By

David Cain of Raptitude.com

Here’s a depressing reality that everyone eventually notices: time goes faster as you age. The days and years seem to get behind you with increasing speed, and it’s easy to understand why: to a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, while to a 40-year-old it’s only one-fortieth of a lifetime.

This means we are, essentially, accelerating towards our graves — but there’s something we can do to make this a non-issue, and I’ll explain how.

I turned 34 last week, and when I think about that number, it seems to belong to an entirely different stage of life than 33 does. A 33 year-old is just a 31 year-old you haven’t checked in on for a bit, and a 31 year-old is just a 29 year-old plus a quick pair of summers, and 29 is what everyone wants to be anyway.

But 34 is the mark at which the rounding begins to go the other way. We know that 34 might as well be 35, and one president later you’re 39, which is the same as 40. And at that point, while you’re nowhere near old age, you’re probably on the leeward side of the mountain of time that is your life, and your days of being a young person are over.

All of this is just a pointless thinking exercise though. It doesn’t mean anything. Numbers make fools of us. That’s why retail prices still end in 99, statistics mislead us relatively easily, and the Monty Hall Problem still blows people’s minds.

When I put the numbers aside, and look at my actual experience of aging, life has gotten consistently better, not worse. I am calmer, happier, more confident, wiser. I get more enjoyment out of ordinary moments, I experience fewer crises and less fear. I have just as many problems more quickly. I find it easier to do hard things as I get older.

Yet it’s suggested repeatedly to us, that aging is something to be feared — that an older you is a worse you, and that any birthday beyond your 29th is a small tragedy.

I am also aware that I only turned 34 and not 64, and that I’ve barely begun to experience the effects of aging. But I have every reason to believe that all of the improving qualities listed above will continue to improve until I’m about dead.

There are tradeoffs of course. When I was five I could fall down and probably not hurt myself. I used to be able to drink Slurpees for lunch and not feel like crap afterward. My skin was clearer. And eventually I’ll probably experience joint pain and other goodies. But I believe that with age I will gain vastly more than I lose.

What do we really lose as we age? Why do we think it’s such a bad thing?

Well first of all, what we’re most afraid of isn’t aging, but the thing that happens when we’re done aging — and we often confuse the two. Death and aging aren’t really the same problem, and I don’t think it makes sense to worry that aging is bringing you closer to death. The fact that life ends has been a part of the deal from the beginning, and you knew that. And death, whenever it comes, will render all of the problems of aging irrelevant. 

Your body will tend to get weaker over the decades. We know that. But it’s important to note that your level of fitness and physical ability has a lot more to do with how you spend your years than how many of them you’ve spent in total. I’m a total novice in the world of fitness, but I’m already in much better shape than I was at 25, and still there are 65-year-olds who can run circles around me, or even bench-press me a few dozen times. While it’s true that our limits for physical prowess do decrease as we age, not many of us live in such a way that we’re bumping up against these limits.

We do experience more age discrimination, which is obnoxious but not exactly insurmountable. It’s also not really a function of aging; it’s a consequence of living in a culture that overvalues youth. In other words, getting younger isn’t what’s required to overcome age discrimination. As we know, many cultures (past and present) revere age.

We do get less physically beautiful, at least in terms of raw biological sex appeal. I will certainly have less hair and more lines in 20 years. But even as you gain wrinkles, you can simultaneously become a more articulate, likeable and admirable person, if admiration is important to you. While the most superficial aspect of your beauty may wilt, you can cultivate charisma and appeal indefinitely in every other area. Even outward beauty can be preserved or improved over the medium-term, with an investment in fitness and health, if that’s still something you value.

For women there is a unique aging issue: the loss of the capacity to give birth to healthy children occurs relatively early in life, so beginning a biological family is one of the few things that might be regarded with a bit of urgency (again, if that’s something that’s important to you.)

I’m willing to accept the gradual fading of my physical qualities, knowing that I’m steadily becoming more learned, more easygoing, more skilled and more wise. I have no reason to believe I will lose any of those qualities from age alone, until I’m pretty close to the end.

Of course, getting better year after year requires an intention to get better year after year. Self-improvement doesn’t happen by accident. A lot of what age apparently “takes” from us — health, possibility, optimism, confidence, personal power — is really just what we’ve given up on voluntarily. If you make a standing priority of improving in the areas that matter to you, then your birthdays will come to mark increases in capability and skill, rather than atrophy and loss.

But if you tell yourself the fitness ship has sailed, then it has. Same goes for the dream-career ship, the traveling-the-world ship, and the write-a-great-novel ship. You didn’t miss them, you just stopped thinking of them as your ship.

I think what many people particularly feel they lose is possibility. The range of what you can do with your life seems to shrink as you become more entrenched in your current obligations.

I don’t think this is due to age, but rather the cultural norm of letting your habits stagnate once you hit 30, and the subsequent slipping from improvement mode into maintenance mode. If you’re 5 or 10 years into a career, it’s harder to switch to something better because it usually means taking a pay cut. We take on family and work obligations that can easily consume all of our energy, if self-improvement is allowed to slip off the list of non-negotiable priorities.

If you’re living life in maintenance mode, then you are losing a step when you age. If you’re just getting older without a focus on getting better, then the same things become harder.

The passage of time isn’t a problem to someone who’s determined to improve every important aspect of their life over time. You still experience some tradeoffs, but it’s easier to say goodbye to your smooth skin and Olympic aspirations when you know you’re moving towards greater wealth, wisdom, skill, personal freedom and equanimity.

If you have long-term goals, age creates some pretty excellent consolation prizes. For example, if you’ve got a goal of getting into marathon-shape and doubling your income in the next three years, is it really that bad when you do find yourself three years older?

Disease and physical breakdown are inevitabilities, but they can be slowed with a long-standing commitment to health. When they do eventually set in, they can be managed gracefully with wisdom and presence — if developing those qualities has been a part of your lifestyle.

What the self-improver is really creating is ease — long-term ease. Taking five years to transition to a career that doesn’t drive you nuts might be harder in the short term, and much, much easier in the long term. Working out is harder than skipping a workout, but beyond the hour it takes to do either, the first option creates much more ease in life.

The lifelong self-improver is always setting up life so that it delivers increasing dividends in ease and joy. If it’s just a matter of course for you to spend every year of your life building skill, wealth, and wisdom, then birthdays come to feel like “leveling up” instead of losing out.

David Cain of Raptitude.com

Photo Credit to Joe Del Tofu

By David Cain of Raptitude.com

During a moment in the checkout line at Costco, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be the worst time for the apocalypse to strike. There might have been two hundred souls in the building, and if we were suddenly thrust into a survival situation by nuclear attack or zombie outbreak, we would have hundreds of tons of food, along with plenty of pharmaceuticals, first aid supplies, and toilet paper on hand.

If a crisis forced you to spend weeks or months together with a fairly random selection of strangers, you’d soon find out which of these people are a positive, helpful presence, and which aren’t.

Like most people probably do, I like to think I’d be one of the more helpful and welcome members of this new post-apocalyptic family, but I’m not sure why I think that. It’s probably the “Lake Wobegon Effect” — our tendency to overestimate our value and capabilities in relation to others. It’s the same phenomenon that has 90% of us believing we’re better-than-average drivers. (Clearly about 40% of us are wrong on that count, but I’m still somehow nearly 100% sure I’m not one of them.)

As Sam Harris points out in Waking Up, one of the reasons we feel so comfortable watching movies and television is because they allow us to observe and judge the intimate happenings of other people’s lives, while at the same time being completely shielded from their scrutiny of ourselves.

In any case, I’m fascinated by how readily we make judgments about strangers, yet how little we actually know about their personality and character (until, perhaps, some unlikely crisis brings them to the surface.)

Over the years I’ve become more aware of my snap judgments, but they still happen all the time. I frequently catch myself damning certain strangers as altogether bad people, on the basis of one instance of their not using their turn signal, or having a conversation that blocks a doorway.

I’m trying to overcome the habit of trying to justify these casual, internal condemnations of strangers. Instead, I see if I can overcome my initial negative impression completely, whenever I notice I’m being judgey. My new response to that negativity is this: I decide to drop the low-level resentment, and instead become their secret ally, for the few minutes we are in each other’s presence.

I’ll explain what I mean. This practice started spontaneously on an ordinary day a few months ago:

I’m walking several blocks to a little grocery store down my street, stuck behind a slow-moving man who is walking directly down the center of the narrow sidewalk. There’s no room to go around without stepping into the street, or shimmying past him on the building side.

At first I have my normal reaction of disdain and character judgments. The usual self-righteous internal monologue starts up: Some people just never think about how they affect others! I would never be that unaware of my surroundings! And so on. The fundamental message of all of these thoughts is, “I’m better than you.”

It’s telling that I only become interested in the Ethics of Proper Sidewalk-Sharing in moments when I’m being personally inconvenienced. Even though the issue undoubtedly affects millions of people every day, it never seems to be an important topic to think about at any other time. Many or most of our internal moral complaints about others are really just petty reactions to being inconvenienced, and not any kind of meaningful examination of personal ethics or how to run a society. I’m learning to distrust these kinds of thoughts when I have them, but I still have them.

Anyway, on this occasion I’m lucky enough to feel a pang of guilt for judging this person. He’s a middle-aged man, dressed in a golf shirt and dad jeans, almost certainly unaware that he’s blocking all but the most aggressive and acrobatic attempts to pass him. Still, it’s not fair to deem him a less aware or less considerate person than I am, because even though I’m frustrated with what he’s doing right now, I really know almost nothing about him.

Although I tend to walk at Manhattan speeds wherever I am in the world, right now I’m not exactly in a rush. So instead of making a move to get past this man, I decide to just relax and walk a good ten meters behind him, at a pace of his choosing. And instead of my normal habit of presuming he’s an especially bad or inconsiderate person, I’ll presume he’s an especially good one, or at least good enough not to deserve bitter glares from a stranger. 

Casual disdain for the odd stranger, for those of us who are prone to it, is a long-conditioned reaction and it doesn’t take much to trigger it. But in spite of my conditioning, I’d rather err on the side of being too approving and too forgiving of strangers, than settle into lasting resentment at the slightest offense.

So to keep myself on the fairer side, I decide that for as long as I’m behind this man, not only will I refrain from judging him, but I will watch out for his well-being, and come to his aid if necessary.

Whatever happens, if I really think I can help, I will offer my help. If he looks like he’s searching for an address, I’ll ask him if he needs directions. If there does happen to be a meteor strike or an alien invasion during my short tenure as his guardian angel, I will help him get to safety, phone his loved ones or fend off roving bandits. Even if there’s no obvious way in which I can help, I’ll still harbor a secret hope that this walk and the rest of his day goes well for him.

Now, it’s not important whether any of these events are likely to happen. The point is to locate that feeling of being willing to help, of being someone who cares about this other person. These feelings are incompatible with that of being just another cold stranger.

By doing this I’m creating a total, deliberate inversion of my initial feeling towards him. In the first moment I noticed him, he was an adversary, just another instance of evidence that the human world is mean, and that we are a selfish, thoughtless species — an irony that was almost lost on me. And now he’s someone I’m cheering for, someone whose well-being is worth something to me.

The most gratifying part is knowing that this man has no idea he has gained a secret ally — just as he probably had no idea when he gained, briefly, a secret detractor. My new role makes me feel good in the way judging him made me feel bad.

We make snap judgments of others all the time, and it’s not really on purpose. Those kinds of thoughts happen like reflexes. But we don’t have to believe them. If my initial impression of a stranger is a negative one, there’s no reason to take for granted that he truly is undeserving of respect, help, or well-wishes. In fact, I am almost certainly wrong to come to any conclusions about a person’s character after only “knowing” them for three seconds.

And I no longer believe that these kinds of judgments are somehow helpful to the world at large — that I’m somehow upholding order and civilization with my intolerance of any perceived infringement of sidewalk ethics. They are only helpful in a completely self-serving way: to convince myself that I shouldn’t be experiencing the inconvenience I’m currently experiencing.

If you live among strangers, chances are you are constantly becoming a private adversary to other people in ways you could never comprehend. Maybe somebody at the grocery store secretly hates you because of where you lock your bike up, or because you ride a bike at all. Or maybe you stand too close in the ATM line, or you use too many buzzwords, or you’re breaking some unwritten rule in a restaurant, or you’re in the way and have no idea. When you think of all of the petty things for which you’ve privately condemned someone at one time or another, it’s no stretch at all to imagine how often you are, in someone else’s eyes, clearly a bad person.

I’ve discovered that as much as I value good sidewalk etiquette and awareness of one’s surroundings, I want to be the secret adversary of as few people as possible. So part of my recovery is this new habit of becoming a secret ally to a given stranger the moment I notice I’m tempted to become his secret enemy.

Not only does it make that particular instance a much more positive and enjoyable interaction for me, but it’s quickly lightening up my overall relationship to strangers, even to the entire species.

I wonder a lot about the private grievances (and fondnesses) that arise between strangers, as we briefly pass into and out of each other’s lives. Imagine if you could hear every verbal thought that occurs between strangers during a single minute in a typical public square, airport, or street corner.

I would love to think that we’d hear more words of compassion, fondness, and willingness to help than words of disdain, but I really doubt that. Casual coldness to strangers is probably the norm.

But every norm has exceptions. You certainly have had secret allies, at times you will never know. And you can also be one, any time you like.

David Cain of Raptitude.com

Photo credit: Kamal Hamid

by

David Cain of Raptitude.com

During a very famous moment, Krishnamurti asked the audience if they wanted to know his secret. The lecture hall went silent, and everyone leaned forward.

“You see,” he said, “I don’t give a shit.”

I’m paraphrasing. By most accounts he said “You see, I don’t mind what happens,” but he could have easily said either, and not giving a shit is a concept more people can identify with. I apologize for the vulgarity of the phrase — I will use it a lot in this article — but nothing else captures this piece of wisdom quite as well.

When you tell people to “not mind what happens,” they’ll probably look at you funny unless they’re the type of person who would be in the audience at a Krishnamurti lecture. But everyone understands that there are times in life when the best way to respond to an unpleasant event is to not give a shit.

Giving a shit really just amounts to thinking about what happened. If someone was rude to you on the phone, and you think a lot about it, you are giving a shit. If you hang up and shrug and then go for a bike ride, then you are successfully not giving a shit.

Giving a shit does not necessarily mean you’re doing anything useful, but it makes it seem like you are. It feels like there’s some kind of justice that you’re getting closer to with every moment you give a shit. But that’s not true, because giving a shit, by itself, is only thinking — and thinking has little use aside from figuring out what to do.

This illuminates one of our most stubborn, silly beliefs about human thinking: that most of it is worthwhile, that it’s actually getting you somewhere. Most thoughts just fill up your head and distance you from the life that’s still unfolding in front of you. They’re not leading to any important decisions or insights, they’re just taking over your present moment, and possibly shortening your life on the other end too.

We often believe that our thoughts are accomplishing something just because they’re emotionally charged, or because they’re “about” something we consider important, like fairness, respect, or the state of society.

No. They are useful only insofar as they get you to move your body and do something useful. 

This isn’t to say that action is always necessary when it comes to responding to life’s countless little annoyances, rudenesses, and unfairnesses. In fact, usually it isn’t. Often there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you’re willing to do. That’s fine. In those cases, which I think represent the vast majority of cases, you’re better off not giving a shit.

Not giving a shit sounds like apathy, but it’s not. It’s simply a refusal to waste your energy and time on thoughts you’re not going to act on. So when you do give a shit, make sure that the point of this shit-giving is to figure out what you’re actually going to do in response to what happened, and then move on to the action part.

Here is a handy flow-chart:

 

It can be hard to not give a shit. It’s something you have to practice. It should be a celebrated life skill that we teach children, alongside math, shoe-tying and talking to strangers.

The other day I was out running and someone yelled at me from a passing pickup truck. I think he called me a pansy (or maybe a Nancy?) It startled me, and I might have even jumped a bit. They probably laughed or high-fived each other or whatever those kinds of douchebags do after a successful drive-by shouting.

There have been times in my life when I would have spent quite a bit of energy giving a shit about a minor injustice like this. But I felt pretty unstoppable that day, and it didn’t do much to me. I still felt the initial surge of adrenaline and anger, but decided that I would let this 5-second event just go on by, instead of investing in an afternoon-long internal protest, which I would probably feel a need to tell everyone about later.

I kept running, and noticed that only seconds later the street was quiet and peaceful again. There was absolutely no trace of what happened, because I didn’t keep it alive in my head by giving a shit.

I have known people who will tell stories, repeatedly, about some unpleasant twenty-second interaction that happened to them years ago, and which they evidently never stopped giving a shit about. I’m sure you have witnessed this too. Don’t fall for this madness. As a general policy, don’t give a shit.

Knowing how to not give a shit doesn’t mean you never give a shit about anything. It just means that when you give a shit, it’s voluntary. You have a reason.

The key to not giving a shit is knowing what the rising temptation to give a shit feels like. It always starts with angry or indignant words in your head, often in the form of a clever comeback or an internal sermon about respect and decency.

You may start playing out different scenarios in your head where you show the offender who’s boss in some way. Maybe you slip into a revenge fantasy where (for example) you run after the vehicle like the T-1000, and they end up driving into a tree, and you stand there and laugh with your hands on your hips.

When you notice these kinds of thoughts arising, remind yourself that you don’t give a shit about things like this, and invest your attention into the physical world again. What’s the next event in your life, now that you’ve moved on from the tiny, unfortunate event that just happened? Pay attention to what your body needs to do next, in order to move on to this next thing.

Then pull the trigger. Dial that next call, run that next mile, mix those drinks, hop on that bike… whatever logically comes next in the life of a person who doesn’t give a shit about petty things. If you’re itching to give a shit, give a shit about that.

David Cain of Raptitude.com