Tag: freedom

Science Doesn’t Exist

I sometimes hear people say things like, “If science supports X policy, it should be enacted.”  Hiding behind the word science for your moral or political beliefs is a bad idea, because science doesn’t exist as something that can be accountable or take responsibility.

Of course there is a method of inquiry called the scientific method.  It is particularly useful in the study of physical objects, forces, and relationships – what we call the physical sciences.  But science doesn’t say anything, and it certainly can’t do or enforce anything.  Science isn’t a person with positions on issues or an ability to clearly articulate and act on them.  It’s a tool and a way of thinking.  It’s a process that helps people test and falsify and eliminate possibilities and make better theories.

Even if smart people using the scientific process arrive at a theory about the physical world and say they believe certain policies should be enacted, it’s not a trump card to then say that science demands legal action.  Science can’t demand anything.  Scientists can demand legal action, but they almost always do so based on a romanticized view of the political process.

Putting aside the fact that there is no such thing as “settled” science – indeed, it is an open and ongoing process, not a body of accumulating, unchanging facts – even when research reveals certain relationships it does not follow that policies imagined by scientists should be enacted.  Political-made law is not like the laws of science.  People with incentives having nothing to do with the facts or the outcome must posture and pontificate and make deals before passage.  The end result only passes if it sates the appetites of enough rent-seeking interests, regardless of whether it resembles what high-minded scientists imagined.  Enforcement is even worse.  Carried out by unaccountable armies of bureaucrats (some armed, all dangerous), laws are a cudgel used selectively by those in power to further cement it.

When you hear people loudly demanding political action based on ‘settled science’ don’t give them a pass.  If a theory about the physical world is really sound, there’s a built-in incentive to adapt to it without resorting to force.  It may happen imperfectly and slower than some experts would like, but ten times out of ten I’d trust the market process more than the political one to discover the best trade-offs.

Opportunities That 98% of People Should Take But You Shouldn’t

When you start to find your groove and get a lot of stuff done you will be in high demand.  You’ll compile a network of interesting people.  You’ll have no shortage of projects.  Inevitably, a phenomenal opportunity will be presented to you.  One that would be a no-brainer for anyone to jump on.  Except you.

One of your defining moments is likely to be the day you say no to an opportunity that almost everyone else would and should say yes to.  If you spend your life doing the sensible thing that everyone else is trying to do, and taking every opportunity that others say they’d kill for, at some point you will stop being you.  You’ll be the sum of “good” decisions in the aggregate.

This doesn’t mean you should turn down every good thing that comes your way just to be different.  You’d probably better take most of them.  But there will be rare moments when you know in your gut it’s not for you, even though everything about it seems amazing.  A simple but effective test is to let yourself really and fully imagine saying yes.  Imagine how it plays out, how it feels, how it challenges you and makes you grow.  Then imagine yourself saying no.  How does it feel to say it, and how does it feel to live without doing the thing?  Which one resonates with you more?  Which one aligns with who you are and makes you feel more at peace?

When others would freak out to discover you said no to it, but you know for sure it’s not right for you, you’re probably on the path to your sweet spot.

What History Really Is

The other day one of the Praxis participants posted this to Facebook:

“As a former history major in college and a college drop-out, I never thought I could love history even more then I did back in school. But as I go through the history module for Praxis, I feel like I’ve been cheated my whole life through school. Instead of learning about the greatness of government and its political figures we get to learn about individuals that have actually changed society for the better through markets and with an entrepreneurial spirit.“

He found the secret.  Each module contains a core theme not directly expressed but conveyed through the broader arc of all the content.  The secret of the history module is to dispel the myth of Great Men.

Most history in textbooks and schools tells very little about how we got here.  How did humanity overcome environmental and social challenges to move from stone tablets to touchscreen tablets?  How did all the order we see around us evolve?  How did languages form, and great stories and myths, and breakthrough inventions?  How can the great fact of exponential human progress after the Industrial Revolution be explained?

Most histories are really only the history of those who have ordered and overseen the deaths of masses of people.  Military and political figureheads who pass laws and give speeches and take credit for all the good things that happen during their reign.  Even non-political figures like artists or entrepreneurs get portrayed as lone geniuses who never collaborated with others or engaged in a rigorous, messy, back-and-forth process in broader society and market.

History is now.  We are making it.  So has everyone before.  We want to open up the mind to the possibility that the great advances in society aren’t from Great Men or Lone Geniuses with top-down plans, but from the dynamic creative process of market and social exchange.  Whether hearing Stephen Davies discuss lesser known but more important dates in history, reading Anderson and Hill on how complex disputes were settled in a decentralized way in the American West, listening to Paul Cantor on Shakespeare and Dickens and the X-Files taking feedback from their audiences and incorporating it into their work, or watching Kirby Ferguson on how everything is a remix, the secret is there.  History is about a complex interplay of people and processes.  The pomp and parades and statues are easily seen, but they don’t tell of the fundamental force in society; creative individuals interacting and exchanging with one another.

The Three Places to Get Drugs

I was listening to the Tim Ferriss Podcast yesterday where he interviewed James Fadiman about psychedelics.  Fadiman was talking about LSD and made an offhand remark that caught my ear.  He said LSD, like almost all other drugs, is very hard to get except in three places where it’s abundant.

Schools, universities, and prisons.

There is a lot to consider in this anecdote.  These three institutions have several things in common that distinguish them from others.  They are almost always funded at least in large part through tax dollars.  They are managed at least indirectly by governments, and subject to elected officials and un-elected bureaucrats in their day to day operations.  They are seen by most members of the public as absolute necessities in any civilized society.  Because they’re seen as necessary they get far less scrutiny than institutions seen as optional.

The vast majority of those in these institutions are not there by free and conscious choice.  It may seem extreme to claim this of universities, but if you spend time questioning college students you’ll find that most don’t really know why they’re there and haven’t ever considered another path.  They’re there because the cumulative force of parents, public opinion, and perceived career safety close off all other options.  Even if they have choice, they do not think they have choice.  They are not freely choosing to be there the way someone chooses to attend a baseball game or join a country club.

These institutions tend to place a higher priority on stopping drug use than other institutions in society, yet they get more of it.  Prison is the starkest example (although schools are not far off) with absolute borders and armed agents 24/7.  Still a drug trade cannot be suppressed.  Perhaps when all other forms of individuality and rebellion are suppressed, whatever subversive activity one can get away with will emerge.

There is something delicious about the irony of these institutions being the best sources for banned substances.  There is also something sad.  What it reveals about human nature is at least a little bit inspiring.  A refusal to fully submit, and a desire to find escape, even if only in the mind.  What it reveals about the institutions and society is at least a little depressing.

 

Things We Do To Our Children

I joined Albert Lu on The Economy Podcast to talk about things we do to our children.  We discussed whether and to what extent a parent can know what’s good for a child and force them to do things for their own good, from sports to music lessons and beyond.  We also discussed the lack of student-directed learning from grade school all the way through college and the problems it creates.

Listen to the episode here.  I’m on first and then author Richard Maybury on the same topic.

Some Excellent Work on Education and Schooling

My friend and colleague Zak Slayback has had a wonderful series of blog posts about education, schooling, testing, unschooling, and many other fascinating and important topics in that area.  I cannot recommend them enough.

Ways to Think About Schooling Part 1

Ways to Think About Schooling Part 2

What is the Purpose of Childhood?

Let’s Abolish Childhood

Hayek and Camus Walk Into a School

Deschooling Myself

How “Below Average” Kills Dreams

“Would I Put Myself Through This?”

A Brief Defense of Playing as Learning

Zak is continuing to churn out some great stuff on these topics, so I encourage you to frequent his blog.  It’s been very interesting for me to see someone a decade my younger, with no kids of his own, and who by all measures was the apex of schooling success come to the same conclusions I have reached about schooling and childhood.  There is something very exciting about the synchronicity of someone else discovering similar books and ideas as you do the same, independent of each other.

What if it Was You?

What would you do if the US economy hit rock bottom?  I mean real rock bottom.  Not like the dot-com or housing bust.  More like perpetual, long-term, no end in sight economic stagnation where grinding poverty was the norm.  If the average wage dropped below half of what it is today.  If you were only able to earn 12, 10, or 8 thousand a year no matter how hard you worked.  If there was no upward mobility and no prospect for a better life.  If your family lived in a house built mostly from pallets and scrap sheet metal and you had to pirate your electricity.  If sickness was frequent and medical care unreliable at best.  Try to imagine a US like that.

Meanwhile a nearby developed country is doing great.  They can’t hire enough workers.  Just moving there and doing the same thing you’re doing now will double your income immediately, improve your family housing and health, and provide ample opportunity for moving up over time for both you and your kids.  Your good friend did it.  Your brother did it.  They are living in paradise compared to what your family lives in.  Businesses there want to hire you, landlords want to rent to you, your kids want to go there.

Would you stay or would you go?

Would going make you heroic or criminal?

There is no room in a humane society for immigration restrictions.

Are All Governments the Same?

Here’s a radical proposition: The US government is no better or worse than any system of government in history.  In fact, all government systems are the same.  Governments do not differ in quality based on the rules, structures, or procedures they employ.

To support this proposition one would have to demonstrate that there is something besides the system of government that determines how oppressive a state is, since there are obvious and dramatic differences in levels of tyranny and quality of life under different governments.  The correlation between certain forms of government and lower levels of oppression causes many to believe the former cause the latter, and that if you just get the structure right you can avoid bad rules and limit extortion.  I don’t think the form of government matters much.

Any kind of state can be brutally oppressive.  Monarchy, democracy, and all forms of republicanism in between are capable of and have engaged in massive acts of violence and oppression.  All these forms also have examples of far less oppression than the historical norm.  It’s not the structure or the ways rulers are chosen or laws are passed and enforced.  So what is it?  What determines how oppressive a government is?

Belief.  That’s it.  It’s not that people get the government they want or believe in, it’s that they get the government they are willing to put up with without resistance.  It’s not just explicit, stated belief, it’s belief as demonstrated by action or lack of it.  How governable are the people?  That will determine how much government they get.  Not how much they want or claim to want.  Not what they idealize as right.  What they give in to.

It is obvious that all governments are run by small minorities who cannot command great populations unless a great number are willing to carry out and enforce their orders and a great number are willing to obey the enforcers.  Etienne de La Boetie described this phenomenon beautifully in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude .  David Hume shared the same understanding of the origin of state power, as did Ludwig von Mises.  Yet most scholars and laypeople ignore this fundamental fact.

We get distracted in debates about procedure or arguments about the form of government or particular rulers or parties.  These are all just particular manifestations; the outgrowth of our own willingness to submit.  The US has been one of the freest countries in history not because of the Constitution but because the people happened to be some of the hardest to govern.  The Revolt against relatively benign British rule is evidence of a low tolerance for being governed by the early European inhabitants of the continent.

The great tragedy, as Boetie points out, is that once subjugated by whatever means (and it is always a means that involves convincing people they have to put up with it for some emergency or expediency), each successive generation tends to tolerate more oppression.  The existence of the oppressors is not an affront when you’ve never lived in a world without it.  The steady churn of propaganda and normalization of deprivation take hold.  This is why famous abolitionist Harriet Tubman said she could have freed twice as many slaves, if only they knew they were slaves.

Add to the propaganda and acceptance the fact that a great and growing number of people work directly for the state and make their living and gain their social status as its operatives.  An army of self-interested bureaucrats and their loved ones are in the long term more powerful than an army of soldiers.

It is not the rule of law that will save us from tyranny.  It is not a new parliamentary procedure or Constitutional amendment.  It is not an election.

The insight of scholars like Boetie reveal that the ultimate freedom from oppression is when we, “Resolve to serve no more.”  Be ungovernable.  Camus said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”  Walk away from the bread and circuses.  Ignore the patriotic pomp.  Don’t work for the rulers.  Build the kind of life and society you want to live in.

Frank Chodorov, a libertarian activist and thinker, put it this way:

“If a prominent politician hires a hall to make a speech, stay away; the absent audience will bring him to a realization of his nothingness. The speeches and the written statements of a political figure are designed to impress you with his importance, and if you do not listen to the one or read the other you will not be influenced and he will give up the effort. It is the applause, the adulation we accord political personages that registers our regard for the power they wield; the deflation of that power is in proportion to our disregard of these personages. Without a cheering crowd there is no parade.”

It doesn’t require revolution by force.  That is only replacing one tyranny with another.  Imagine a law the proposal of which would be so deeply offensive that no political figure would dare bring it forward.  That is the mindset.  Now ask about why the constraints placed on politicians in this case, and the fear they have for acting, aren’t the same for every law they propose?  When they are, full freedom will reign, no matter what formal pieces of paper say.

Tide

I have always been moved by the imagery of the tide.  There is something cleansing and freeing about it, yet powerful and dangerous at once.  The feeling of water steadily pulling can seem threatening, but I’ve never felt that way about it.  It feels liberating to me.  I can rest and it will do its work.  There is a sense of letting go connected with the push and pull of the tide.

Tides are relentless.  They don’t care what’s on the beach, or what the weather is like, or if it’s a convenient time for me.  They have no indecision, no waffling.  Its not like the rain that sometimes wants to fall but won’t make up its mind.  They proceed on their predictable pattern.  Sea creatures know this and let the tide bring them sustenance.  They naturally, gracefully navigate it with minimum resistance and find harmony in its rhythm.

Tides don’t affect small pools, only great lakes, seas, and oceans.

Tides reveal the connectedness of the universe.  A gray rock floating two hundred thousand miles away raises and lowers the water just down the beach.  Tides are tirelessly creative.  They play with grains of sand in and endless dance and make new beaches and shorelines every moment.

Tides are revealing.  When it goes out you can see previously obscured rocks, shoals, reefs, islands, and wrecks.

I don’t like to share my music, but today it felt right.  The quality is low because it was recorded on an iPhone and because I am a decidedly amateur musician.  Still, perhaps it can convey something that I am struggling to convey as I deal with the loss of a friend.

(If you are so inclined, you can support his family here.)

 

5 Reasons to Rethink College

Originally published on Thought Catalog.

Everyone knows you have to go to college to be successful.  Sometimes everyone is wrong.  Here are five reasons to rethink college as the best path to a fulfilling career and life.

1) It’s expensive.

Here’s a chart showing college debt and earnings for degree holders.

Guess what?  It doesn’t matter.  Charts and graphs and studies like this can’t help you make your decision about college for two reasons:  Because data can never show causality and aggregates are not individuals.

When it comes to causality, it’s pretty unclear college is doing the work.  Yes, degree holders on average earn more money than those without degrees.  People in Florida on average are older than people in the rest of the country.  Does Florida magically speed the aging process?  Degrees don’t magically make people more productive workers either.

College is a sorting mechanism more than it is a forming mechanism.  The types of people who get into and complete college are the kind who would command higher salaries anyway.  Some studies have followed people who attended Ivy League schools and others accepted to those schools but who chose lower ranked schools instead.  There wasn’t a difference in lifetime earnings.  In other words, Ivy League caliber people don’t need an Ivy League education to have high earnings.

As for aggregates and individuals, consider the following question: Are pickup trucks a good idea for 18-25 year olds?  Are they worth the cost?  How many studies would it take to prove it?  It’s obviously a dumb question.  There is no one answer for all 18-25 year olds.  Aggregate cost/benefit analyses for all 18-25 year olds buying pickup trucks won’t mean much to you in your highly personalized experience.  It’s just as ridiculous to come up with a single answer to questions about whether college is worth it for young people.

Data can’t do the work of deciding.  The only answer that matters is whether a particular path is worth it for you.  What do you want to get?  What are the possible ways of getting it?  What do they cost?  The cost is not just money but time, foregone opportunities, etc.  Whatever your decision, know why you’re doing it.  Which brings me to…

2) Most people don’t know why they’re doing it.

I ask high school students if they plan to go to college.  They all say yes.  When I ask “why” I have never heard anything but some variation on,

“Because I have to”, or, “To get a job”.

Then I ask what kind of job they want.  Crickets.  They don’t have any idea.

That’s perfectly fine – most teenagers don’t know and probably can’t know what they’ll be doing in ten or twenty years – but it’s pretty odd considering their entire reason for going to college is to get something about which they know nothing, including whether or not a degree will help them.

So the formula is, “I want X.  I have no idea what X is or what’s required to get it.  Therefore I’ll spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars on college.”  Maybe logic classes aren’t taught in high schools.

College may be a necessary or valuable way for you to get what you want out of life.  Then again maybe not.  The point is, you need to do some exploring and experimenting to find out.  You won’t know if your calling in life is marketing by sitting in a classroom and reading about it.  Spend some time around people who do it and see what it’s like.  If you love it, do you need a degree to do it?

The cultural narrative on college is, “Buy it!  Buy it!  No amount of cost or debt should factor into your decision, because it’s always worth it!”.  That’s a terrible way to make sound decisions about anything.  Remember the last time everyone was saying, “Buy! Buy! The price can only ever go up!”? (Housing bubble anyone…)

But maybe you’re going to college just for fun, which leads me to…

3) Most don’t enjoy it (and the parts they do enjoy can be had for free).

Parents and students tell me all the time that they’re unhappy with college.  Do you know what the number one complaint is?  Surprisingly, it’s not how much it costs.  It’s how much it sucks.

The number of young people who are bored in class and disappointed with the caliber of professors and students is staggering.  Students feel disengaged.  The part they like least about college is attending class and official duties.

If you sent a visitor from another planet to a typical college class and asked them to observe and report back to you what they thought they were witnessing they’d probably guess by the pained, dreary looks and lack of engagement it was some kind of penal colony or experiment where the students are being paid huge sums to endure fluorescently lit torment.  Nope, you tell them, these people are actually paying thousands to sit in the squeaky chairs and Snapchat their friends with a distracting TA in the background.

The things they love the most – parties, socialization, late night conversations, football games – can all be had without paying tuition.  Heck, if you really love a particular class or professor, I bet you can sneak into her class without registering and take it anyway.  I’ve never seen professors checking who’s current on tuition before the lecture.  They’d be thrilled to have someone in the class who was actually interested!

So why do people go?  Most don’t do it to stand out from the crowd, but to be normal; to blend in.  In that sense, it works.  But that might not be such a good thing…

4) It’s one size fits all in a world that demands customization.

Sure, there are lots of different majors and classes, but the approach is almost exactly the same in every case.  Follow rules, meet arbitrary deadlines with arbitrary assignments that will be glanced at by TA’s, passively listen to lectures and memorize answers you never need to know (because, you know, Google exists now).  

Chances are the job you’ll have in ten or twenty years doesn’t even exist yet.  That means the most valuable life and career skills are the very ones the classroom setting isn’t conducive for.  Adaptability, entrepreneurial thinking, creative problem solving, networking with people who can help you, etc.  In the classroom setting entrepreneurship is called cheating and networking is called missing class.

You can’t rely on your university to be your brand.  You are your own company, “Me, Inc.”, and you have to develop valuable skills and knowledge and find ways to communicate them to others.

The good news is, things you’ll really need to succeed are available in myriad forms, most much cheaper than the university.  Get a job.  Get a bunch of jobs.  Travel.  Talk to a lot of people.  Read.  Take online courses.  Write.  Figure out what you enjoy and practice it.  Work your butt off.  Anyone can graduate college.  It takes a lot more work to list what you want to gain and find the best way to get it.  Customize your life.  Don’t assume a degree can do this for you, because…

5) It doesn’t signal much anymore.

I overheard a classmate in college talking about how hard the test was (it wasn’t) and how many girls he wooed the previous night (he didn’t) and how hung-over he was (he was).  Right then and there I had an epiphany: He, like everyone else in the classroom, would probably graduate from this place.  Like me, they’d go on the job market and have the same degree.  Suddenly I felt the market value of my impending accomplishment plummet.

Let’s be real.  The only reason people keep paying so much for college is for the signal a degree sends to employers.  Sure, the other parts of the college bundle are great, but they can all be had in other, better and cheaper ways.  It’s the signal that keeps people buying.  But that signal is weakening and the value declining.

I talk to a lot of business owners.  They don’t care much about degrees anymore.  They want experience, proof of work ethic, and ability to quickly and coherently answer an email (only about seven people under the age of 25 have this ability).  College is the new high school.  Everyone does it, so it doesn’t make anyone stand out.  In fact, not going to college and having a damn good reason why might stand out a lot more.

Top venture capital firm Andreessen Horwitz specifically looks for entrepreneurs who were college dropouts, because it’s a good sign they are courageous and confident in their idea.  Google is one among many businesses to recently remove degrees from job requirements.

Get experience, gain confidence, learn what you like and don’t like, work hard, build skills, knowledge, and a network around your interests and goals.

College is one option among many.  Don’t do it just because everyone else does.  Those are the same people who bought a bunch of Beanie Babies as a retirement fund because everyone else was.

Why Is It So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation?

The most common thing in the world is to hear someone complain about their job, their church, their school, or their neighborhood.  It’s almost a form of casual conversation.  In many cases people don’t actually dislike these things, but they just enjoy ripping on them for fun.  In many cases though there is a deep and genuine frustration, boredom, annoyance, anger, or pain.  Why don’t people leave?  Why not exit the situation for a better one?  It turns out this is one of the most difficult things to do.

I don’t think the primary difficulty in exiting a soul-sucking situation is for fear of the unknown.  In many cases even the unknown would be better than the known frustration.  I don’t think it’s primarily because society places a (too) high level of respect on loyalty.  I don’t think it’s primarily because of the illusion that we can “change it from the inside” or play the role of reformer.  I think these are rationalizations people give for why they stay.  There is a more fundamental reason people stay in bad situations.  Staying means you get to play the role of two cheap, easy archetypes with quick rewards: the critic and the martyr.

It’s incredibly easy to be a critic.  Hardly any effort is required to sit at the back of the room, arms crossed, and look indifferent while making an occasional sarcastic comment to the person next to you.  Critics get friends.  They get quick points and rally a small band around them in every setting.  Every company has the critic and his cadre of cronies who circle around to hear his latest jab.  Every church has the member who has meetings and conversations to discuss their concerns and troubles.  Critics enjoy a weak form of respect and they are never alone.  Even in a happy crowd as soon as one critic peels off and stands apart, too good for the activity, he attracts others who don’t want to be duped or fooled.

Being too cool is easy.  Actually making good on your critiques and leaving that which you claim to be above is hard.  The role of critic is not a bad one, but it’s dangerous.  It’s dangerous because it’s so easy.  The way caffeine is easier than getting more sleep.  Both have valuable and enjoyable uses in the short run or in certain situations as a kind of jolt into reality.  But in both cases the long run effect is incredibly deleterious to your health.  If you only ever play the role of the critic you lose the capacity to exit or create.  You are no longer the one in control of your life.  You are a victim of and a slave to that which you critique.  You need it because without it you have nothing.

It’s a little harder to be a martyr, but not much.  To play the martyr is to stay in a painful situation, which may sound hard but is much easier than doing things you love.  Unpleasant things naturally find their way to you upon waking in the morning.  Most disciplines are unpleasant at the outset.  Most jobs are.  Most new people are a lot of work to befriend at first.  The easy route is to give just enough of an effort to stay in a situation, but never fully engage and never simply exit.  Complaining about your boss or professor and how mind-numbing your day was is an easy way to get the attention of others.  If the critic gets cheap popularity, the martyr gets cheap sympathy.  Everyone feels bad for the sufferer.  When you feed off of that sympathy and choose it over the much more challenging work of finding situations that don’t make you suffer, you seek the same caffeine-like quick fix as the critic, and with equal danger.

I’ll use an example I’m very familiar with.  I’ve met many young people who hate college.  They’re bored, the classes are useless, the tuition is costly, the experience as a whole makes them feel dull and depressed if not openly angry.  Calculated as a purely economic decision it makes no sense for them to stay.  Four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and a very weak network and set of skills and knowledge gained at the end.  They can think of myriad ways to get more with less.  But that’s not the only cost.  To exit means to quit playing the role of critic and martyr.  Those come with a lot of easy points.

Worse still, once you exit you forgo the chance to play those roles again.  When you complain about your job or rip on your boss you won’t get laughs or sympathy.  You’ll get condemnation.  “Well it’s your own fault.  I told you not to drop out of school!”  It’s the same with churches, cities, and any other situation you can exit.  Exit means giving up the cheap benefits of the critic and the martyr and adding the cost of social approbation.

It’s easy to see why so many people stay in crappy situations they clearly hate.  It’s easier.  No one gets mad at you for staying.  You get cheap popularity and/or sympathy.  You are not accountable for your feelings.  It’s always the fault of the bad situation you’re in.  This is one of the most tragic traps a human can trip.

The power of exit is at the core of human freedom.  It is the first step on the road to genuine fulfillment and self-actualization.  Once you embrace it – and the only way to embrace it is to exercise it – you begin to find, paradoxically, that it needn’t be used as often as you thought.  Sometimes just knowing that you are in a situation by choice and could leave at any time is enough to re-orient your outlook to a more productive, positive one.

If you want to live a great life you have to create it.  Creating is learned.  It’s not free.  To become a creator you have to first let go of the critic and the martyr.  Yes, critique can be the eye-opener that leads to exit and creativity.  Yes, martyrdom can bring the pain that leads to the same.  It’s not that you’ll never play those roles, it’s just that you can’t live in them.

If you want to create a good life you have to first exit the bad one.  Exit alone is not sufficient.  Indeed some people get addicted to exit much the same way they can to critic or martyr.  Always leaving what’s not working but never building what will.  Still, exit is indispensable and far more powerful than attempts at reforming bad situations.  Reform is fundamentally submissive and reactive while exit is empowering and leads to the creative and proactive.

The martyr, the critic, and the coward belong together.  Leave them behind.

The Expedition of Our Age

unnamedNothing is guaranteed.  There is no plan or path that can ensure the kind of life you want.  There are only opportunities with varying degrees of risk.  And sometimes the least risky opportunities are also those least likely to result in fulfillment.  The great success stories are the result of daring expedition and pursuit of unique goals.

There was a time when a college education was something of an adventure.  It was exclusive, not easy to get, and signaled something special.  Leaving your home town for a university was a big deal, a great expedition.  This is no longer true.  Going to college is not difficult today.  It’s not elite or rare.  Most young people can easily travel and live away from their home towns and many have even before college.  Today, college isn’t much of an adventure.  In fact, it attracts some of the most risk averse individuals, and perhaps paradoxically the higher ranked the school often the more risk averse its students.

There is a small but growing number of young people who see this and they’ve got the itch.  They go to college only to realize it’s a warmed over version of all the years of safe, institutional schooling they’ve just completed.  No one will question their decision to go.  No one will call them crazy.  The risk of flunking out is as minuscule as the risk of standing out.  The sense of adventure is gone, replaced with a sense of perpetual adolescence and paternalistic planning.

Those with the itch for real adventure realize that no one is going to give it to them.  The prefabricated social life and conveyor-belt career track isn’t enough.  If they want to embark on a daring expedition, they’ll have to do it themselves.  The great secret is that it’s far easier than anyone imagines.  All the resources exist already within arms reach.  Anything in the world you want to learn or do, anyone you want to meet, any personal challenge you want to give yourself, any skill you want to devote yourself to: they’re all doable, without anyone’s permission.

The world is waiting.  It won’t be found on dorm room couches.  It won’t be found in cinder block classrooms.  It won’t be given to those who simply follow the rules and don’t upset the apple cart.  It will be discovered – it will be created – by those daring enough to seek adventure and live life on their own terms.

The geographical territory of the earth has been largely discovered.  But we’re only on the borderlands of human potential.  It lies before us vast, untamed, full of mystery and possibility.  It will be explored by those brave enough.  No special qualifications are needed beyond courage, self-honesty, a hunger for self-knowledge, and willingness to break the mold.

The great expedition of our age is the self-created journey; the self-directed life.

A Word with T.K. Coleman: Escapism

I decided to try something new on the blog and ask my good friend and colleague T.K. Coleman to freestyle riff on a single word.  I gave him a word and without notice he gave me what came to mind.  I love how it turned out.

The word today is escapism.  I’m intrigued by unconventional interpretations of escapism (I wrote in favor of a form of escapism and one of the best decisions I ever made) and I knew T.K. would bring something unconventional.  I suspected he might have a few thoughts in a few paragraphs.  As always, he exceeded expectations.  An active mind is ready at a moments notice to spill out goodness.  I’ll turn it over to him.

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Escapism.

The first thought that comes to my mind is this image:

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It’s a picture I stumbled across a few years ago and it continues to grip my imagination.

What’s going on in this picture?

At first, it seems pretty obvious that this woman is a courageous or adventurous soul who’s preparing to make a daring and admiral leap towards freedom. After all, she’s getting ready to jump out of a cage. How can that be an example of anything other than a movement from captivity to freedom? But take a closer look. Where in the world is she going to land? She’s in the middle of the sky. Surely she’s going to die if she just jumps out of that cage without a parachute. Her cage may feel restricting (as the truth often does), but at least it offers her a better chance of survival than just taking an irrational leap into the clouds, right? Isn’t she being just a little bit crazy here? Isn’t she just allowing her frustration with the ugly truth of her situation to seduce her into illogical fantasies and false hopes? Maybe. But there are so many possible questions we could ask:What’s holding up the cage and how long will it continue to be able to do so? Is there anything holding it at all? Is the woman really jumping into the middle of the sky or is there something or someone waiting to catch her and we’re just unable to see? Does she know something about her situation that we don’t know?

It probably seems foolish for me to engage in this kind of exercise over a surreal photograph, but I think it illustrates the ambiguities involved in our judgments regarding when people are simply making an escape versus when people are practicing escapism.

Let me explain:

We tend to think of the word “escape” as the act or process of breaking free from restriction. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, for instance, lists the following as the first three entries for the term:

to get away from a place (such as a prison) where you are being held or kept

to get away from a dangerous place or situation

to get away from something that is difficult or unpleasant

So if someone says “My friend really needs a plan of escape,” we’ll most likely be inclined to regard that person’s friend as being in an undesirable situation and thus in need of some help. While it’s possible for us to regard a plan of escape as being a bad thing, it’s also possible for us to regard it as a good thing. We wouldn’t support a mass murder’s efforts to escape prison, but we’d definitely support someone’s efforts to escape slavery.

When it comes to escapism, however, we tend to think of it as the act or process of avoiding reality. Here’s what the same dictionary says about that word:

habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine

If someone says “My friend is an escapist,” we might be inclined to regard that person’s friend as being a delusional sort of individual who could benefit from a healthy dose of reality. Escapism tends to have a much more negative connotation than “escape.” If someone describes you as a person who’s trying to make an escape, there’s a chance that we’ll look at your efforts as noble. If someone describes you as an escapist, that’s almost always going to be looked at as a bad thing.

Sometimes we accuse people of practicing escapism (i.e. being delusional or irresponsible) when they’re actually just using their imagination to create an unconventional escape from an unnecessary or unjust form of confinement. This is precisely what J.R.R. Tolkien was getting at when he wrote the following:

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

Neil Gaiman elaborated even further when he wrote:

“People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality…Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in. If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.”

As both Tolkein and Gaiman point out, sometimes the best way to escape imprisonment is to risk looking like an escapist by taking your mind far away from the reality of your problems and focusing your attention on something that stimulates inspiration and creative thought.

Sometimes a legitimate escape towards true freedom can appear to be a delusional indulgence in mere escapism. And sometimes those who choose to remain where they are in the name of “facing reality” are the true escapists because they never face the realities made possible by radical leaps in their thinking. I think of the slaves who stayed back on the plantation laughing at the “silliness” of the ones who sought to get away and I think of Harriet Tubman’s words when she said “I freed thousands of slaves, and could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.”

Now go back to the picture. There seems to be this ambiguity there when I really consider things. Maybe the woman is moving towards greater freedom. Maybe she’s moving towards lesser freedom. I simply don’t know. That sense of “I don’t know” —that’s what I think about when I hear the word “escapism.” I can be sure of what the word means, but can I be sure that I’m always correctly applying it to others when they ignore the realities I prefer them to focus on? I don’t know. I sometimes suspect that freedom may have a closer relationship with fantasy than what I’m currently prepared to believe.

The Danger of Conflating Education with School

In the airport recently I saw this ad:

 

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I was struck and almost offended by it.  Not only does the idea of this autonomous individual being “gently nudged” sound a bit creepy and paternalistic, the ad implies that we should be happy for Hector.  Why?  It tells us nothing about what Hector loves or wants.  It tells us nothing about why Hector was running from school.  It tells us nothing about what Hector went on to do.  It simply states that he was, “pushed to reach his potential” and “succeed in school”.  But succeeding in school may not have anything to do with success in life for Hector.  No matter.  Well meaning teachers and parents will do, “whatever it takes” to get kids in school and keep them there.  They’ll cajole and pressure them to get passing grades on tests and in subjects that have almost no bearing on anything important to the kids.

We’re saturated with Orwellian doublespeak when it comes to school.  It’s gotten to the point where almost no one seems to remember that education exists apart from school.  Same goes for words like success and achievement.  School is used as a synonym.  A simple Google image search for the word education results in all the trappings of school.  But school is one of the narrowest, least effective means of education.

If we mean by education a tamed will and constrained imagination, school does a decent job.  If we mean the temporary memorization of a set of arbitrary facts chosen by arbitrary authority and the permanent crystallization of the life-as-a-conveyor-belt mindset, school does a decent job.  But then it’s more about obedience than education.  Education is about transformation.  It’s a process of transforming the way we see the world and giving us new conceptual tools to put on as lenses and improve our ability to navigate towards our goals.  Kids aren’t given much chance or scope to explore and decide what goals they want to pursue or how they want to do it.  They don’t even get responsibility over their own schedule.

All genuine learning is self-directed.  It happens only when the learner has the desire.  Obedience and hoop jumping can be generated by compulsion and deprivation, but transformative education requires freedom.  If Hector really wanted to be in school he wouldn’t need a nudge.  If he was there of his own volition because he wanted to learn what they were teaching then he might genuinely learn.

Hector was nudged and pushed into school by others.  Not a great way to become the creative force in his own life.  Most kids dislike school and would skip it if they could get away with it.  Before immediately attempting to get them back within the fences we might ask why they want to escape.  It’s not because kids simply won’t push themselves to do challenging things.  Watch them play.  They do it all the time.  It’s not that they won’t pour themselves into study and experimentation to improve knowledge and skill.  Watch them work to beat a video game.  They’re not running away from hard work or education.  They’re running away from school.  Maybe we should let them.