This letter is for those who want to do something that matters.
Because if you’re observant, it’s not difficult to see the state of the modern world.
We’re addicted to our phones. We’re disconnected from nature. We’ve lost trust in public schooling, and for good reason. People are realizing that an education model adopted from a Prussian military state can’t work. In other words, an education model that is a mirror reflection of the education of indentured servants, created to keep people weak, dumb, and powerless – even if that wasn’t their intention, it was the result of incentives based on status and survival – was bound to make people lose trust in the system, because the state of their life is guaranteed to end up in a place they despise.
Where do they end up? In a job where they face the threat of replacement more and more as years pass. If you can’t see this, I’d encourage you to think through what hyperspecialized education leads to. You were blinded by status to get a degree. And by doing so, you probably didn’t pursue education on the side. So you narrowed your mind on one goal and allowed it to be conditioned with a one-sided worldview to be useful as one thing: a worker.
And once you become a worker, you start to realize that what you worked for all this time is (1) at high threat of replacement and (2) not meaningful in the slightest. You lost the curiosity and wonder of your childhood that brought a zest to life.
Everyone is either at work or at home dreading going back to work. There is little desire to soak in the good, the true, and the beautiful of reality that realigns your psyche toward meaningful contribution to those things.
Addiction. Disconnection. Lack of trust. Lack of stability. Lack of education. Fear of replacement. Status seeking. Survival mode. A gradual decline into chaos that makes us question the meaning of our existence. Constant questioning as to why you are working so long, what better things you could be doing with your life, creating a state of anxiety and overwhelm that traps you in a state of fogged perception, unable to actually think of a solution to get out, and it doesn’t help that you the time or energy to acquire the broad set of skills that would allow you to see clearly and create that solution.
Those are the characteristics of this meaning crisis we are facing.
So what do we do?
How do we live a meaningful life?
How do we reconnect with what we’ve lost while continuing to make forward progress?
How do we educate ourselves in a manner that doesn’t get us replaced by rapidly advancing AI and technology?
How do we find our unique and individual path and feel as if we are doing something that matters?
Let’s find out.
The Meaning Equation
If our lives are meaningless, what are we doing here?
What do we do with our lives?
How do we make sense of suffering and pain?
Is the good life as simple as a belief in a God, when belief is a disconnected map of that thing rather than the thing itself, and the map is interpreted by an individual’s culture, value system, language, and conditioning? The map, most of the time, is miles away from the territory.
I have a sense that we all want to feel useful. We crave purpose. We are social creatures after all… we want to feel connected – as nature is – to something greater than ourselves. And by losing that connection, we start to see life as meaningless.
The question then is how do I reconnect to that which matters? And how do we determine what matters?
To reconnect, we need to strip down and reorient our fundamental experience. To determine what matters, we need to pull from multiple disciplines and cultures to uncover a holistic direction – or highest order – to align ourselves within as an antidote to chaos and meaninglessness.
At the base of it all, there are 3 general categories or modes of existence.
- Being – connection to reality, direct experience, and the present moment.
- Doing – contribution to reality and the experience of others.
- Becoming – increasing your capacity to connect with and thus contribute to reality, personal experience, and the experience of others.
We all engage in these every day. But a massive problem arises when we do so unconsciously. We are assigned goals and values during our upbringing. What we do and who we become are at the whim of someone else. The schooling, the job, and the society all project what they think is good – often for selfish gain – leading us into a trap that has us questioning our sanity.
Being, doing, and becoming form a feedback loop.
They influence one another.
The more time you spend being, the less psychological time you spend in the familiar past or predictable future. You immerse yourself in direct experience. Your perception clears. You can achieve a neutral – or peaceful – mind. You aren’t projecting into a stressful future of tasks that make you feel that stress now, even though you aren’t in that situation. You aren’t reminiscing on a painful past, leading to the same thing.
From that state of clear perception, your doing increases in degrees of consciousness. You start focusing on what matters and thinking toward a deeper future. Your choices then create who you become, and when you do that from a state of higher consciousness and connection, your identity expands and sheds its limitations. Meaning is easier to make sense of.
Unfortunately, most people neglect being and get stuck in doing mode. Their attention is focused on the next task, next event, next meme, next pleasure, next cause of stress or anxiety, so they end up becoming something of that nature. Rivoted to “next,” avoidant of “now.” Their mind begins to narrow into a state of meaninglessness because they’ve lost touch with reality.
That’s where we start.
The now. Being. Direct experience. Maintaining connection.
Before we go any further, consider adding time for being even if you don’t notice its direct effects. Meditate. Go in deep nature for a day. Go on a walk and attempt to “push” your awareness toward the skies. Stare at your hand for 10 minutes and marvel at its intricacies. Go deeper into your senses. Feel the water on your hands as you wash the dishes. Pick apart the nuanced flavors of the food you’re eating. Explore the human experience that is happening right now.
Soak in more beauty.
It’s all around you. Sit with it until you can see it. Observe until you see clearly.
From that state of connection, how do we ensure that we are doing things that matter?
Aligning With The Highest Order
We aren’t adapted to this chaotic modern environment.
Phones. Computers. Information everywhere. It’s difficult to filter signal from noise. Since wealth and entropy are two polar ends, the more uncertainty there is, the more opportunity to create value there is. Individuals are learning skills and building businesses on the internet that wasn’t possible before, but many people are more uncertain than ever. And they don’t know how to order the chaos all around them.
Before the Industrial Revolution, we interacted with small communities and tribes.
The main information you were exposed to was that which was passed down by the elders of that community or tribe. A mentor of sorts.
Everyone used to be on the same page.
Now everyone is on a different page, and that creates conflict. We are in the middle of a psychic war. A war of worldviews and identities.
To understand this, let’s work from the ground up.
We lack meaning because we can’t make sense of the chaos.
The mind craves order, and once order is maintained by expanding our mind to the highest order, meaning isn’t difficult to find.
To live a meaningful life, we can synthesize strong conclusions across multiple domains like:
- Flow psychology
- Stages of development
- The ultimate structure of reality
In the next section of this letter, we can use that understanding to create our own unique path in this life. One that brings meaning through mastering ourselves and our craft so we can contribute in a way that matters to others.
How To Enter The Flow State
They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible. They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called “paramount reality” of everyday existence. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When people enter the flow state, they call it a “spiritual experience.”
However, I think that description is misguided as to what is actually happening.
Most “spiritual experiences” can be more accurately described as clear perception. Clear perception leads to decisions aligned with the transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful.
No distractions. No projections. Minimal to no limitations. You feel invincible because you are locked into the here and now. You tap into the source code of reality and flow with it.
To enter the flow state, or achieve an extremely clear state of perception, you need a few things.
1) A Hierarchy Of Goals
Order is created when the mind has a clear path to focus on.
Chaos is created when there are gaps in that path of either knowledge, skill, or understanding.
When you’re having a conversation, if you don’t have a shared goal, it will probably devolve into conflict and argument. You see this on social media all the time. People with vastly different worldviews are arguing their points without attempting to understand what goal their mind is working toward.
Everyone has a goal they are working toward.
For most people, those goals are assigned to them. They do what parents, teachers, and authorities tell them, so they learn the knowledge and acquire the skill to do that narrow set of things, conditioning their mind into a potentially destructive state.
Zoom out and determine what you want out of life.
Create a frame. Vision and anti-vision. What you do and don’t want out of life. Let it evolve with time. It’s not going to be perfect at the start. From there, create a hierarchy of goals. 10-year, 1-year, monthly, weekly, and daily priorities.
These goals are for direction and clarity. You aren’t supposed to achieve exactly those things. If they change, let them.
2) Deep Interest
Contemplate your life.
What you do and don’t want.
The temporary goals create a frame for your mind to adopt.
Now, what interest, topic, or skill will help solidify one piece of that puzzle and move you forward toward your ideal lifestyle?
Start there. Pick something to begin studying. Block out time for it. Read a fundamental book. Watch a lecture or podcast. Follow new social accounts. Expose your mind to more information and allow your vision to filter for signal.
This is only the starting point. As we will learn, through interest-based education, you will have to learn much, much more. You will have to learn for life. To master one interest, it will demand that you go deeper. It will demand that you learn another, then another, until you have a deep interest in the intricacies of life itself. To think that everything, and I mean everything, isn’t interesting is to have lost your ground. You’re distracted.
If a good, true, and beautiful life is important to you, anything other than being or doing in alignment with that is, by definition, wasting your time.
3) Challenge & Skill
If your skill is high and the challenge low, you will get bored.
If your skill is low and the challenge is high, you will get anxious.
Both scenarios prevent you from getting into flow, increase the potential for chaos, and, when left unchecked, can lead to feelings of meaninglessness.
The boredom stems from self-centeredness. Your focus breaks, a new desire pops into your head, and related thoughts start filling your attention.
If you are bored at work, you will start thinking of more productive things you could be doing.
The anxiety stems from self-consciousness. Your focus turns toward your concept of self, and again, related thoughts start penetrating your field of awareness.
If you take on work that you aren’t good enough to do, or challenge a player that is much higher level than you, negative thoughts of doubt start to come in.
The antidote to chaos is an interest-based project.
Projects force you to learn effectively. They help you realize that success in building a project is not as simple as learning one skill. In a one-person business, you don’t just learn “marketing” if you want to be financially free. No. You may start with that, but then you get exposed to branding, content, product, persuasion, psychology, and more auxiliary skills that don’t make themselves apparent until you see initial progress.
Meaningful projects order your mind and narrow your attention on the levers you need to pull every single day.
But that’s not the end of the story. We will loop back to this in the final section.
Side note: if you don’t have a skill you want to learn, consider writing. Any other skill or interest you plan to learn will demand that you learn to write. You will have to attract people to your work if you want to actually get paid and sustain it. Check out 2 Hour-Writer here.
How Your Level Of Mind Shapes How You See The World
To enter the flow state, you need a hierarchy of goals, deep interest, and challenge that demands a certain level of skill.
But we are all at different stages of development in our lives.
We all operate from different meta goals. We see different things as important and worth acting on.
Why does this matter?
Because if you are at a lower stage of development, frankly, you have no business acting and faking like you are at a higher stage. Putting on a spiritual hat when you haven’t earned that experience isn’t spirituality. It’s status-seeking.
We broke down the 9 stages of ego development 2 weeks ago in How To Become More Intelligent Than 99% Of People, so we will go over broad stages here for understanding.
Most humans, in most domains, evolve through 4 broad stages:
- Ego-centric – focused on the survival of ourselves.
- Group-centric – focused on the survival of our group, tribe, nation, or ideology.
- World-centric – focused on the survival of humanity and the biosphere.
- Cosmo-centric – focused on the survival and harmony of the cosmos and beyond, the highest order.
As a society, we are still mostly at the group-centric stage. The election is quite a good indicator of this. People are still worried about defending their side rather than seeking the truth and transcending their harmful identity.
This weaves in the topic of mental survival. Where animals attempt to survive the information in their genes and humans attempt to survive the information in their genes and consciousness.
This can be seen across all domains from religion to business to ecology to relationships.
When your religious (group-centric) beliefs are challenged, you may feel threatened, as if your mental body, or identity, isn’t going to survive, so you attempt to reproduce the information in your head by preaching and arguing as to why your limited worldview should be adopted by the other.
We can go over more examples, but to keep this brief, most of your emotional reactions and feelings of being offended stem from an inability to open your mind and expand your identity to the next stage.
How does this have anything to do with a meaningful life?
Well, if you are so focused on yourself and your group – like 80%+ of people – and those concepts (religion, schooling, politics, etc) are bursting at the seems with the rapid spread of information and acceleration of technology, you’re kind of lost in a void until you attempt to self-develop toward the next stage.
Fun fact: regular meditation can help you “unstick” from a specific stage and accelerate reaching the next, because it helps understand your current stage and clear perceptions toward the next.
In the next sections of this letter, we will learn how to evolve into higher stages and what you, as an individual, should do that is meaningful.
A Brief Description Of Evolution & Ultimate Reality
Two words:
Transcend & include.
Okay, I lied. One more word:
Holons.
Wtf are you talking about Dan?
A holon is a concept that helps describe the fabric and nature of reality. The building blocks of the universe. First coined by Arthur Koestler and now adopted by Ken Wilber, a holon is a whole/part. Both a whole in itself and a part of something else.
For those who have studied systems thinking or the Greek philosophy of the Kosmos – an orderly and harmoniously arranged system, like the universe, in which everything has a purpose – you see where this is going.
Everything transcends and includes what came before it.
Atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. Letter to word to sentence to paragraph. Ego to group to world to cosmos. Employee to team to department to company. All of these interconnect infinitely, like how the employee is a whole in itself but also a part of a family, or group text, or the honey inside of a whole cup of coffee, both of which are processed by beekeepers and coffee manufacturers who may or may not be causing harm within their own whole processes. Reality is constructed of metaphorical holons. Metaphors breed understanding.
Tip: Holistic thinking, or thinking in holons, is quite fun and leads to deeper conversations and solutions.
One key insight is that reality is hierarchical. However, not all hierarchies are created the same. There are dominator hierarchies and natural/growth hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies or imposed order. They are often oppressive and harmful. It makes sense why the left wants to rid the world of these, but they often lump both hierarchies into the same group, which leads to them wanting to dismantle any and all order in the world, resulting in mass chaos (another massive reason we are in this position of meaninglessness). Natural hierarchies are emergent order. After conflict, pain, or problem-solving, a solution or level to the hierarchy emerges, transcends, and includes the rest, resulting in increasing wholeness and embrace.
So, by aligning what you do with this highest order of the Kosmos – whose systemic properties can be mapped to that of God, Brahman, or any other omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent identity of reality (not reality itself) – you begin to see reality as an interconnected whole, and your place or purpose within it starts to shine through. You perceive how your being, doing, and becoming send a ripple through everyone and everything, and your decisions carry a vast weight of responsibility that crushes the weak and empowers the strong.
That leads us into one of our most important lessons:
So, What Do I Do With My Life?
Happiness is the feeling that power increases – that resistance is being overcome – Friedrich Nietzsche
For Nietzsche, happiness is a sense of control over one’s surroundings. A sense that progress is being made.
For Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Godfather of flow psychology, this is the source of enjoyment, which I find to be a better descriptor than happiness.
But that begs the question, what do I make progress toward that leads to maximum enjoyment?
How can I find that perfect intersection of what matters, what I’m good at, and what is needed?
What do I learn? How do I learn? How do I contribute to humanity in a meaningful way that I can be paid well for?
Here are a few steps.
1) Your Personal Path
The first thing we must do is revolt against the meaningless path.
We must start from scratch. We must reject the education system whose sole purpose is to breed useful workers who are dependent on another for their paycheck. In turn, they relinquish their control over their emotions (stress from paying bills) which impacts their potential (their mind remains narrow) and prevents them from change (if they dig themselves too deep).
How do we start from scratch?
By ideating, creating, and iterating our own narrative. Our own story. Not the narrative that was assigned to you by parents, teachers, and peers.
To do this, you create a vision and anti-vision. This starts to form a mental frame from which you can focus your attention on things that matter. Since we’ve already discussed that, here are a few key questions to uncover what you want to do:
- What are you most bothered by? This could be behavior, the state of the world, how people think, etc.
- What were you most interested in as a child?
- If you could change one part of the world, what would it be, and are you conscious of its impact?
- Who are you most inspired by? Can you continue their work?
- If you could study something all day, what would it be?
There are a thousand more questions I could ask, but I will let you let those 5 questions trigger more thoughts. Sit with them for at least 10 minutes. A notebook would be helpful.
All you need is a starting point.
A spark of curiosity to kickstart your journey into the unknown.
Your personal and unique path is the bridge between your anti-vision and vision. Acquiring knowledge, building solutions to problems, and developing yourself to take on more complex challenges. On that path, you can help others with the bridge you create.
2) Interest-Based Education
Here’s the kicker:
There is no right path.
If I could assign you a path to take, you would end up in the same place. Replaceable and dependent. You must create your own path through a better style of education. Self-education.
I was a straight-A student in high school.
Before I went to college, my parents got divorced, money became scarce, and I rapidly realized that I didn’t want to end up in that situation. As a child, I was observant as to what made my parents’ lives seem unhappy, unhealthy, and unfulfilling.
That alone sparked my interest-based education. I began to question everything, and thanks to the internet, those questions could be partially answered. The other answers were found as my experience increased.
I started by studying religion and then arguments against religion. When I couldn’t find answers that satisfied me, I started betting on myself. I dove into fitness and nutrition but realized that was only one domain of my life. I knew I had to get my financial situation in check, so I started learning about business. It all felt so shallow, so I dug deeper and dove into philosophy.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve experimented with a plethora of nutrition models, training programs, business models, religious worldviews, metaphysical philosophies, and more that made me much more adaptable than any narrow specialized education could have.
I realized that in order to be great at business, I had to move up a layer to philosophy of mind, meta systems, and more that grow you into higher stages of development.
Now stick with me, here’s the cool part:
Most of history’s greatest thinkers, like Marcus Aurelius, had the privilege of being taught by the world’s best teachers. To prepare them for leadership, they were mentored by top mathematicians and strategists. It’s not a matter of luck why they were great.
This disappeared after the Industrial Revolution. Everyone started learning from teachers with poor incentives to be the greatest inside of a public school system.
Now, with the rise of the internet and social media, you have access to the world’s greatest minds. They are posting content every day because that’s their purpose.
However, the information they distribute is still tailored to suit a shallow algorithm. You can pick up general information about a field, but it won’t lead to you being the best.
So, my advice is this:
- When you feel that spark of curiosity, go all in.
- Follow new people. Buy books. Listen to podcasts on walks or commutes. Binge-watch YouTube lectures.
- When you find a topic important, purchase a course on it.
- When you find one thing you want deeper education in, seek out a mentor.
We don’t live in ancient Greece, and you aren’t the heir to the throne. You don’t have the luxury of being given a great teacher by default.
So, you’re going to have to pay for their time. And that’s only a bad thing with people who either (1) don’t understand what money is or (2) have an irrational and poor relationship with money. If that’s you, read my letter, The Truth About Money.
No, modern mentors shouldn’t give out their knowledge for free. The lips of wisdom are closed except to the ears of understanding.
3) Contribution To Humanity
The purpose of this entire letter was to help you find meaning.
So far, we’ve learned:
- A meaningful life is a recursive relationship with being, doing, and becoming to appreciate, contribute to, and deepen your capacity for appreciation and contribution. The doing must come from being.
- You are a part of an evolved conscious form called society, culture, etc and it is your duty to maintain and strengthen that connection through contribution.
- The best way to contribute is by finding the intersection of what matters, what I’m good at, and what is needed.
In my eyes, the best way to learn and contribute is on the Internet. That’s where the attention is right now, and you need attention if you want to contribute in any meaningful way.
Personal brands and creators – who don’t get trapped in the popularity or status race – embrace the path of uncertainty and find meaning in the unique and helpful products they sell. They aren’t personal brands or content creators at all, actually. They are simply people who saw the opportunity of distributing the value they have to offer – and getting paid to do so – where the attention is right now. The place where they can make the greatest amount of change.
If you want to sustain what you love to do, then you will have to make money.
If you want to make money doing what you love, then you will have to start a business.
If you want to start a business, you will have to educate yourself with the broad array of skills necessary to do so. That is a part of your interest-based education. At some point, if you want to continue your path of mastery, you will become interested in business. Hopefully, you will go through the stages of development so you can do so in a way that results in the least harm (no, businesses aren’t evil, but not starting one ensures that the evil ones dominate.)
This is getting long, and I’ve written about this before, so I’ll end here.
I’ll end with this:
If you want to learn more about the new media and economy, watch my One-Person Business playlist on YouTube.
If you want to start a meaningful business around your interests, check out 2-Hour Writer (for building an audience) and Mental Monetization (for turning your knowledge into a product that you distribute to that audience.)
– Dan
