Science Archives - Page 3 of 6

Why Rest Is Essential To High Performance

April 9, 2019August 10, 2023 Nik

On The Tim Ferriss Show, LeBron James said he sleeps eight or nine hours each night. Sometimes ten. And if he can’t get those, he’ll catch up with a two-hour nap. James is a prominent fan of quality shut-eye, but not the only one.

According to ESPN, sprinter Usain Bolt and tennis stars Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova also shoot for an average sleeping time close to the double-digits. Point guard legend Steve Nash told The New York Times that naps on game day are a common occurrence among NBA players — and they help.

The message is that sleep isn’t just beneficial, but essential to top performance.

This is easy enough to understand for physically demanding activities, like sports, but when it comes to knowledge work and creative professions, we have a much harder time accepting the importance of sleep.

And yet, all of us know how tough it can be to host a long meeting or how hungry we are after hours of creativity. So what’s going on here?

Happiness Is Loving the Boring Days

March 14, 2019September 17, 2023 Nik

Out of all the great TED talks that exist, Barry Schwartz’s is easily the best. He talks about what he calls The Paradox of Choice. I’ve gone back to it countless times for countless reasons, but my favorite part is when he shows this comic:

David Sipress, The New Yorker, Nov 24, 2003

Ask anyone how they feel about their life from ten years ago, and they’ll likely tell you that “those were simpler times.” Less to worry about, more to enjoy. Somehow, everything was easier. Today, it’s all complicated. Always.

“Everything was better back when everything was worse.”

It’s more than a good chuckle. So simple, yet so instinctively true. But why does our gut want to agree so badly when we hear this? Barry explains:

Finding Yourself Won’t Make You Happy

March 4, 2019December 19, 2023 Nik

I have spent the last seven years finding myself.

It all started with my semester abroad, which created two breaks. One voluntary, from my emotional connections, the other necessary, from my material possessions. My usual environment of friends, school, and family turned into a small room, space to think, and a blank social canvas.

Thus began my journey of self-discovery. First I weeded out some bad behaviors, then I explored new ideas. I dove headfirst into blogs, books, travel, and events. I learned random skills like Persian, SQL, and the Gangnam Style dance. Like on a scatter plot, each dot shaped the line.

The line was my life, and the more I tried, the clearer its trajectory became.

At a fairly young age of 21, this turned out to be one of the most productive things I’ve ever done. Having a purpose is important, and finding it is one of the biggest challenges most of us face in life. But I also became obsessed with it. I used to think the line was all that mattered. That, as long as I knew who I was, I could care less about the rest of the world. Now, I’m not so sure.

Finding myself has helped me in countless ways and I wish I could’ve embarked on this adventure even sooner. But, ultimately, it’s not what contributes most to my happiness.

That requires something else.

An Intuitive Promise

Years ago, Kamal Ravikant was down in the dumps. He’d built a track record as a successful entrepreneur, but then his last company failed. Too depressed to leave the house, he spent weeks in the dark, bed-ridden and barely moving.

Eventually, however, he got sick of himself. His chosen helplessness and resignation. He decided he’d get out of the hole or die climbing. On the day he did, he wrote down a vow: the promise to love himself. Without an idea of what it meant or how it felt, he built a practice around this vow.

Kamal’s life improved. First slowly, then surely, but at an ever-accelerating pace. His mind cleared. He took care of his body. He engaged with the world again. Over time, Kamal’s good thoughts, decisions, and habits compounded.

Good things started happening, some of which he couldn’t possibly have controlled or anticipated. I can only judge from afar, but today, he seems calm and happy. A thriving author and investor, but one with few wants and needs.

When now asked why he thinks his simple idea worked so well, he says he intuitively built it around the best piece of advice he ever received:

“Life is from the inside out.”

Miraculously, both science and philosophy agree.

Unraveling the Existentialist Brain

One of my favorite German words is “Trampelpfad.” It describes a path in the woods that’s not quite a paved road, but well-trodden enough to make it the obvious choice. I like this word because it resembles neuroplasticity — your brain’s ability to physically change throughout your entire life. Donald Hebb summarized how you can use this to your advantage with a simple rhyme:

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

For every action you perform, your brain takes a picture with vast amounts of information. Which neurons fired, what was the context, how did you think of yourself at the time? Keep choosing the same actions in similar situations and your brain will start remembering it took a similar picture before — and make another one just like it. Actions become reactions, efforts become habits.

Neuroplasticity — the trampelpfads in your brain turning into highways — is what makes habits hard to get rid of. But it’s also what allows us to change them in the first place. All you need is to create new snapshots. You might not believe the line “I’m not a smoker” the first 100 times you use it to decline a cigarette but, over time, your mind will make it so. Until your brain is rewired.

That’s exactly what Kamal did. By insisting on loving himself long enough, he literally altered his mind, updating it with a new belief. Life is from the inside out. Beyond making biological sense, this idea is right up an existentialist philosopher’s alley.

For over 5,000 years, going all the way back to Plato, essentialism dominated our view of philosophy. It suggests we’re born with an inherent purpose, an ‘essence’ we must align with. But in the 20th century, a few bold individuals, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others, challenged this notion, asserting that:

“Existence precedes essence.”

Existentialism rejects the inherence of meaning. It says that first and foremost, you are. You exist. Discovering your essence, figuring out a purpose, all that comes second. In fact, doing so is not just your job, it’s the whole point of life.

So while both philosophies agree that “life is from the inside out,” only one leaves you with a say as to what that inside is. One is bent on finding yourself, the other allows you to invent yourself.

An essentialist Kamal would likely have concluded that, after a big failure, being an entrepreneur wasn’t who he was. And only an existentialist Kamal could have chosen to love himself in spite of not believing it at the time.

In a way, existentialism, like neuroplasticity, is the ultimate move towards gaining agency. If you believe you can create meaning from nothing, meaning is always just one thought away. That’s all fine and wonderful, but how does it contribute to your happiness? You’re right. It won’t. At least not on its own.

Life may be from the inside out. But happiness is from the outside in.

The Final, But Never-Ending Destination

Today, most people know Kamal as a founder and venture capitalist, but his first self-paced endeavor was to publish a book. A memoir of what he learned traveling the world after laying his father’s ashes to rest. Of course, no one wanted to read an unknown, unpublished author, so he kept rewriting it ten times over the course of a decade, collecting rejection letters along the way.

After his last, colossal failure as an entrepreneur, however, a friend urged him to self-publish a short account of how he’d recollected himself. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It became an instant bestseller. Funny enough, he now had the credibility to tell his other story. Rebirth was published in 2017.

Kamal has a third book, published in between the other two. It’s called Live Your Truth. The title perfectly encapsulates not just the story of his life, but also its biggest lesson: Finding yourself is the starting point, but continuing to share your discoveries is the final if never-ending destination of a happy life.

Life is from the inside out. Before he could enjoy the externals, the accolades, relationships, financial freedom, Kamal had to rework his inner wirings. But only when he shared his self-created essence did his bet on neuroplasticity really pay off. There’s finding your truth and there’s living it. Two sides of the one coin that is your life. “Live Your Truth” is pulling from both directions.

Managing your mind, loving yourself, confidence, keeping your promises to yourself, minimizing regrets, all of these are important. But once we have them, once we find self-love, self-belief, self-compassion, we must share them with others. Turn back outside. Return to the world. Live your truth.

And you can’t do that in a vacuum.

Don’t Forget the Second Half

At some point in our lives, self-improvement catches most of us. I get it now. It’s attractive. Immediate. Change one thing, one habit, one pattern, and you might change your whole life.

But learning to live from the inside, to reassemble the infrastructure in our mind, is just the first step. Rewiring our brain is a waypoint on our larger path.

As the existentialist worldview takes over, we slowly learn to deal with the vastness of freedom we’ve been afforded. To be less trapped by religious dogma or political doctrines. But as empowering as it is to infuse your life with self-created meaning, it’s still one step shy of happiness.

Because unlike life, happiness is from the outside in.

Whatever we find inside ourselves that brings us joy, only sharing it can get that joy to multiply. Seeing our truth is not enough. We must live it. That’s a job that lasts a lifetime, but one with infinite space for new discoveries.

Change your habits, but let them serve something larger. Find a purpose, but fit it to something larger. Live your truth, but live as part of something larger.

Dive into yourself. May life flow from the inside. But do it with an open heart. Allow happiness to visit. Don’t forget the second half. Don’t forget…

…to engage with all of us.

Why Your Problems Seem To Follow You

January 12, 2019October 2, 2022 Nik

Do you feel like you’re never quite out of the woods? Not exactly drowning, but certainly not cruising either. Like there’s always a bunch of problems, lurking just around the corner, waiting to be addressed.

If you’ve ever looked forward to a vacation for weeks only to realize the peace you’d hoped to find isn’t there, you know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’ve raised all hell to finish a big project, to push a huge boulder out of the way, and yet still woke up in a cold sweat the next day.

Well, despite how it feels, you’re not alone. You’re not the victim of a grand, cosmic conspiracy and other people don’t have fewer troubles than you do.

Thinking our problems follow us around is a feature that came in the box; a trait we all share. And it’s especially pronounced in smart, self-aware people.

Scientists call it negativity bias. It’s our tendency to assign disproportionately large value, attention, and meaning to everything negative in our lives. UPenn researchers Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman broke this bias into four parts:

Negative potency. If you had to rate your happiness after finding $50, you’d likely rate it lower than your unhappiness after losing $50. This has to do with loss aversion, a concept discovered by Daniel Kahneman. It’s not as simple as saying one is twice as powerful as the other, but it’s there.
Steeper negative gradients. When you have to pay a $1,000 bill in a month’s time, you fret more and more about it the closer the deadline gets. In comparison, your excitement rises less when you expect to get $1,000.
Negativity dominance. If that $50 loss and find happen on the same day, you’ll likely go to bed thinking about the loss. In a mix of equally positive and negative events, our perception of the whole skews towards the bad.
Negativity differentiation. Adversity often requires more thinking and is, thus, conceptualized in more detail. Psychology has increasingly focused on negative emotions and most languages have more words for them too.

Negativity bias is why we taste a tiny bit of sour in a sea of sweet, why it takes couples five positive interactions to neutralize one spat, and why we stress over one bad review in 50 great ones. It may drive us nuts today, but, for thousands of years, it’s how we survived. By spotting the bad before it kills us.

Over the last few centuries, however, particularly the last 200 years or so, our environment has evolved much faster than our brains ever could have. As a result, we’re now stuck with an outdated version of human perception. Our challenges haven’t disappeared, but their nature has changed faster than ours.

The logical response, then, is to tone down our negativity bias. If fewer events threaten our survival, there’s less reason to view them as potentially such.

For example, a lot of people might think their being perpetually broke is a big problem. But when more than half of all Americans are, that’s actually just the norm. Clearly, you can live with little savings for years and, in most cases, nothing drastic will happen. This isn’t to advertise being broke or to say you have to like it but to show you: it’s not really something worth stressing about. Especially not all the time and especially not if you’re working on it to change.

The habit we need to live this new, calmer version of reality, this less slanted version of the truth, is controlling our perceptions. This is an ability most people don’t even know we have. But we do. We can hit the pause button before negativity bias takes hold. We can ask: “What do I want to believe?”

It’s the old Stoic adage: You can’t control all that happens, but you can control how you think about what happens. This isn’t just a great filter to process life’s challenges through. In fact, it’s the only real solution.

Outside events hold no power over us in and of themselves. Maybe, they affect our bodies. Or our possessions. Or our time. But never our minds. Whatever impact they have on our well-being is impact we have afforded them.

Life is. Reality is. It’s all subjects and verbs. We’re the ones with the adjectives.

That’s what ‘problem’ should be. An adjective. Not a noun.

Life is only made of situations and how we look at them. Nothing else. Our brains may have evolved to favor the stuff that scares us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change. That’s what neuroplasticity is for. It just takes practice.

Your problems will only truly disappear once you stop viewing them as such.

If you really want them to go away, you must learn to see straight. To control your perceptions. Because in any situation, you can. And only those, really.

Limiting your negativity bias won’t make your life all sunshine and rainbows. But those problems following you around? Most of them will just fade away.

You Don’t Need Motivation — You Need Rational Habits

January 4, 2019October 2, 2022 Nik

I know, I know. It’s a new year. The last one sucked, but screw that, 2019’s here! With all the bells and whistles. Oh, you’re gonna do so much.

First, you’ll get your workouts back. Then, you’ll improve how you work. You’ll see more, live more, get more done. And, of course, you’ll finally start writing.

Except you’re not doing 2020-you a favor with any of this. Let alone 2030-you. God knows about 2050. But this? Forget it. It’s a charade. We did the same one last year, remember? The reason we keep doing it is that we spend all of December convincing ourselves that this year, this time, it will be different.

It won’t. The year you’re waiting for — the year you manage to somehow magically extend your January-motivation through the entire 12 months that follow — will never come. You don’t need motivation. You never did.

What you need are rational habits. Patterns that make sense.

When it comes to your health, brushing your teeth is a rational habit. That one’s obvious enough, so we do it. Sleeping 7–8 hours a night? A much tougher sell already. But it’s just as rational. So are getting fresh air, not overeating, and a light workout routine. The problem is, often, we only end up with these by accident. If ever. But what if you were intentional about them?

If you want to be an artist, waking up early is a rational habit. Write before work, and you’ll be under pressure. You’ll also be satisfied all day. Write after work, and the urgency is gone. The couch looks tempting. You’re tired. And drained from fretting about that hour all day. So you’re more likely to fail.

For every goal you can think of, rational habits exist. They either support it directly or make it more likely you’ll follow through on the actions that do.

Painters must paint. Entrepreneurs must open shop. Most of us function better in the mornings. Most of us feel tired after work. That’s not to say there can’t be the usual exception to the rule, but, in most cases, the same rational habits will make sense for the people chasing the same goals.

Rational habits sidestep motivation because they don’t depend on your mood. They minimize the impact of external circumstances on your ability to follow through. And their fallback versions are still more satisfying than even the best failed attempt. Rational habits bank on how your brain works.

Override your autopilot? That won’t last. Good luck changing 200,000 years of human nature. Just point it in the right direction. Ask if it’s an autopilot you can trust. That’s a control function, not a new system you build from scratch.

Our minds are pattern-seeking machines. Always have been, always will. Where there’s a loop, they’ll latch onto it, hold it tight, and try to never let go. Your job is to hang out around the right loops. Let your brain do the latching.

They say you’re the average of the five people around you. That’s character. But your behavior, that’s the average of your five strongest habits. Your most enduring patterns? Like it or not, they dictate your actions and, thus, results.

Science suggests 40% of our daily activities are habitual. Maybe it’s more. As long as the actions moving you towards your goals are included, you’re set. But there’s a high chance they’re not — and ‘occasionally’ won’t do the job.

Usually, what we want isn’t unreasonable. We know we can do it. It just takes longer than we think. We need grit, patience, and flexibility along the way. But, for some reason, the bigger, bolder, and more unlikely our goals become, the more we believe we’ll achieve them with a massive, one-time push.

I think the opposite is true. The more irrational your goal, the more rational habits you need to accomplish it. Only sane compounding patterns can sustain you long enough. Because you’ll need even more grit, patience, and flexibility.

You need rational habits for an irrationally great life. It’s not intuitive, I know.

But if you want to write a bestselling novel, starting with a daily tweet makes sense. Announcing your commitment, betting on it, and creating a vision board, however, do not. They might help you write the tweet and that’s fine. But none of it will get you there. One is the reality of being a published writer — it takes years of practicing the craft — the other just a story that covers it.

So you might as well start with tweets. But start writing. Forget ‘big goal, big motivation.’ Go for ‘big goal, small action.’ Hang out with the right habits. Take it slow. Experiment. Make it tiny. Make sure you succeed. Stay rational.

Where is motivation in all this? You’re right, it’s not there. And that’s why it’s hard. Because where’s the excuse? After all, now you can’t blame an elusive concept when you fail. It’s your fault. Because you broke the commitment. Because you skipped the small action. That sucks to suck up. But it’s true.

Motivation isn’t something we can properly maintain. Rational habits are. They’re rooted in action, not inspiration. And there’s always an action you can take. No matter how small. No matter how long it takes for the habit to form.

If this all sounds sad at first, give it some time. I think it’s empowering. Lose a dependence, gain actual agency. Better to face hard truths early in the year than a big, mystic failure at the end. That’s a rational habit too.

I hope my brain will latch on. But if not, I’ll just do it again until it sticks.

Self-Awareness Is Not a Character Trait

December 22, 2018September 22, 2022 Nik

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Edward J. Stieglitz

While this quote makes it clear that time is a bad way to assess the quality of a human life, it also begs a question: how do we best measure our lives?

When you think back, do you recount how much you did? How much you made? How happy you felt on average? Me, I’m turning inward this year. The more external a measure, the lower my chances of living up to the standard I set. There’s no perfect tool, but I like this question for year-end reflection:

How much have I learned about myself?

It acknowledges outcomes as side effects and zones in on the parts you control about your character, identity, and behavior. Living in sync with your natural tendencies while adjusting to your life’s context is a good way to be happy and content, at least most of the time. You don’t stress about externals. You know you’ll get there by getting better. And syncing is how you’ll do it.

But when I tried to answer this question, I realized I was about to give not just a bad, but a completely wrong answer. Does that make it a bad question?

I think it’s something else. I think we have the wrong idea of self-awareness.

Woke Is Always the Wrong Word

I don’t like the word ‘woke.’ Used to create or point out a lack of awareness around societal and racial issues, it does much for the marketing of an important movement, but little to actually build the understanding this movement seeks to create. Because what it does is split the world in two.

You’re either awake or you’re asleep. It’s a binary state and so, for the people using words like ‘woke’ to identify with or isolate from others, it’s very easy to fall into a worldview that’s binary too. In reality, all of life happens on spectra.

I might be well-aware of some racial issues and completely oblivious to others. What’s more, I only have a chance of recognizing each one in its own context. Unless my mind is in the right place at the right time, I can mistake the cashier’s being unfriendly for being racist or vice versa. I’m not big on politics, but it’s easy to see this how this debate could get very ugly, very fast.

But it needn’t be. Maybe, we just have to reconsider our chosen language. What if we used words like ‘responsive’ or ‘sensitive?’ Words that live on spectra already. It’d make our efforts so much more productive.

When it comes to self-awareness, we have the exact same problem.

There Are Two Kinds of Dictionaries…

I’m not an etymologist, but I don’t think it’s foolish to assume the words ‘aware’ and ‘awake’ being in close relation. The German ‘gewahr’ means roughly as much as the former, ‘wahren’ equals ‘to protect,’ to keep in its current state, and ‘wachen’ literally means to stay awake and potentially guard something.

Clearly, some connection to our state of consciousness exists. But that’s not what we think of when we talk about self-awareness, is it? We see it as a character trait. A quality. And a rather permanent one at that.

Just like an aggressive social revolutionary, we want our world to be binary. To split neatly into two categories. We talk about “self-aware people” as if that call was as easy to make as “he talks loudly” or “her hair is curly.” It’s not.

And yet, even most dictionaries focus on self-knowledge as a feature:

The quality or state of being aware; knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.

But if you find a good one, like Wiktionary, they’ll include another definition:

The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer.

It might seem like I’m nitpicking, but when you try to better understand how you live and move in this world, the distinction between these two definitions makes all the difference. One describes self-knowledge as static, the other as a state of observation. Mere presence is enough. You’re self-aware long before you draw conclusions and file them away. Just observe and you’re there.

Self-awareness is not a characteristic. It’s a cognitive state.

Closing the Archive

When I try to judge my year by how much I’ve learned about myself, I’m making two false assumptions in one go:

There is a fixed set of equally fixed elements to discover.
Knowledge about those elements will serve me permanently.

The truth is that, besides my physical features and abilities, there’s very little about myself that won’t change. That I can’t change. I have no interest in learning to play the guitar, but if I did it anyway, maybe I’d enjoy it after a certain amount of practice. Accepting the status quo is only useful if I’m not looking to change it.

Instead of considering self-awareness to be this internal archive of facts about who we are, we should dedicate ourselves to mastering the cognitive state. To build the thought habit of being conscious of our actions and feelings.

Being self-aware is like being alert or attentive or quick-witted. Sometimes you are, sometimes you’re not. But the degree to which is measurable. We can design tests to measure how quickly you respond to stimuli or count how many puns you drop in an hour. In theory, self-awareness is the same.

Except there’s no device for this yet. Imagine you had a written list of all your thoughts for one day. You could scan it for observations about your actions and emotions, then calculate how much of the time you were self-aware. How much would it be? 1%? 3%? 0.1%?

In any case, it changes the nature of the big, year-end question.

A Simple Behavior Instead of an Elusive Quality

Having external goals can be useful. They’ll spur you on in a certain direction and, to some extent, reaching them can make you happy. But if they’re all you measure your years by, you’ll likely have a bad time.

Measuring your inner progress and drawing satisfaction from how much you did for what you actually control feels relieving and adds balance. Problems arise when we impose the same standards of false permanence of external goals on our development as humans.

The difference between self-awareness as a steady set of ideas about yourself and a cognitive state you can practice is the same as the difference between knowledge and intelligence: one leads to a never-ending struggle for more, the other provides a daily standard that’s possible to live up to.

It’s not how much self-knowledge we’ve accumulated, but whether we assessed our thoughts and feelings at the right times that matters. Don’t ask how much more you know about yourself now than you did a year ago. Ask:

How much time have I spent observing myself?

Of course, this is only one aspect of the grand puzzle, but self-perception as your default cognitive state — or at least for a large chunk of the time you spend awake — seems, to me, a battle worth fighting.

It’s not bent on perfection or pinning down what can’t be fixed in place. Instead, it allows adaptation and encourages deliberate change. It’s a simple if hard to attain behavior, not an elusive quality. And it can start small.

Oh, and I have this feeling that, at the end of next year, you’ll feel a lot better about yourself when you look back.

What Is the Future of Learning?

November 28, 2018June 30, 2022 Nik

“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
— Bruce Lee

In the past four years, I have asked a lot of foolish questions:

Can I be a professional translator without any credentials?

If I want to be a published writer, should I still ghostwrite for money?

Do summaries of existing book summaries make any sense?

The seemingly obvious answer to them all is “no,” yet I did all those things anyway. And while some led nowhere, others now pay my bills. Often, the only way to get satisfying answers is to try, especially with foolish questions. The beauty of daring to ask them, rather than accepting the answers society gives you, is that you’ll have many more unexpected insights along the way.

Like that, today, the answers are always less valuable than the questions.

The Half-Life of Knowledge

In 2013, we created as much data as in all of the previous history. That trend now continues, with total information roughly doubling each year. Michael Simmons has crunched the numbers behind our knowledge economy:

You probably need to devote at least five hours a week to learning just to keep up with your current field—ideally more if you want to get ahead.

Bachelor’s degrees in most European countries consists of 180 credits (EU schools tend to use a quarter credit system as opposed to the semester hour system typical in the U.S.), and each of those credits is worth about 30 hours of studying time. That’s 5,400 hours. Sadly, what you learn from those hours starts decaying as soon as you’ve put in the time. Scientists call this “the half-life of knowledge,” a metric that’s decreasing fast.

A modern degree might last you just five years before it’s completely irrelevant.

Since new information is now generated more and more rapidly, it takes less time for said information to lose its value. Back in the 1960s, an engineering degree was outdated within 10 years. Today, most fields have a half-life much less than that, especially new industries. A modern degree might last you just five years before it’s completely irrelevant. Even with a conservative half-life estimate of 10 years (losing about 5 percent each year), you’d have to put in 270 hours per annum just to maintain those initial 5,400—or about five hours per week.

As a side effect of this global, long-lasting trend, both the time we spend attaining formal education and the number of people choosing this path have increased dramatically for decades. Years of schooling have more than doubled in the past 100 years, and in many countries, it’s common to study for some 20-plus years before even entering the workforce. In the U.S. alone, college enrollment rates have peaked at over 90 percent of the total population in the age group around secondary school completion already.

The larger our ocean of information, the less valuable each fact in it becomes. Therefore, the knowledge bundles for college degrees must get bigger and, thus, take longer to absorb. But the ocean also grows faster, which means despite getting bigger, the bundles don’t last as long. It takes a lot of time to even stay up to date, let alone get ahead of the increasing competition.

Instead of flailing more not to drown, maybe we should get out of the water.

A Scary Future to Imagine

While it’s important to dedicate time to learning, spending ever-increasing hours soaking up facts can’t be the final answer to this dilemma. Extrapolate the global scramble for knowledge, and we’d end up with 50-year-old “young professionals,” who’d retire two years into their careers because they can’t keep up. It’s a scary future to imagine but, luckily, also one that’s unlikely.

I saw two videos this week. One showed an unlucky forklift driver bumping into a shelf, causing an entire warehouse to collapse. In the other, an armada of autonomous robots sorted packages with ease. It’s not a knowledge-based example, but it goes to show that robots can do some things better than people can.

There is no expert consensus on whether A.I., robotics, and automation will create more jobs than they’ll destroy. But we’ll try to hand over everything that’s either tedious or outright impossible. One day, this may well include highly specialized, knowledge-based jobs that currently require degrees.

Knowledge is cumulative. Intelligence is selective. It’s a matter of efficiency versus effectiveness.

A lawyer in 2050 could still be called a lawyer, but they might not do anything a 2018 lawyer does. The thought alone begs yet another foolish question:

When knowledge itself has diminishing returns, what do we need to know?

The Case for Selective Intelligence

With the quantity of information setting new all-time highs each year, the future is, above all, unknown. Whatever skills will allow us to navigate this uncertainty are bound to be valuable. Yuval Noah Harari’s new book asserts this:

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

The ability Harari is talking about is the skill of learning itself. The 2018 lawyer needs knowledge. The 2050 lawyer needs intelligence. Determining what to know at any time will matter more than the hard facts you’ll end up knowing. When entire industries rise and fall within a few decades, learning will no longer be a means but must become its own end. We need to adapt forever.

Knowledge is cumulative. Intelligence is selective. It’s a matter of efficiency versus effectiveness. Both can be trained, but we must train the right one. Right now, it’s not yet obvious which one to choose. The world still runs on specialists, and most of today’s knowledge-accumulators can expect to have good careers.

But with each passing day, intelligence slowly displaces knowledge.

The Problem With Too Many Interests

Emilie Wapnick has one of the most popular TED talks to date—likely because she offers some much-needed comfort for people suffering from a common career problem: having too many interests. Wapnick says it’s not a problem at all. It’s a strength. She coined the term “multipotentialite” to show that it’s not the people affected but public perception that must change:

Idea synthesis, rapid learning, and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at and three skills they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.

While there’s more to it, it’s hard to deny the point. After all, some of these thinkers work on some of our biggest problems. And we love them for it.

Jeff Bezos built a retail empire and became the richest man in the world, but he also helped save an important media institution and works on the infrastructure we need to explore space. Elon Musk first changed how we pay and then how we think of electric cars, and now how we’ll approach getting to Mars. Bill Gates really knows software, but now he’s eradicating malaria and polio. The list goes on.

The term “polymath” feels overly connoted with “genius,” but whether you call them Renaissance people, scanners, or expert-generalists, the ability they share stays the same: They know how to learn, and they relentlessly apply this skill to a broad variety of topics. In analyzing them, Zat Rana finds this:

Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes deep doesn’t. You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp concepts of a broad variety. This ironically then allows you to specialize in something else faster if you so choose. This is an incredibly valuable advantage.

Beyond learning faster, you’ll also innovate more, stay flexible, stand out from specialists, and focus on extracting principles over remembering facts.

To me, that sounds exactly like the person an unpredictable world needs.

A Curious Boy

In 1925, one year before he entered school, Isaac Asimov taught himself to read. His father, uneducated and thus unable to support his son, gave him a library card. Without any direction, the curious boy read everything:

All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on.

“And so on” led to some 500 books and about 90,000 letters Asimov wrote or edited. Years later, when his father looked through one of them, he asked:

“How did you learn all this, Isaac?”
“From you, Pappa,” I said.
“From me? I don’t know any of this.”
“You didn’t have to, Pappa,” I said. “You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.”

When we hear stories about modern expert-generalists, we assume their intelligence is the result of spending a lot of time studying multiple fields. While that’s certainly part of it, a mere shotgun approach to collecting widely diversified knowledge is not what gives great learners special abilities.

What allowed Asimov to benefit from his reading, much more so than what he read or how much, was that he always read with an open mind. Most of the time, we neglect this. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how we learn.

In order to build true intelligence, we first have to let go of what we know.

The Value of Integrative Complexity

Had Asimov learned to read in school, he likely would’ve done it the way most of us do: memorizing or critiquing things. It’s an extremely narrow dichotomy, but sadly, one that sticks. Rana offers thoughts about the true value of reading:

Anytime you read something with the mindset that you are there to extract what is right and what is wrong, you are by default limiting how much you can get out of a particular piece of writing. You’re boxing an experience that has many dimensions into just two.

Instead of cramming what they learn into their existing perspectives, people like Asimov know that the whole point is to find new ones. You’re not looking for confirmation; you’re looking for the right mental update at the right time.

With an attitude like that, you can read the same book forever and still get smarter each time. That’s what learning really is: a state of mind. More than the skill, it’s receptiveness that counts. If your mind is always open, you’re always learning. And if it’s closed, nothing has a real chance of sinking in.

Scientists call this “integrative complexity”: the willingness to accept multiple perspectives, hold them all in your head at once, and then integrate them into a bigger, more coherent picture. It’s a picture that keeps evolving and is never complete but is always ready to integrate new points and lose old ones.

That’s true intelligence, and that’s the prolific learner’s true advantage.

A Matter of Being

Your brain is like a muscle. At any moment, it’s growing or it’s deteriorating. You can never just keep it in the same state. So when you’re not exercising your mind, it’ll atrophy and not only stop but quickly reverse your progress.

This has always been the case, but the consequences today are more severe than ever. In an exponential knowledge economy, we can’t afford stale minds. Deliberately spending time on learning new things is one way to fight irrelevance, but it’s not what’ll protect us in the uncharted waters of the future.

The reason the wise man can learn from even the most foolish question is that he never assigns that label in the first place.

Beyond being carriers of knowledge, we need to become fluid creatures of intelligence. Studying across multiple disciplines can start this process. It has many advantages—creativity, adaptability, speed—but it’s still not enough.

If we focus only on the activity of learning, we miss the most important part: Unless we’re willing to change our perspective, we won’t grasp a thing. It’s not a matter of doing but of being. The reason the wise man can learn from even the most foolish question is that he never assigns that label in the first place.

And so it matters not whether we learn from our own questions or the insights of others, nor how much of it we do, but that we always keep an open mind. The longer we can hold opposing ideas in our heads without rejecting them, the more granular the picture that ultimately forms. This is true intelligence. It’s always been valuable, but now it’s the inevitable future of learning.

Bruce Lee undoubtedly possessed this quality. By the time he died, he was a world-renowned martial artist, the creator of an entire philosophy, and a multimillion-dollar Hollywood superstar. All at only 32 years old. Long after his passing, one of his favorite stories captures both the essence of his spirit and how he became the cultural icon we still know and love today:

A learned man once went to visit a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher talked, the learned man frequently interrupted to express his own opinion about this or that. Finally, the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, then kept pouring until the cup overflowed.
“Stop,” said the learned man. “The cup is full, no more can be poured in.”
“Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,” replied the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?”

Why We’re Afraid of Being Alone

September 11, 2018September 22, 2022 Nik

Located at 2709 East 25th Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a grey, one-story building. Nested among trees, with concrete walls covered in poison ivy, it’s so inconspicuous it almost seems to merge with its surroundings.

Inside, however, lies the most terrifying room in the world. It looks like this:

It’s not like people are tortured inside the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs. But when researchers close the door and shut people in absolute, perfect silence, few can bear the experience.

In a room so quiet you can hear your own breath, heartbeat, blood flow, even your bones’ grinding noise, things get uncomfortable real quick. First, people lose their balance. Hearing helps us move, so in a space without sound, we must sit down. Soon, the ear begins to exaggerate, even fabricate its own noises, like a heavy hum or ringing sound. Some start to hallucinate.

While most people give up after minutes, once an hour passes even the toughest have had enough. That’s because — and this relates to actual torture — the pain we suffer in complete quiet is not physical. It’s mental.

Our biological aversion to silence is only a symptom of a much deeper, more elemental problem: we’re fundamentally afraid of being alone.

The Story That Never Stops

Locking yourself in a room that resembles the infinite, noiseless vacuum of space might be an extreme example, but there are other signs of our discomfort with nothingness. Some are rather obvious, like the constant engagement with our many technological devices or the frequent desire to escape our state of consciousness using music, drugs, sex, or alcohol.

Others hide on a less visible level, like what happens when we wake up alone in the middle of the night: We immediately start telling ourselves a story.

Maybe it’s a scary story about a stranger in your house, or a story about the coming day that excites you. It might even be a mundane story that makes perfect sense. But it is always a story your mind has conjured for the sole purpose of distracting you from the fact that, right now, there is only you, wrapped in darkness and silence.

If you pay attention to it, then pause, you’ll notice it’s only when there’s no story that the real suffering begins. Maybe that’s why the story never stops.

We rise from our beds in the morning and the voice in our head starts talking. We tell ourselves a story while we get ready for work, another one on the way, several dozen while we’re there, more at home, and the last one right until we fall asleep. Fascinating, right?

It’s almost as if consciousness itself is an endless fight against inner silence. That’s the most elaborate, universal scheme of escapism I’ve ever seen.

But what is it that makes solitude so terrifying?

Seeking Answers in an Answerless World

When asked what makes America the greatest country in the world in the opening scene of The Newsroom, one panelist answers with “freedom and freedom.” It’s true. No other country has placed this good higher in its value chain. And while most countries have been following in America’s footsteps, the weight of that freedom in the 21st century is now crushing us.

Not quite coincidentally, right after the atrocities of World War II, when the importance of freedom was clearer than ever, a philosophy trying to describe this burden arose. The core idea of existentialism is that “existence precedes essence.” That means you simply are — and it’s your job to give life meaning.

As seekers of answers in an answerless world, our main frustration therefore lies with choice. That’s why, when you dig into the ideas of Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus and others, you’ll find they all have their own terms for the oppression inherent in freedom. Some call it ‘anxiety,’ others ‘angst’. Sartre refers to it as ‘anguish’ — the painful awareness of free will and choice.

Today, we live in a world where individual freedom is more accessible than ever. It’s not universal yet, but reaching more people by the day. As a result, existential crises are at an all-time high. Young people get them earlier, older ones more often, no one seems to be spared. Sadly, our philosophers leave us only with questions. Questions, such as:

Who am I? Where am I going? What’s the meaning of life? Of my life? Who do I want to be? And why am I not that person?

That’s why, when we’re alone, there’s always a hint of anxiety in the air. All you’re left with when you take out your earbuds and turn off your phone are these daunting, existential questions posed by the freedom we value so much.

Naturally, rather than face them, we prefer to plug the music back in and run away from them full-time. We all go overboard with sensory pleasures one way or another. Some of us chase the thrill of orgasm all their lives, others drown their inner turmoil in whiskey, some forever dull their senses with TV.

We seek reassurance in stimulation. That’s what the story in our head, the constant engagement, the flow state experiences are really for. Because whenever the stream of ‘everything’s-fine-at-least-for-now’ stops, it’s like someone pushes us into that room and shuts the door behind us. Silence.

Suddenly, the questions become really loud. There’s nowhere to escape. But since we’re so busy engaging with the world in ways we hope will comfort us, we miss the reassurance from realizing we don’t need to. In hopes of not going insane, we drive ourselves insane.

And yet, the music stops for all of us anyway.

The Inevitable Truth

Imagine a single person, representing all of humanity, being locked inside the anechoic chamber. What would she do? I think she would scream, yell, and shout. As loud as she can. Until she is exhausted, ultimately arriving in the same silence where she began.

I think this image delivers an apt description of the world’s character as a whole: restlessness. But a body, an animal, any moving object, really, no matter how fast it goes, must eventually come to rest. It’s a law of physics.

The analogy here is that when we choose overstimulation, a burnout becomes inevitable. We all land in the occasional, long stretch of inner silence sooner or later. We can find it at the end of a burned down candle or face it in the comfort of our own choice. But we must all deal with it in time. Because for all the decision power we have, it does not grant us freedom from truth.

The truth I see here, at the bottom of all this, is sobering: I think we are alone.

As Twitter-philosopher Naval puts it, “life is a single-player game.” We’re born alone and we die alone. In between, we must learn to know ourselves, love ourselves, lose ourselves, find ourselves and do all of it over again. All of your life’s most important moments, you experience alone. You suffer pain alone. You enjoy the dopamine high of victory alone. Even things you experience in the presence of another person — your first love, first kiss, first time — you ultimately live through inside your own head and, thus, alone.

At first, that makes everything sound even scarier. But it’s actually beautiful.

First, loneliness is an absolute necessity to deal with life’s important questions. All of the noise and distractions don’t help. They make things worse. Because while sitting in discomfort won’t always guarantee the best outcome, running away will always lead to regret.

Second, our singular, unchangeable perspective on the human experience is what makes us unique. If our point of view wasn’t locked at the individual level, our species en masse would never have ventured this far. What each of us brings back from their own depths of quiet makes us stronger as a whole.

Lastly, and this is where the true beauty of facing your own desolation lies, we have solid evidence to believe it improves us as individuals. For over 3,000 years now, we’ve had a name for practicing the discomfort of nothingness.

It’s called meditation.

Engaging With Emptiness

Steve Orfield, the founder of the silent lab, has noticed something in his visitors throughout the years. Those suffering from autism, ADHD, or other conditions of anxiety and hyper-sensitivity enjoy the anechoic chamber. They say it’s calm. Peaceful.

There’s something to be said for quietness if the people who run from it end in overstimulation and burnout, while those with ailments around those things prefer it. Maybe it’s because the silence of reality is the best reassurance. It’s relieving to disengage, almost remove yourself from the world, and observe that it keeps turning for a while.

But doing that requires focus. When you pause your inner monologue, you need somewhere to pull your attention. Maybe it’s the image of your own, empty head. Or a tiny, visual or haptic sensation. The most common place people choose, however, is the one we all share: our breath.

In. And out. In. And out. Reducing your own expenditure of energy to a minimum is a deliberate decision to rest. It’s like taking a stand at the shore of the ocean and then letting the waves wash over you. The silence. The questions. The loneliness. Everything.

When you open your eyes, you’ll realize you’re still here. A survivor. And while everything’s the same, something’s always changed. I’m not a strict meditator and I don’t think it only works as a rigid practice. To me, the point of it is to engage with emptiness. To carve out a small space in your mind, sit there all by yourself and draw strength from that. You can do that anywhere, anytime.

Even the idea of a one-minute meditation on the subway reminds me of Will Smith’s observation about skydiving: “The point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear.” It doesn’t make it less dangerous to venture into the depths of your own mind. Just less scary.

But that alone makes it an experience worth having.

The Outside World and Us

As the world provides us with more and more freedom to self-actualize, the mental weight of that freedom gets bigger and bigger. Instead of facing what may be too much to lift, we’ve become masters of avoidance to the point of feeling physical discomfort with silence.

We flush our senses with emotions, running from the quiet in which difficult questions arise. In doing so, we miss the hard, but comforting truth that life is ours to live and ours alone.

Like the ancient tradition of meditation shows us, solitude is not a state to be feared, but one to enter prepared and practice. Engaging with discomfort allows us to focus our attention, accept what we can’t change, and address what’s important. And there’s more than one way to do it.

It takes lots of effort, but learning to enjoy solitude will make us more comfortable with our limitations, imperfections, and, ultimately, ourselves.

The outside world is louder than ever. Let’s meet it by being quiet inside.

What If I Invest In All The Wrong Things?

July 25, 2018September 22, 2022 Nik

I’ve always been a planner. The Joker would call me a schemer:

“You know, I just do things. The mob has plans; the cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. They’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds.”

“I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

While giving that speech in The Dark Knight, the Joker is wearing a nurse outfit. He’s in a hospital, visiting someone he put there in the first place. It might be ironic, but it’s also easiest to doubt my plans on days when I’m sick.

What if they’re really just…pathetic?

Trains Leave Stations All The Time

When I first got into crypto in the summer of 2017, choosing what to invest in was easy. The space was growing, but the good, serious projects were far and few between. One year and thousands of new companies later, selecting among even the top 1% feels like an impossible task. There are 17 good solutions to every major problem and all sources of information have their own, hidden agenda.

Once again, infinite choice has caught up to us. The community even has a word for it: FOMO. The fear of missing out on the next, hot investment keeps individual players forever anxious, circling around a single question:

What if I invest in all the wrong things?

Stuck in bed with a cold recently, thinking about my portfolio and my many other plans, I realized this question is about more than allocating your money.

It’s the defining struggle of a generation.

The Essence of All Philosophy

One of the easiest ways to distract two millennials is to tell them to arrange a meeting. It sometimes takes me as many as five or six attempts to schedule a simple lunch. Don’t even get me started on Friday night. Now I’m not perfect, but more often than not it’s the other party who can’t make up their mind.

That’s why, usually, I feel pretty good about my ‘schemes’. Whenever I’m done setting them up, I’m rewarded with fewer decisions in the moment. Planning allows you to forget the big picture, forget yourself, even, and to focus on the task in front of you. But on days like the past few, days when I’m sick or not working as much, the Joker’s ideas start to visit on me.

What if this project is a complete waste of time? What should I do next? Who should I hang out with, when do I really need to focus on dating, and what if I invest my money into things that go to zero? Is it stupid to keep it all in cash?

What if, what if, what if.

Two little words that ruin a lot more than just Friday night. The bigger the decision to make, the worse it gets. It’s a phenomenon that’s especially pervasive in my generation, but it’s far from new. As the wealthy and famous 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would remark:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. […] Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

You could call Kierkegaard the prototypical millennial of his time. Equipped with many more possibilities than his peers, he was still haunted by constant anxiety. “The dizziness of freedom,” as he would say. Given our modern-day choice cornucopia, it’s no wonder young peoples’ heads are always spinning.

But that’s not what we choose to see.

Three Rungs on Every Ladder

The most famous millennial meme is that we feel entitled. We’re eager to skip three rungs on every ladder and if we can’t, we don’t start climbing at all. That’s the story and it’s everyone’s go-to explanation for why we refuse to make many of life’s most important decisions.

We’re not marrying, we’re not having kids, we don’t even move out. We don’t make enough, save enough, invest enough. We’re not willing to get our hands dirty, we’re blinded by bean bags and ping pong tables, and we hope for the big payday that never comes.

And yet, having grown up in a world where school shootings are normal, where banks get bailed out for losing our money, a world full of fake news, corrupt systems, and crushing student debt, our expectations aren’t all that high. According to Stephanie Georgopulos, we’re well aware it’s up to us to do something about these things. But that doesn’t make committing any easier.

Maybe it’s not entitlement that’s at the heart of our procrastination at large. Maybe it’s the fact that, with 300 hours of video being uploaded to Youtube every minute, with thousands of potential Tinder matches, with over 200 types of bread in every Walmart and so much pressure to get it all right, it’s become really hard to choose.

This is beyond existentialist philosophy. Something’s happening in our brains.

The Joker of the Millennial Generation

One reason we stay on the edge of our seats when the dismal clown torments Gotham is that the choices he offers always seem so simple. Pay half your fortune or watch the Batman take the mob apart; save the lawyer or save the girl; sacrifice the convicts or the regular citizens — which one is it going to be?

As we listen to the Joker present our options, an answer forms in our gut right away. And yet, because they’re so full of moral dilemma, they quietly drive us insane. Like Kierkegaard, we know we’d regret the decision either way. This is where science kicks in. In The Paradox of Choice, researcher Barry Schwartz explains why the explosion of individual freedom in the past century continues to make us miserable today. He talks about five things:

Postdecision regret. It’s now easier to imagine we could have done better in hindsight, even if a more suitable alternative doesn’t exist.
Anticipated regret. The thought of making a choice only to find out you could have made a better one two days later is a paralyzing threat in itself.
Opportunity costs. The more things you can select among, the easier it is to factor in all the attractive features you’re missing.
Escalation of expectations. With such a big selection, it feels natural that perfect should be possible. But it never is and that’s depressing.
Self-blame. Finally, it’s clear who’s at fault for all this disappointment: we are. It was healthy to blame a lack of choice, but that excuse has gone.

These are all bad, especially in conjunction, but it is number two that is the bane of our existence.

“How will it feel to buy this sweater only to find a nicer, cheaper one in the next store? How will it feel if I take this job only to have a better opportunity appear next week?”

The questions millennials ask themselves on a daily basis are all variants of the same theme: What if I invest in all the wrong things?

Anticipated regret is the Joker of the millennial generation.

The sheer number of options we have makes every decision feel like a moral dilemma. So we stand there, frozen, dizzy from all this freedom. Paralyzed by choice, regretting what we have not yet screwed up. That’s why we keep watching superhero movies, rather than living them.

But, as in any good superhero movie, there is a silver lining.

The Purpose of Supporting Actors

For as much as he claims to be an “agent of chaos, a dog chasing cars,” the Joker then turns right around scheming. It’s only on the surface that he’s aimless. From Kevin Lincoln’s piece about the 10-year anniversary of the film:

“The Joker’s plan is to appear as if he has no plan, and by hiding the plan — and, most importantly, disguising the inevitably tedious moment in which the villain reveals his plan, as the Joker does in [the hospital] — [the creators] reinforce the Joker’s purpose.”

There’s a lot to be said for plans if even the self-proclaimed antithesis of schemers has one. I don’t have a perfect list of arguments, but here are three I can take comfort in when doubting myself:

It’s okay to take your time with life’s big decisions. Our grandparents probably wouldn’t have an easier time than we do if they had to make the same, big choices today. It’s easy to belittle the situation from the outside, but in the end, it’s your life, not theirs.
What you choose will probably be good enough. As a corollary, for everything that isn’t all-important, which is most things, you might as well “introduce a little anarchy,” as the Joker would say. Where to get lunch? Which bar to hit on Friday night? Flip a coin, these things don’t matter, and you won’t remember them two weeks from today. Anything will do.
Last, and most importantly: At the very least, I am investing. There is boldness in the act of commitment itself. And no matter how hard any particular decision may squeeze your brain, it is far better to sacrifice your time, your money, your energy, for a cause you think is worthy than to stand on the sidelines waiting.

The Joker’s role in The Dark Knight is so powerful, so all-consuming that it’s hard to focus on any other character. My generation might often feel like supporting actors in their own lives, but, ultimately, it’s always the sidekicks that get the hero to carry on. Like commissioner Gordon, when he gives advice to a newbie, which feels a little like a tip for growing up:

“You’re a detective now, son. You’re not allowed to believe in coincidence anymore.”

Life Is Full of Cosmic Jokes

May 31, 2018August 10, 2023 Nik

Someone once asked Neil deGrasse Tyson what the most fascinating thing about the universe was. As if having prepared for the question his entire life, he launched into a full-blown speech:

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy ions in their core. Under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.”

Wow. That’s quite the image to hold in your head. And how impressive the cocktail of life just one planet, our planet, has mixed from these ingredients:

And while we, the species of humans, have come out on the very top of this tree, we’re still just a branch. A tiny splinter of the universe. The genetic difference between the smartest monkeys, chimps, and humans is 1.2%. That’s why they and our toddlers still share many behaviors. So when asked about the possibility of alien existence, Tyson imagines the same gap:

“If aliens came and they had only that much more intelligence than us — the gap that is between us and chimps, and we have DNA in common — if they were only that, they could enslave the entire earth and we wouldn’t even know it. Maybe that has already happened. And we are living our lives as though we are expressing the free will of the human species, yet we are nothing more than an ant farm. On their shelf. So we are their entertainment. Not even worthy of investigation beyond what we look like in their terrarium.”

It’s funny, isn’t it? This contradiction. We are the pinnacle of evolution, and yet, we know next to nothing about the context we’ve been dropped into.

I may not wear a lab coat at work, but I’m a little bit of a scientist myself. Every day, I try to parse a small fragment of that context and make sense of life. Through writing, especially over the past year, I’ve discovered there are many ways this grand, cosmic contradiction is baked into life itself.

Here are 12 of the biggest jokes the universe plays on us.

Category: Science