I’m not going to sugar coat it. Literally, I will not put sugar on anything.
You are screwed.
Okay, maybe it’s not that bleak.
But without digesting this email you are.
I know that I was before I realized this.
Everybody today faces an impossible predicament.
You’ve been catapulted into this world (literally shot out of a human body) without an instruction manual.
For 9 months you grew inside of a human body….then all of a sudden you were expected to figure sh*t out on your own.
It’s almost like you woke up in a ferrari going 100 miles an hour headed for a cliff and you’re expected to stop the car.
But you have no clue what a ferrari even is…you don’t even know what a car is. You don’t know what a cliff is and you sure as hell don’t know what a brake is. You don’t even know that you’re a human being…You just feel sensations…and you’re not even sure if you like them or dislike them…
You’re totally lost and helpless. You know absolutely nothing.
This state is what the Greeks called aporia.
The human body & brain is the most powerful machine in the world, but similarly you have no idea how to operate it.
In some ways, you’re not totally helpless — you have genetic programming and DNA that learns & adapts. You’re programmed with the capability to learn to speak, walk and survive in social environments. Your body knows how to grow into a full human being (imagine if you needed to mentally grow all your limbs…).But that’s about it.
Over the course of human history, people realized that humans needed more than this. They needed people and traditions to guide them how to live beyond mere survival.
Your ancestors knew that life was more than just eating, drinking & having sex and created things like myths, religions, philosophies and rituals to instill that wisdom in people. They outsourced this to the cultural layer because they realized that this wasn’t just innate. Unfortunately human beings don’t come out of the womb yet in a meditation pose with the wisdom it takes to live a good life…
But pretty much all of that wisdom has been extirpated from society over the last few 100 years.
Everybody has forgotten how to operate a human body.
Nobody knows:
- How to eat
- How to be happy
- How to find meaning
- How to be fulfilled
- How to live a good life
- How to be a good citizen
- How to love
Instead, people just defer to culture & politics to answer these questions. More and more, everything is answered by someone’s beliefs and political affiliations than their actions.
The nuclear family has been destroyed. The education system is propaganda. Religions are gone. Nobody philosophizes (in the socratic sense).
Instead of becoming wise, people simply vote for the “right party” and assume that makes them good & virtuous. If you hashtag the right thing or post the right instagram photo you’re a good person. If you don’t, you’re not. It doesn’t matter what you do in your day to day life — it only matters what you believe.
Life is more than voting left and being a hedonist. But that’s how everybody is living.
And frankly, it’s also more than having a 6 pack and healthy body. As much as I love beef liver, eating it alone cannot make you live a good life (but I think it is an important part nonetheless).
Once you realize that you too have no clue what a good life means, that’s when you can start actually living one.
There used to be a human operating manual. But it was burned to ashes. Like after a wild fire we can scavenge a few of the remains. There’s a page here and there about meat I think I found…There’s another about community and love. But there’s nothing cohesive.
We’re stumbling around in the dark putting together a manual that was burnt to crisps.
Can it be resuscitated? I think so.
If you’re interested in following along this journey and figuring a way out of this mess, sign up below. There will be 5-10 more parts to this series.
