Some Notes on the Nature of Life

1) There are two things worth maximising in life: valuable subjective experiences and positive objective impact on the world. 

2) Subjective experiences can provide different kinds of value, such as sensory pleasure, affirmative social emotions, character development, a sense of meaning, and intellectual understanding. These kinds of values are both outcomes and motivations: they are both benefits an activity might create and also motivations for engaging in that activity in the first place. As motivations, they can be divided into two categories: intrinsic, whereby you derive internal pleasure and/or value from an activity, and extrinsic, whereby the value of the activity relates to other people’s response or your relationship with other people. Sensory pleasure, character development, a sense of meaning, and intellectual understanding fall into the first category, while affirmative social emotions belong to the second. 

a) Common sources of sensory pleasure include food, art, music, sex, comfortable clothes, fragrance, and beautiful forms in general, which include people and places. 

b) Social emotions have two primary types: empathetic and competitive. Positive empathetic emotions are derived from other people’s positive experiences: for example, if you are a musician and see other people dancing happily to your music, you feel a sense of vicarious joy. Competitive social emotions are defined in opposition to other people: you feel happy because you think you are better than other people — richer, smarter, more famous, better looking, or more influential. People who tune primarily into competitive social emotions are playing the status game.  Status is a powerful but often unhealthy drive because your advancement comes at the expense of other people and there is also no end to the status game: if you measure your worth purely by a certain metric, there will always be people above you, and you will always feel inadequate.

c) Character development relates to positive changes in your mindset and moral character. 

d) A sense of meaning appears to be slightly different in nature from the other kinds of value. It might encompass or overlap with some other kinds: for example, you might say that intellectual understanding is valuable because it is meaningful. I use the term mainly as a catch-all category for things that are not fully captured by the other categories. For example, if somebody cares deeply about the planet, the motivation might not be fully explained with reference to sensory pleasure or social emotions. Some might say that it is pleasurable to see a beautiful planet or that someone is engaging in the cause to obtain validation from the activist community or that the person derives vicarious joy from future people who inhabit a better planet, but I think from the perspective of most climate activists, there is something more to their motivations: they deem the cause intrinsically good and meaningful. 

e) Intellectual understanding seems inherently valuable: it is good and enjoyable to understand reality better, regardless of the utility of such understanding. That is why it is fun to read widely, learn new things, and keep up with current affairs.

3) Objective positive impact exists in different forms and on different scales.

a) At the most fundamental level, it consists in improving the subjective experiences of other people or bringing about positive changes in the external world independent of its human inhabitants. By creating beautiful things, you provide sensory pleasure to others; by keeping others company and giving others validation, you evoke positive social emotions; by thinking deeply about things and sharing your thoughts, you contribute to others’ intellectual understanding… Some kinds of positive impact do not relate to humans at all: for example, you can improve the welfare of animals or the conditions of the planet. 

b) Some people contribute positively to the lives of people around themselves — family, friends, colleagues… Some people build something valuable in their local community. Some people shape the course of an industry or a country. Some people change the world and bend the arc of history. One path is not necessarily better than another: it is both a matter of capacity and one of choice. It is important to know what you can do, what you want to do, and what paths there are. Augustus built an empire, while Horace tended to his little estate and achieved poetic immortality. 

4) Every activity contains a multiplicity of subjective motivations and objective outcomes, both actual and potential. 

a) When you engage in an activity, there is usually a mix of motivations. For example, if you take a course in classical music, it might be because 1) music provides sensory pleasure 2) you enjoy the social company of your classmates 3) you recognise the value of such knowledge as cultural capital, which might confer social validation. Similarly, sex concerns both sensory pleasure and social validation. People do things for different reasons, and each individual assigns weight to different motivations differently. 

b) The subjective and objective value of an experience often changes with time. You might do something for certain reasons at the time and then recognise different kinds of value later on. For example, you might study biology really diligently in school mainly because you crave validation from your parents, classmates, and teachers, but twenty years later, you decide to become a doctor and improve people’s health and only then do you see how the biology class helped to lead you to the present point. As is often the case, you might begin an activity for extrinsic reasons, but then you internalise the experience, appreciate its value, and pursue the activity of your own accord. 

c) The same activity has the potential for different levels of outcomes, depending on the person’s capacity and mindset. One person might do drugs and become an addict, but Aldous Huxley turned his psychedelic experience into a book that is still read to this day. Some may engage in adulterous affairs and become psychologically damaged, but Annie Ernaux sublimated her passionate affair with a married man into Passion Simple. Many read science fictions as a pastime, but Elon Musk treated sci-fi novels as a formative influence that inspired him to build SpaceX. 

5) It is important to consider and expand your capacity for subjective experiences and objective impact.  

a) Several things maintain or expand your capacity: capital, health, and intellect. 

b) Capital comes in different types, as Bourdieu points out. The most common universal capital is economic capital. The famous story about the conversation between a fisherman enjoying sunshine on the beach and a businessman who interrogates him about his life choices elides the importance of capacity. It is true that if all the businessman wants in life is a house by the beach and the leisure to lie on the beach and enjoy sunshine, the fisherman has long attained this end state. However, with his wealth, the businessman is capable of accessing far more valuable experiences and making a much bigger impact on the world; he has more optionality. You can reduce your subjective desires, as is the spiritual path; or you can expand your objective capacity, as is the way of the world. Social capital is also important: it might be your social status, network, or social media following; it enables you to do more things. 

c) Some activities reduce your biological capacity for experiences and objective impact in the long term. For example, if you binge on drugs, they might provide sensory pleasure in the present but accelerate cognitive decline, which will then blunt your future experiences, damage your dopamine system, and reduce your capacity to create objective value in the world. Some forms of damage are more insidious: inaction is one example. The body naturally declines with age, so it requires extra work to maintain its functions.

d) Intellect allows you to derive more subjective value from an experience and also contribute more value in the world. The same experience creates different amounts of value for different people. Two people might watch the same film and come away with completely different experiences: one might enjoy the general vibe of the film and derive a one-liner about its meaning, and the other, skilled in analysis and familiar with the history of cinema, might dissect its formal devices, cinematic influences, and so on. The latter is able to obtain far more subjective value from the experience than the former. This ability requires conscious cultivation. For example, you might go to ten concerts, but your ability to appreciate music will not improve significantly unless you make an effort to study music systematically. Needless to say, intellect, in the form of knowledge and skills, also empowers you to make a bigger impact on the world. 

6) Almost everything is a trade-off. 

a) Ultimately, your time is limited, and every activity has an opportunity cost: the time you spend doing something is the time you are not spending on something else. You can watch a hundred episodes on Netflix, and that is totally fine. Similarly, you might read a book purely for leisure and intellectual understanding: the book's content might have nothing to do with your work, and you will not write a review or even talk about it with anybody else. However, you should understand that you could invest that time in some other activity that also creates subjective value or objective impact or expands your capacity for those. It is a choice, but you should make it consciously. 

b) Another cost that is less commonly understood relates to mindset. You can only hold a set of active beliefs at a given time, and your main beliefs have to be coherent — otherwise you would not be able to function. If you prioritise social validation from your friends and/or family, you have to mould your belief system to theirs. That changes the way you do things and look at the world. Similarly, every source of information changes your mind to some extent: if you read productivity books, you think more about productivity and might become more productive; if you read nihilistic books, you have more nihilistic thoughts; if you are ingesting partisan content on X, you get angrier at the state of the world. You can only tune into a limited number of worlds at a given time, while there are infinite worlds out there.

c) Another cost concerns mental energy. If I have certain thoughts and feel the urge to share them, I could share them with some friends in private chats, or I could channel the energy into writing a blog post. Indeed, I can do both, but what often happens is that doing the former reduces my psychological propensity to do the latter. 

d) Many people try to tune into too many worlds, which reduces their ability to excel in any one of them. There is a trade-off between well-roundedness and excellence. Again, it is a choice that should be made consciously and responsibly.

7) Social validation is a dangerous source of motivation. 

a) The main reason is that the identity of the people in your immediate surroundings is entirely contingent. You happen to be in a certain place at a certain time and meet a certain group of people; but if you change your context, it could well be a completely different group of people with different beliefs and values. Indeed, after some years, your social groups might change completely. The risk of conforming to any social group is, as intimated above, you’re missing out on other possible ways of life.

b) Early life experiences, such as childhood and compulsory education, programme people to seek social validation and internalise societal standards and dominant cultural hierarchies. Parents are, of course, a formative influence, and divergent family backgrounds contribute to divergent worldviews in children, which are not always apparent in day-to-day interactions at school. Teachers also have an outsized influence on people’s outlooks, and this is problematic because most teachers share similar and conformist values and life experiences. 

c) The desire for validation tends to encourage people to either reduce their individuality to placate others or assert their status at the expense of others. For example, if your primary motivation for engaging in a conversation is social validation, you might want to affirm the other people’s views to make them happy or show off your own knowledge and status to trounce your interlocutors. However, if you treat every conversation as an opportunity to improve your intellectual understanding and character development, you might get more out of it. 

d) People’s life experiences are different; it is often not very productive to compete with others or follow in their footsteps. When we look at other people, we only see the tip of an iceberg with regard to their identity: the schools they went to, the jobs they had… Those experiences are only a fraction of the totality of life. In the case of the most extraordinary people, those experiences are often the least important contributors to their success. For people like Steve Jobs, Palmer Luckey, or James Dyson, the garage engineering experiments they did in their teenage years might have been far more formative than the colleges they went to. Other important factors include people's starting points, intellect, and character traits. You can go to the same schools Mark Zuckerberg went to and then drop out of Harvard, but that alone would not make you create something like Facebook. 

e) It is good to look beyond your immediate social groups by consuming different sources of information and meeting different people, at least for some time. However, if you stay in this exploratory phase all the time, you risk constantly destabilising your belief system, which would diminish your capacity to excel in one domain.

8) People are all different, and it is impossible to fully understand another person. 

a) Many people to quick to judge other people by their own standards because that affirms their self-worth, belief system, and sense of status: ‘that person is rich, but he’s so tacky on social media’; ‘that person is wasting her life reading random books and studying art'; ‘that politician is so stupid — I don’t know how he got where he is’. We judge other people negatively because we feel the need to validate ourselves. A better approach is to recognise the diversity of human experiences and motivations and try to learn from everyone you encounter. 

b) When you interact with a person, you only present a limited facet of yourself and see a limited facet of the other person. Furthermore, because of each person’s unique life experiences, communication is imprecise and slippery. If you do not express yourself clearly and empathetically, misunderstanding can occur easily.  As TS Eliot writes, 'words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still.'

c) Everybody makes assumptions about you based on the limited information they have. It is up to you to present yourself and clarify your thoughts, and it is also up to you to decide whose opinions you value and prioritise. If you care about what every stranger thinks of you, you will have very little mental capacity left for other things.

9) When you look back, your past experiences are valuable in several forms: memories, milestones, and stepping stones.

a) Memories are enjoyable because they provide sensory pleasure and also serve social functions. When you look at your photos and diaries, you access your past experiences again. When you discuss your memories with people with similar memories, that is a bonding experience. It is good to record your experiences so that you can access more of your past experiences later on. 

b) Milestones have different forms: prizes, writings, artistic output, press features, and companies that remain. Milestones are summations of your work or your thought in a given domain during a certain period of time. 

c) Stepping stones are experiences that create value for your future self. For example, you accumulated wealth through some experiences, which later expanded your capacity for experiences and impact. 

10) When you do something, it is important to understand your motivations, the activity’s objective functions, and its associated costs.

a) Are you doing it because you are intrinsically interested in it or because you want to derive social validation from other people through it? If it is the former, are you doing it for its subjective value, or for its effect on the world, or for your capacity for experiences and impact? If it is the latter, do those people’s opinions really matter and will you still care about them in ten years’ time? How does the activity affect your time, mindset, and mental energy and your capacity to do other things? 

b) You are changing all the time with your neurochemistry and life experiences. The best you can do is to minimise regret. 

PS: This essay is written in the form of a series of notes because these thoughts cannot be structured into a linear argument. If I had time, I would really love to reread Sontag's 'Notes on "Camp"' and Wittgenstein's Tractatus and think about the relationship between writing style and thought.

Over the years, two essays have had a profound influence on the way I look at the world: David Foster Wallace's 'This is Water' and Sam Altman's 'How to be Successful'. Steve Jobs's commencement speech, Graham Weaver's Stanford lectures, and Naval's interviews are some other sources that I return to time and time again. What I have come to realise is that people often say they have read or watched something, but what really matters, in the case of information consumption, is less the event of reading or watching than the retention of beliefs that inform your behaviour in your working memory: if you have learnt something valuable from an essay or an interview, is that knowledge still influencing your worldview and behaviour?

When I have more leisure, I want to read some philosophy and critical theory books again: the Greeks, Nietzsche, Arendt, Benjamin, Sloterdijk, Parfit... It would be so liberating to read such books just for myself and think more deeply about life and the world.