Pursue What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient

Here's another rule: pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. This is also a great thing to know. I think that's a tricky rule. Expedient might be, "We're going to have a conversation and I want something from you." A lot of conversations are like that, you know, because you have a goal in mind; this is what I want from this person. And so then you craft your conversation to what you want, right? You subordinate your words to the ethic of your desire.

You might say, "Well, what's wrong with that?" Well, what do you know about what you want? Haven't you been wrong about that before? Or you might say, "Well, what's the alternative?" Well, is there an alternative? Well, you have to want something from the person to even interact with them. It's like, no, you could want to see what happens. You could want to play. You could tell the truth. That's an interesting thing to do because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth, that's for sure.

You could let go of what you want and just say what you think. You could presume, and this is an act of faith too, that the truth does set you free and that the truth that's spoken properly makes out of possibility the order that is habitable and good. And then you could just tell the truth and you could see what happened, and that would be an adventure.

That's better than expediency, partly because maybe you're wrong about what you want, you know? And you know that because you're kind of narrow and maybe narrowly self-serving from time to time, and your purview of the world isn't as wide as it could be, and you're a bit bitter. So you tend to be that narrowly selfish because of that. You want something from a conversation, and you bend and twist it to get it. It's like, fine, but maybe you'll get something you don't want. Or worse, you'll get something that's positively bad for you. That happens a lot.

Part of the reason there's a deep moral injunction to tell the truth, in a religious sense, is because there's a hypothesis behind that, which is: there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what will happen to you if you tell the truth. Now, that might be hidden from you because sometimes if you tell the truth—and I don't mean to blurt everything out carelessly—like this is a sophisticated thing to do. It's not careless. It doesn't mean just say any old thing that pops into your head. You have to be judicious with the truth.

But the notion would be if something emerges as a consequence of engaging truthfully and it doesn't seem to be going your way, wait, there's more to the story to unfold. Because, like, how do you know if it goes your way or not? Like, over what time span are you calculating this? Sometimes things can go pretty badly initially and then much better as they progress. Lots of times, the truth has that effect because you know, you reveal something that's maybe disturbing or shocking even to yourself and others. It causes waves, especially if it's a deep truth, and that destabilizes everything.

It's like, yeah, but maybe that's preferable to a false peace. You can't find out if it's true without doing it. You're not going to gather the evidence beforehand. So that's the true side of it: meaning, pursue what's meaningful instead of what's expedient. It's another hint, like the spirit of play about the pathway.

The yin and yang symbol, you know the famous symbol? It's two serpents, one black, one white, head to tail. Inside the black serpent, there's a white dot, and inside the white serpent, there's a black dot. The representation is something like: the world of your experience is made up of chaos and order. Order is where you are when things are going according to what you want, and chaos is everything that can come in and disrupt that. Both of those can be positive and negative too; too much order is tyranny, right? Too much chaos is nihilistic uncertainty; optimized balance.

So let's think about what the optimized balance would mean. You have a structure of perception and conception that you inhabit. It's orderly—reasonably orderly, orderly enough so that when you inhabit it most of the time, things are going the way you want them to go. But things change and shift, and you don't know everything you should know, so you can't just stay where you are with a good thing. You have to expand.

And as you expand, you move out of the domain of order into the domain of chaos, or out of the domain of actuality into the domain of possibility. Then you might think, well, how do you know when you're doing that optimally? Well, one marker, as I said before, maybe that you do it in a spirit of play. But another is—and this is so much worth knowing—things get meaningful. You know people ask, does life have any meaning? It's like, why is anything worth doing if in 4 billion years the Sun is going to envelop the Earth?

The answer to that question is, that's a stupid question. I can prove that in some sense. It's like, you're a mother and your baby's crying, and so you're going over there to do something about it. Someone comes along and says, "Why? Why do you care if that baby's crying? You know, in four billion years the Sun is going to envelop the Earth."

What's the right response to that? It's like, it's something like, "Go away—are you out of your mind?" And the answer to that question is, yes, you are out of your mind. Of course, you can find a time frame or a spatial frame of reference that makes everything you do pointless. You know, it's like, "What is this going to matter in 20 trillion years?" Well, it's like, the only proper response to that is, that's not a wise time frame.

Imagine you're in a concert, you know, listening to some great music and it's got you, you know. Someone taps you on the shoulder, and you know this is going to come to an end. What's your response? Like, "Go away!" And that's the right response to that voice in your head that does those things to you which says, you know, you're engaged in something and a nihilistic thought comes out, "Well, what's the point of this given, you know, how unbearable the world is and the current political situation and the fact that we're inhabiting some ball of dust on the edge of some fringe part of the cosmos and that everything's dead and material?"

It's like, "Get thee behind me, Satan," right? Real—it’s not a mark of wisdom. It's not a mark of wisdom to let nihilistic demonic voices steal your joy. That is not a mark of wisdom. You might object, "Well, at least it's not naive." It's like, yeah, cynicism might be preferable to naivety, but it doesn't hold a candle to wisdom, and that's worth knowing too.

Cuz once you've been hurt and you're cynical, there's no going back to naive. But there's no point in staying at cynical and there are degrees of courage way beyond cynicism. Some of that is the regaining of the faith you had as a child despite your current level of wisdom. And that's something to strive for, right? That's a moral attainment; that's not a burying your head back in the sand—quite the contrary.

And so, well, back to the yin and yang symbol. Imagine you have an instinct that orients you. Well, you do, as a matter of fact. There's a reflex that's replicated at multiple levels of your nervous system, and it's ancient. If you have a nervous system as an animal, you have this reflex, and the reflex is something like surprise. You know, if I walk across the stage and I hear a loud noise behind me, I might go like this, and that would be automatic because I'm gripped by unconscious systems.

What's happening is some chaos has emerged, and it stops me in my tracks because something unexpected happened. My current plan is incomplete, and then I'll turn and orient towards the place of the disturbance. That's the beginning of exploratory behavior. Then I might run away, which might make me safe, or I might cautiously investigate, in which case I can find out what caused the disturbance, maybe rectify it, and maybe update my plan so that that sort of thing doesn't happen again. That's a better approach.