Finding Your Tribe

Why purpose cannot exist within a vacuum.

• It is important to establish what you enjoy and what you can contribute, by yourself. After you have discovered your “authentic” purpose it is advisable to find others like you. This can speed up your learning process and help you to remember that you aren’t alone. This helps to fulfill the social needs when discussions about your interests require an expert to bounce ideas back and forth with. Settling uncertainty.
• Collaboration is a form of tribalism. We desire it whether we admit it or not. The determination to work alone is usually bred from fear of judgment and confrontation or a previous traumatic experience. By collaborating, we can designate tasks to others that are better suited for them, we can focus on what we are better at, and as a whole, become more efficient at achieving certain goals. 
• Finding the right people to work with and the importance of group cohesion.  
• No falling into stereotypical group dynamics of slacking off and not taking responsibility. 
• Appropriate group dynamics and communication to ensure a productive yet enjoyable working relationship.

Becoming An Adult

Hunter Gatherer Notes

Rites of passage are useful as markers of transition. But they are rather uncommon among WEIRD people, less ritualistic, and this has contributed to our losing track of the characteristics of adulthood. Historically, adults were those who knew how to feed and shelter themselves, how to be constructive and productive members of a group, how to think critically. This knowledge does not magically accrue with age, though. It must be earned.

Across cultures, rites of passage therefore provide clear signals to you, the individual, about how far along you are and what society can expect from you. Without these markers, we are more likely to end up with widespread confusion—thirty-year-olds who are effectively children, unfamiliar with responsibility, and eight-year-olds who are granted adultlike status with regard to their ability to determine, for instance, what sex they truly are. Rites of passage thus coordinate society with respect to what is expected of individuals at various stages of development, and they exist in two forms: temporal (age) and, loosely, merit (earned).

Age is a rough guide to what a person should be able to do, and merit is a specific guide for what an individual is capable of or, in the case of marriage, signing up for. These have been abandoned or corrupted across WEIRD culture. Temporal rites are loosely and inconsistently applied, and merit rites are largely gameable.

People who are deserving of being called “adult” can observe themselves carefully and skeptically, and regularly ask themselves questions like these: Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being closed-minded? Am I entrenched in a worldview, and if so, why? Am I coming to conclusions independently, or have I accepted an ideology that I allow to do my thinking for me? Do I avoid collaboration that would be valuable, if it would also be challenging? Am I letting emotions make decisions for me, especially hot, intense emotions? Am I ceding my adult responsibilities, and do I make excuses when I do?

• These questions all ask, in different ways: Am I doing as well as I should or could be doing? Answers will often be easier to find through one of the two categories of rites of passage. Age rites tell people what to expect of others and allow society to hold individuals accountable when they don’t rise to the occasion. This teaches us to ask: Am I doing my job? Because others will be expecting that we are.
• Merit rites teach us to think for ourselves and, when accomplished, view ourselves as people of knowledge and skill. They also convey this to society. This raises the bar of what is expected and what it means to “do your job.” The interplay of expectation and accountability would naturally result in more self-examination to ensure you are living up to what is expected.

One of those adult responsibilities is to not spend money on every latest thing. Selling delayed gratification is rarely a successful business strategy, so it is hard to find in the marketplace. Instead, junk everything is available—junk food, entertainment, sex, news. The aggregate of the market is therefore selling infantile values, which make you a desirable consumer but a poor adult.

Absent the hyper-novelty and unconstrained market forces of 21st century WEIRD societies, childhood is when you take in information from your ancestors, and discover the world that you inhabit, both physically and cognitively. Adulthood, then, is the phase in which you operationalize what you have learned, and become productive.

Our narratives are also no longer shared at the societal level. The tremendous choice that we have in picking and choosing narratives means that when we partner with people, we generally share a language but not the baseline set of beliefs or values that we would have in an ancestral environment. Historically, shared narratives, or at least the cross-pollination of narratives, kept manipulation in check. Now those systems are breaking down. In the past, those creating and those consuming the narratives—be it religion or myth, news or gossip—had shared fate, and they knew it. Now we live in such a fractured society that most of us have little sense of our shared fate—that we all live, for instance, on a single planet on which we depend.

School, which should be helping young people learn how to be successful adults, is mostly rudderless at best, and actively harmful to development too much of the time. Products and algorithms coming at children will do them harm, their motivational structures will be hacked, their peers will lead them astray. They will not be unscathed. How, then, to become functional adults?

Laboratory of the Self

The problem for humans who are trying to figure out how to live in the world is that we are each our own unique, complex system. There are some universals, to be sure—toxins and advertising and sedentary lifestyles are risky for all of us. Consider, though, that our internal wiring is so distinct from that of the next person, that for many topics, the advice that works for person A may well fall flat for person B.

Humans are capable of inhabiting every human niche that has ever been exploited: we are hyper-plastic. Combine that with a modern environment that is ultra-noisy, and we all face an independent landscape of dysfunction.

Roughly speaking, such would-be self-help gurus fall into four categories: the con artists, the confused, the correct but of finite applicability, and the universally useful. We posit, and we hope by now you agree, that many evolutionary truths are universally useful.

• Effective con artists are hard to see in advance, but it’s up to all of us to learn to do so.
• In the second category are those who are confused, spouting “wisdom” because it attracts people and money, not recognizing that such wisdom may have no relationship to truth or value. Both con artists and the confused are generally playing an entirely social game. Many of the confused, and the con artists, appear to have dispensed with core beliefs altogether, navigating in an entirely social mode with no reference to external reality. Rather than having generated ideas based on their fit with reality, they have generated them based on how they are received by their audience. Sometimes there will be “tells” in how they present material. However, you figure out who they are, do not seek such people for advice.
• In the third category are people who are correct in claiming that they have discovered something that has worked for them, but (and they may not be aware of this) what works for them may not work for you. Their wisdom has limited applicability.
• Finally, the fourth category includes those rare people who have advice that is universally applicable.

The trick, then, is in figuring out how to:

• Dispense with the con artists and the confused.
• Learn how to distinguish, within the third category, between those with advice that works for them but is inapplicable for you; and those who know something that, if you can figure out how to apply it, would improve your life almost instantly. Do this by engaging in a kind of scientific Buddhism. Banish noise, notice small potential patterns, and test hypotheses within yourself for what works.
• Adopt the good advice of those in the fourth category, those few who actually have universally applicable advice.

Complexity and noise are the enemies of signal. The solution involves controlling your experiments as much as is possible given the constraints of the environment. Change only one thing at a time. Do it fully and completely (if you cheat, you’ve learned nothing, but you may be fooled into thinking that you now have information). And give it time to work.

Types of Reality

Many modern people seem to imagine that by changing people’s opinions or perspectives, you change underlying reality. In short, they believe that reality itself is a social construct.

How do you avoid becoming someone who assesses the world based on social responses rather than based on analysis, one of those people who are easily fooled by con artists and the confused? Two good strategies are to regularly engage with the physical world and to understand the value of close calls. The sad truth is that the more “educated” you are today, the harder this is to do. Our current higher education system is steeped in a philosophy that doubts our ability to even perceive the physical world. That philosophy is called postmodernism.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed. Postmodernism, and its ideological child, post-structuralism, were once contained in a small corner of the academy. These ideologies do contain kernels of truth. They teach us that our sensory apparatus biases us, and that we are mostly unaware of those biases. They reveal that schools, factories, and prisons are similar in their use of power to control populations (as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his metaphorical extension of Bentham’s Panopticon). And Critical Race Theory has at its foundation the real observation that the American legal system has had a particularly difficult time emerging from its racist past, and that full recovery from that past is not yet on the horizon. These are a few real and valuable contributions that such ideologies have contributed to the world. But most modern instantiations of postmodernism have jumped the shark.

• Postmodernism and its adherents have infiltrated systems far beyond higher ed and are doing considerable harm. One of the most astounding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.
• If you have little or no experience with the effects of your actions in the physical world, and therefore have not had occasion to see the reactions they produce, then you will be more prone to believing in a wholly subjective universe, in which every opinion is equally valid.
• Every opinion is not equally valid, and some outcomes don’t change just because you want them to. Social outcomes may change if you argue or throw a fit. Physical outcomes will not.

Our eyes are tools of our brains, taking note of the world. We are fully embodied—our bodies are not afterthoughts to our brains, or unnecessary to their interpretation of the world. Perception is an action. The more you move, therefore, within whatever your particular limits are, the more integrated, whole, and accurate your perception of the world is likely to be. Movement increases wisdom. So, too, does exposure to diverse views, experiences, and places. We need both freedom of expression, and freedom to explore, because both speak to the value of environments in which outcomes are uncertain.

Pursue feedback from the vast universe that exists beyond other human beings. Watch your reactions when the feedback comes in. The more time you spend pitting your intellect against realities that cannot be coerced with manipulation or sweet talk, the less likely you are to blame others for your own errors.

On the Benefit of Close Calls

The fact that we tend to believe in bad luck, but not in good luck, makes it more difficult to learn from our mistakes.

Trying to explain away the past, rather than learning from it and moving on, is a poor use of time and intellectual resources.

Having close calls is part of the set of experiences that are necessary in order to grow up. If your child has been made totally safe, living a life with no risk, then you have done a terrible job of parenting. That child has no ability to extrapolate from the universe. If you, as an adult, are totally safe, you are probably not reaching your potential.

On Fairness and Theory of Mind

Being an adult, in part, means not abdicating responsibility, especially when others are depending on you. Being an adult also means engaging in cooperation on a number of levels. We may engage in kin selection, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity.

When your group is threatened, you rally, and the bonds within the group grow stronger. In good times, however, when things are easy, group stability tends to fray, first around the edges, and ultimately at the core. Again, economic markets prey on this tendency, destabilizing our sense of self and community, causing us to look elsewhere for the missing ingredient that will, finally, make us happy, productive, and secure.

One thing that theory of mind provides potential access to is a sense of fairness. The concept of what’s “fair” didn’t originate with philosophers. It didn’t emerge with city-states, or with agriculture. It wasn’t new to hunter-gatherers, either, or to our first bipedal ancestors. Monkeys keep track of what’s fair, and what’s not, and they have decided opinions about unfair practices in their social realm.

Markets prey on our sense of fairness. They fool us into thinking that everyone else is getting grapes, while we are stuck with cucumber. If other people already have those better things, why don’t we? Our sense of fairness is thus kept off balance, always threatened by the invisible other consumers who already have the next big thing, and thus must be doing better than we are. We are still trying to keep up with the Joneses, but the Joneses are no longer our neighbors. They are now a tiny fraction of the world’s elite piped into our screens, and photoshopped to boot.

As humans, one of the ways that we test the moral waters and assess the mood of a group and its boundaries is through humor. It helps mitigate questions of fairness. Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can’t be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problems lurking just beneath the surface. Furthermore, attempts to induce laughter inorganically—as with laugh track—is the market once again trying to intrude on honorable human tendencies to bond over shared experience and understanding. Laugh track ultimately renders us more humorless, and less capable of connecting with actual human beings.

On Addiction

Many things have a pathological version. Pathology is not the same as “downside”—senescence is a downside of early adaptive traits, but it is not pathological. In contrast, arrogance is pathological confidence.

Positive obsession has many words in English: passion, focus, drive. The primary manifestation of negative obsession, of pathological obsession, is addiction.

Our software is built to maximize our fitness, even if our conscious minds have other priorities. But our software has an increasingly difficult time telling signal from noise, because our map of what enhances fitness in the ancestral world does not prepare us well for the modern world.

Our intuitive sense of the fitness value of behaviors is thus often wrong in modernity. Our intuition had a greater chance of leading us to the right choice before the Industrial Revolution, before hyper-novelty was ubiquitous. Many of us are now effectively able to pull levers, like rats with access to amphetamine, and get a concentrated burst of euphoria that doesn’t just obscure the risk of that euphoria, but makes it ever less likely that we can turn away from it in the future. It’s another instantiation of the Sucker’s Folly: the reward obscures the cost.

“Reward” is not binary—it is not simply a positive or a negative. The valence and size of the reward depend, in part, on what the other possibilities are—the opportunity cost. The cost-benefit analysis is incomplete until you compare it to what else you could be spending the time on.

Boredom is effectively synonymous with the “opportunity cost” having gone to zero: if you believe there is nothing else enriching that you could spend your time on, then the calculation of whether or not to engage with a particular substance or action is skewed, particularly if that substance or action results in a feeling of enrichment, even a false one.

• It is, of course, too simple to say that boredom causes addiction. There are many factors at play: the limiting nature of ancestral environments did not require self-regulation for most substances or behaviors; both trauma and psychological disorders disrupt decision-making processes; emotions are hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors that create a false incentive structure; and social pressures often drive calculations toward consumption.

The Corrective Lens: How to Give Yourself a Raise

• Explicitly aim to be an adult. Do this, in part, by regularly asking yourself the questions that we posed at the beginning of the chapter (Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being closed-minded? . . .), and by minimizing the effects of economic markets on your daily life.
• Become aware of the constant flow of information telling you what to think, how to feel, how to act. Do not let it into your mind. Do not let it steer you. Your internal reward structure needs to be independent and un-gameable. That independence, in turn, should allow you to collaborate well with others who are similarly independent. Be wary of those who may well be nice, but who are captured.
• Always be learning. Look for collaborators. Play at competition, and be prepared to stop playing if things get real. Be skeptical, if not suspicious, of any novel prescription for which the rationale is unstated or thin on reflection.
• Revive, or create, rites of passage in your life. Celebrate not just the passage of time, but also developmental transitions. Honor graduations and marriages, births and deaths, but also career and job changes and promotions, the completion of important analytical or creative tasks, and the ends of eras, when they are recognizable as they end.
• Seek out physical reality, not just social experience. Pursue feedback from the physical universe, not just from subjective social sources. Move your body.
• Gain experience with model systems that tell you how things actually work.
• Get over your bigotry. Variation is our strength. Not just sex and race and sexual orientation, but class, neurodiversity, characteristics of personality—all of this adds to what we can accomplish on Earth.
• Place equality where it belongs. Equality should be focused on the equal valuation of our differences. It should not be a bludgeon for uniformity.
• Smile at people—the people with whom you live, the person behind the counter, the stranger on the street.
• Be grateful.
• Laugh daily, with other people.
• Put your phone down. 
• Define your fights for whom and what you love, rather than against whom and what you hate. If a mob ever comes for people you know, people whom you consider friends, stand up and say, “No, you’re wrong.” Be honorable and courageous when bullies move in. Speak up for what you know to be true, even if it makes you a social pariah.
• Learn how to give useful critique without backing the other person into a corner. With our children, when they fall off a unicycle or don’t do well on a math test, we tell them it’s “not your best work.” It’s true; it doesn’t pretend that every action is worthy of a gold star; and it demonstrates that we know that they can do better work, and that this wasn’t it.
• Count fewer things about your life (calories, steps, minutes), and do more.
• Develop a theory of close calls. When a close call occurs, have a plan for how you will leverage it to gain a better understanding of yourself and the world.
• Calm down, and level up.
• Learn to jump curves. Diminishing returns are a factor for every complex phenomenon, so learn to jump curves (put another way: consider learning a new thing rather than being a perfectionist and trying to get ever better at whatever you are already really, really good at).