How not to change your life in three easy steps

I quite like self-help guides and articles on improving yourself and your life. But sometimes I get a bit fed up with the serious, well-intentioned tone. So here is my mini-anti-guide called

How not to change your life in three easy steps

1. Let yourself be paralyzed by frustration and fear of failure, or let fear make you do things that are against your own best interests. Or have completely unrealistic hopes and aspirations ... the effect is different, but the end result is the same.

2. Live in denial. Delude yourself that your life is just hunky-dory, and that there is no need to do anything to change it. If you are no good at denial, there are other options, such as overeating, binge shopping, overworking, over-exercising, designer drugs or more traditional ones. Nothing chases away the existentialist blues better than a good stiff drink. And don't be overly alarmed when habituation sets in, and you need more each time to achieve the same effect: it is worth it.

3. If you are physically attractive and good at faking intelligence, arrogance, scepticism and/or cynicism are good attitudes, preferably in public; if you are not, consider crawling into your cave, and cocooning in resignation and/or total apathy. Couches have a right to potatoes.

4*. Always blame others when things go wrong. And keep on blaming others until you end up anger and bitterness set up house in your life permanently.

*I know it says three easy steps, but things are always more complicated than they sound. Get used to it.

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"We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs." - Bruce Sterling, Involution Ocean.

Controlling emotions

Something funny happened a while back. I got into an argument with someone about something that was not really very important, and it became quite heated. To me, it was so obvious that I was right, but he didn't seem to see my point of view. In the end, I spent several days after the argument fuming over it, and blaming the other person for my anger and frustration.

It took me quite a while to calm down and realise that - irrespective of who was right (me) or wrong (him) - the blame for my frustration and anger was all my own. And the funny thing was that - contrary to what I myself would have thought - accepting the blame made me feel better, not worse. But I couldn't figure out why, until a few days ago, when I realised that it is all about control. When I blame others for how I feel, I basically put them in control of my emotions, with of course very frustrating results. Accepting responsbility for my own emotions puts me back in control.

I am feeling so happy about this little discovery that I think I might go pick an argument with someone, just get some practice in controlling my own emotions. But it has to be relatively trivial. Ooooh, I know! I will try to convince the neighbour to stop practicing the piano at ten o'clock at night. And I will do so by practicing songs I do not know very well on my electric guitar, and aiming the amplifier towards the connecting wall, at the same time. That should get the discussion going quite well. If I can really control myself, we will soon be playing in four or five-part harmony: piano, guitar, doorbell, percussion (banging on the door when I don't answer the bell) and vocals (shouting).

Moral relativism

While reading Obama's "The Audicity of Hope" I came across the concept "moral relativism", a term I didn't know existed, but which is a nice concise description of how I see things. It's nice to find a glove that fits: I am definitely a moral relativist. In fact, in spite of my general aversion of any extreme or fanatical position, I would say I am such a relativist that you might start to wonder whether I can distinguish between right and wrong at all. I think I can, but to me, right and wrong only exist in context. I am not talking so much about how ethics change with time (although they do), but more about the fact that there are different levels. There is right and wrong for the individual, the family, the group or class, the nation, the species ... and we spend a good part of our lives trying to resolve the conflicts that arise as a result.

Of course, it would be much more convenient to have universal rules of conduct, but I have yet to find them. Take our attitude towards life, for example. As a general principle, we want to protect it. This is seen as "only natural", and the drive is so strong that I still feel bad about a few tadpoles that I caught with my daughter some weeks ago, and that died because I didn't know how to take care of them. But there are situations where the general "life is holy" principle might be justifiably suppressed. I have great deal of sympathy, for example, for rape victims who do not want to have the child of their aggressor, especially since in most cases, it will mean taking care of them for years. And I have even more sympathy for the mothers of children who are the result of incest, where - in addition to having a constant reminder of what can only have been a traumatic experience - there is a significant risk of having a child with serious health problems. And I am not at all sure that life should be prolonged as long as possible, no matter what the condition of the patient. So here we have a conflict between the group interest, and the interests of one or a few individuals.

Or the disagreement about immigration, which arises from a number of different conflicts at the same time, namely between the rich (who stand to benefit from cheap labour for menial jobs), the immigrants (higher income), the lower class in the receiving country (unhappy about the competition from the outside), both nations (evening out of the income differences), the human race as a species (mixing of genes, when the immigrants stay and interrmarry), etc. etc.

I have no solutions for the above problems, but I would like to suggest that we try to avoid being unduly swayed by our emotions when deciding on them. Not that I am against emotion per se: as a survival mechanism, it has served us well for millions or years. But there are at least three problems with emotions: they are very imprecise and error-prone (having been badly frightened by a clown as a child may leave you with a lasting fear of all clowns), and they are or can be "contagious" (which can lead to mass hysteria, for example), and, like everything that has been hard-coded by evolution, they are slow to adapt to changing circumstances. In fact, thought is the only survival mechanism that can keep up with change. Which is why we rely on it so much. But there is a problem with thought as well: it not only helps us keep up with change, it can actually cause it. But that is a different story ...

Short versus long term

I think a lot about the short vs. the long term. Long term consciousness is probably the most importance difference between us and other animals. Of course (to paraphrase Darwin), it is a difference of degree, not essence, but still, the difference is quite striking: we are capable of thinking in terms of geological time, while most other members of the animal kingdom with similar life-spans probably don't get further than the concept of seasons. 

Apparently, newly born babies start with no concept of time whatsoever, but as they grow, they learn to handle ever-increasing time spans. My eldest - now eight - has no trouble imagining things happening years from now, including having children of her own. And human  society as a whole has shown a similar sort of development: collectively, we become more conscious of the long term with every new generation. The acceptance of the theory of evolution is just one of many examples, as are the idea that we might want to preserve our cultural history, and our current concern with climate change: all indicate that collectively, we are thinking in ever-longer time spans.  

Emotions are a bit different. Emotional development also passes through phases in individual humans and in society as a whole, but as compared to the above-mentioned examples of commonplace long-term thinking, emotions are short-term. They can be useful as short-term aids to survival (think fight-or-flight responses), but they can also get in the way of our long-term collective interests. Which is why we tend to see emotions as something to keep in check. 

Seen in Darwinian terms, we could see this process as the competition between two different systems designed to do the same thing (processing stimuli and formulating a response). And according to Darwin, the winner will be the more adaptable of the two. So kudos to the nervous system with its rapid-fire electrical signals, and a booby prize to hormones. (Sad, but logical.)