My four-year-old son Cal almost drowned yesterday. A rip tide on Ke Iki Beach sucked him out while playing in the shore break. Long story short, I was able to swim out quickly enough to catch him, he made it back in safely, and we had our moment of love and gratitude, forcing to the surface the reality of how fragile life can be.
First-hand Experience
As I reflected on this experience, it raised the question: Why do we have to experience something first-hand to make it a part of us? Said another way, how do we take what we understand academically (meaning things that we understand to be correct ideas) and feel it in a very real way without living it? There are two things that I understood academically yesterday but became more of a reality with more tangible feeling:
Nature is powerful – Said simply, I highly doubt that someone who surfs that beach would have let their kids play in those waves. They understand from first-hand experience what those currents can do and how unhelpful they will be in trying to fight against them. I understand that, and in fact just a week before we were doing the same thing at the same beach and some surfers told us that it was dangerous and we should get our kids out, which we did. But “these waves were a little smaller and I was close by, so it should be fine” goes the thought. So I understood it, but I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t a part of me because I’d never experienced it like they had.
Life is fragile – The closest experience I’ve had to a loved one dying too young is when one of my closest friends discovered a brain tumor last year. After surgery and treatment, he has a much better prognosis than originally expected, but it has been a trying mental experience which causes one to reflect on the purpose of our existence, the best way to live, and other such existential questions. But I, as close as I am to him, am not him. So whatever understanding I learned and felt from that experience so far is small in comparison to his. His and his wife’s experience is stronger and more meaningful because it’s happening to them directly. They feel it in them and it changes them. And the further from the epicenter you are, the less it changes you. Most of us are so far removed from those feelings that it is purely academic, likely by reading about someone who died young in the news or from a friend of a friend. I was close enough that I felt the value of human life, how short our lives are, and how we need to savor every moment. But until one feels it in a real way, it’s very hard to make it real. And even then a friend is different than myself or a spouse or a child, so the feeling is still different.
Our experience yesterday further converted my academic understanding to a real feeling. And after feeling it I can't help but think that it is a better way to feel. Last night putting him to bed I hugged him so tight and cried as we talked and I told him I loved him in the most heartfelt way I've ever told anyone. Today I've felt slower to anger, more caring and attentive, and generally more grateful and at peace. But it's only been a day. Soon I will revert to my usual state of existence with the usual frustrations, problems, and moments that I take for granted and fail to give my presence.
Understanding > Feeling
I clearly I learned a valuable lesson through first-hand experience, so how can I feel that same way without having to live it again? Before I get to that, what other ideas do I understand but that lack the feeling that I would receive by experiencing them first-hand? A few examples:
I understand that loving my neighbor makes me a happier person, but I still find it hard to love a neighbor that is hard to love, or is different than me, or makes me angry, or that I don’t get along/agree with. So my love is still very much conditional. I understand the saying that "we talk about loving our neighbor yet kill them with competition," and yet I unknowingly compete.
I understand that hard work is not the solution but that good decision making and leverage is the solution as Naval Ravikant puts it. But yet I still find myself working hours that aren’t naturally aligned with improving my decision making and leverage, but are simply created by social norms and expectations. It is easier to conform despite my understanding that it is suboptimal. And still our society (at least in the U.S.) worships hard work, therefore taking time away from actual happiness drivers like quality relationships with friends and family.
I understand that the every day millions of people live through atrocities that are unfair, unjust, and unwarranted. Extreme poverty, war, hate crimes, sex crimes, disease, mental illness, and on and on. And I understand that I can do something about it, even if only small. But feeling this is another skill that typically only develops when someone puts it in your face and causes that feeling. Otherwise it is “out of sight, out of mind” and I continue my privileged life unscathed, typing away my musings from a beach in Hawaii on a laptop that costs more than the average annual income in India.
I understand that peace comes only from within, yet I default to looking externally for things that need to change for me to have more peace.
I understand that Seinfeld is the greatest show ever created, yet I don’t feel that greatness enough to watch it every day like I should.
Even though nothing can replace a first-hand experience, I think that we can move from simple academic understanding of these and other things to feeling a real connection with them without having to live them. Which I suppose would allow us to move from being a product of our environment to a product of what we want to be. I don’t really know how, but my first guess would be through reading and thinking. Leveraging this brain of ours that can uniquely imagine. Imagine something that can cause a feeling that can cause action that can cause a result – ideally one toward a deeper understanding of truth and thus a happier and more meaningful life. All while sitting still with words on a page and a thought in the brain. So what does that look like taking something like the fragility of life as an example?
Reading
I won’t attempt to make a list of meaningful books that could help frame our thinking around this complex topic, but many a thought leader, philosopher, scholar, and religious leader have been discussing the meaning and purpose of life for millennia. Finding our truth in their teachings seems like a good start. Either adopting one ideology wholesale or, more preferably to me, being unbiased, honest seekers of truth wherever we find it and create a framework that satisfies both the mind and heart.
As an example, Jesus taught that there is life after death and that we are here to be tested and, with positive test results, live somewhere better for eternity. With this belief, the fragility of life becomes less daunting. Earth life is a blip on the radar, so as painful as losing a loved one can be, it is but a moment. A beautiful belief. What else? The Stoics viewed this differently, that we must live every moment of this life as it’s the only one we have. As Marcus Aurelius said, “Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.” With this motivation, you live a good life because that’s the right way to live, not for eternal rewards. Also a beautiful belief. From a completely different angle Krishnamurti teaches that to remove fear you must face it, and only after we remove fear can we truly love. So facing our fear of death is the only way to love life. Also beautiful. Then there's research on happiness and meaning and what has proven to make people feel like they're living a happier and more meaningful life. Maybe that's not the end game for some people but it sounds pretty good to me. So let's learn what they have to say (TL;DR it's basically meaningful relationships, social interaction, gratitude, giving, and a few other things). And on and on we read, all helping to frame a nuanced, complex topic and gain a greater appreciation for life without needing a near-death experience.
Thinking
As creative animals, I suppose we can better understand this topic by thinking about it more deeply. As an investment nerd, my first thought is to run scenario analysis on this topic that we don’t typically want to run because it’s scary or morbid or depressing.
Asking questions like “how would I react today if my family died in a car accident?" are terrible things to think but can be helpful to really look at what might come of that. "Am I mentally prepared for what that would mean for my life? What that would mean for my beliefs? What that would mean for my career, friendships, geographic location, sense of humor, or the way that I spend my time? If I knew that this would happen one day but I don’t know when, what would I change about the way that I live my life? Anything? If so, maybe I should consider some of those changes. If I knew that there were no life after death, would I change anything? Maybe I should consider those too. How practical is it to live each day like it may be your last? I can’t walk around assuming that those closest to me will die, it’s too depressing. Is there a happy medium where I life a full, meaningful, purposeful life filled with joy and no regrets, but also not get bogged down by these existential realities?"
As I’ve sat on these things this morning the clearest takeaway that I do have is that I want to minimize the regrets I may have at the end of life such as being too selfish, working too much, or those moments filled with anger, hatred, or fear. But with one twist – I don’t imagine myself a 90yr old man looking back on a long life – I imagine myself at 40. This helps me contextualize the urgency of living a meaningful life today and focusing on what the happiness drivers are in my life – namely – quality family/friend relationships, having a personal and meaningful purpose, helping those less fortunate, quantity time with kids allowing for quality moments, healthy diet and exercise, reading good books, and finding ways to feel and express deep love and kindness toward my neighbor. Now I don’t do all of these things well, but if these are my happiness drivers, I think I need to make sure that the way I spend my time matches proportionately to them.
I find it interesting that I can read and think about all of these things and have real feelings that lead to real changes in my life that increase real happiness without having to learn a lesson the hard way, by actually living it. And if happiness isn't allocated to each person as a fixed amount, then it can increase and, like nutrition or exercise, can improve with practice. So why not work on it?
Final Thought: Leverage
Parents everywhere wish that their kids could learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. And there is a certain journey that we all must go on to learn for ourselves first-hand, it’s true. But I think that part of the leverage that we as humans enjoy is precisely that ability to take first-hand experiences from others and apply them to our own lives, sight unseen, without having to live them ourselves. This is, after all, why the printing press and the internet changed the world. They allowed us to take what others have already learned and internalize it by reading and thinking deeply about it, then turning that feeling into action as if we had already experienced it ourselves. In theory, one could learn the wisdom of 100 (or 100,000) lives lived with the amount of information we have today. Ultimately we're just constrained by the strength of the muscle in our head.
There is learning in suffering, yes, but I don't want to live yesterday ever again so if we can still learn and feel without the need for that specific suffering, I’ll sign up for that. Or if it can better prepare us for when that suffering does in fact come to find us, I'll take it. And if I can use this framework to make my life a little happier along the way, even better.
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