This is the audio version of a blog post I wrote in May 2021.

Everyone eventually reaches a point in life where the need to question assumptions arises; this may manifest in different ways at different points in life. Whenever I pass the apartment nearby my girlfriend’s house where the teenager loudly plays the electric guitar, I like to joke, “You don’t understand me, mom!” My girlfriend says the teenager and the mother actually seem to get along quite well.

A lot of people might look around in their twenties and say, “Why are all these people doing this?” Or, they might pose this question’s twin sibling, “Why am I not?” Cultures, beliefs, assumptions evolve over decades, centuries, millennia. The end result for beings who can think and feel is, ultimately, the perpetuation of the human race, the reward of evolution. So, if you feel like something is “missing” or if you aren’t happy, maybe it’s time to take a step back and evaluate, because evolution doesn’t necessarily reward us with happiness.

Karen Horney was a psychoanalyst. I, decidedly, am not, nor am I a psychologist or a therapist; I’m just a person trying to figure things out. I excitedly read Karen Horney’s 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth after finding it as a footnote in another book by a social psychologist named Carol Tavris (I would recommend both her books Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)). I really liked Neurosis and Human Growth, though I am told by Dr. Tavris, whom I emailed about it, that psychoanalysis has fallen out of vogue and is quite dated. But, I still find a number of things Ms. Horney has to say to be extremely compelling.

She talks about our expectations of life, of others, and of ourselves, dubbing this, “The Tyranny of the Should.” This is how things “should” be, as we esteem them, as individuals, societies, and cultures; I “should” be doing this, you “should” be doing that, you “should” be treating me a certain way. She illustrates what she calls a “neurotic claim” (Dr. Tavris also informed me psychology students today would no longer use the word “neurosis”) with an example about a train not being available when she wants to take it, and the resulting frustration that can result. The train “should” be available at 2:30PM, when I want to take it; how stupid that it is not available then! Certainly some injustices in our day-to-day life are more grave than others, but when you learn to see how you think about little things such as the dawdling pedestrian crossing the road or the driver who is having a hard time parallel parking, you can start to calm down a bit and go through life giving other parties a bit more benefit of the doubt.

People often assume they are omniscient, as any connoisseur of Fox News or CNN might notice. We think we have all available facts, that if you just do X, Y, and Z, life will fall into place, and a magical happiness and utopia will result. And in a lot of ways, if you do the things you “should” do, you might be setting yourself up for success. But, evolution didn’t reward human happiness; it rewarded the conditions that led to seven billion humans on Earth, a number that has increased over 10-fold in the last 500 years. If you’ve ever been to the natural history museum, humans are really old;like hundreds of thousands of years old. So, you don’t have to be a math whiz to gather that modernity and civilization are, relatively speaking, kind of a new thing.

In light of this, if you are feeling unsatisfied, unfulfilled, unhappy, maybe that, actually, makes quite a bit of sense. Modernity isn’t quite as soul-crushing as history was, so we have a lot more time to think, take it easy, and ponder what exactly is going on. If you are feeling “something is missing,” maybe a personal re-evaluation of your philosophy of life, your “shoulds,” so to speak, is in order. My friends are all doctors, lawyers, engineers, are having children, have expensive real estate, and here I am holding a uniform from Hot Dog on a Stick and I live with my parents. To a certain extent, a lot of “should” can put humans in a place where they can achieve happiness; it is easier to be happy when you have a little extra money in the bank. But if you become addicted to a certain kind of lifestyle, that potential for lasting and intrinsic happiness can morph into a form of slavery, and then you’re stuck making boat payments.

To be sure, many people genuinely like having a boat, others maybe would be just as happy without one. I am sure there are just as many satisfied and happy parents as there are parents who wished (or think they wished) they had never had children; and surely their answers will differ ten and twenty and forty years from now. Different things have different meanings for different people; what do you want your life to mean for you?

Jonathan Haidt and Carl Rogers both point out how inescapably social creatures humans are; if we did not care what others thought, we would be sociopaths. But, as you get older, you can start to question some of the assumptions that are core to our historical human function. Yes, it is impolite and rude to fart loudly on the subway, and we really ought not to shoot other people in the head for cutting us off in traffic; I think most people, on any given day, would feel these to be simple truths. But humans are no longer on the savanna with prehistoric creatures, and a lot of the impulses and feelings we evolved with have overstayed their practical welcome. You might start to question, as you get older, the up-keeping of appearances, and start to do the things that you want to do. Social isolation can be lonely, but it is fair to assume we will still have friends and be allowed at the grocery store if we pull up in a Nissan Versa instead of a BMW. Carl Rogers said, “When an activity feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing... I have never regretted moving in directions which ‘felt right,’ even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time.”

Learning to trust what you want from life doesn’t have to mean a descent into booze-fueled nihilism coupled with a fast car and lots of drugs. A lot of the post-WWII pop-psychologists like to talk about listening to your inner dictates, being your true self, self-realization, so on and so forth. What they’re really saying is that you need to do some things with your life that you genuinely want to do. Rob Kurzban is a psychologist who writes about the “modular mind,” and how we evolved with different brain “modules” that achieve certain evolutionary goals; there is no “self” in there, in our brains, running the show. This is another way of saying that all of the potential things which could be considered humanly good do not necessarily add up to all being compatible. There is no final life solution. Life has paradoxes. There is nuance. And, there are tradeoffs.

What do you want from life? What do you want from the World? These are big questions. Humans are sexually reproductive creatures. If you want the pretty girl, a BMW might help. Others will tell you that if you are relying on the fancy car to get the girl, you’re getting the “wrong” kind of girl. Do you want to start a family? If you aren’t sure, maybe you should put the idea on ice until you’ve better sorted out your personal life philosophy.

We have some modern society-wide assumptions that go like this; you should go to college, you should have nice stuff, you should have a family, and you should get a good job. And if you want things from the world, and from other people, a lot of these things will be mutually complementary.

I did all of the things. I was married at 23, I had a mortgage not much later, and a graduate degree in marketing. And all I wanted to do was to sock away enough money so that we could pay off the mortgage so that I could “stop working.” I felt this deep hatred for my work, which for me was a career in internet marketing that eventually became somewhat lucrative. Eventually, couples therapy failed, my marriage went kaput, and I entered a fumbling figuring-myself-out in my late twenties; things people like my own parents had to figure out while being married to one another and having two young children. And it took about ten years of fumbling and doing the same thing until I finally had saved enough money to say I could quit my job, if not forever, at least for a good long while. I had had enough and wanted to embark on “something else.”

My something else wound up entailing a lot of reading. I started with “Winners Take All” by Anand Giridharadas. I read a lot of non-fiction books, books about politics, something which I had an undergraduate degree in and had always been interested in. Then I found my way from political books to pop-psychology books, since politics involves people, as well as philosophy. I eventually wound my way to literature, having previously deemed the genre of fiction as mind-smut, and non-fiction as the way one learns things. And in the course of all this reading, I accidentally found my own, better, personal philosophy of life, and realized some life lessons of my own.

Dostoevsky, a Russian literature author, pointed out that existence is in fact slavery, and while this sounds like a bleak assessment on the surface, it is objectively true, in a sense. We have to eat, thus, we need to get food; it so happens that now food comes from the store and not from the savanna. I think a lot of the modern discontent which exists is a rejection of this fact, a desire to spit in its face, the dislike of reality. Philosopher...