Whether it’s vaccines, the system, salesmen, gas prices, climate change, websites, mobile hotspots, noble lies, taxes, or hidden fees — “That’s how they get you!”
The trouble is when you think this way, you’ve made yourself a victim of the nameless and faceless “they.” You’ve manifested the very thing against which you are guarding.
They haven’t got you. You’ve got you.
You might think that this outlook is the smart one; protecting you and keeping you safe, or at least keeping you from exploitation.
What if, however, you thought differently? What if instead of looking for exploitation, you look for mutual benefits? What if you lead with empathy? What if you assume the other person is not trying to extract something from you?
What if the thing you are worried about really is better for you and others?
It doesn’t have to be either-or. It can be both-and.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce took the first photo in 1826.
In 2022, we’ll take approximately 4.7 billion per day and 1.72 trillion per year. The devices we call smartphones today could plausibly, and maybe more accurately, be called smartcameras because they account for 92.5% of those photos.
Your camera rolls contain your story. You are the subject or the direct observer for each of the thousands of photos on your device. As you scroll through, they tickle your emotions with fondness, humor, or sadness.
But how many are iconic?
Some photos are iconic because they don’t require us as the subject or direct observer. They have the power to mesmerize us as if we were. They provide photo-realistic glimpses into a moment we didn’t personally witness. We respond viscerally as if it was on our own cameral roll.
This is the way it looked. The image caught in time.
Paradoxically, iconic photos are actually abstract representations, even though they are the very definition of a realistic representation.
The problem is context.
A photo that strikes our emotions does so because of what we bring to it. We superimpose personal baggage or tribal baggage over the image to interpret the meaning or the action. We create backstory, story for the moment, and then a story for the aftermath. The story gives it meaning.
But it’s our story, not the story of the subjects or the observer in the photo.
Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong.
To be clear, “eat more veggies” is usually the perfect advice to help make anybody and everybody healthier.
But it’s also not going to work.
My daughter is a young professional dietician, fresh off years of academic study with several degrees and many letters after her name to show for it. She currently works with a range of people, from young women in crisis to adults trying to get their act together.
She said to me recently (paraphrased):
“You, me, them — we all know that we should eat more veggies, and if we did, we’d be healthier. However, I’ve learned working with real people that this isn’t a math formula, nor do people need more scientific information.
Nobody needs to be told to eat more veggies, although that is true. They already know that.
What people need is to explore the emotions associated with their eating. Their personal history. Their feelings about what they like or dislike. How different foods make them feel is likely attached to events in their lives, both positive and negative.
They need counseling to figure out why they feel like they do. Then we can work with the food.”
How true this is for so many parts of our lives — our likes and dislikes, tribes we join, successes and failures — all rooted in our personal histories and the associated emotions.
We rarely need scientific advice about the how. Instead, we should start with the why.
According to published US Lifesaving Association statistics, lifeguards at US beaches made 47555 rescues in 2021. Over that same time 65 people drowned at unguarded beaches.
How many of the 47555 would have drowned if not rescued?
Of course, we don’t and can’t know, but one thing is clear: many more families, friends, and colleagues would have been devastated if not for the work of the USLA lifeguards.
The USLA estimates the chance of fatally drowning at a protected beach at a paltry 1 in 18 million. Choose a beach with lifeguards if you want the best chance of swimming in the ocean and coming out alive.
And yet…
Swimming at the guarded beach comes with a tradeoff — freedom.
You can’t “do whatever you want, whenever you want” at a guarded beach regardless of your ability as a swimmer or your desire to take on risk. If the surf is too rough or the tide is ripping, red flags fly. Get out too far, and the whistles blow. Too many people? Don’t fish or surf here.
The lifeguards must assess the risk and make decisions to restrict freedoms based on the desires and abilities of the collective, not of you specifically. What’s the best decision for the group?
You, however, do have a choice. You can seek out that gritty, unfettered, and often beautiful stretch of shoreline with the big waves. Just remember, though, that this freedom, like all freedom, comes without a safety net.
Pragmatism gets a bad rap. Sometimes deservedly so.
Pragmatists are labeled flip-floppers, scoffed at as non-believers, or painted as having no integrity.
Are those labels earned?
Ideology makes everything monochromatic by assuming objective right and wrong, best and worst, true and false, regardless of the individual.
Ideology can be the comfortable choice because it allows one to outsource truth — to the group or the text. When you outsource truth in this way, you lighten your personal burden.
It’s comfortable, but does it ultimately offer the best solutions for a diverse community of ~7.5 billion people, or even ~335 million?
Ideology requires we pick a direction and never veer, no matter what we learn. Pragmatism allows us to pick a direction and then modify according to what we learn. And as the great experiment moves forward, we are unafraid to modify our guidance as we learn more.
The case for pragmatism comes down to recognizing that most problems we’re trying to solve can’t be ideologically categorized as right or wrong.
Most of the problems are grey, affect some more than others, and follow from perspective informed by opinion and preferences.
Pragmatism recognizes that solutions can be subjective and that a solution may work for you if not for someone else.
Pragmatism may get a bad rap, but it recognizes that most problems are grey, the best solutions take time and experimentation, and personal values and opinions are important.
Reality, not truth, is based on experience. But experience is easily fooled, as is perspective.
The smell test (known as Occam’s razor in academia and “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck” in kindergarten) is simultaneously the best tool and a complete charlatan.
It’s the best tool for reality, but a charlatan for truth.
You are in a cult. So am I. So are they. So is each of the ~7.5 billion people on this planet.
In fact, we’re all members of several cults. We join them because they feel right. Their rules align with what we believe or want to believe. Or because we’ve been persuaded that this is where the smart people are.
The problem is not whether we’re in a cult or even which cult. The problem, like most problems of community, is self-awareness and empathy.
It’s a question of whether we — the people inside this cult and the people inside the other cult — can foster the empathy required to open the gate on the fence.
A good start is the knowledge that all cults, even the ones divinely inspired, are a creation of humans.
We can take another step by recognizing the labels we use — for them and us. These labels reinforce and buttress the fences around us. They make us feel better about ourselves. Like somehow we are right, and they are wrong.
But when we recognize that their cult, like our cult, was created by smart people just like us, with families, needs, desires, curiosities, challenges, joys, and miseries, we can see that the labels have no meaning. Even the label “cult.”
Once we stop yelling over the fence, “You’re in a cult!” we can start to foster unity. Unity doesn’t require that we all believe the same thing, but it does require empathy.
We dropped our youngest off at college last week for his freshman year.
The last of our three children.
If you’ve been there or are getting there, you know that it’s been emotionally complex — empty nest, finances, what’s next, who we are, have we been good parents, are we still good parents, is he ok?
But amongst that complexity, a strong sense of gratitude has emerged. Gratitude for where we live and our public school’s commitment to getting those kids back to in-person class as soon as possible.
The three heads of the Cerberus — school board, administration, and teachers — all came together and had our students back to full-time in-person instruction in October 2020. Yes, there were bumps in the road, fits and starts, and wrong turns, but they did it.
They committed to the education and, by extension, the well-being of our kids, which paid off in spades. Observing other incoming college freshmen and kids of all ages around this country leaves no doubt that we got it right. Our kids are as ready as can be for what’s next.
Pre-pandemic, we had meaningful arguments about the quality of our kids’ education in our community.
Post-COVID, the conversation changed to the most basic level — Are we educating our kids at all?
Hindsight is 20/20, and revisionist history is rampant, but thankfully, our Cerberus got it right. They endured the criticism, had the hard conversations, and made tough calls — correctly.
Use the Natural Inflection Points in Your Life to Redefine and Rebuild Your Self-Talk
A couple of years into our marriage, both in our mid-20s, Chris and I started the discussion about kids. The result was that we decided the time was now.
The logic went something like this:
Someday we’d like to be where we want, when we want (This was the mid-90s, way before remote working and internet/social media self-employment was a mainstream possibility). Travel for fun, yes, but also if our kids had families, we’d like to be able to travel around to be part of their lives. We wanted geographic freedom from jobs, houses, etc.
To realize this goal, we’d need both finances and our health, and we only had one of those at that time.
We also wanted our parents to be an integral part of our children’s lives, and they weren’t getting any younger.
So we decided now was the time. I remember at once feeling excited, nervous, optimistic, and apprehensive.
Our oldest son, Joe, was born in 1996. Then our daughter, Maddie, in 1998. As Joe and Maddie exited toddlerhood and started leaving us during the day for school, we got the itch and decided that two was not enough. Luke was born in 2004.
As I write this, Joe and Maddie are fully self-sufficient adults, and Luke is entering the last throws of high school. He will be off to college in a few short months.
We’re just about to enter the time of life that we envisioned and drove our decision those many years ago.
I feel it again.
Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.
Stories are About Emotions, Not Facts
I can vividly recall that specific conversation. It was a weekday, and we were eating dinner on the couch, as we regularly did, watching some reruns of Friends. An episodic point about children came up and launched us into our discussion. By the end of our conversation, I was sure, but Chris was not so sure — but we decided now was the time.
Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.
Chris and I recently replayed that conversation, and apparently, she remembers it totally different — except for dinner. For starters, it wasn’t a single conversation but a series. No, we didn’t start it on the couch on a weekday. It was the weekend, and we were out to dinner in the city. The conversation started there, but then lingered over several days. I was the apprehensive one, and she was sure.
But we agreed on the outcome — Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.
Obviously, one or both of our memories about this watershed moment in our lives is a bit…fuzzy. But the core message of that conversation (or conversations) is burned into my brain — now’s the time.
Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.
(Side Note: Friends didn’t start syndication until 1998, which refutes my memory of the infamous dinner and spurring of the conversation. My memory of the conversation would necessitate syndication in late 1995 or early 1996.)
That’s how it is with stories, isn’t it? We remember how the event made us feel.
Many studies have concluded that we’re generally terrible at remembering factual details of events from our past. As we temporally distance from events, even critical, life-molding events, our memory of the facts begins to fade, and hence, the factual reliability decreases. This reliability of memory is one of the significant challenges of the judicial system because witness testimony relies on humans recalling factual details of events in the past.
But we suck at it.
However, our brains are amazing at remembering how that event made us feel. Sometimes we’ll even distort the details to preserve or enhance the remembered emotions. Skilled litigators will help witnesses recall their feelings about the events in question to fill in (augment?) gaps in their recollection.
That’s what a story is — a narrative account (fact, fiction, or some combination) that evokes an emotional response. The emotional response leaves an imprint.
By midlife, we have experienced thousands of stories: some impactful, some trivial. But each left an indelible emotional imprint on our psyche.
Excited. Nervous. Optimistic. Apprehensive.
Tell Yourself the Right Story
Who controls your story?
The most powerful story is the story you tell yourself about yourself: that inner monologue running through your head every minute of every day.
For most of my life, I let The World generate that story for me.
I’m not worthy.
I’m not good enough.
I’m an engineer, not a writer.
I’m an employee, not an entrepreneur.
From my pre-teen years to early midlife, the story I told myself was shaped by how I thought others perceived me. Each little outside perspective sabatoging my view of myself.
Feelings, not facts.
Then along comes this beautiful gift of midlife. This natural inflection point that has allowed me to build a new story about myself — the right story.
Until now, you may have let The World generate your story. Maybe, like me, you believed the wrong version of your story.
You might say to yourself, “But yes, I am that guy. Look at the facts.” But stories aren’t about facts. They’re about feelings, and feelings are both malleable and controllable (and fickle).
“Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.”
If you’ve been given the gift of an inflection point such as midlife, now’s the time to tell yourself the right story. You take control because the only one who has the right and the ability to control that story is you.
What do you want your story to be?
Do you want to be a badass? Tell yourself that story.
Do you want to become the person your younger self admired? Start by running that through your head every day.
Do you want to be the guy who’s just getting started? Say it to yourself about yourself all the time.
Because if you want to be the guy who doesn’t deserve anything good, phones it in, and is on the downside, you can be him also. Just keep telling yourself you are.
How do you want to feel about yourself and your life?
Tell yourself that story.
Go Forth and Become Your New Story
You’ve lived.
Sure, you’ve got regrets. So do I. But the experiences you’ve had are just stories, and you can choose to see those stories however you wish.
How can you reframe these stories to help you tell yourself the right story?
You probably have things you would do differently (I sure hope so). Rather than being ashamed or unhappy with stories from your past, you can redefine the emotions around those events with a new inner monologue.
Mistakes were lessons.
Failures and rejections were roadblocks and left turns.
Regrets were the hills and the valleys that taught you perseverance.
Each of those stories has brought you to this moment and who you are today. And now, who do you want to be?
Like the wrinkles around your eyes and forehead, you can now wear those stories from the past like a badge. Sometimes a badge of honor, but also sometimes a badge that says, “yup, that one was a signpost on a journey of lessons.”
If you can reframe the stories from your past by reframing your emotions around them, you certainly control the story of who you are today and who you want to become.
“I can learn and become an expert.”
“I can start over with a well of wisdom and experience.”
“I still have time. I’m not too old.”
“I have something exciting and useful to share with my family, coworkers, and this world.”
“I am going help her remember why she/he married me.”
“I’ve always wanted to, and now I’m going to.”
If none of these resonate or seem too big, but you’re looking for a new story, start here — “I am enough. I am worthy. I can go become.”
Your subconscious believes what it hears over and over. Make sure you tell yourself the right story a million times a day.
