Maybe social media isn’t the problem, maybe it’s that we lie through our teeth about how happy we are

Social media wouldn’t be so destructive if we didn’t lie about our lives, and make them seem better than they actually are.

Here’s my train of thought.  

Humans are constantly making social comparisons. We scan our environment and mimic the people who seem to be doing well. If someone appears to be happy, healthy, and prosperous we try to do what they do. 

It would be a big problem, if we mimic someone who appeared happy, healthy, and prosperous but actually wasn’t. Why? Because we’d be tricked. We’d be mimicking behaviors that weren’t actually good for us.  

Social media isn’t solely dangerous because it makes it easy to compare ourselves to others, but that’s obviously true. Social media is dangerous because it’s hard to discern if someone is truly happy, healthy, and prosperous or if they’re faking it. Which makes it really easy to emulate the wrong people.

So we end up mimicking behaviors that aren’t actually good for us, and pay for the mistake with our sanity. 

The liberating devotion of having kids is something I didn’t expect

There’s a liberation that happened when we had a child, that I didn’t expect. When I am with him, he takes 100% of my attention. Which doesn’t sound freeing but in a way it is.

When we are together he can’t help but force me to pay attention, in two ways. First, being with him is such a joy, I want to give him my full attention and full self. But also, say I’m distracted.  He cries, he gets into stuff, he waves his arms, he laughs. If I’m not giving him my full attention, he finds way to request it. One way or the other, I’m giving him my full attention. 

Admittedly, that can be draining, because the hours are long and kids (Bo included) has a special type of energy (that I don’t). Robyn and I have had to drastically change our schedule, what we prioritize, and how we socialize. That’s not liberating. 

But when I am with him, and I mean really with him, I don’t have space in my working memory to think about worries. I can’t think about a task list. I can’t multitask. It’s just not possible. When I am with him, I have no choice for mind mind to be 100% there.

Being with my son is liberating, despite the commitment and full devotion it requires, because it frees me from the painful wandering of my own mind. It helps me stay fully, right there, in a moment that I am so grateful to be in, with no other distractions clouding my mind.  

I think this is why meditation is so transformative and social media is so scary. Both require the same sort of full attention, one is just freely given attention and the other steals it.

If my working definition of “devotion” is something that I voluntarily or involuntarily allow to take my full focus and attention, asking myself what I’m devoted to is a very interesting question. And further, how is that devotion changing me as I practice it - is it releasing stress, creating loving relationships, helping me express something, or is it just making me into a basket case?

After death, grief. After grief, a gift.

Only after many months and years could I arrive here, finally. After so much time with so much pain, I am grateful to my father for teaching me, even after death.  

I realize now that his going ahead was one of those showstopper kind of things, like a power outage, the pulling of a fire alarm, or a flat tire. It was a no-choice-full-stop. After he died, I shut down and reconsidered everything about how I live. I couldn’t help it.

His death taught me, in the most belligerent way possible, that I cared way to much about my job. He saved me years - maybe decades - of being addicted to work and status.

After three years of suffering and grief, I see his death was, in at least a small way, a gift. And I am grateful.

Paradoxical observations on being my son's hero

I realized this weekend that I have the market cornered of being one of my son’s heroes. Like, unless I do something horrendous and hurtful to him or others, I’ll be someone he really admires and looks up to. In a way, I have a natural monopoly on being a hero to my son.

The conclusion I’ve come to after realizing this is counterintuitive.

My first thought was, “I’d better set a good example”. After all, if I’m his hero he’s going to be watching me.

But my second thought was more skeptical. f I try to set a good example, that’s a contrived way of living unless whatever setting a good example entails is just part of who I am. If I try really hard to set a good example for the sake of setting a good example, I’d be modeling a behavior of basing my thoughts and actions on how I want others to see me.

What I really should be doing is modeling the behavior of “it’s okay to be yourself, and think and act for yourself.” Because all wisdom I’ve ever received points to being yourself as absolutely fundamental to a happy, purposeful, prosperous life. And if being myself is isn’t setting a “good example”, what I should probably be focused on is modeling the behavior of “it’s important to improve myself to become a better, more virtuous person”.

Being a hero to your kids (or to anyone, perhaps) is counterintuitive. It seems the way to be a hero is to be yourself and improve yourself, even when it is hard. And paradoxically, the first step to being yourself and improve yourself is to stop trying to be a hero.

And something even more cosmically humorous, trying to stop “being a hero” is one of the hardest things I’ve ever struggled with.

Being a Keeper of My Brother's Mental Health

I hadn’t thought to look it up using a Google Books Ngram before, but the concept of “mental health” is relatively new. Check out this chart - it plots instances of different words in the Google Books archive over time.

The way I’ve heard the term used is personal. It’s something that’s “owned” by an individual. My mental health is mine, and yours is yours. I might influence your mental health and you might influence mine, but my mental health is still a property of me as an individual. Our mental states are independent, even if they may affect each other.

But maybe that’s not quite right. After all, “mental health” is a relatively new concept. Maybe we don’t understand it fully yet.

I’m starting to see mental health as interdependent. Because speaking personally, it’s really hard for me to have a stable mental state without the love, encouragement, support, and honest feedback from others. It’s possible, perhaps, but just much harder. To a degree, I can’t help but have my mental state be affected by others.

At the same time, I have the same impact on others. My wife, my son, my best friends, my parents, my colleagues - I have a tremendous impact on their mental state. That impact I make, for them, is basically unavoidable. If other people can’t help but have their mental state be impacted by me, I ought to bear some responsibility to have that impact be positive.

I have some responsibility to be loving, encouraging, supportive, and honest. I have some responsibility not to inflict trauma or make threats. I have a responsibility not to make them dependent on my praise or feel like my love is conditional. And those close to me have the same responsibility toward me.

The more I think about it, mental health isn’t a personal health problem, where it’s solely our own responsibility to make healthy choices and “get fixed” if our mental state is unhealthy. it’s something for which we have a reciprocal responsibility with others. When it comes to mental health, maybe it’s better - and more accurate - to think about it as something for which we are our brother’s keeper.

Letter from the Future

This was an exercise I learned from a great coach I had the luck to work with as part of a class during my MBA. Robyn and I have kept up with it every year or two since then. Here are the instructions. You could do it by yourself, but Robyn and I dedicate an hour or so and do the exercise together.

Letter from the Future: Instructions

1. Get a few pieces of paper and a good pen.

2. Find a comfortable place to sit, and try to eliminate distractions like TV, music, etc.

3. Get a watch / timer

4. Write the date at the top of the page that is five years in the future. So if today’s date is January 1, 2019, write the date as January 1, 2024.

   1. You don’t have to do 5 years exactly, but the point is to choose a date a few years into the future.

5. Set a timer

   1. You’re going to go hard, so try for at least 15 or 20 minutes. Robyn and I find that we extend the time to 25-35 minutes most of the time we do this.

6. Write a letter to yourself about the life you are living in 5 years

   1. Rule - don’t ever let your pen stop moving for the whole time. If you can’t think of what to say, just scribble until your brain kicks in with a new idea

   2. Rule - be very specific. If you’re at your desk drinking coffee talk about what kind of coffee. If you’re talking about a new job that you just got, talk about the name of the company and your specific duties. If you just came in from playing in the backyard with kids, be specific about what you were doing. The point of this exercise is to have a vivid image of what your life is like 5 years from now.

   3. Rule - Talk about whatever you want, but try to give a full picture of life. Not just family, not just work, not just leisure, etc.

   4. Rule - Write until the clock stops

7. Talk about your vision with someone you care about. For me, it’s Robyn. If you’re not married you can still do the exercise. Be sure to share it with someone, if you feel comfortable, that really knows you and can ask you probing questions.

8. Do something fun, you’ve earned it!

Temperature Check

I look forward to Erik’s annual e-mail. One year, several years ago, he asked a question about relationships. I wrote him this letter. It’s a tool Robyn and I learned about from our wonderful friends Jeff and Laura. It’s something we’re religious about and it’s worked for us. We’ve missed our weekly temperature check less than 5 times in our whole relationship, I’d estimate.

Hope it’s helpful to you.

June 12, 2014

Robyn and I set aside time every week to talk about our relationship. We setup a structure, called temperature check, that we modified from some great friends of ours - they are married and have a kid. It's worked well for them. This check-in happens every week on Sunday...it's something we have committed to. You don't have to do it weekly, that's just the pace that works for us.

Anyway, we take turns sharing on each of the following topics, in this order. We also alternate who speaks first for each topic on a weekly basis:

1 - Appreciations: We talk about what we've been appreciating about the other recently. These could be small (e.g., I appreciate that you swept the floor) or large (e.g., I appreciate that you stayed up with me all night when my family's dog was sick). We always use "I messages"..."I appreciated it when you..."

2 - Issues: We talk about issues that we're having. It could be a self-issue (e.g., I'm having a hard time staying up so late), an issue about the other (e.g., I'm worried about how stressed you are at work), or mutual (e.g., I think we're not spending enough time with our families). Or it could be anything else. The key is, these issues can't be humongous. When we have bigger issues we say, I have this issue, let's set a time to talk about it. Temperature check is not designed for huge conversations, it's a check-in. Hopefully if you bring up small issues early, you have fewer big blow-ups.

3 - Requests for Change: We talk about small requests for the others. Keyword - small. (e.g., could you please not use metal utensils on teflon pans) That example is smaller than our average, but you get the idea.

4 - Other stuff: It's often easy to forget that your partner has his / her own stuff going on that affects them. We take the end of temperature check to catch up on all the news from other spheres of life outside our marriage. Work, family, ideas we have, societal issues we're thinking about, books we're reading, friend news...whatever. It's nice to know this stuff because it contextualizes where your partner is coming from and what external factors are affecting your relationship.

5 - Logistics: Finally, we discuss logistics for the week. Different meetings, social plans we have, grocery lists, whatever. It makes sure we have time to spend with each other and we both have the right expectations about the other's activity and stress levels. It's a chore, but it prevents us from squabbling about little stuff.

A note: Remember about all this, it's really important to create a safe environment to have this discussion. Listen actively, don't allow distractions, commit to it every week, and empathize with the other person. Temperature check is useless if it's not in a completely open and safe forum.

Hope this helps!

To Neil of January 1, 2016

To Neil of January 1, 2016, 

You don’t know this yet, but life is going to throw the kitchen sink at you in the next three years. A few days ago was the last time you’re going to see Papa alive. You’re going to say goodbye to him in about two weeks. You’re going to get married, and it’s going to be better than you ever dreamed. You and Robyn are going to add a pup and a beautiful miracle of a son to your family. But you don’t know these things yet.

You’re going to move into your first home and some of your closest friends will become your neighbors. You’re going to start going to church and you’re going to discover your Hindu roots, simultaneously. You’re going to write the most important letters of your life, to date.

You’re going to struggle a lot at work but contribute something real. There are going to be a lot of days that you wish you could retire.

You’re going to grieve. You’re going to make so many memories and have so many house projects. You’re going to try to function on too little sleep. You and Ma are going to struggle after Pa goes ahead, and your relationship is going to reset completely.

Your best friends are going to keep getting married and having more kids. So is your global extended family. You’re going to lose a Masi and your last grandparent. You and Robyn and going to laugh so darn much. You’re also going to cry a lot of heavy tears. Somewhere along the line you’re going to stop believing in yourself and believeing you’re good enough; those days will be dark. Some days, you’ll want to give up.

But you’re going to make it to January 1, 2019, please believe me. You just don’t know it yet.

All these incredibly difficult and joyous things are going to change you in a big way, that’s not a choice. And to be sure, you’re going to fight it. And who could blame you, a lot of what happens to you in the next three years are going to be terrible and you’ll want to go back to the way it was, at least in part. But that’s not a choice you have, either.

Don’t forget the choice you still do have - you have some ability to shape how all this does change you. You can choose whether it’s for the better or worse.

What life throws at you in the next three years could make you angrier. It could make you obese, frenetic, risk-averse, and more selfish. It could make you bitter and traumatized. It could make you turn inward and isolate yourself. It could make you lazy and dishonest. In the next three years life could make you into a man you don’t want to be, one that you aren’t. Don’t let it.

But it could make you more courageous and grateful. It could make you more honest and caring. It could pry your heart open to more love and light. It could make you more resilient and disciplined. It could make you into a better man, closer to the one you aspire to be someday.  

But you have to choose, actively, how it’s going to play out. My advice to you, to us really, is to make the choice to take what life throws at you over the next three years and let it change you for the better. Fight like hell when it tries to change you for the worse.

It will be hard, but I know you can do it. Heart to God brother.  

Love,

Neil

Lesson from 2018: Listening

As I reflect on 2018, I could think of one lesson worth sharing. Putting this lesson into practice is one of my aspirations for the next year, too.

I’ve started to see a general principle that emerges in many domains of life - family, work, marriage, culture, business, and more - tension is created when the demands of the external environment are out of whack with the internal environment. 

For example, at work when the demands of a job don’t match with the employee’s skills and interest. Or in business when what the customer wants doesn’t match with the skills or culture of the company selling its products or services. Or in a marriage when what your partner needs isn’t what you’re able to provide.

Some tension is good because it helps us grow. But when in excess, tension is destructive.

The point is this: it’s really important for the internal and external environment to be in harmony. If they’re not, one or both have to evolve, or else tension is inevitable.

The practical lesson is about listening. How would someone even know if the internal and external environment are out of whack? It takes honest, sincere, listening. Listening is the first step to getting the internal and external to be in harmony. Which means listening is also the first step to having harmony in many domains of our lives.

Where is the pressure coming from?

When I am with my wife and son, I am free. I feel lighter than air. When I hear “papa” or “honey” my mind is focused precisely on the moment. When I am with my family, and also good friends, the pressures of the world go away for a minute.

An issue area I follow relatively closely is mental health, anxiety, and depression. Mostly because I wonder about my own mental health sometimes and of those I’m close to.

Suicide is on the rise in the US. I see news stories about high-profile and low-profile people alike about overdoses, mental health, and suicide too often. I’m sure you do too. There’s surely a lot that goes uncovered by the press.   

Why is our culture dumping stress on us and/or leaving us without the skills to cope? Where is this pressure coming from? 

Why I wanted to become a father, retrospectively

In some ways, my desire to be a father is selfish. And not just a little selfish, but quite a lot selfish.

I want someone to take care of Robyn and I when we are frail. I want someone to love me the same way I love my parents. I want something of myself to continue after I die. Being a parent is also a respectable thing to do where I come from and having that respect is something I don’t mind.

I can’t deny that those selfish reasons are motivating. But I hope, and to some degree pray, that my intentions are purer.

I hope that part of me always wanted to be a father because of the inspiring love of my own parents. The way Robyn put it earlier was that we could never repay our parents for the childhood we had, but we can pay it forward.

I hope too that I and all who actively choose to be parents must be optimists, deep down. If we choose to conceive a child, we must think living a human life is worth it. That the chance to live and to breathe, to learn, love, sing, think, dance, pray, and all human things are worth it. Worth the trouble, fear, pain, and inevitable suffering that human life brings. That Robyn and I chose to become parents must mean that we think life is worth death.

And by choosing to conceive a child - which is really creating a life when it comes down to it - we think we ought to give that opportunity to be part of human history to someone else. Even if providing that opportunity comes with a beyond-financial cost to us as parents, plus considerable added risk, stress, and responsibility.

As I’ve reflected on my own character, I’ve also come to see being a father as a sacrifice for the community. I hope that is part of my motivation, for becoming a father, too. I see that sacrifice occurring in two ways.

First, being a father is an exceptionally rigorous course in how to live a more virtuous life. Fatherhood imposes its own will on how I live my life. Fatherhood makes me make sacrifices. It makes me love deeper. It makes me scrutinize my own choices. It makes me communicate better and be more patient. It has made me a better listener and much less lazy. I also drink a lot less alcohol.

All that intense training - and believe me it’s training - has given me no choice but to a better husband, son, brother, and neighbor. It will eventually make me a better friend, I think, when we actually start seeing friends regularly again.

Second, as parents we are important stewards of human potential. Every person, myself included, will have a limited amount of energy and talent to give in our lives. We will have to use some of that energy and talent to maintain our own existence. Ideally, if we learn to take care of ourselves relatively quickly as adults, some of it will be left over.

What’s uncertain is how we will use our surplus energy and talent. Will it be used to serve others or ourselves? Will it make our species better off or worse? Will it be wasted?

When we became parents Robyn and I created the potential for our children to have surplus energy and talent. We are now responsible for helping them shape how they use that surplus, because we have a disproportionate influence on the sort of people they become.

That stewardship is a sacrifice we make for the community. Admittedly, that sacrifice is perhaps the most joyous sacrifice I will ever experience. But I still I consider it a sacrifice for the community because more than likely we will be gone when our childrens’ energy and talent really bears fruit and won’t be around to enjoy it.

When our family was on the plane to Florida, I looked over at Bo sleeping in Robyn’s arms and realized I’ve always wanted to be a father but never really thought about why. This post is my best attempt at retrospectively figuring it out.

If you are a parent or aspire to be one, what’s your motivation for why?

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If you’re interested in reading more, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I publish new posts. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to send you a note.
 

I wonder why...

As I listened to the beautiful carols and meaningful homily at Christmas Eve mass, I wondered why so many people resort to violence over “disagreements” of faith. Why can’t we recognize the beauty within others’ traditions and leave it at that?

As I lounged with Robyn on our couch, reflecting on our year, I wondered why for so many people a peaceful home and loving family isn’t enough. I know we are blessed to have stability in our basic needs and the ability to have leisure time, but isn’t peace and love a minimum that most people can reach?

As I took time away from work after a month on overdrive, I wondered why I’ve always had an unhealthy relationship between work and identity. When did work become about status and avoiding shame instead of putting food on the table and sharing my gifts with others?

As I realized this morning that I may have messed up Spirit Airlines check-in (it’s equally possible Spirit’s check-in process has really bad design) and may be at higher risk for a flight bump down to Florida, I wondered why I became to angry with myself over something that may not even be a problem. Why is it that I treat myself with more cruelty than I treat others?

As I chat (literally as I write this) with my man at the quick lube, I wonder why this conversation is so less guarded than many others I have with semi-strangers. What is it about our culture that makes us behave in ways that are so cutthroat and skeptical?

As I make all these observations, I wonder where the need for moremoremore comes from. What do I truly need more of, and what am I merely fooling myself about? 

And as I contemplate the way out of this culture, all I can think of is the first step...but maybe that’s enough. I think I individually and we collectively ask ourselves, especially when in the throes of anger and despair, why and what. Why are we doing this? What are we trying to accomplish? What’s it for? Why does this really matter?

It is through those questions that two really important things happen. First, we reorient away from distractions that seem important by really aren’t. don’t really matter. And perhaps more importantly, the questions force the pause we need to do the long term essentials to reach challenging goals - like think, plan, reflect, learn, and heal - that are easily trumped by the urgencies of right now.

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 If you’re interested in reading more, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I publish new posts. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to send you a note.

Better Mistakes / Thank You For Your Wisdom and Generosity

Robyn was telling me about a story a good family friend - the mother of one of our close friends - told her today. The details of the story aren’t important (and they’re personal, so I don’t want to share them here) but the lesson was wise: it’s important to protect Christmas traditions because the amount of Christmas mornings we have with our kids is fixed and extremely limited.

One, she was right about the scarcity of Christmas mornings. Two, I felt so grateful to have heard that story through Robyn. It is an act of tremendous generosity when our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, elderly neighbors, and family friends to talk about the lessons they’ve learned from experience - especially the lessons that involve making mistakes. Talking about your mistakes and offering up what they’ve taught you, for free, out of the goodness of your heart, is not a normal behavior in most contexts.

At work? Definitely not normal. When’s the last time anyone openly discussed their mistakes with you? When’s the last time you heard a senior executive, a peer, or a recruit talk about a failure without couching the story in some frame that alludes to resilience or beating the odds after a struggle?

How often do you think the CEOs of established firms mentor the CEOs of startups in their industry? Could you ever imagine the CEO of a Big 3 automaker ever sharing advice with Elon Musk so that he may avoid the pitfalls they had? I sure can’t.

In public life and public relations? It’s definitely not normal to talk about mistakes openly and candidly.

Which is all to say that mentors who throw down about struggles and failures are very special indeed. Sharing wisdom so someone else doesn’t have to repeat your mistakes is an incredibly gracious act. It’s perhaps the most important and profound example of paying it forward. To those people in my life, thank you.

I often think about how my own father spent tremendous amounts of time preparing me to avoid making the same mistakes that he did. I wish I could thank him and give him a long hug about it now.

I hope that as a father, I can do the same for our kids and help them avoid the mistakes that I’ve already made, suffered through, and learned from. Very little would please me more than to see my kids make better and more important mistakes than I have.

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If you’re interested in reading more, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I publish new posts. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to send you a note when I do.

Introducing a new project: Choosing Goodness

For almost two years I have been writing a series of letters to my then unborn, now 14 month old son (and any other children we have in the future). My original intent was to publish it in a book.  

But I was grabbing a drink with a friend today, who has written books, and he reminded me that most books are never read. 

So I thought, why not just share it? In about 3 seconds I realized that there was no reason not to.

So here I am, I made this.

Here’s a link to the page which has the first letter, which is the dedication. I’ll post the rest there too, with the next coming in the first week of January.

I’ll publish at least one letter / essay a month. And maybe when I’m done I’ll edit it all into a volume and print a copy for our home library, and anyone else who wants it.

I’d love to hear what you think, privately or in the comments.

Yours,
Neil

My Hopes for You Kids

When all you kids are grown up, there are many things I hope I don’t pass on to you.

I hope you don’t get my short height, or uncontrollably growing hair. I hope you don’t pick your nose or intermittently chew with your mouth open. I hope you don’t worry as much about what others think of you or be as beholden to pleasing others, as I am. I hope you don’t have as much youthful arrogance as I did. I always wanted to go on a road trip of the western national parks with your Dada, but we didn’t get to it in time before he passed away. I want to be around much longer, and I hope you don’t have to live with a regret like that.

I hope it doesn’t take you as long to realize how important family is in your life. Perhaps even more, I hope it takes you less time than it took me to open your heart to God.

I hope you don’t get my receding gums or my weak hips. I hope you don’t get my dreadful fear of being alone. I hope you don’t get gout, high cholesterol, or diabetes. I hope you don’t get my knack for verbose answers to simple questions. I hope you don’t get my outdoor allergies or my anxieties about failure. I hope you don’t get my temper or my weakness for fried potatoes.

Most of all, I hope you don’t get my tendency to obsesses over my imperfections, like I am doing now. I hope that if I try with my whole heart, that I can prevent you kids thinking that you’re not enough or not really that good at anything, like your pops does. I pray with my full heart and soul that you believe that what you’ve been given is enough, and that it is special.

Which leaves me in a predicament. Because I know that what you see me doing is what I will pass onto you. I can’t just hope not to pass these liabilities onto you, I have to change some of them. And the hardest change for me is self-worth: really believing that I have at least a few special gifts to pass onto you.

And so while I outline the things I hope I don’t pass to you, I must also try to tell you about at least a few parts of me that I do hope to share with you. Because I must learn to believe something of myself for you all to believe something of you.

I hope you get my curiosity and penchant for asking questions. I hope you get my openness to seeing the good in people who are rough around the edges. I hope you get my patience and love of a good bass drop. I hope you get your Dada’s honesty and your Dadi’s energy. I hope your mother and I can pass on at least a few lessons on how to build a strong, loving marriage. Perhaps most of all, I hope I can pass on the habits of reflection, spending time in nature, and reading.

My hopes are not enough, but perhaps they are a good start.

Book Summary: Stubborn Attachments, by Tyler Cowen

A summary of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, by Tyler Cowen.

Overall, this book was a quick, no-frills read with a style that individuals who follow Tyler’s Marginal Revolution blog will find familiar and newcomers will likely find refreshing and concentrated with substance. The work is a valuable outline of the well-known economist’s philosophical orientation. Readers may or may not subscribe to Tyler’s argument, but it is clear to understand, well argued, and above all intellectually honest. I personally found it persuasive.

Keep reading for a summary of the key ideas (as I see them) and the questions I would ask the author were I to share a meal with him.

Summary from Amazon / Book Jacket

Growth is good. Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? 

Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.

A summary (in my own words)

Creating sustainable economic growth does the most good for humanity (in the long run), so our society should be focused on improving the sustainable economic “growth plus” rate (note: Tyler argues that common measures of economic growth to not reflect welfare appropriately, which is why we need a “growth plus” metric). Consequently, focusing on increasing the sustainable economic growth rate, so long as it does not violate human rights, undermine societal stability, or create environmental destruction is a moral imperative. To do this, we must place much more emphasis on the needs of people who will live in the distant future.

An outline of essential ideas (in my own words)

• Chapter 1: Tyler makes two “philosophical moves” in this book

  • Don’t take productive economies for granted

  • Rethink moral distance - value future people much more than we do now

• Chapter 2

  • “Wealth Plus” is extremely important because wealthy periods are when quality of life increases for all people

  • “Wealth Plus” tends to make people happier

  • A lot of happiness studies are flawed because of expectation changes

• Chapter 3

  • We should maximize the sustainable growth plus rate because that is the greatest way to make everyone better off in the long run

  • There is an important constraint: don’t violate human rights

• Chapter 4: Tyler argues in detail why we should have a much greater concern for future persons than we actually do

• Chapter 5

  • We should redistribute (wealth), to a point…for as long as it increases the sustainable economic growth rate

  • If we are optimistic about the future we should redistribute relatively less (because we should deploy capital to where it creates the most growth)

  • If we are less optimistic about the future we should redistribute relatively more (because we can’t use our wealth after the world ends)

• Chapter 6

  • We are most likely wrong about the long-run consequences of our actions but that shouldn’t paralyze us

  • We should adhere to a common-sense morality (Tyler explains what that is)

Questions I would ask the author (were I to share a meal with him)

I think your view is persuasive, but I find it incomplete. Perhaps that’s intended given the scope of the book. A major shift in thinking is required of a society that subscribes to your point of view, namely that we should value future persons more. How does that actually happen? How do you take “society” where it is and change the thinking of institutions and individual people so that they are more future oriented? How do you make today people care about future people more than they currently do (and then put their money where their mouth is)?

There’s one area that I’d also like to dig deeper. You discuss times in history where high sustainable economic growth rates have lead to lots of quality of life improvements that we value today. In other words (and loosely in your words) we are better off in the long run when we increase sustainable economic growth, even after accounting for uneven gains from growth in individual cases. We are better off because there is less suffering and senseless death, as well as art that’s created and other things of beauty. And this is true.

But is that even a complete picture of what we really want? Isn’t the real dream to have the freedom to pursue our own aspirations and dreams? Couldn’t it be that it’s not the growth in wealth that really creates happiness but that wealth simply creates the space for us to freely pursue the activities which make us happy and give us meaning? Wealth / growth may be a fantastic proxy, but isn’t it merely an enabler of our real aspirations?

I’m reminded of a time I was with my cousin sister in India. We went to a poor neighborhood (in a car, because she is a doctor and relatively wealthy) to purchase some firewood. I do not know whether this neighborhood was considered a slum by Indian standards, but most Americans would probably assume it was a “slum” if they saw a picture.

Nevertheless, she said something to me that has regularly echoed in my head since and will continue to, “they are happy because they have God.” Wealth probably does make enlightenment easier, but isn’t that enlightenment (or whatever spiritual / philosophical term you want to use) the real goal? I’m not disagreeing that wealth isn’t really, really beneficial, but haven’t we missed the point if we increase the sustainable economic growth rate and don’t achieve the mindset we need to actually value the improvements that the growth brings and have fulfillment? As you said, happiness studies are flawed because of expectation changes, but in real life the impact of our expectations and our mindset matters a lot. Isn’t meaning, enlightenment, and our mental orientation at least half the ball game? Isn’t your framework incomplete without a discussion of enlightenment and meaning?

Finally, I think it’s worth unpacking the specific role that different individual and institutional stakeholders have in increasing the sustainable economic growth rate. If the society is a complex system (I think it’s safe to assume that it is) I don’t think we can assume that to achieve a societal increase in the sustainable economic growth rate, individual people, companies, or countries should try to increase their individual sustainable economic growth rates as there are probably systemic dynamics which lead to unintended consequences when those agents act at scale.

Put more specifically, what is the role of individuals, governments, civil society, clergy, politicians, parents, etc. to increase the sustainable economic growth rate? Everyone has a role to play, surely, and what are everyone’s roles? Are there any types of stakeholders where there is a leverage point to really take advantage of? Are there any counterintuitive conclusions about any of those stakeholders’ roles?

The two ways I can think of to develop a feeling of care for the distant future

In his recent book titled Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen argues that we should care much more than we do about the distant future (among other things). It’s so interesting and honest a book I plan to post a review later this weekend. 

But for now, a question I have been ruminating on for many months now - how do I develop care for the distant future?

All I can come up with are the following two. Can you think of any other mechanisms to develop care, or a stubborn attachment if you will, for the distant future? 

The first mechanism is love. When I think of and look at my son, my heart becomes open. I don’t want to leave him in a world with tons of problems. I want to make sacrifices for his future. (And for the future of his spouse, friends, and neighbors).

And because I know Bo will love his kids, I love and want to make sacrifices for them too. And because my grandkids will love their kids, I love them and want to make sacrifices for them, and so on.

My love for my son, translates into a love for many generations after that. A love so strong that it transcends generations is one way to develop a concern for the distant future.  

The only other way I can think of to develop care for the distant future is beauty. There are some things, I think, that are so beautiful and so pure that they are worth something priceless. These things are probably different for different people, but are things like art, truth, God, family, sport, nature, music, and freedom. But it is an understatement to call them things, because they have more gravity than that. They are ideas that transcend a moment in time, because they are intrinsically meaningful.

These intrinsically meaningful things are such special creations that perhaps we just want them to exist in the universe, even long after we’re gone. We care about the distant future because we simply want these beautiful, intrinsically meaningful creations to exist in perpetuity.

I happen to agree with Tyler that we should care much more about the distant future than we do. Which is why I think it’s important to think of the messy, tactical question of the ways we can develop that sentiment. 

Why do you hate meetings?

I’m on a quest to find out why meetings are so bad. Why do you hate meetings? 

Some theories: 

• They’re very long. Can we accomplish the same goal in a shorter time? 
• They meander. What are we trying to accomplish here?  Is it compelling, or even clear?
• The people. Is everyone prepared? Do we even have the right people here? 
• The organizer. Leading a good meeting is a skill. Does the conveyer have that skill?

Perhaps most importantly is why so we have meetings in the first place, what could we do to accomplish just as much (or more) without so many meetings? 

Some theories: 

• A process for making decisions is not clear. We have to meet if decision authority is split, or, debate is required. 
• Information is asymmetrical. We have to meet if (or do we?) if information needs to be shared. 
• I don’t trust you to do your job. We have a meeting for “accountability.” (This is humourous, because meetings make it difficult to do our jobs!)
• Working through a problem. We each have something to bring to the table that is not easily activated without human-to-human contact. This is a great reason to have a meeting.
• Efficiency. Borrowing from Paul Graham, meetings are efficient for managers, but not for makers. 
• Hierarchy. If someone with higher ranks asks you to attend a meeting, you have little choice to skip.  

Why do you hate meetings? When are meetings totally worth it? What’s the best meeting you’ve ever had? What’s the worst one? 

H/t to Liz for the point about split decision making, I never thought about that.  

Halloween

I had forgotten why Halloween is so much fun. No SATs, no homework, no music classes, no pressures. It’s just a night where you run around in a costume and get candy. It’s care free.  

On Halloween, kids get to be kids.  

Inner Success vs. Society's Success

The hardest part of this exercise is being honest with yourself. But if you can do that, even 10 minutes may substantially change your life in the long run. I know because it has changed mine.

I had the good fortune of working with a coach during my last semester at Ross. Kathy introduced me to this very simple exercise:

1. Get a piece of paper and pencil

2. Draw a line down the middle

3. Label one side, “How I define success”

4. Label the other side, “How society defines success”

5. Fill out the page as honestly as you can

The difficult and unwritten 6th step of this exercise is choosing which side of the page to live by - and actually sticking with it.

But you can’t choose a side unless you know what the difference between them is. Showing me that there was a difference was how this exercise changed my life in a big way.