132. Authority Is Insidious

If someone imposes an ultimatum on you, you immediately feel annoyed. They are threatening you with a bad outcome in an attempt to force you to do what they want. Even if you want the same thing as they do, you’re frustrated because you believe you could have easily reached an amicable agreement. But now you feel like you’re being coerced.

Every time an authority demands you do something, you are being given an ultimatum. You will comply with the authority because you feel the consequences of noncompliance would be too much to bear. You know you’re being coerced, but you feel there’s no real alternative. If you don’t feel this way, then the authority is not actually an authority. It is you who is the authority, for you agree with it and you would do what you are being told to do anyway.

131. The Power Of Reflection

A strong feeling is often short-lived. Someone harms me, and I immediately become angry. My anger is an intuitive response to what has happened to me. It’s also a signal that there is a problem that requires my attention. Once the problem has been resolved or removed, the feeling dissipates quickly.

But I might later reflect on the memory of what happened and form a concern that it could happen again. This concern is not an intuition but an intentional response. It’s a product of my reflective consciousness and it comes from my judgment of what happened and the potential I see for it to happen again in the future. If I become attached to this new intention, I will begin to suffer from anxiety, and this feeling will last for as long as I remain attached.

130. The Human Project

Every human being contributes something to the whole of humanity. We each have projects we have chosen for ourselves. Sometimes these projects are shared with others, like when we raise a family or work for an organization, and sometimes they are largely individual efforts where we help others indirectly. We each have particular goals we want to achieve and we do this through dedication to our projects.

The combination of all of our projects together has brought humanity to its present point. Most of our efforts never aimed at this specific point, and yet this is where we find ourselves because our individual contributions have built on each other. From an objective standpoint, it might seem like humanity is merely expanding its reach and understanding for no reason other than because it can.

129. Reasoning About Ethics

What should we do? This is the central question of ethics, and when we think about ethics we immediately begin to think about rules and principles. What rules are binding in our present situation? What principles should we apply? How do we decide which rules and principles are correct? All of this is open to discussion and debate. Claims will be presented, propositions postulated, and arguments for this and against that proffered.

128. Something Like Transcendence

She wants to be alone. Other people have become too much for her. Out in the world, she feels like she is constantly wading through a sea of drifting bodies, each seemingly alive but really only going through the motions of life. She cannot stand this feeling. Everyone seems artificial. It’s as though they are not quite human.

Or perhaps it is she who is not human. Why is she unable to accept what everyone else accepts? Why does she feel everything that happens to her so deeply? Why does every experience resonate so loudly that it leaves her drained and damaged?

127. Judgments And Anxiety

When a friend is feeling anxious, I listen to their concerns and I do my best to empathize with them. If I judge the worrisome situation differently than they do, I try to make them feel better by showing them that the outcome will be better than they think. Sometimes this helps to lessen their anxiety, provided they come around to seeing things as I do.

My friend’s anxiety is a kind of suffering that arises from attachment. They have become attached to their desire to avoid a future outcome they have foreseen. This intention arose because they judged that this particular outcome will be bad for them. By showing them that the outcome will be better than they think, I provide them with a counter judgment. When they release their hold on the original judgment and substitute the counter judgment, the intention dissolves and so does the anxiety produced by their attachment to it.

126. The Importance Of Attention

We discover at an early age that it’s important to pay attention. By paying attention, we figure out how things work, and when we understand how things work it’s easier to get what we need. We gain not only knowledge but also stronger intuitions about life.

Awareness is our intuitive understanding of experience. It expands through attention to the experiences we have. By paying attention to the objects, events, and people we discover in the world, to the thoughts, feelings, memories, and imaginings that arise in the self, and to the relationships between all of these various things, our awareness continuously expands.

125. Like A Living Heart

To write from a blank page can be daunting. You begin with nothing other than perhaps a single idea and from there you must somehow create language. What necessarily emerges from such a process is a text that is raw and rough. It lacks the smoothness that comes with revision, with the careful work of rounding the edges and improving the flow.

But despite its blemishes and idiosyncrasies, a first draft can be captivating. For it expresses not only your original thought process but also the predominant feelings you have as you write. This is the text that is closest to you, as it has not yet been subject to the refinements that would help it fulfill the requirements of a possible reader. It is only and exactly what you intuitively felt it must be in the moment of writing.

124. Choosing A Life

You’re following a certain path when you realize there might be a better one. When should you change course? If the choice is a minor one, then maybe it doesn’t matter whether or not you switch. But what if the decision will change your entire life?

We’re usually taught that we should make the change when it would help us reach our desired goals more quickly. In doing so, we’re supposed to account for both the potential benefits and the potential costs. The result is that our choice turns into an optimization problem: we should choose the option where the benefits will most exceed the costs. In this way, we maximize the probability of achieving our goals, which is supposed to be the best possible thing.