had to wander in and speak to the friendly clerk, an older woman wearing a crucifix necklace and smoking a cigarette who immediately recognized that we were out-of-towners. A brief, unremarkable bout of small talk about life in Pliny followed, and we were soon on our way, but something about that tiny little town and that image of the window sign in the beat-up old gas station with thirty-year-old gas pumps stuck with me. I could not help but view those human beings as “others”, and I am certain they felt the same way about me. Not in a malicious way, of course, but one that could lead to disregarding the very real pain and suffering of the other group. As the election winds to a close after over a year of wild twists and turns, I can’t help but consider that empathy is the missing ingredient that has torn our country almost cleanly down the middle.

Now, the easy conclusion is: No, duh. Of course, when everyone is hammered by partisan talk shows and 24-hour news cycles, and when social media causes clustering around similar beliefs, thus shifting people’s informational intake to more match ideas they already agree with, it will cause problems in bridging the gap between Red and Blue states. The problem has only gotten worse over each of the last four elections (which are, incidentally, the only ones I can remember), and it figures to get even worse no matter who wins tomorrow’s election.

So, in recent days, what have I done to make this election philosophically relevant to me? I’ve contemplated the unenviable position of the people with whom I disagree. I’ve really, honestly tried to “walk in their shoes”, so to speak. I sat there, and I meditated on what life would be like if I’d grown up in Pliny, or any other small town dotting the map between the major metropolises. I invite you to join me. Take a moment, right now, and envision yourself growing up in a working-class family in the Rust Belt.

(If you did in fact grow up in a working-class family in the Rust Belt, I apologize for my overgeneralization, and I urge you to contemplate what life would be like, as, say, an undocumented immigrant living in Texas or Southern California instead.)

Mom stayed at home, Dad worked at the factory, or maybe in a store in town. They scrimped and saved and they just barely managed to raise you and your siblings. You went to high school where, sure, there wasn’t much diversity, but you read about Martin Luther King in class and celebrated equality just the same. There was never any issue with racism, and all the differences in the world melted away when everyone was sitting together on Friday nights at the high school football game.  You graduated, and you thought about trying to get to college, but you wanted to make some money for yourself, so you contented yourself with part-time community college while you worked as a clerk and sometimes-assistant at the auto repair shop in town. Somewhere along the way, you had a kid, school got left behind, and you had to get serious about earning a living *NOW*. Unfortunately, the big factory in town was downsizing, laying people off, and you had to settle for picking up some shifts at the Wal-Mart 12 miles away. No matter, you grit your teeth and bear it. You need to make rent, and diapers ain’t cheap! Meanwhile, your brother breaks his leg at his construction job, and gets addicted to the painkillers that the doctor prescribed him.  Ugh. Okay, well, your hours keep getting squeezed at your jobs, and your car is making this annoying whine that you know you can’t afford to fix. On top of that, Mom’s got this hacking cough that won’t go away, even though it’s April and cold season is over. Health insurance? Not since Dad got “early retirement” (read: laid off), and they’re not eligible for Medicare yet. If only there were any good jobs…

Dig deep, and try to identify with the people who would just as soon call you out for being a fool on a public Facebook thread as they would come to your aid if your tire blew out on some remote Interstate Highway exit in Kentucky or Tennessee. Try to see things from their position, see how a certain narrative that has been pushed about the candidates might line up with their pre-existing biases, and how they might view a Hail Mary vote for an unqualified authoritarian as a desirable alternative to the slow decay they see creeping in around them.

If not for the value of empathy in its own right, at least do it because empathy is certainly more likely than antipathy to bring would-be political adversaries around to your way of thinking.

In an odd way, this entire election has been about empathy. Hillary Clinton, while dodging accusations and indictments, has spent the last year repeatedly trying to show her empathy for common voters (with only middling success) while her opponent, Donald Trump, has spent that time expressly showing a lack of empathy to remarkably impressive results. Maybe people like it more when a candidate isn’t obviously trying too hard to empathize with them, and while Clinton makes it too obvious, Trump makes it obvious that he couldn’t care less. People want to win his approval, to be on board with him as he “Makes America Great Again”. I don’t know if this is inadvertent genius on Trump’s part, but it’s not entirely relevant to the matter at hand: Selecting a President.

Look, I understand the impulse to make the election about controversies and scandals. Both major-party candidates have had their fair share of over-hyped, sensationalist stories that aren’t truly pertinent to their abilities as potential Commanders-in-Chief. Of course, you can make this election about emails and Benghazi versus sexual assault allegations alongside a string of failed businesses, lawsuits, and shady tax evasion techniques. However, I generally prefer the more substantive questions about policy that actually determine what kind of President these candidates would make.

Fortunately, I have two wonderful algorithms that I’ve created for each of these axes of the election. One of them smoothes over all of the messy policy differences and offers a choice based on instinct and tribalism. The other ignores any of the candidates’ personalities or histories, and asks the single most pertinent policy question for a young voter. Inexplicably, both of these algorithms point to the same candidate, which demonstrates both my implicit bias in algorithm design and my explicit bias for which candidate I prefer. But enough meta-discussion, let’s get right down to it. (And I hope I don’t alienate too many of you along the way. If I do, please take a minute and pretend like I’m sitting right there in front of you before you hit “send” on that snide comment or message).

Algorithm A (The sensationalist, cynical, content-free algorithm):

1: Which candidate do the KKK and Neo-Nazi/White Supremacy groups support?

2: Vote for the candidate who is most likely to beat that person.

Easy, right?

But let’s pretend like we actually care about the issues for a moment. In a long-range view, there are a few existential threats to humanity that must take precedence over smaller, pettier economic and social issues, no matter how painful those social and economic issues may be to the affected individuals. The most prevalent existential threat to humanity today is most likely climate change, although strong cases could be made for nuclear war, AI catastrophe, or drug-resistant super-germs.

I humbly present for your consideration, Algorithm B (the “there’s only one issue in the long term that matters here” algorithm):

1: Which candidate denies climate science and the existence of anthropogenic global warming?

2: Vote for the candidate who is most likely to beat that person.

Now, I know that over-simplifying the election to a one-issue algorithm is an extreme expression of my privilege, but there is no reasonable way for me to distance my preferences and choices from the circumstances of my (fortunate) life.

And really, we are all bound by the circumstances of our upbringings, the happy accidents of birth that landed us here in the 21st century in a pivotal time in human history. I sincerely hope we don’t blow our shot at overcoming our existential threats and someday colonizing the galaxy, but that is the beauty of our current democracy. Whether we sink or swim is entirely in our hands. We may be divided as a country politically, but until and unless we really do colonize Mars, we’re going to have to learn to live with each other. Whether your preferred candidate wins or loses tomorrow, I urge you to start practicing empathy now, because if we are going to repair the rift in our country, we’re going to need all of the empathy we can get.

What marks the true boundary between childhood and adulthood? When does a person become a “grown-up”? Is it when they graduate college? When they get their first job? When they move away from home? Maybe when they get married? Or even when they become a parent? Different people mark the transition differently. There are some who seem to never grow up, who retain some irreverence and immaturity to their dying days. Other people grow up young, suckered in by the allure of money and gobbled up by the modern-day corporate machine. Their bank accounts (and more importantly, their lifestyles) grow, but their dreams atrophy. “Life gets in the way,” they might say, as they nurse a drink or binge-watch a show on Netflix.

When you were a child, if you were like most people in the First World, you probably had big dreams, high ambitions, and no patience for the future to arrive. After all, you were going to be (rich/famous/successful/influential/world-changing), and you couldn’t possibly wait! But the days and years did start to slide by, and the dreams stayed firmly in the realm of fantasy. The realm of “possible” shrunk down, down, down towards the path of least resistance. Slowly but surely, you packaged up some of the more extravagant dreams, mothballed them “for after I become financially stable”. And there they sit, right on the border between “someday” and “would be nice”. Squashed by a mortgage or a child’s daycare costs or a car payment or a pending promotion at work, the dream of being an astronaut or a rock star (or heck, even being financially independent) earns less and less mental prime time now that life has become a series of chores. Welcome…to adulthood.

Respectfully, I would like to propose a new definition of what it means to be an adult. Adulthood is that special mental place where a person’s expectations in life have adjusted to match their reality. When a person wishes for no more than a few extra weeks of vacation, or a small cash windfall to offset the credit card debt they’re carrying, or to lose ten pounds to fit in their old jeans, they have reached full-on adulthood. Once a person gets just comfortable enough to be complacent, when their dreams have deteriorated from “I’m going to be the President of the United States” to “I’m on track to be a Senior VP someday!”, then and only then are they truly an adult. Once a person has no fight left in them to change, because reality is too comfortable, and change is too hard, then they become a full-fledged grown-up.

Too often, the anger described in this quote from Fight Club is instead subsumed by a general discontent and ennui among young people in our contemporary society. The theme, however, of unfulfilled expectations rings truer in today’s world than ever before. Adulthood is when human beings “go gentle into that good night”, when they give up the struggle and the growth and the dreams they once held in favor of comfort and predictability. If we are not careful, each and every one of us is susceptible to this disease of the soul, this thing we call adulthood.

But…we do have a choice. Every day, we can commit a small act of childhood. A miserable daily routine (the hallmark of many a self-described “adult”) is just a series of unhealthy habits, and anyone can certainly change those. We can actively move towards accomplishing our deep-seated, innermost goals. We are never completely stuck until we believe that we are. As Dylan Thomas wrote in his oft-quoted poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”, or in this case, that comfortable dusk where so many lives settle down for an unfulfilling and unexciting denouement. Instead never give up on the dreams of childhood, and “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

My wish for all of you is neverending childhood, where wonder and growth remain the norm all the days of your lives.

When we last left off, we had built up from a singular postulate, “I think, therefore I am”, to the philosophy of Solipsism. A natural progression, then, took us from the idea that the world might as well be a giant virtual reality game playing solely for us, to the conclusion that the ultimate goal in life was to maximize our happiness. Indeed, to quantify that goal, we can visualize our happiness as a graph charted over time, where our objective is to maximize the integral of happiness over time. To make it more palatable, I called a well-designed pursuit of that goal Conscious Hedonism.

It’s so simple! Just do more of the things that make you feel good. After all, it’s all about you. You don’t know that anyone else really exists, and when you die, it all disappears, so combine nihilist and selfish tendencies, add a healthy dash of cold logic, and voila! Instant recipe for happiness.

Well, to be honest, this is an excellent paradigm for finding happiness…temporarily. The flaw in the plan appears bit by bit, and for some people it takes many years to realize why this model for happiness is flawed. We often find those people lamenting the demise of their “glory days”, wondering where to go now that the thrills of the fast life have left them in the dust. What gives? They often pursued short-term pleasure with a dogged persistence, and now they regret those decisions?

Quite simply, empathy pays dividends, happiness-wise. Consider an extreme case. A man who actually, deep in his heart, believes that no one else is important. Chalk it up to a wholehearted belief in solipsism, but he cannot bring himself to feel sorry for a beggar, or a cancer patient, or an abused child. To him, it’s all just a part of the big video game of life, and he chooses to turn a blind eye to those problems in order to focus on himself. Sex, drugs, gambling, fast cars, all the traditional vices are the pillars of his life. But cocaine begets a dependency, and gambling runs him into debt, and his lovers abandon him when he never reciprocates emotionally. Quicker than he’d anticipated, the roller coaster ride that was his exciting life starts sliding downhill. With no one left who cares about him, a lifetime of prioritizing short-term pleasure over long-term fulfillment exacts its painful and lonely toll. So, do you think he ends up regretting his choices?

Or consider a different sort of selfishness. Consider the workaholic, passionless banker. He works 80 hour weeks to win the ephemeral rat race, making millions, which he has to use to patch the holes in his marriage and his relationships with his children. There’s no love in his life, because he has become an emotionless robot, with no cause to fight for and no ability to enjoy his life. He trades his time for money, and he doesn’t even derive meaning or satisfaction from his job. By putting off relationships and the search for meaning, he delays gratification until he has one foot already in the grave. He, too, fails to practice empathy. Don’t believe me? He exists. And not just John, but in every city on the planet, people have capped their happiness by denying their own humanity (read: their sense of empathy).

Now, let’s change that graph again, to show what it looks like when you either front-load gratification or delay it for too long.

Here’s what happens if you neglect relationships in favor of working more.

And here’s what happens if you can’t escape the trap of instant gratification.

But of course, no one’s arguing with the devastating effects of either one of these lifestyles, and the conscious hedonist would argue that he or she would never follow such an unbalanced path. Of course, these self-destructive lifestyles are anathema to a conscious hedonist, but why must we move beyond hedonism altogether? To put it another way, we’re trying to find a logical reason to move forward from the paradigm of “me me me” and towards recognition of others as equally, if not more, important than us. Essentially, we want to dismiss Solipsism as a useless philosophy for purposes of maximizing our happiness.

Why should we do this? Well, the simple fact is that longer-lasting happiness and fulfillment with life demands that we exercise empathy, the act of considering the perspective of another when making our decisions. What is the highest form of empathy? I would posit that it coincides with the highest form of happiness. Love. Love is what Solipsism misses entirely, because how can one love another without acknowledging their reality?

To return to our graphical analogy, Solipsism puts strong caps on the amount of natural, long-lasting happiness we can obtain. You will never rise above a certain level of happiness for long without accepting your fellow humans as being as real as you. There is a biological basis for that assertion, in what are called mirror neurons. Some scientists claim that mirror neurons form the physiological framework for empathy, and denying that basic biological inclination for empathy would be ill-advised. From the simple fact that humans are social animals, and wired to empathize, to the fact that we often feel significantly better after helping those less fortunate than us, there is no escaping the need for empathy as a key ingredient for happiness.

The stiff upper bound on happiness (at least, happiness that lasts longer than a few minutes) all but demands that we discard Solipsism and accept as a second postulate in our growing philosophy that other humans exist, they are valuable and worthy of our empathy, and that helping others is often more rewarding than helping ourselves. But don’t just take my word for it. This excellent article digs deeper into the need to give back and work towards a larger societal goal as a prerequisite for true satisfaction in life.

And isn’t that a little odd? By starting with Solipsism as the least assumptive philosophy after accepting “I think, therefore I am” as our first postulate, we quickly find ourselves rejecting the philosophy entirely from a utilitarian point of view. If Solipsism tells us to focus on making ourselves happy, then we must immediately throw it out for the simple fact that Solipsism is a happiness dead-end.

What’s the next step after accepting the existence of a world outside ourselves, along with all its inhabitants? Well, I’d guess that working on a large-scale quest to better humanity is a pretty good place to start. Just because reality may not exist solely in your head, doesn’t mean that you can’t work hard and possibly reshape the world. After all, you’ve got nothing if not a life full of opportunity in front of you.

Just a fair forewarning: This post may sound a bit preachy, so please forgive me in advance. I do not truly believe that people are morally bankrupt for not considering what I’m about to lay out here, rather, this is just intended to expose some cognitive blindness we all have.

We all know how important it is to frequently express gratitude for all of the blessings we enjoy in our modern lives.  As some of the luckiest people to ever be born, the best way to slow down the hedonic treadmill and regain a sense of perspective is to remind ourselves of how fortunate we are. It’s hard to get upset about a $125 speeding ticket when we remember that we will still eat tonight, we still have the same wonderful opportunities ahead of us, and we will likely not even remember the annoyance in six months’ time.

And yet. Despite this knowledge, we often turn a blind eye to the fact that the same amount of money (or a little bit more, but not much more) could be absolutely life-changing for a person in real need. Let me repeat again, with an illustration. The tiny inconvenience of losing $125 for us might reduce our quality of life by a total of 0.001% (as in, we’ll still eat, we’ll still have a roof over our heads, we’ll still have a job, we’ll still still have all of the same  major necessities and luxuries that make our lives so wonderful). That same amount of money, for a family in Sudan, might be the difference between life and death. It might be seed grain for a farmer who lost his crops to blight. It might be an anti-mosquito net to protect a child from malaria. It might be a microloan to a would-be businesswoman in Sub-Saharan Africa. Suffice it to say, that money could be life-changing.

(And the picture doesn’t even consider the jolt of endorphins you get from donating to a good cause, but that’s for another time.)

Let me paraphrase one gut-wrenching parable for you all before we talk about a specific plan of action.

I want you to imagine you’re walking down the street in your brand-new $3000 suit. You are ready to crush your first day as a Wall Street executive, and as you walk to your car in front of your apartment, you hear a scream from above. Just two floors above you, a woman, covered in blood, is holding a crying baby, also covered in blood, out the window. With a wordless scream, she drops the baby down, directly towards you, standing below. You would ruin your fresh new suit if you caught this bloody baby. But if you step aside, the infant will almost certainly hit his head on the pavement and die. The question is: do you save the baby?

Dark, I know. But in effect, it asks a simple question. How much do you value the life of a stranger? If you would save the baby (and I hope most of you would) then why would you not forgo the expensive suit in the first place, and spend the difference on life-saving charity? Or, if you feel that you must have an expensive suit to look professional in the office (although I am sure that a $1000 suit would suffice), why do you need a BMW when a Toyota would serve the same purpose, while saving upwards of ten children’s lives?

I understand that it is easy to ignore the suffering of those we cannot see. Believe me, I get it. I also recognize that there is economic value in spending money on material goods within your own locality. By spending locally, you may be creating or improving jobs right here at home. But too often, we build up large material wishes in our heads, “American Dream”s flush with houses, cars, vacations, private education for the children, retirement, and more. I merely suggest that every so often, in addition to expressing gratitude for what we have, we also stop and take a look at the hidden opportunity costs that come with our preoccupation with material excess.

Postscript: Counterpoint and resources to help you take action:

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, sparks an interesting debate here about the actual value of philanthropy, specifically within philanthropic foundations, which avoid taxes and serve the wishes of a small board of directors. This is not to say that philanthropic spending is worthless, rather that we should be careful in considering the best way to channel that spending.

Apropos of that, two websites that I found interesting in my desire to learn more about effective altruism were www.givewell.org and www.80000hours.org.

And as always, I love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

I get stressed out, angry, upset, sick, tired, and just plain bummed sometimes. I’m sure you do too. In keeping with my recent post examining the truly exceptional fortune we experience today, I have come up with a rough draft of the twenty-something’s Modern Manifesto. The point of the Manifesto is to kick your butt into gear when you’re feeling out of it, to remind you to express gratitude, and to exhort you to use these unprecedented circumstances to better the lives of all people. If you feel inspired by this exercise, please feel free to plagiarize my Manifesto in the making of your own. Use it whenever you need a dose of motivation. So here goes:

(note: this is me addressing myself, replace the gendered terms as appropriate for you)

The Modern Manifesto:

I am one lucky guy. I’m not just ordinary-lucky, I’m one of the most fortunate humans to ever walk the face of the Earth. Whatever hardship or difficulty or annoyance I’m facing right now, odds are in a few days or months or years, it won’t matter at all, and if I do remember it, I’ll be grateful to have overcome the pain and moved on with my life.

They say you should count your blessings, so let’s see: I live in a country with a first-rate healthcare system, so if I get sick, I’ll be able to see a competent doctor. I have access to fresh, unspoiled food and clean running water. I have indoor plumbing, heating, and air conditioning! They didn’t have those a couple centuries ago. And a car, that allows me to move ten times faster than any human could move before the Industrial Revolution. Oh yeah, beyond that, I can fly! We have airplanes that can bring me across the world in a few hours for a very affordable price. I can read, write, use math and logic to solve problems and make rational judgments, and I can share my ideas freely without fear of retribution. I have access to the Internet, a repository of human knowledge greater than anything imaginable even fifty years ago. I am young, in good physical and mental health, with the intellect and drive to achieve anything I set my mind to.

(note: next section is not applicable to every single person, but it applies to many of us)

I even have an excellent job, and if I decide that I don’t like doing it anymore, I can find a new job. I don’t live the life of a feudal serf, and there is mobility in the job market and in life. The only limitation on my success is me.

So why was I mad again? Some fleeting inconvenience or minor disappointment? Some antagonistic stranger? Let’s think, what would anyone from the year 1750 say if I brought them here and told them about my problem? Probably something along the lines of, “Wait, so you DON’T have half your babies die before they turn five? And you can talk through magic boxes to people on the other side of the world?! And you have flying ships that can even bring people to the MOON?!! Good God! So what is this ‘road rage’ you’re complaining about? Is is some sort of crippling illness or terrible accident? No? Oh. Okay then.”

Modern life seems like a pretty good deal, no?

So I promise to get out of my funk because there are people in real pain and suffering out there, and I can make a huge difference for them. I pledge not to get lost on the hedonic treadmill for even one more second! I swear to set lofty goals and not to lose sight of them. Above all, I will always remember that I live in a time of unprecedented freedom and possibility. Who knows what the human race can accomplish in my lifetime, and what impact I might be able to make?

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I’d love your suggestions and feedback. How can we make this better? Let’s make this more applicable to everyone, while still being a potent reminder, both of our potential and the need not to wallow in self-pity and bitterness.

(Oh, and thanks to Halley for inspiring me to write this with your complaining.)

Let’s talk about luck. Many of us frequently bemoan our misfortunes, all the way from flat tires and parking tickets to shattered retirement funds and cancer diagnoses. We humans sure do have a funny way of looking at luck, don’t we? It seems that no matter how well our lives are going overall, a single bad outlying event can bring on frustration, anger, despair, or (as my Magic-playing friends like to describe it) “tilt”.

How often, on the other hand, do we stop to consider just how well our lives are going? According to the Population Reference Bureau (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx) over 100 billion people have ever lived. Right now, there are a little over seven billion living people, and if you are reading this, you are among the blessed few who have the powerful combination of English literacy and internet access.

So how lucky are you? Well, let’s start by affirming that you’re luckier than all the people who were born before the twentieth century, which has seen humanity gain such advances as widespread vaccination, home heating and air-conditioning (in the Western world, at least, but I’ll get to that), automobiles, airplanes, television, the internet, and most importantly, real social mobility.

For simplicity’s sake, that cuts out all but the people currently alive (and a select few thousand royalty, billionaires, and other unique and extraordinary outliers from the past).

Now, you most likely live in a place with indoor plumbing, a grocery store within driving distance, internet access, and countless other comforts of modern first-world life. How many people do you think miss out on those? A recent Washington Post article put that figure at about 4.4 billion. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/02/4-4-billion-people-around-the-world-still-dont-have-internet-heres-where-they-live/) Well, a lot of those people live in places with poor or nonexistent infrastructure, and there is likely significant overlap with a lack of indoor plumbing, heating and air-conditioning, or even running water. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that you are luckier than those 4.4 billion people. That leaves 3% of the people who have ever lived who are even in the same realm of discussion as you.

Now it gets a little trickier, because readers may have different experiences beyond the shared commonalities of living contemporaneously and living in an Internet-connected (and by proxy, connected to the benefits of the modern world) area.

To start to pare it down even more, I am going to make some assumptions that will expose my bias about my life and the lives of those around me, but I hope that it will remain instructive even if you do not specifically have the same circumstances as me.

I was born into an upper-middle-class house in a safe, suburban enclave in the United States of America. If you are reading this, perhaps this description fits you. If you are an exception, then the fact that you managed to improve your life to the point where you do have the leisure time to read this article should tell you that you are exceptionally fortunate regardless.

Let’s assume that you had a reasonably stable and loving family life, have managed to avoid significant financial or health hardship, and have every opportunity to craft your future as you choose. I’d say that cuts away over half of the remaining slice of humanity and puts you in the rarefied air of the luckiest billion or so people who have ever lived, wouldn’t you?

(Cue gripes about the 1%…hint: we are all the 1%)

But I’ll go further (and get way more controversial, if I haven’t already). Shave off another piece of the pie if you’re white, because you don’t have to worry about being the next Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, or Trayvon Martin. Shave off a big ol’ slice if you’re a man, because despite all the gigantic leaps forward that women have made in the last half-century, the simple fact is that men have the advantage when it comes to achieving success in the professional arena, because of numerous subconscious psychological and cultural “bugs” that tilt the playing field in favor of guys. (In many cases this is due to “societal lock-in”).

The last sweeping generalizations before I leave you to contemplate your fantastic fortune are, of course, your intelligence and your age. (If you are old and/or dull, please recognize that this section is directed towards a very specific audience, the ones who make up the bulk of my blog readers).

Let’s say you’re a pretty bright individual. I’m sure most of you are. If you think you’re smarter than most of your peers, you’re lucky! You have a free bonus gift to go with your already-spectacular birth circumstances, and you can use those extra megahertz between your ears to achieve your goals even more easily. I hope you use your extra IQ points well!

Now, let’s talk about your age. Most of you still have many fruitful years ahead of you, ripe with opportunity to see the continuing improvements in quality and duration of life thanks to technological innovation. I mean, we have smartphones, we’ll have self-driving cars in a few years, not to mention quantum computers and more better vaccines and treatments for disease. Who knows what awesome inventions await us next? If we’re lucky enough, we might even pull off Ray Kurzweil’s long-shot dream, and conquer aging itself. Being able to choose when we’re ready to go would be the ultimate freedom, the biggest river card we could ever be dealt, so to speak.

I know that thanks to hedonic adaptation, we find misfortune in the variance of everyday life. Sometimes it pays to look at the big picture, and recognize that in the big game of life, we are holding just about the best possible hand. So…how are you going to play it?

(P.S. For what it’s worth, I guesstimated myself as one of the luckiest 10 million people to ever live, so in the top 1% of the top 1% of people’s lives. Pretty extreme, but I tend to be a bit optimistic. Where do you think you fall?)

Unfortunately, as it stands, we are all dying a little bit each day. That sense of dread when we think about all the time we’ve squandered, that’s because we know we’ve wasted some time we’ll never get back. We are going to die. That existential crisis is tough each and every time we contemplate it, but let’s seriously talk about death, and what that means for our goals here in life.

Death is the great equalizer. No one escapes it, and no one knows what lies beyond it. Putting aside religion for the moment, there is nothing after death. With the destruction of the brain comes the end of consciousness. You will, literally, cease to exist. Nothing you do in life will have mattered, because you won’t be able to appreciate your worldly accomplishments after your biological clock hits midnight. Do you really think that even Einstein, the man who has arguably done the most to advance humanity, can appreciate his success now? Like a person in a dreamless sleep, there is no consciousness after death. Consciousness, the state of being alive (and more specifically, self-aware), is embedded in having a working brain with the little electrical impulses running back and forth between neurons. A dead guy doesn’t have those tiny impulses, we do. The chemical reactions and tiny electrical impulses that dart through your brain are you, in the sense that you are a thinking being with feelings and senses. It’s sort of an intimidating thought, that we are just some chemical reactions taking place in that gray mush in our skulls.

While that may be a little scary to think about, we don’t have to worry, because we have many long years ahead of us, secure in the knowledge that we are alive. Or are we? The great Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once recounted a dream he had, wherein he dreamt he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he asked himself if he were in fact Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or if he were a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. So how do we know that we exist? We don’t. We can’t know, because our perspectives are embedded in our consciousnesses. I mean, let’s take an example most of you should be familiar with: The Matrix. It’s a little overdone, but how does Neo know what is reality? For the people still plugged into the Matrix, their reality is 100% real. It’s only after being separated from that perspective that Neo sees it for the grand illusion it really is.

Here’s another example to try to explain the philosophy of solipsism, because it’s kind of a difficult philosophy for us to understand from our perspective. There is a short story by Stanislaw Lem (which you can buy in this collection) that I’m going to shamelessly paraphrase here to try to explain why our lives have absolutely no objective meaning or truth.

So the story goes, a scientist invites the protagonist to his laboratory to show him an interesting experiment the scientist is running. When the protagonist gets there, he sees a bunch of metal boxes all attached to a big metal drum, humming mysteriously. The scientist explains that within each box is a mechanical “brain” that receives sensory input from the magnetic tape in the big metal drum, just like we receive sensory input from the world around us. He explains that logically, there is no difference between the “people” contained within those boxes and us.

To really put the screws in this little mind-game, he explains that this box thinks it is a beautiful seventeen year old girl, that one thinks it’s a priest having a crisis of faith, another thinks it’s a scientist studying physics, and by their choices, they can control which way their lives travel along the magnetic tape that makes up their world. He has one box that he keeps separate from the others, though. It contains the mind of a man going insane. He is on track to be put into a sanitarium because he has concluded that he is nothing more than a box on a shelf in a laboratory, and his whole world is nothing more than a series of sensory experiences taken from miles and miles of magnetic tape contained within a giant drum. He knows the truth, but no one can accept it, because that would invalidate everyone’s existence.

The point is, their world is as real to them as our world is to us, and their world is obviously “artificial”, so how do we know that our own world truly exists? The final observation of the story is that perhaps we are all boxes contained in a higher being’s “laboratory”, who is himself a box contained in a higher being’s “laboratory”, ad infinitum. The scientist in the story simply wants to continue the chain of existence up to divinity, and play God by watching his little world unfold before his eyes.

That’s solipsism, in a nutshell. We can’t know for sure that any of the world around us exists, since there is nothing to prove that the entire world isn’t just a private reality. Everyone you meet, your family, friends, the people you care about, you don’t know if they are thinking beings or essentially unthinking bodies following the elaborately choreographed programming that makes up your universe.

But let’s stop doubting the existence of our reality for the moment. Society really can’t get anywhere if we’re always assuming that everyone around us is just a figment of our imaginations. So, like Descartes did with his famous proposition of “I think, therefore, I am”, let’s take it as a given that we exist, and try to move forward from there. What purpose will this serve? It just might provide a consistent, logical framework that otherwise unmotivated, disillusioned young adults like you or me can use to figure out why we’re here, assuming for the moment that we actually are here.

So, where does this leave us? We know that death is the great endpoint. We have consciousness, perspective, experiences, senses, a reality to enjoy, and then—BAM! We’re dead, and we have nothing. No consciousness, an eternal dreamless sleep. What’s a guy (or gal) to do, when confronted with this philosophy that practically borders on nihilistic? Don’t worry, there are answers, and they may just restore your optimism for life. Rene Descartes’ famous declaration may help us build up from here to a more sustainable philosophy.

Some people like to believe that life has no meaning at all, and nothing is real. We call them “teenagers”. Well, maybe “nihilists” is the more correct term, but I don’t know too many functioning adults who truly believe that nothing matters and that there is no purpose in life. I don’t believe that you can be a functioning adult and believe that, never mind being a happy and fulfilled person. So let’s start with the presumption that you are indeed thinking, therefore your consciousness exists. Where do you go from there? Well, first, if you’ve watched The Matrix or read any of the great books that tackle it, you can head towards Solipsism. I recommend you do that, then come back here and read what happens if you start out as absolutely skeptical as possible, trusting only in your own existence and not in the reality your senses feed you.

Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait. It works better if you start from the most skeptical philosophy and work your way up from there.

Okay, so you can start with the principle that you exist, but that’s it, so to speak. You (strictly from a logical standpoint, as I sure as hell don’t actually think this way) don’t start out with the belief that other people exist, because there’s no way of knowing. So it’s you, alone, in a massive computer program you can call “life”.

Well, if this life is all we’ve got, let’s try to figure out what we’re doing here on earth, taking as a given that we get on average seventy-five years to do whatever that is. You can think of it as figuring out the rules and objectives of the game, if you want to. Even though we like to think of ourselves as the highest form of life on this planet, pondering abstract concepts and rationalizing our decisions, the default purpose of our existence is very, very simple. Survival and Replication. That’s what we were designed for. The purpose of our DNA is to perpetuate itself, and particularly with humans, it has done a great job. We have big brains to help us survive the pitfalls of life on this dangerous planet, and we have complex social constructs to help us breed in a way that perpetuates the human genome. Everything we are and everything we do stems in some way from these biological principles. Why do we work? So we can have money to survive, or to attract the opposite sex (I know, I know, cynical, but it’s true), or to provide for our children’s survival. Even though we’re not conscious of it, we are basically programmed with those two goals in mind, and everything we do is a function of that objective. Happy you got into college or got a job? At a base level, it’s because society pounded the message into your head that college will get you a job and a future, which will provide for your expenses and demonstrate high value to a potential mate. So we’re all just a bunch of biological impulses wrapped up in a brain in a skull in a head on a body made of carbon compounds. Congratulations to us humans, the difference between us and other animals is that we’re at least self-aware and realize that we’re born, we copulate, and we die. Other animals don’t have to deal with the discomforting sentiment that comes with knowing and contemplating their own mortality. But more on this later.

So what is the meaning of life, if we’re just running around fulfilling our biological destiny? Well, at a fundamental level, there is none. Nothing objective, at least. Not to be nihilistic, though, the only sustainable solution is that we have to create meaning for ourselves. For some, that’s the external value system called “religion”. Others choose to follow a moral code, or to pursue wealth or knowledge. The bottom line is, though, to aim for achieving maximum enjoyment out of life. What is life, if not a series of experiences that we hope leaves us better than when we entered it?

So if we are all just collections of neurons bumping around in flimsy carbon bodies, then trying to enjoy the time we do have on earth is about all we’ve got. That can be interpreted in many ways, but it brings up an uncomfortable word that many associate with an adolescent outlook on life, and that is hedonism. Most people, when they think of hedonism, think of carnal pleasure, a lack of maturity, a lack of purpose or direction, or generally being a shallow and degenerate human being. Well, that’s really not a fair characterization. A hedonist recognizes that the most important goal in his life is finding what makes him truly happy, and trying to maximize time spent doing that. There is a lot to be said for corporeal pleasures, but some people might find them to be unsatisfying in the long run. I can’t prove nor disprove the existence of any higher purpose for those people, but I can try to appease them by explaining how to be a conscious hedonist.

Basically, you have to recognize what lets you fully realize your goals in life, intellectually, physically, emotionally, sexually, whatever. Of course, a lot of things can give a person enjoyment if that person dedicates time to that activity. The classic example is working out. Lots of people claim to hate working out, but it’s only because they haven’t pushed past the pain and reaped the rewards of a physically fit body, longer, healthier life, more energy, and the endorphins that are naturally released after strenuous physical activity. Or take a career in high-level medical research. Many people would consider researching different proteins and discovering new drugs to be incomprehensible and joyless. For some people, though, it’s like solving a good puzzle, and gives them deep satisfaction to know that they are helping people and advancing human knowledge with their creativity.

The problem we face as disengaged twenty-somethings is that we never really stepped back and took a good, hard look at what our own authentic goals are in life. If we did, then we periodically lose track of them somewhere in the mind-numbing grind of adult life and never stay on track for long. That is why you see people advising that you quit your job, travel the world, and find what you’re truly passionate about. They know that the only way to get out of a rut and move towards these higher goals is to begin to mentally disengage from the taxing requirements and distracting pleasures of a modern American life. That involves upheaval, which is extremely uncomfortable for almost all of us. The uncertainty, the weight of expectation that we pursue the “safe” or “respectable” path, that is what keeps people from contemplating their goals, much less acting on their dreams. That barrier of discomfort prevents growth, which is paramount to happiness.

The truly beautiful part of examining conscious hedonism, though, is the ability to sum up the entire philosophy graphically. What do I mean? Well, a good friend of mine, in a debate we were having over my philosophy, asked, “Why don’t you just go somewhere and overdose on crystal meth or something? You’ll have infinite pleasure for a split second, and then die immediately after. If life is meaningless, you’d be happiest leaving it right now with the greatest high medically possible.” I quickly responded that since life is infinitely preferable to not being alive, I would rather be alive for as long as possible, because that would make me happier than a limitless high followed by death.

It wasn’t until I discussed this with another great philosophical influence, my mom (hi mom!), that she wrapped this idea together with my desire to discipline myself to achieve greater happiness in the long run, like with my diet. She explained it like this. Imagine your life as being a little graph of happiness versus time. Every second, the happiness you feel at that instant gets plotted, and you can never re-write the graph once you’ve lived that moment. Overdosing on heroin would shoot the graph to the sky, and then it would drop to zero a few minutes later when you die. If you live a long life free of drug addiction and rich with purpose, however, your graph will remain naturally high for a longer period of time. For those of you that have taken calculus, you might know what’s coming. The ultimate goal is to maximize the integral of our happiness over time. Yeah, I just included a math analogy in the meaning of life. What this means is that even if we have the little asymptote of instantaneous happiness followed by death of drug overdose, that will give us overall less “area under the graph” of general happiness than living a fulfilling life with spikes of carnal pleasure here and there, but the general satisfaction of a purpose-filled life nonetheless.

Note a few things: Almost everyone has a baseline happiness level that they deviate from in extreme circumstances, but quickly return to it. No, I’ve never done heroin. Yes, from what I’ve read, I believe that it is the purest, “best” feeling in the world, the kind that you want to have forever and ever. You know, the kind that you get addicted to and ruin your life while you chase it. The kind that quickly moves your baseline irrevocably downward, because you start to develop a tolerance. Longer-lasting happiness spikes result from more lasting emotional connections (more on this later). And yes, I was extremely happy for a long time when I got a Game Boy Advance as an eight-year-old. But that’s not the real point here. The point is that, in a simple utilitarian calculation of the sum of your life, the integral of the happiness over time is the most straightforward way to evaluate.

Now, a lot of this thought stems from ideas I had as a more cynical, smart-ass eighteen-year-old. If it resonates with you, good, but there is more to consider. If you hate this philosophy because it seems cold and selfish, bear with me. There is more to consider, some bridges between conscious hedonism and a warmer, love-thy-neighbor philosophy that might make the arguments a bit more palatable.