Missives from Samsara

We all know the pull of wanting to be right, especially in the always online world many of us inhabit. It can be intoxicating. In a heated conversation, whether in person or online, the moment we sense our position getting battered, something inside resists; not because truth is at stake, but because our ego is. Shane Parrish–author, podcaster, and clear thinker extraordinaire–calls this the “ego default,” the drive to feel right at the expense of actually being right. I’ve felt it in staff meetings, political arguments with friends, and even small family squabbles. Hell, I even argue with myself while I am reading. Self-righteousness is deeply alluring.

The irony is that this insistence on being right usually blocks one’s growth. When I look back on moments when I dug in the hardest, I wasn’t always defending the truth; I was largely defending myself (even if I was correct on the facts). The hierarchy I built in my mind was designed not to clarify reality, but to protect my pride. Jonathan Haidt also writes about how reason takes a back seat to our feelings and views of the world in his book The Righteous Mind.

The alternative to this ever present issue is harder but richer: to pause, and to ask whether I’d rather feel right or learn something new. The question lingers for me: what parts of my life might shift if I chose truth over comfort more often? This is easier said than done and I am certainly no Jedi in this regard. However, Shane Parrish is correct. It pays to step back from our defensiveness and try to understand the other side. If done well, I think it actually strengthens one’s own position ultimately. Indeed, it not only strengthens our own position, but it also opens the door to genuine discussion instead of polarization and anger. What might shift in our communities, even our politics, if more of us chose truth over comfort?

The quote below struck me because I see this dynamic with my students all the time. Getting young people to quiet down and focus on a primary source from the 18th or 19th century, after lunch let’s say, is not easy. There are strategies to help with this and good teachers utilize them. However, high school students often get lost in the initial attempt to get focused and never get ‘through the gate’ to where their minds are calmer and they are applying their background knowledge and general wisdom to the text, to build meaning. I think many people give up on activities that require sustained focus—like reading—because they don’t often make it ‘through the gate.’ A few years ago the Pew Research Center reported that 23% of American adults hadn’t read a single book in the past year. Americans with ‘a high school degree or less’ were at 39%. Slightly more recent data from the federal government indicates that 51.5% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the previous year.

This inability to continue leaning into something challenging to get through to ‘the focus component’ might also help explain the decline in American’s willingness to prepare food themselves at home. This lands close for me, as I do not enjoy cooking because I find it boring. When I am attempting to cook, I often set up the laptop and listen to YouTube videos. I’d be better served in the long run, if I really wanted to get better at cooking, by focusing on what I am trying to achieve and trying to get into the zone.

I think we all have areas in life where the resistance is hardest and we struggle to get into a focused flow. Maybe it’s reading, or writing, or exercising. Maybe the real challenge is not that we lack focus, but that we don’t give ourselves long enough to reach it. What would change in our lives if we treated that initial restlessness not as a stop sign, but as a doorway?

The quote below, which I read on Substack, resonated for a few reasons. For me, it gets at the idea of contentment. I am an admitted productivity nerd. I read all the books, I listen to all the podcasts. My interest, in part, comes from a drive to be better, and better…and better. All the time. However, like the futile goal of always trying to be ‘happy,’ such a goal is a mirage. Instead, I try to remind myself to put forth my best effort and be content with the results. If I do a solid job at work as a teacher, I’ve earned the right to contentment. This is true because my job is hard and the work I do contributes to the common good. Indeed, I’ve earned the right to create a boundary when I am home and to indulge in other pursuits, like reading, trying to stay fit, watching some college football, or hanging out with my family. Our media clearly focuses its attention on the stars, the incredible outliers in their various fields, which is understandable. I get it. Extraordinary achievements are laudable. However, it means most of us need to be vigilant and not get sidetracked into thinking we are not okay because we don’t measure up to the superstar outliers we are constantly seeing online and in the news. Especially if we are working hard and contributing.

Indeed, it often feels a bit radical to reject the idolization of ‘achievement.’ A quirk of my personality is that often when I have down time and I am thinking about what to do, I usually land on the same fork in the road: Sit down with a book or do some ‘work.’ Nowadays, I usually decide to read, but the nagging feeling that I am missing an opportunity to be ‘more productive’ lingers. It is my own toxic productivity hangover. When I really stop to think about it, I actually think I am more impressed with the good, helpful person who is truly content, than with the accomplished striver. Of course, the best in their fields have admirable qualities. Indeed, studying these folks is both interesting and helpful in many ways (it’s one of the reasons I love to read biographies). However, in my mind, true contentment, in a life that is still contributing to society, is more impressive, largely because it is so rare amidst the deluge of influences we all see that fuel our discontent.

I’m with Dr. Park: in a world obsessed with achievement, I want to celebrate contentment.

An idea that I have come across several times of late is the one shared by Brad Stulberg in his book Master of Change. Indeed, Ness Labs founder Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote a whole book on the topic called Tiny Experiments, which I recommend.

The idea is to see yourself as a scientist of your own life. That means applying the scientific method to yourself. Instead of avoiding a change or committing fully to a change, run an experiment. That means starting, taking notes, and being okay with a hard stop in the not-too-distant future. If the change is a net positive, you can continue. If it isn’t working out; abandon it and take solace that now you know.

Examples can include subscribing (or unsubscribing) to a service or subscription, or adding a particular food to your diet. Or maybe changing up your workouts. Or changing when you have your smoothie and what goes in it. You get the idea. The possibilities for experimentation are vast.

Importantly, running these experiments can lead to impactful changes to one’s life. Another major benefit of this approach is noted by Stulberg in the quote below: It allows you to start taking action and avoiding the pitfall of paralysis, which we have all experienced too many times. Running ‘tiny experiments’ helps us take action. In my case, I find that taking action leads to a willingness to run more experiments. Thus, my willingness to experiment with my media consumption helped lead me get started on some diet experiments. Such momentum is always welcome.

A recent experiment that I have learned something from has to do with my online reading habits. I love to read and wanted to read more newsletters instead of just books. I went on to Substack and started following several great writers. Unfortunately, their Notes feature lured me in and after a week of liking comments, I had trained the algorithm to feed more political hot takes, which was a big mistake. Visits to Substack got me worked up and definitely harshed my mellow. I decided to delete the app in all the places and make it more difficult to visit in my favorite web browser. I’m bummed that there are some voices I am not hearing anymore (though in some cases I can find their writing or thinking elsewhere), but I am exceedingly pleased that the political noise is tuned way down in my head.

Surely there are a few experiments you can run for yourself.

This quote from Edward Luce’s recent biography Zbig (about foreign policy guru Zbigniew Brzezinkski) strikes me because it humanizes the pope, a figure revered worldwide and often seen as uniquely above everyday concerns. Zbig, as he was known, was a Polish American foreign policy expert and academic. He had befriended Karol Jozef Wojtyla in the 1970s, the man who would become Pope John Paul II, as a result of their both being prominent Poles. Once he was the pope, he and Zbig communicated regularly, as friends do. To me, this anecdote illustrates that John Paul II was a friend before he became pope–and remained a friend afterward. I think many of us have had daydreams in which we are all powerful and are able to use our unique influence to help our friends and family. I certainly wonder what the church employee who took the call from the Vatican must have thought!

As I write this, we have an American pope, who followed the first pontiff from Latin America. However, when John Paul II became pope in 1978 he was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and of course, the first Polish pope. At the time Zbig was serving as president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. The odds that Zbig, having risen to his high station, had also befriended a Polish priest that would become the leader of the Catholic church is also quite stunning and serendipitous.

Interestingly, the biography also reveals that Zbig was never a devout Catholic. Indeed, he was cremated and his ashes returned by his family to the earth. No cross, tombstone, or memorial marks his grave–a humble end for a man who once shaped global history (and was often not very humble) and who had a powerful friend who could do his wife a kind favor; one that we’d all love to do for our friends had we the power to do it.

Dr. Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist who teaches at Harvard. I am reading a book of his about WEIRD people; that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people. For years scientists did their experiments on mostly WEIRD populations and came to conclusions they assumed were true for all of humanity. We now know that WEIRD people are actually a bit weird, and don’t represent the rest of the world in many important ways.

In this book, Henrich explains how the WEIRD roots arose and changed us in ‘the west’ (and later elsewhere as western ideas came to dominate many parts of the world, like in Japan for instance). A huge factor was the Christian Church and its policies. For one, the Church enforced and changed how Europeans thought of marriage. Specifically, the Church established monogamy as the norm and outlawed previously widespread types of marriage such as cousin marriage and polygyny. In societies that allow polygyny, high status men wind up with multiple wives, even harems. However, it also had the effect of making it hard for many low status men in society to find mates.

The quote noted below gets at one of the major positives of this change. Men without wives, Henrich demonstrates, tend to have more testosterone in their systems more often, changing their behavior in many antisocial ways. The flip side is that once men are married, testosterone tends to diminish, leading to generally more caring and mellow dudes. In other words, the rise of monogamy in Europe led, in part, to less less sexual violence, less crime in general, and more trust by men of other men.

This historic development makes me reflect on how many other “givens” in our culture might be the result of centuries-old institutions shaping behavior in ways we hardly notice. If something as personal as marriage norms can be engineered—and can ripple out to influence crime rates, trust, and cooperation—then what other aspects of our daily lives are quietly products of history rather than universal human nature? Even though I remain deeply skeptical of organized religion, I can see how this particular historical turn produced social benefits we still feel today. It’s a reminder that traditions are not simply inherited. Rather, they are crafted, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident, and always worth re-examining.