Life Must Be Lived
The good life requires more than just knowledge of the world, it requires experience
Introduction to Monthly Theme
The survival of most species relies on a very particular emotion: fear.
Built within the hardwiring of every creature on earth is a desire to survive and a skillset to do so. As such, each creature receives a sense of fear, something that alerts them to potential danger.
In today’s world, however, our day-to-day lives are often not filled with life threatening events as they used to be. Instead, we’ve replaced the fear of potentially dying from lions or snakes with a fear of dying from public speaking, being in crowds, or of flying.
But this doesn’t mean fear is not real today. It isn’t something made up. Fear affects everyone in one way or another. When we’re afraid we feel the physical ramifications of the emotion—we get a sense of fight or flight, we suddenly become more aware, our heart starts pumping more blood, our cortisol spikes, the hairs on the back of our neck stand.
These are not imaginary, these are physical reactions to an environment or thought. And these are there as a way of protecting us.
For the month of July, we explore the theme of fear and look at how we can overcome it, how we can take advantage of it, and how we can live with it.
This Week at a Glance:
This week, we kick off our July theme on fear with an exploration of why it is so important to live life and experience the good, bad, and ugly of it.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 How fear evolved for humans and why it is so important to existence;
🍬 How life today is setup to allow us to feel as comfortable as we want;
🍫 The downfalls of comfort today and what we give up in exchange for it.
“Be not afraid of life.
Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact…”
William James
Whether we realize it or not, we are living in one of the most comfortable periods of human existence.
This does not mean that we are without suffering, or that we do not have economic, cultural, or societal problems, some of which are hugely impacting our day-to-day lives.
What this means is that for the entire span of human existence, we have not had the luxury of not having to worry about food, shelter, or medical care, all of which meant life or death.
The majority of us do not need to worry about our next meal. We have entertainment on demand. We are able to sleep in a bed every night. If we need a product, we can have it with a few clicks of a button. Same for food. Or transportation. Or an appointment.
Life today is setup in such a way that if someone does not want to go out into the world and experience it, they don’t really have to. Their food will come to them. Their entertainment is on their TV, phone, or tablet. Their appointments can be done over a phone or with a Wifi connection.
And so what this does is it sets us up for comfortable living, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. We don’t need to hunt for food. We don’t need to draw stories on cave walls for entertainment. We don’t need to go without medical care. We have all of these things thanks to modern-day advancements.
But in exchange for them, we give up our need to live a life that requires we face the world in person. And by doing so, we have every excuse we want to avoid our fears.
This all creates a feeling of comfort. But comfort is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it provides security, something desired nearly universally. But on the other, It makes us soft. It makes us weak to the world that continues moving forward each and every day.
Just because something is at our fingertips doesn’t mean it is without cost. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. There is wisdom and strength built into the world, into the experiences of being alive and the actions of being forced to experience it.
Throughout evolution, we were in constant situational awareness for our survival. If we heard a sound in the brush, and a lion emerged, our brain would encode brush, noise, and lion. Those who could quickly learn this survived and those who didn’t, well, didn’t.
But life is never that simple. What happens when the noise in the brush turns out to have just been the wind? Or antelope? Or a bunny? Our mind through hundreds of thousands of years had to reprocess scenarios like this and millions more in order get genes from one generation into the next. This is our survival mechanism and it required living through experience..
The brain looks to the past in order to dictate the present and the future. It digs through its sense memory for the same scenario, or a similar one, and then reacts.
When we have not experienced the world, when we’ve lived it confined to a screen, or our room, or the small bubble we’ve made, we’ve limited our sense experience and in turn have hindered the playbook our mind has to respond to events it encounters. Without properly exploring the world outside of our comfort zone, we miss the ability to build out knowledge to defend us against future situations we may run up against.
This is critically important work the brain is doing. As the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has pointed out:
“What the brain is doing is it’s sampling from the past based on similarity to the present to plan an action.”
Our minds are pattern seeking machines. We need to recognize patterns to survive. But pattern recognition is done in the real world. We create maps of the world in order to properly navigate it.
We therefore overcome fear by creating maps of courage, proving to ourselves through experience that we can and have overcome fear in the past, that we know how to overcome it.
As Aristotle said:
“We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it… we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
So much of the fear we’ve built up today is based upon our comfortable lifestyles and in turn, our fears are exaggerated.
We must, as Epictetus advised, not jump to conclusions with the impressions we see but rather observe them.
“First off, don’t let the force of the impression carry you away. Say to it, ‘hold up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from—let me put you to the test’ . . .”
If someone wants to survive, or better yet thrive, if they want to be able to properly navigate the world today, they have to live it. Experience it for all it has. The good, the bad, the ugly. Experience the wins, learn from the losses. Find love and lose it. Have a life changing conversation with someone. Help a stranger in need. This and millions more are experiences that teach us, that build us, that shape our character and build our brain’s pattern recognizers.
First-hand experience doesn’t just give us knowledge, it gifts us wisdom.
Without practice through experience, we have no way of properly handling a scenario. What we need to do is follow the advice of the psychologist Susan Jeffers, we need to feel the fear, be in tune with it, and regardless, do what we need to do.
This doesn’t mean ignore the fear and it doesn’t mean to tell yourself it doesn’t exist. What this means is we need to acknowledge that based on our situation, something within us has triggered fear. And that’s okay. But regardless of whether the fear is there or not, we must proceed. We must experience life. We must truly live.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, once said that we need to have maximum financial flexibility so we can face both hazards and opportunities. This sentiment goes far beyond just financial wisdom, however.
Fear keeps us in place and prevents us from the opportunities if we allow it. It keeps us on the defense, on our heals, and therefore we miss opportunities and play the game of life out of fear. As a result, we’re not ready for opportunities when they land in our lap. How often have we been tempted to start something but didn’t only to discover that had we started, we would have been in prime position for the opportunity that arose?
We must experience life. We must prepare for what it throws at us. And we do so by living, by getting out into the world and experiencing it. We do not need to give up all of the comforts of today, but rather, need to be aware of what they are doing to us, what they are taking away in the process. Then we can better decide how we want to live.
3-Bullet Summary:
Fear evolved within all living creatures as a way to assist us with understanding when we were in danger;
In today’s world, we’ve replaced fear this evolved fear with other tyopes of fear that are more common to our daily existence;
In exchange for the comfort of modern-day living, we’re sacrificing facing our fears which is in turn preventing us from gaining the wisdom to navigate the world based upon first-hand experience.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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