We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
One of the most important lessons I've gotten from psychology, and one that I am still re-learning, is how minds are inconstant and malleable things-- including thoughts, including this thought, and any other that occurs to you while reading it (h/t: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).
Cynical thoughts create cynicism. Grateful thoughts create more opportunities for gratitude. Humans are prone to cognitive errors and distortions; for every story you have about why something is the way it is, there is another possibility.
Yesterday, I wrote cynically about Catch-22s and useful fictions, one of my favorite examples of logic colliding with the edge of what logic can do. But here are some more hopeful others:
Quantifying pain, joy, and life itself.
I was once a consequentialist, but I've been forced to embrace the utter unpredictability of "utility" and "meaning" among meaning-making machines. We all like different things, and how much we will like things is highly controllable by our attitude toward those things.
In this sense, it is poets, priests, influencers, and advertisers that create value, not engineers or scientists or financiers or project managers; the market follows money, but money follows ideas.
It seems similarly impossible to reason about human life and how much a minute of human life is worth. Compare the calculus of insurance, policy, or public health interventions
vs the lived experience of humans buying medical treatments for themselves, willing to pay a lot of money for life
vs the lived experience of humans working in jobs they hate--willing to pay a lot of life for money
vs the lived experience of humans choosing to fight in war or go into dangerous situations--willing to pay a lot of life for life.
(Planet Money's episode on this was phenomenal, by the way.)
The phenomenon of platitudes
Twitter and nursing homes alike are lousy with platitudes-- the sort of advice that seems wrong/useless until it seems obvious; satisfying to receive and retweet if you believe it, but rarely able to actually change minds: Go outside. Meditate. Practice kindness. Tell someone you love them, and get a hug every day. Be grateful. Drink more water and less alcohol, and probably spend less time on Twitter, too.
In a sense these sorts of platitudes are the answer to every question:
How can I be more popular?
How can I win friends and influence people?
How can I be happier... richer... less depressed... more alive?
One of my favorite contemporary poets, Andrea Gibson, describes this with the example of butterflies. Watching them struggle, we want to help them out of their cocoons, but that struggle is what makes them strong: "to become what we are meant to become, the becoming must be ours."
Today, I'm writing from a sun-dappled clean-aired corner of Lake Tahoe. I could write this essay in well-researched and cited form that tells you everyone you should read to know more about, but it's hard to say anything other than: well, you should come and see for yourself.
An answer in pataphysics
We all know what meta is: X about X. A movie about making a movie. An essay about writing essays. Thinking about thinking. (Cue groan.)
Sometime in the late 1890s a bunch of French philosophers assigned--t he headscratchers above metaphysics the term pataphysics. Most of their definitions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics) are a bit of a head-scratcher, or a head-inverter, but I'm hopeful that pataphysical approaches have a solution for some of the problems that clean logic and meta-logic can't answer.
"How can I become rich?" Volunteer to help those less fortunate than you is a pataphysical answer: one whose doing changes the question.
"How can I get a bunch of girls to have sex with me?" Make more friends--maybe in a hobby you like--and focus on your own emotional growth--advisers hope, maybe, that the young man asking will be safe for young women by the time he gets what he wants.
Robert Greene --famous for The Art of Seduction and The 48 Laws of Power -- is a brilliant writer of this style. "How do I get people to do exactly what I want, when I want it?" I won't spoil the answer.
Emily Dickinson: Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
A sort of zen koan, maybe.
"What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" Meditate more. The smell of pinecones in the morning. Your child's laughter. The first time you fell in love. Sisyphus, walking down the hill, glancing over his shoulder.
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This is my sixth day of writing for #ship30for30. If you found it useful, retweet or DM me what so I know what to write more about.