How Should We Live?
There are a lot of theories about what kinds of things one has to do to say that they’ve lived a good life. Philosophers have written about these ideas since the dawn of writing. A lot of thought about living the good life comes from an ethical point of view. To live well is to do good. This makes sense, since our consciences can weigh us down and make our lives seem to be a living hell. Dostoevsky would clearly agree with this perspective, reflected in his famous Crime and Punishment, a book I barely got through about 7 years ago (but which probably deserves a re-read, given my recently re-awoken enthusiasm for literature).
Then there’s the Christian view, or really any religious view, which can be simplified (and has been, by Steven Pinker among others): the good life consists of living as much in accordance with the word of god as possible.
In America, from at least the end of the second world war until probably the late 90’s (and it still persists, just in diminished form) the view of the good life consisted of variations on the theme of two-story house, white picket fence, car in the driveway (or even better, the garage), and a handful of kids. The suburban dream, one may call it.
When we examine these different prescriptions for the good life, though, we invariably encounter flaws in the programs. With moral philosophy, whether we’re talking about Stoicism or Utilitarianism, there always seem to be ways of twisting the principles to bring about horrific results. In the writings of Stoics we find passages that enjoin us to abandon our family, or at least to be seriously ready to do so, and resist all ties that bind us to places, people, or things. The perils of bald Utilitarianism hardly need to be spelled out, as every dystopian novel seems to be a response to Utilitarianism, from Brave New World to 1984 to A Clockwork Orange. Any time you encounter a moral failing justified as having been done “in service to the common good,” you have run up against the flaw in the Utilitarian argument, at least when the philosophy is not applied sensibly.
The poisonous possibilities of Religious ideas about living a good life hardly need to be, I dare say, pontificated. For the serious of heart there are the innumerable atrocities which zealots have committed, and continue to be commit, in the name of piety and faith. I could direct you to books written by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, or any of the New Atheists. For the less serious, there is The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. Jacobs points out a strange fact of religious faith in the current moment: everyone who has some belief in the Bible (and I’m sure it applies to most faiths, though perhaps not to some radical followers of Islam) decides for themselves which passages are worth adhering to and which are not. Their careful curation of the text allows them to feel that they’re living the good life, without having to bear the costs of sacrificing shrimp, a clean-shaven face, or clothes with blended fibers.
As for consumerism, more and more of my generation, if not older generations, are realizing that this idea of accumulating stuff isn’t a road to happiness. The suburban dream has been summarily dispelled, and good riddance. Consumption as an ideology didn’t even try to be morally correct to begin with, and has always been a bankrupt philosophy. What we have produced, all the trinkets that fill our homes, not to mention storage units, has come at the cost of a large part of our natural environment, and has been made possible largely as a result of near slave labor and the exploitation of resources from poor countries that most of us would fear to even visit.
But perhaps it was a necessary stepping stone. The great process of globalization, driven by consumerism, has after all led to incredible advances such as the internet, which allows me to communicate via this blog, Facebook messenger, and Gmail with friends and family thousands of miles away at near instantaneous speeds. And some of the products we purchase, like the laptop I’m using, or the phone that sits beside me, are genuinely useful, allowing a layman like me to access the majority of human knowledge from the couch I’m sitting on in Cairns, or the couch I’ll be sitting on in Bali next week, or anywhere in the world with wifi coverage (soon to be everywhere in the world, if Elon Musk or someone else is successful).
Consumerism, the dream of a good life based on owning trinkets and the space to store them (an idea described wittily by George Carlin), has led to some incredible advances in technology and standard of living. By harnessing the power of markets, and the vast engine of non-zero-sum production represented by the globalized world, we have catapulted ourselves to a level of comfort and convenience that mocks the state of even kings in previous centuries. It’s worth stating again for emphasis. We are, each of us in the “first world”, more well off in terms of comfort, convenience, and health, than the King and Queen of England in 1900. That’s an incredible achievement.
And yet, most of us fail to notice this. Why is that? Probably, it’s because we feel crushed by the weight of our dissatisfaction with our lives. Consumerism promised the good life over the course of thousands of commercials, short videos of people living luxurious lives buoyed by products like “Mr. Clean” and “Frigidaire”. We saw, those of us who used to watch network television, short snippets of the lives of satisfied homemakers who had conquered the ultimate evils of the world: a stain or the need of a space to store leftovers. Consumerism promised to help us solve these ills – the minor inconveniences, what we’d now refer to as “first world problems” – that now occupied the spaces in our brains formerly reserved for starvation or infectious disease.
The problem was that it didn’t solve the problem of stress, it just shifted the focus of stress. In a Houdini-like gambit, consumerism kept our eyes on the gleaming object, while swapping out our old stresses with new ones. We didn’t have to worry about the harvest anymore, but we did have to worry about losing our job at the office, or the factory (indeed, even before we started closing many of the factories). We didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table, but now we had to keep up with the Joneses, if we wanted to have any shred of self-respect. And writ large, consumerism’s greatest success, the boost in our collective standard of living, required us to embrace a Ponzi scheme of a global economy that required continuous growth and the borrowing of imaginary money, which has led to numerous economic collapses, the exploitation of millions of poor workers, and the leaving-behind of millions of laborers (those who worked in the aforementioned factories), who are a big reason why Donald Trump sits in the White House today. Consumerism failed because it offered us comfort, but only by using unsustainable amounts of resources, resources which, like cheap foreign labor, are quickly running out.
My generation seems to be waking up to this fact. Not that we don’t still consume, and still at unsustainable levels. But we recognize that this isn’t going to be the thing that makes us happy. The Obi-Wan Kenobi meme almost creates itself: “this isn’t the good life you’re looking for.” Movements such as minimalism show this. And there is the modern Millennial (as in the generation) movement of Digital Nomadism.
The Digital Nomads
A Digital Nomad is someone who, like me, uses an internet connection, and, unlike me, makes money and supports themselves by doing freelance work, writing a blog, or working for a company that allows them to work remotely, and travels around the world as they work. They live in backpacker hostels, in Air B&Bs, or in a range of new forms of accommodation that are sprouting to support them: companies like Roam in Miami, or Workaway in Bali. These Digital Nomads don’t always write about their travels, but like Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World”, when they do, they paint such travels using an old brush: this is the good life you’re looking for. Through short video snippets, blog posts, and curated pictures, we see a window into a world of endless adventure, excitement, discovery, and meaning.
At first, this was all it was, really. Travel blogs set up by Digital Nomads that offered tips on where to go, how to save money so that you could do it cheaply (I bought a book from Nomadic Matt on how to survive on $50 a day while traveling), and advice on specific tour groups or ways to see exciting places without the expense of a tour group. This was the shackling together of two formerly disparate bands of people: the adventurous backpackers, who were mostly European, and the digital natives of America, who famously started making more money than their parents when they were about 14 and started programming websites. The tech-savvy youth found a new market: jaded youth like them who felt alienated by their broken suburban homes (like those depicted in movies like American Beauty), who sought a new kind of good life. Who weren’t taken in by consumerism’s hollow promises, who sought something more authentic, something more real. The answer was out there: travel.
The problem was that even if you were stingy, even if you saved every dime you had and cooked all your meals on the road, there was still a limit to how far you could stretch a dollar (or a Euro, or a Pound). Teens and those in their twenties, and I’m sure plenty of people in their thirties and beyond, saw glimpses of the good life when they traveled, but these glimpses were far too short. Two weeks, a month at most. Some frugal travelers, by working on the road, stretched their trip lengths to a year or more, but it still left them feeling dissatisfied. Thinking back to their good times on the road, they thought that this could be the answer. And so the second market emerged: digital nomads teaching others to be digital nomads.
Blogs and youtube channels emerged offering to teach you the secrets of the trade. Reminiscent of the old infomercials that promised the secrets and success of the good life of yesterdecade – real estate – the creators of these videos assured the viewer that you could make thousands of dollars, enough to live comfortably, just by creating a youtube channel or a blog (ideally both) and getting your followers to send you their cash, either through small sellables, like PDF travel guides or ebooks on the Kindle store, or through sponsorship like a paypal link. But one can see an immediate problem here. The market for travel blogs and youtube channels is one that ends up becoming a.) extremely competitive, as you are competing with anyone in the world with an internet connection, and b.) quickly saturated, as people only have so much time in the day to watch videos or read blogs, and your potential customers will quickly coalesce around the most popular (because they offer better content) bloggers. Simply put, if this is the good life, only a couple hundred, perhaps a couple thousand, can really experience it. And unfortunately, if you’re entering the market at this point, the point where we have bloggers teaching people to be bloggers, the market has already reached saturation. Poor news for the aspirant blogger (woe is me).
But there is another problem that I have, depressingly (as if the tenor of this post wasn’t depressing enough), discovered out here on my travels. Even if there was room in the market for everyone to become a digital nomad, it still wouldn’t be the good life because travel by itself is not a good life. It can be interesting and rewarding in it’s own way, but it’s also apt to be arduous, unpredictable, disappointing, and lonely. It can also be just as shallow and meaningless as the consumer culture that it sells itself as replacing. Indeed one could say that this idea of nomadism is the perfect replacement for consumerism, as consumerism was the perfect replacement for theism: it does not, by itself, offer us what we are really looking for.
This may seem odd coming from me. I am, after all, the one who has been writing, for months now, about the benefits of travel, about the fact that we should travel. I’ve lifted up the examples of men from the golden age of European exploration, as well as a certain Greek hero, to depict travel as a form of bravery, as a method of stepping outside of the world we take for granted. My viewpoint actually hasn’t changed, but I noticed something three days ago that forced me to reckon with the difficult idea that travel must be undertaken carefully if any serious growth is to be made. Travel is not a surefire path to the good life: but it can help us to achieve it.
This idea brings us finally to my most recent adventure (the experience must qualify for the term. After all, it involved a journey through rough seas, a dangerous encounter with a cyclone, and breathing underwater): diving in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
Bucket Lists and Dukkha
The experience was one that has long been on my “bucket list”, a term all-too familiar to Millennials, and probably everyone by now. For those who have spent the last ten or so years “in a cave” as they say, apart from mainstream society, the term comes from the movie (which actually wasn’t that popular) The Bucket List, and refers to a list of things that we intend to do before we “kick the bucket” (a term that we don’t really interrogate too much, but which presumably means to die). So it’s a list of goals that we want to achieve in our lives. As for why we have a bucket list, and what it means to accomplish it, I’m quite sure that none of us give this much thought. It seems, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson, self-evident. But I think the logic that underlies it is actually so familiar to us that it is, while not technically self-evident, at least beyond question. Not to say that it can’t be questioned, but that we can’t be bothered to question it. The origin of the bucket list’s appeal is the same as the origin of the appeal of consumerism and nomadism: we imagine that when this happens, then we’ll be happy. Then we will live the good life.
This idea is actually well-known to at least one religion: Buddhism. The Buddhists have understood for thousands of years that the emotion underpinning ideas like these is dissatisfaction. They sanskrit term is Dukkha, a term which is more well-known to Westerners as “suffering” as in the first principle of Buddhism, which many understand to be “life is suffering”. This idea is also translated as “desire”. But dissatisfaction is the better term, for the following reason. If you look at yourself right now, sitting or standing there, reading this blog, perhaps feeling jealous that you’re not on this trip that I’m on, what you are feeling is dissatisfaction with your current life. Indeed, whenever we long for the good life, we are by definition dissatisfied with our current life. If we weren’t dissatisfied, we would already be living the good life. Thus Dukkha is always present. That’s what the first tenet of Buddhism actually means.
This isn’t just religious bobbeldy-gook, either. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that we evolved such that any sense of satisfaction would be temporary. Dissatisfaction propels us to find more food, more safety, more mates, and so on. A zen human, perfectly satisfied with his lot in life, simply wouldn’t be as competitive on the savannah. Unlucky us, the heirs-apparent of a legacy of angsty apes.
The interesting aspect of our lives, yes, the interesting aspect, is that we never catch on to Dukkha’s ploy. We never realize that satisfaction is never lasting, and that dissatisfaction will always creep in to our lives. We don’t even trust the accounts of those who warn us that “money doesn’t buy happiness”, and though we pay homage to the ideas of connection to friends and family, personal achievement, and morality as sources of well-being, if we examine our lives we will find that in most cases we’re chasing something that we allow ourselves to believe will, at last, satisfy us. Something that will finally allow us to achieve the coda of the fairy tale: to live happily ever after.
There could not be a more perfect example of this idea than the Bucket List. The Bucket List is a series of items that we wish to accomplish for whatever reason, because we secretly, or explicitly, believe that the accomplishment of these things will bring us lasting joy and happiness. This is what diving the Great Barrier Reef meant to me. It was a thing I wanted to do because it’s famous, because I wanted my name associated with it. Because, when it came up in conversation, I wanted to be able to say “I did that.” Because I wanted to post pictures online and have people “like” them and comment on them. And even though I knew that it wouldn’t make me happy forever – I am enlightened, after all – I assumed that it would at least satisfy that endless hunger long enough for me to reach another place of sufficient status to “re-up” my social high, like a cocaine bump.
This is the other part of travel, after all. Many of us travel to see places, and there is probably some element of what’s termed wanderlust engrained in our DNA. We want to see new places, and experience new things. But aside from that, in the current social zeitgeist travel has taken on the same role as owning a new car did in the 1960s. We have replaced our pursuit of more stuff with a pursuit of more experiences, but when you start to see picture after picture of different people in the same places, the same famous mountains, the same cultural ruins, you start to wonder why they went there. Do we really travel the world just to take a picture of it?
I’m guilty of this, of course. And if I’m honest, I’m going to remain guilty of it. I want to see the famous places of the world, the UNESCO world heritage sites, the places I’ve heard of, and for some reason (well, we all know the reason) I want the evidence that I was there. Among the good reasons for travel: for self-growth, for encountering people different than yourself, for learning about the world in which we live, there is one of vanity: travel awards us social status.
Now that I’ve explained all of that, and if I’ve still held your attention, I can go into my experience at the reef itself.
The Great Barrier Reef
For the uninitiated, the Great Barrier Reef is actually a collection of smaller reefs that extends over a thousand miles along the Eastern coastline of the Australian continent. It is one of the few creations of life large enough to be rewarded with what must be called a cliche description of hugeness: it is “visible from space”. Of course, the Australian government tells us that it is the “only living thing visible from space”, but the reef is not a single organism, and if we’re being intellectually honest forests the world over are visible from space, and surely count as similar ecosystems.
Still, the reef is an astonishing and beautiful example of the scale and diversity of nature. There are over 600 types of hard and soft coral that comprise the reef, and thousands of species of fish, crustacean, and mammal (including us humans) which ply its depths. It is, therefore, an immensely interesting part of the world. The size is, actually, not even really the interesting part of it, when you think about it. After all, it’s not as if you could realistically traverse the whole thing. Even if you put in the years of work required, you wouldn’t have a great deal to show for it, and I’d predict that you’d start to find the task tedious after a few weeks. No, what is fascinating about the reef is not its size, but the diversity of its inhabitants.
But that was not what I was thinking about when I landed in Cairns, or even when I showed up at the dive shop to check in for my three day live-aboard dive cruise. What I sought was a very clear image in my mind. If you google right now “Great Barrier Reef” you will see something similar to my mental picture. It’s the same thing, in spirit, as the mental depictions that housewives had in the 50s of their perfect home. These images, saturated in rainbow hues, are incredible. They are also professional images, and almost certainly photoshopped. If they’re not photoshopped, they are taken under perfect conditions of visibility, in perfect sunlight, with robust artificial lighting as well. In other words, like the two-story house with the white picket fence, they aren’t, strictly speaking, fake. But they are idealized. And that’s what I thought my trip would be: ideal.
My first rude awakening was the boat ride out to the reef. A cyclone named Iris was converging on the region, whipping up the seas and making it difficult to enjoy being anywhere on the water. Our skipper was determined to get us out there, and seemed to think it was safe enough, but as we headed out all I could think of was George Clooney’s character in A Perfect Storm, screaming in lunatic glee as the ill-suited Andrea Gale crested the penultimate peak of a wave in those deadly Northeastern seas. I didn’t honestly think we’d die out there, but it was the first time in my life I’ve been seasick (and as you know, I was in the Navy for 11 years), and it was not enjoyable.
Still, I consoled myself, this would all be worth it. When my mind wasn’t occupied with images of ships capsizing, it was focused on an image of me in full SCUBA gear, floating amidst thousands of colorful fish, against a backdrop of color that would put Jackson Pollock to shame. More importantly, this moment of ocular bliss would be captured on camera, posted to Instagram, where I’d be showered with the praise of little hearts. Confident that all would be well, I allowed myself to enjoy the fruits of my labor prematurely, like awarding myself a loan against this future happiness. I borrowed from it, confident that the debt would be easy to pay. This place would probably, I guessed, even exceed my expectations. Despite my nausea, I remained excited about the prospects of the next few days.
The first dive changed my opinion. The water was murky, filled with silt kicked up by the rough seas. Much of the coral was bereft of color, bleached by rising ocean temperatures and chemicals introduced in the water by tourists (this is a real tragedy). There were fish, but I knew that I was forcing myself to like them. There were no clownfish (“Nemos”), and no sharks, nor turtles, manta rays, or anything else interesting. It was like I was swimming in a big fish bowl. I might as well have just gone to the aquarium, or better yet, the pet store. I climbed back on deck with buyer’s remorse. I’d wasted my money on this stupid trip.
I forced myself to be in good spirits, though. It may not be the best experience of the reef, but at least I could still get some pictures (and post them). And I could see, despite the poor conditions, the potential that the area had. In better weather, the place would be much more interesting and beautiful, and so I resolved to come back one day. It was a shame that I couldn’t yet cross this off my bucket list (one thing about bucket lists is that they imply a finality to things. Once you’ve done an item, you must move on. There is not, on my bucket list anyway, a return feature. It is all just putting checks in boxes.), but my brain started churning and problem solving. I would find a way to turn this into a positive experience. I could write a funny entry about how the whole trip had gone poorly, and still scrape some esteem from people. Yes, they would admire my ability to endure hardship and loss. This disaster would make me more popular than ever. I went to bed the first night content that I would experience success in the end.
The next day, the Captain informed us that the cyclone was closing in on our location, and we’d need to cut the trip short, and return to Cairns that night, a day early, to moor at the ship’s cyclone mooring, which was quite a bit inland. Outwardly I groaned along with the others. What a shame! We couldn’t dive anymore! Inwardly, I rejoiced. I could get off this blasted boat, post my pictures to social media, and get on with my life. Perhaps I could spend the extra day planning my trip in Bali, figuring out the “must see” places there. Or I could look forward even more, to Malaysia. This seemed to be entirely a positive for me. Screw this shitty reef, it was all dead coral anyway. Maybe enough to interest some, but not enough to interest me.
We returned to Cairns, slept overnight on the boat, and then in the morning we were given an option. The Captain told us that the weather had improved somewhat, and he was willing to make another trip out to the reef for two dives, since we’d paid for them, but he cautioned that conditions out there were unknown, and might be just as bad as before. He didn’t want to get our hopes up. My initial reaction was, “no way I’m going back out there. I’ll just get off the boat and be on my way.” But when I emerged from the boat and looked out over the water, so still it was almost a perfect mirror, and seeing that twin sunrise before breakfast, I had a moment of clarity.
I realized that if I went ashore, all that I’d do was the same thing I did every day in every place I’d ever been in my life: I’d read books, write about my thoughts and feelings, and surf the internet or play video games. And I thought of a situation that was only slightly different. What if I was already on shore, and someone told me that I could, free from expense, be taken out on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef and have two 30 minute dives guided by professionals? There’s no point in my life where I would have turned down such an opportunity, and yet here I was, almost gleefully decamping this vessel, when the same opportunity was being provided to me (at this point I’d already paid the full price for the trip, and no refund was offered, so it was essentially free of cost).
So I stayed.
When You’re Not Busy Expecting Things
We set out to the reef, and the weather was a great deal calmer than the day before. Indeed, the sun was a blazing fire above, which my burnt shoulders will testify, and the sea, though not quite glass-like when we emerged from the channel, was much more manageable.
“Dive time! Get on your wetsuits and gear!” the Australian-accented voice of Mike, one of the instructors, shouted out. I left my cabin and went to the dive deck, and started putting on my gear. And I made a decision. For these two dives, I would drop my expectations. I don’t mean that I’d be expecting less. I meant drop as in “let go of”, I would simply avoid having them as much as I could. Along with this, I resolved to essentially act as though I’d stayed behind on shore. That is, I left my camera on the boat. This wasn’t about achieving popularity or acclaim for my “achievement” of having been to the Great Barrier Reef. That was done. This was about witnessing a piece of the world that I’d never really appreciated, even though I’d thought that I had. This place had been, in other words, a means to an end for me. I determined to make it an end in itself.
I took the standard “big step” into the ocean one more time, rising to the surface and giving my okay signal, then meeting up with the group to descend the 10m to the sea floor. I instantly noticed something different. As the waves reached over my goggles like a blanket, the light from the sun playing on them like quicksilver, as I dropped down into the water, I immediately saw a small school of the tiniest fish I’d ever seen pass by my goggles. They’re so small they look like bubbles, came the unbidden thought to my head, and I knew that this was different. I wasn’t looking for, or hoping to find. I was simply seeing. And once the veil of expectation had dropped, it seemed there was so much to see.
As we wound around the reef, I saw how beautiful the place was, and how different it was from anything I’d ever seen before. I’ve dove reefs before, in Belize, but this was a totally different experience. For one thing, the number of fish was just astounding. True, they did look a lot like the varieties that you find in pet stores (their commonality is probably why they’re in pet stores), but I wasn’t focused on seeing something picture-worthy. I just noticed their beauty. Schools of fish, each no bigger than my thumbnail, flitting around a single plant, then hid amongst its branches when I’d approach, darting in and out to see what I was and whether I was a threat. One of the biggest differences I noticed between these fish is how different fish are than animals in the forest. When you walk through a forest, you could easily come away thinking that there are no animals at all out there. They hear you coming from a mile away, and quickly hide from you. Not so with fish. I don’t know whether it’s because they’ve become accustomed to divers (probably plays at least some role) or whether they just know that we’re way too slow to catch them, or they’re just incredibly stupid, but they have no problem getting incredibly close to you. It’s true that I could have gone to an aquarium and seen many fish, and probably fairly close. But there is nothing that compares to being surrounded by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of small fish, feeling the same current that carries them carry you, feeling the in and out waves of the ocean, like the beating of a heart pumping you along, between massive coral formations that grew over the course of hundreds of years. This wasn’t picturesque. No, it was better. It was real. It was the cool feeling of the water on my skin, the dry, salty taste of ocean water and compressed air in my mouth. The stinging of water that would sometimes get past the seal on my goggles and into my eyes. The slight tired pain in my shins from using strange muscles when kicking through the water with flippers. The feeling of connection when watching a fish and knowing it was watching me back.
It made me realize why travel is still important. It’s not about vanity or saying you’ve been somewhere, getting that iconic photo, proving to the world just how much of a wanderlust and adventurer you are. It’s also not about getting a perfect experience, with professional-quality photographs, nor is it about being overwhelmed with pleasurable colors and images.
It’s about seeing the world as it actually is. Without a photoshop filter, on a non-perfect day, cold and uncomfortable, but seeing the variety of the natural world. Seeing thousands of fish living their lives, lives much simpler and more dangerous than ours, but lives nonetheless. And not just seeing, but experiencing all the sensations of a place. The things that, at least for now, can’t be captured and sent digitally across the world.iTo put it another way, the real joy of the experience isn’t being there. It’s being – there.
The Good Life?
The good life, the life worth living, is elusive. It’s not as simple to achieve as saying: live with passion, be curious, stay present, or other cliches. The good life involves those things, certainly, but it is also individual. No one can tell you exactly how to do it, because the good life is different for everybody. That’s the frustrating truth of it. Some people will achieve great meaning and happiness through a life of scholarship, others will find fulfillment as a police officer, still others as zookeepers. Our passions are the result of so many factors that there’s no way that I could tell you what will work for you. But I do know one thing for sure. No matter what map you have to guide you, you will always be lost if you do not know where you are. The lesson that this experience had for me, and which I want to impart to you, is this: as much as possible, see and appreciate the world as it is, without wishing that it were otherwise.
This doesn’t mean that we abandon all attempts to make the world a better place, or even to better our lot in life. But with so much of the universe out of our control, it is worth noting that we face a choice in nearly every situation to suffer by ruminating over its disappointments, or to enlighten (think of the similarity with unburden) ourselves by appreciating it for its own sake.
🙂