Become a Monk or Start an OnlyFans
The modern world has delivered every material benefit our ancestors could have dreamed of, but somehow it feels like we’re trading that for our soul. It would be easy to forget about your spirit to worship flesh and the dollar. It is the default mindless consumption path approved and encouraged by today’s society. In an act of defiance you could run to the hills and reject it all. Living simply as an ascetic. As if technology never existed. I find that path to be just as mindless as the first, and much less fun! But, there is the third path. It's the most challenging and requires the most finesse. Engaging fully with the modern world while attempting to dance gracefully through its minefield of materialist traps. With some wisdom and a mental framework, you can reap the benefits of our advanced world without losing your soul to it. This is the path I’m choosing and here is what I’ve figured out so far.
The problem we face today is that we wrongly assume that the technological progress we’ve made in better understanding the material world has been accompanied by comparable progress in the understanding of the human spirit. There is an asymmetry of effort required to experience the benefit of our collective progress in each. Every generation inherits the full stack of technological achievements that came before it and builds from there. We don't have to re-invent technology every generation, so it can build and compound on itself. We don’t inherit wisdom the same way. Every person born today starts from roughly the same place as someone born in 2500 B.C. We only develop ourselves through what we choose to learn. For thousands of years, our solution to this has been tradition and books. It was our attempt to distill and pass on hard-earned self knowledge to the next generation. It requires active participation, which is why it works inconsistently and why humanity keeps relearning the same lessons. In the last few decades we’ve thrown out thousands of years of understanding about who we are. The result is people navigating the most complex and manipulative environment in human history with the same unexamined nature they were born with. Remember, we are the same animal as Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, and Napoleon. Same wiring, better gadgets.
This is my 3 part framework for surviving engagement with the modern world:
Choose Being
Define Yourself
Build a Strong Tether
Each point builds on the previous one, so I’ll start with the most foundational.
Choose Being
Everything follows a single choice: decide that being is preferable to non-being. This sounds almost insultingly simple until you notice how many people are operating as though they haven't made that choice yet. If you find yourself indifferent, just think of the infinitesimally small probability that you should exist right now. The precise combination of sperm and egg that produced you required an unbroken chain of ancestors, each of whose existence was its own improbable event, to survive, find each other, and reproduce, going back further than you can meaningfully imagine. If nothing else, try not to squander the rare opportunity you’ve been given by simply existing as yourself.
Sometimes the suffering and malevolence of life can challenge that belief. They say the devil wins when you stop believing life is worth living. Historically this would come from a place of poverty, lack and torment. Today it's likely to come from the inside: a slow accumulation of meaninglessness, cheap stimulation standing in for real satisfaction, and a creeping sense that nothing you do quite matters. The rest of this framework is to prevent that from happening.
Define Yourself
Who are you? Most people answer with their name, which tells you almost nothing useful. Start somewhere honest: you are a human. We are either monkeys that evolved to launch rockets, made from mud, or spoken into existence by a benevolent god - pick your favorite story. However we got here, we share more in common than we have differences, and what we share is a human nature that nobody has yet managed to fully escape. That includes you. That includes me.
The modern environment is built by people that understand human nature and how to leverage it. The words of John Cleese should be plastered on a wall somewhere as a daily reminder.
“The divide is not between race, generation or political party. It is between those who have mastered their nature, and those who have fallen victim to it.”
Start building a working understanding of your own nature. Look to evolutionary psychology for why we like hyperpalatable foods, cheap dopamine and paths of least resistance. Learn what Carl Jung means by “the Shadow”, the parts of your unconscious you’d rather not acknowledge. The goal is not to eliminate those parts, but to know them well enough to stop them from running your life behind the scenes. Learn the basic playbooks of advertising and cognitive biases. Once you are aware of them, you’ll see them everywhere and be less susceptible to acting on them.
The resistance you'll feel doing this work has a consistent refrain “that's not me”. The ego is extremely motivated to protect its sense of uniqueness and will produce that response reliably when it is challenged. The more often you hear that, the more likely it is you’re lying to yourself. Or, you are correct and you're the most special person in the world - in which case it's an honor to have you read my work. The better that you know the tendencies of the human animal, the better you know yourself.
You’ll find that this starts to answer “who are we?”. The harder question remains, "who are you?" and that one has a different answer for every person. The working definition I've come to is: you are the unique combination of your talents, your interests, and your intentions. Each of those three things is worth examining carefully because the modern world can trick you into getting them wrong.
Talents
Talents are what you have a natural proclivity toward, often called gifts. The Viscott framing has stuck with me: the purpose of life is to discover your gifts, the work of life is to develop them, and the meaning of life is to give them away.
What do people consistently tell you you're naturally good at, even when you weren't trying? What kind of work pulls you into a flow state where time disappears? ? what did you gravitate toward as a curious kid, before you started editing yourself for social reasons? What frustration or discomfort are you unusually willing to tolerate that forces others to quit? This one is underrated. The capacity to persevere is just as important in the game of life as the talent itself.
Interests
Talents are most powerful when they align with your true interests. From a young age, much of what we think we're interested in turns out to be an extension of what the people around us are into. Fads, sports or whatever cultural moment is dominating the screens will crowd out the quiet blossoming interests of many a teenager. I spent years thinking my interests were too weird or niche before realizing that is specifically the point, not a problem.
The modern technological environment makes this simultaneously easier and harder than any previous generation had it. Harder because pop culture is more pervasive and algorithmically optimized than ever, and platforms can make their interests feel like your own. Easier because those same platforms also contain the most diverse collection of niche communities and rabbit holes that have ever existed. Every library of the ancient world, every field of modern science, every obscure craft or discipline has a corner of the internet that can be curated at your fingertips.
The pop interests of the people around you probably aren’t even their own true interests. Have the bravery to be honest with yourself about what you actually find curious, and then follow it without apology.
Intentions
Your intentions are your goals and aspirations. What do you actually want to do with your talents and interests? We all start off on a tightly defined track in school where our goals are neatly laid out and a vision for a “successful life” is painted for us. Once we graduate, the cart leaves the rails and the real world opens up. From here, people tend to diverge into two camps. There are those who are intentional about designing their own path, and those that continue to have their path handed to them – by employers, culture or whatever the algorithm decides you should want this week. The people in the first camp ask: what do I want my life to be like? Sitting with this question every few months is one of the harder things I’ve ever made myself do.
There is an important distinction of terms that I think about a lot. My operational definition of intelligence is “the efficiency of moving from an undesired state to a desired state”. Wisdom to me is “choosing the right desired state to begin with”. The problem is these develop independently at very different rates. Smart people can be incredibly efficient at achieving goals that were never their own, only to find them hollow. We see this constantly with “successful” people that scale the corporate ladder or achieve some fame and find their externally validating accolades to be meaningless, or worse a waste of precious life. Or entire companies staffed with brilliant people building things because they technically could, without anyone seriously asking whether they should. Intelligence without wisdom is a good way to speed run a life you never wanted.
A useful filter is to notice when your intentions take the form of “I want to have” rather than “I want to be”. The first ties your sense of progress to material objects and status markers that can be taken away or lose their luster. The second is harder to define and score, but it is more durable. What outcomes would still feel meaningful if material possessions disappeared tomorrow? Whatever survives that test is likely something meaningful and real.
Your body runs a background process monitoring how meaningful a life you're living, and it registers genuine progress toward things that matter with a slow, steady dopamine signal. The more meaningful the goal the stronger the signal. This is what makes meaning analgesic. People with genuine pursuits can endure more difficulty in life, not because they suffer less, but because that signal makes the suffering worth tolerating.
This system also runs in reverse. No meaningful progress means no dopamine signal and no signal generates anxiety. The modern world has a solution to that anxiety: hyper-palletable food, infinite doom scrolling, substances that short circuit the dopamine system directly. All short spikes that mimic the signal of progress and temporarily attenuating the anxiety. Knowing this, the seemingly counterproductive actions of many people make a lot more sense.
Two things affect everyone, regardless of their intentions: health and wealth. Neglect either and they will consume the attention intended to spend on anything else. They are table stakes. Not the game, but the buy in required to play.
The modern world is again contradictory on both fronts. We have access to the most sophisticated medical knowledge in human history while food and pharmaceutical companies engineer products that quietly undermine it. We have more individual access to the global economy than any previous generation while a culture of marketing and lifestyle inflation works to make sure you spend faster than you earn.
Live by sound fundamentals in both and largely ignore the whirlwind of conflicting minutiae. Get at least 7 hours of sleep every night, eat whole foods with sufficient protein, walk every day, challenge your muscles a few times a week and get sunlight. Spend less than you make, invest the left over in diverse assets, avoid high interest debt, spend intentionally on the few categories that give you the most joy and save on the rest.
Luxuries become necessities faster than people realize. If you’ve ever said “i need this” or “i should be able to x”, take a long pause to evaluate that thought. Strong language tends to do the heavy lifting for a loosely justified desire. Remember money should be treated as a tool not a scoreboard and that Dante found both misers and spendthrifts sharing the same circle of Hell. Too much and too little are the same mistake in opposite directions. Spend and save with the same intentionality you're trying to bring to everything else.
Begin the work of defining yourself and deciding what you intend to do with this life. If your life is not designed by you, it will be assigned to you.
Develop a Strong Tether
A tether is a harness that keeps you from straying off your intended track. A visual I return to is a zipline that connects you to your best possible self, its a bright white light on the horizon, and your tether is what attaches you to it. The stronger your tether, the more you can venture into chaotic or difficult parts of life without losing your line back. It can snap if it's weak or you stray too far into the darkness. Once you fall, the fight back to your path is a challenge.
Practically, your tether has three components: the beliefs you choose to hold, the rules you voluntarily impose on yourself and the community you cultivate around your intentions. Like any bit of safety gear, it requires frequent inspection and maintenance.
Community
Humans are social beings and we need communities. Traditional third spaces, the places people gathered voluntarily outside of work and obligation, have been quietly disappearing for decades, replaced by platforms that deliver the perception of community without the substance.Whether it is a feature or a bug of being human, even the strongest introverts have a necessity for face to face interaction. As the cliche goes, “the worst thing you can do to a prisoner surrounded by murderers and thugs is put him in a room alone”. There is nothing more debilitating than the feeling, or worse a reality, of being alone.
Communities show you that nothing you are going through is unique as it feels and you don’t have to go through it alone. They create low stakes repetitive contact with people who share something real with you, interests, beliefs and intentions, which is quietly how most meaningful relationships form. If you are fortunate enough to have a good family, that is the foundation of your community. From there, branch out to find organizations you’re interested in that meet in person. For me, it was starting jiu jitsu. I came for the training and unintentionally built connections with a community of great people. It can be intimidating to try to do anything new, especially when there is a frictionless escape to your screens, but it is important that you try.
Be very careful about communities built around a shared enemy rather than a common interest. This is our tribal instinct finding an easy outlet and modern discourse is great at producing them. The group feels real and the belonging seems genuine, but the foundation is negative. They tell you who you should blame without developing who you should be.
Rules
Rules a set of personal guardrails that keep you moving towards your life intentions when nobody else is watching. There is no specific set of rules you must follow, but you must follow a set of rules. It's somewhat of a metarule - as a general rule you must follow some rules.
We live in a world of near absolute freedom where you can do almost anything that you please so long as it doesn’t harm someone else. There is something beautiful in that as a social arrangement, but absolute freedom is counterintuitively destructive for an individual.
The best metaphor I’ve found for this is music. Every great piece of music ever written, from a Bach cantata to a hard bass techno set, operates within a set of constraints. There are scales, time signatures, chords and a mathematical theory to music. You don't have to follow any specific set of musical frameworks to make something worth listening to, but you have to adhere to something. Let a child walk up to a piano and slam any key they want. All the notes are there. They have absolute freedom. With the same notes available to Mozart, this kid will create a cacophony of nonsense. To turn freedom into art you need to understand that there are constraints. To lack any disciplined structure is to simply make noise. In the words of Jocko Willink, “Discipline is Freedom”.
Basic adherence to a set of personally chosen guidelines is conveniently also the basis of self-esteem. Actual self worth, not performative affirmations, comes from acting in a way that you’d admire. Structure your day with actions that you’d admire and avoid actions that make you think less of yourself. A person with genuine self worth is significantly harder to target with the modern world’s most effective marking pitch: "You aren’t happy with yourself, but this will help”. Beauty products, fitness supplements, courses offering shortcuts to wealth, and status symbols like watches or sports cars feed the hole created when an internal sense of self worth is lacking. Force yourself to act like someone you would respect and gradually you’ll notice that you’re building self-esteem.
Beliefs
Beliefs are essentially tools. You can pick them up and put them down as you see fit. The ones worth carrying are those that reinforce your conviction that life is worth living and clear the path for your intentions. Sometimes beliefs that got you to where you are today were helpful for the previous leg of your journey, but may be less helpful moving forward. There is a reason booster rockets fall away when they aren't needed anymore.
The resistance to examining your beliefs is itself worth examining. Orson Scott Card observed it perfectly when he said: “we question all our beliefs except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” The beliefs worth scrutinizing are the ones that feel the ones you inherited rather than chose. We absorb the beliefs of family, culture and the ambient noise of whatever is circulating on social media. Not to say any of the beliefs are wrong, but they should be audited to make sure you’re not carrying someone else's beliefs out of default rather than intention.
What this looks like in practice is different for everyone. It can be a helpful exercise to write them down. These beliefs have been incredibly helpful tools for me recently. I believe my ability to do the work is the reward – separating the outcomes that are outside of my control from the actions that are within my control and sparing me from the suffering that comes from confusing the two. I believe 80% of my creative work is bad, 15% is okay, 4% is good and the best 1% will make the other 99% worth the effort – this lightens the blow of failure and keeps me moving. I hold the belief that beauty and comedy are present in almost any situation – that if you believe they're there you’ll find them, and that they are reliable sources of levity when life gets heavy. I hold loosely, with awareness of how it sounds, in a version of reincarnation – that we get to come back and play the game of life again. It is a tool that relieves the paradox of choice, the fact that there are far more worthwhile paths to take than a single lifetime can accommodate. I’ll more than likely exit as worm food, but this belief allows me to commit fully to the path I am on now without grieving the possible paths I am not taking. It also incentivises me to be genuine and kind so as not to return as a dung beetle.
For most of human history religion was the tether, and it’s worth being honest about why it worked. It covers all three aspects with a cosmology that gives meaning to being, a code of behavioral rules to live by and a community built around shared intentions. I grew up begrudgingly learning Catholic doctrine and at the age of 11 I said “I would rather learn about dragons, they are just as real and much more interesting than 12 guys in sandals”. I still find this funny coming from a kid. I was an unusually rational child and disregarded religion for its perceived shortcomings, in my view, against cold hard science. The issue with this is that science is an extraordinary tool for understanding the material world, but it can’t answer why any of it is worth experiencing. Taken to its conclusion, carbon based organisms on a rock orbiting an unremarkable star in one of billions of galaxies, it’s a reliable route to nihilism.
Recently I’ve discovered the power that religious and strong fictional reading has for revealing meaning in the human condition – acquiring and strengthening the tether that keeps me attached to that which makes life worth living. The irony is, I was right to want to read about dragons because, in the words of Neil Gaiman, “Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” And that is what the tether is ultimately made of. Not certainty, but faith that the ideal on the horizon is worth moving towards and a system to keep you heading there.
There’s a philosophical problem worth naming here. Agrippa’s trilemma holds that every belief system, if you trace it back to its roots, ends in one of three unsatisfying places: circular reasoning, infinite regress or some unjustified axiom. Our deepest convictions are supported by: God, the word “Science”, the Big Bang, or some other ultimately unjustifiable claim asserted on faith. This isn’t a reason to abandon belief. It’s a reason to hold your belief systems with some humility. We adopt belief sets so our finite brains can make sense of the infinite amount of information in our environment. Since our own belief systems are unjustifiable they shouldn't be forced on others.
Everything in this essay is subject to that problem. The framework of choose being, define yourself, build a tether is working for me in my phase of life. Every day I develop and refine the way I live a little more, but I will always have my ideal on a horizon to aim for. If anything resonates with you, take it. My goal is never to impose a doctrine. If you want people to adopt your belief system, you should have such an admirable, meaningful and fulfilling life that others willingly seek and entertain your perspectives and routines. I hope to live a life that proves to be admirable and I wish the same for you.
