40 in 40
A summary of what I know about life at 40, in 40 short bullet points
For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be— Pink Floyd
On the occasion of making revolutions around the sun that is four times the number of fingers on my hands, I am jotting down as many thoughts picked up during this journey.
These are not maxims that can serve an exhaustive population but are hopefully useful to some.
Note: The first few points are abstract, but form the trunk for the remaining practical ones to branch out from.
[On Meaning]
- There is no known absolute meaning to life.
Birth, death, and the space in between are just chance events. In the very long run, nothing has any consequence. You die. Your species dies. The planet you live on is absorbed by its parent star and dies. That star and its uncountable siblings will die too. Everything is marching towards the ultimate heat death, without any intent, or remorse, or pride.
There is great relief in knowing this.
[On Entropy, Energy, Information]
2. This is not to say that there is no meaning.
Everything you experience is generated by the machine between your ears. It seeks meaning, and it may eventually find one.
The most convincing answer it can offer as of now is the Physics explanation: You are an agent to accelerate entropy. You play your part in helping the Universe get to the ultimate equilibrium by building local pods of low entropy, which in return increases global entropy.
So, the tentative meaning of life [in Steven Pinker’s words] is: “To deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
3. Everything in life is about efficient energy management.
It dictates the metabolism of cells and the ascent and collapse of civilizations.
4. This efficiency management is done through information.
Life is a constant play of observing, learning, and acting to find more order.
[On Practice]
In practice, you need not go into this abstract discussion. Your genes and their local representative, the brain, will guide you on your day-to-day journey.
5. The brain seems to say that the goal of life is to: Lead a reasonably long, painless, and fulfilling life.
6. Randomness controls (without consciously controlling) a large majority of this.
E.g. genetic disposition, circumstances you are born into, chance events and encounters throughout your life.
7. Life then is the engagement provided by the conscious steering of the very little one has control over.
8. Lifespan and physical pain can be optimized by taking care of health.
To do: Know that the body is a biological machine and treat it like one. Provide it with the right fuel (energy, nutrition), rest, maintenance, and load.
More tactically: Eat whole foods, avoid poisons (sugar, alcohol, etc.), hydrate, weight-train, walk 5+ miles/day, sleep 8+ hours/day, fast occasionally
9. Lifespan and physical pain can also be optimized by avoiding conflict.
To do: Apply your feet/mind to/towards a safer society — one that provides protection from the elements, aggressive beings, and foolishness.
10. Mental pain can be alleviated through art & play. This comprises observing nature, poetry, music, cinema, stories, sports, etc.
To do: Widen your art appreciation aperture — learn more languages, be open to more cultures, try more forms of art.
11. Mental pain can also be alleviated through friendships.
To do: Make friends. Then invest time in meeting them, participate in their lives, ask for their support, give them unconditional support, and keep in touch.
12. Fulfillment can be found only by getting a wholesome human experience, where each living moment is savored with attention.
To do: Practice mindfulness all the time.
13. Fulfillment can also be found by identifying an arbitrary goal and chasing after it.
Sustaining or increasing the collective happiness of all sentient beings in the Universe (until everyone organically loses the fight against entropy) intuitively seems like a worthy goal to chase.
[On Wealth]
To fund the points above, you need money. A few ways to generate wealth are:
14. Learn a skill that has a high supply/demand mismatch in your era then find employment in that field.
You need not love it or be already gifted at it. With some liking and aptitude, you can practice and become an expert at almost anything.
15. Spend < Earn
16. Spend > Save
The second bite of a cake tastes less sweet. A dollar spent is likely to bring more joy in younger years vs later years.
Usually, experiences bring more joy than things.
17. Invest consistently
Keep two years’ worth of expenses in a liquid asset, like a HYCD. Invest the rest in higher return (also higher risk) instruments.
[Easy] To do: Buy index funds consistently at a set frequency to leverage cost averaging. Do not sell and disturb the compounding.
18. Do not borrow. Do not lend.
Unless circumstances are excruciating.
This doesn’t include mortgage, venture capital.
[On Wisdom]
To operate on the points above, you need wisdom. Wisdom is about making good decisions. This can be done by:
19. Data — Find out facts and known patterns gathered about nature and society
To do: Read about everything from cells to cosmos, cognition to civilization; Observe; Engage with a diversity of situations.
20. Algorithm — Find rules and methods developed to work with data
To do: Learn ways to model using words, art, math, computation.
21. Empathy — Understand how other living beings experience life
To do: Engage with a diversity of people and situations; Adopt a pet; Read fiction
22. Diversity — New ideas are born when different threads collide
To do: Learn about a variety of topics; Be open to diverse opinions; Build diverse networks to leverage a wider cognitive repertoire
23. Use the Reductive technique
Break any problem/solution into its constituent parts. But be aware: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In Siddhartha Mukherjee’s words: “… to create the sum of the parts, we must begin by dividing the parts of the sum.”
24. Systems Thinking — Notice that everything is connected.
The universe looks for balance. If you move something, the universe will move something else to find balance.
To do: Think of the nth order effects of any action; Think of feedback loops, delays, and network effects; Draw causal diagrams.
[On Managing Life]
25. Persevere. Nature progresses through small wins/losses. The margin of error between win/loss, life/death is minuscule. The one that puts up a fight to the last breath and some more usually wins.
In Christopher McDougall’s words: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
26. Be irrationally optimistic. That is the only rational thing to do to win in an evolutionary game.
The number of things that work seamlessly like clockwork is indefinitely higher than things that break.
When you change your mindset from focusing on why something won’t work to how you can make it happen, things usually end up working.
27. Everyone is winging it, at best with some heuristics.
On one hand, this is concerning. But, this is the nature of nature. There are no clean answers.
But, there is also consolation in knowing everyone is in the same boat.
28. Practice > Passion
Passion is overrated. It is hard to find or retain.
When you are honing a craft, the act of that practice becomes the passion.
29. Measure everything
Seeing progress is the greatest source of motivation. Creating ambitious but achievable goals, even if for something small and seemingly inconsequential, provides the voltage to move in life.
But, be aware of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
For others: Assume they will cheat and create clever metrics, goals, and guardrails.
For yourself: Don’t cheat yourself. Stick to the essence of the activity you are measuring,
30. Habits > Goals
Once a goal is set, do not obsess over it.
Instead, focus on committing to a few non-negotiable habits that will by definition lead to the goal.
31. Do > Plan
Planning is only a reason to justify laziness
Start small, but start action
Fast fail, Try many things
The best antidote to anxiety is action
Your life will change when you change your life.
32. Decentralized > Centralized
Leverage the power of many by creating pods of solutions.
These pods could run in parallel, have some intentional redundancy, and have some intentional disconnect for uninfluenced experimentation.
Central should use the power of numbers to collate, standardize, disseminate information and energy. Local is more likely to effectively allocate energy with context and better control.
An organic adaptive bottom-up approach often brings better solutions than a planned top-down approach.
33. Feedback = Gift
Acting on feedback is the only way to grow.
Feedback can never be wrong. Even if the facts are incorrect, they represent perception. Collective perception makes common reality.
34. Embrace Randomness
Inject randomness in your life to stumble upon serendipitous encounters that can be boosters or trajectory changers.
To do: Build a diverse network of friends; Do spontaneous things; Take risks
[On Presence]
35. Past & Future = Fiction
The past and future exist only in the mind and are technically fiction.
Bringing these images to focus in the present is replacing reality with fiction.
Sometimes that is beneficial. But, it is an opportunity lost to experience a new image.
Playing a painful event in your head is going through the pain multiple times. It makes no rational sense.
36. Boredom > Always-On
Boredom provides the buffer space in the head to do sorting.
37. Journey > Destination
In many cases, the anticipation and engagement provided by the effort to get to a state is more joyous than the final state itself.
[On Ideology]
38. Most ideologies are not black/white.
A singular theme cannot cover life’s complexities.
Every ideology has historical and localized context.
To do: Don’t immediately reject others’ pov. Try to understand the underlying dynamics.
39. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Life is nuanced. Seemingly similar problems may need different (even opposing) solutions in different times/places.
To do: Solve problems in a bespoke manner. Reuse what’s known.
40. An ideal ideology:
Every individual should have the freedom to do whatever they want to [Liberalism]
To this add guardrails where one’s freedom hurts another’s [Regulation]
This decision is made collectively [Democracy]
By a local population [Federalism; Decentralization]
Market forces should be the primary solutions provider [Capitalism]
State must sit in where the market fails [Government]
Society insures itself by supporting the unlucky and infirm [Welfare]
