How To Live a Conscious Life

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”  — Socrates

The Question We Keep Postponing

At what point in our lives do we stop? At what point do we turn off the distractions — the screens, the notifications, the relentless noise of a culture engineered to prevent reflection — and ask ourselves the only questions that actually matter: What is the purpose and meaning of my life? Am I honoring that purpose and meaning? And where do I begin to question which pieces of this puzzle do not make sense to me?

I have found, over decades of this work, that there are thousands of pieces to the puzzle of a human life. And if they are all put together — through experience, through intuition, through proper conditioning, and through the genuine intent to make our lives work — then we can see when something is not right. We can feel it. Something is off. A piece has been forced into a place where it does not belong, and the picture it produces is distorted.

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How many times has something been wrong — visibly, obviously, consequentially wrong — and everyone knew it was wrong, and no one changed it? Like smoking. Like drinking. Like doing drugs and gambling and cheating. There are over 30 million Americans who joined websites that specialize in connecting people who want to commit adultery. Thirty million. That is not a fringe behavior. That is a culture. And the people doing the cheating are not the only ones affected. There are the partners they betrayed, the families they destabilized, the trust they incinerated. That is a piece of the puzzle that should never have been in the puzzle, because it did not represent the person they claimed to be.

And so we arrive at the first question, the one that Socrates staked his life on, the one that every serious philosophical and spiritual tradition has placed at its foundation: Who am I? Not who do I perform for the world. Not who does my family expect me to be. Not who has my conditioning programmed me to become. Who am I, underneath all of that?

But where do you begin to ask that question? You do not start a New York City marathon at the 25th mile. And yet we are always looking for the magic pill, the magic solution, the simplest shortcut to solve all of our problems. It does not work, does it? Sooner or later, we all benefit from positive input and choices and outcomes, or we pay a price for all the wrong ones. And the price compounds. It compounds in our bodies, in our relationships, in the slowly accumulating weight of a life that we sense is not quite our own.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard understood this dilemma at its root. He argued that the most common form of despair is not the dramatic kind — not the anguish that announces itself in crisis — but the quiet kind: the despair of not being oneself. It is the condition of living a life organized around other people’s expectations, other people’s values, other people’s definitions of success, without ever stopping to ask whether any of it reflects your own authentic nature. And the reason most people never ask is not stupidity or laziness. It is fear. The fear of what we might find. The fear that if we lift the hood and look at the engine, we will discover that it has been running on the wrong fuel for decades, and that changing it now will cost us everything we have built.

This essay is about lifting the hood anyway.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”  — Søren Kierkegaard

What the Boomers Never Understood: When More Was Never Enough

“To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” — Henri Frédéric Amiel

Parallel to the diminishing health and resources of our elders, I observe a growing segment of individuals among my generation — the children of our seniors’ Great Generation — who have no sense of knowing when more is enough. Regardless of how far they have climbed on the social ladder, regardless of how above average their salaries are, they still chase speculative gambling in hedge funds, in quick-revenue investments in food commodities, fuel, and housing that have a direct impact on the lives of others. Their exploitation of quick-wealth opportunities actively prevents our seniors from obtaining the very things they need to rise from an austere existence. Amazon Basics Melatoni... Check Amazon for Pricing.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus — who is widely misunderstood as an advocate of indulgence when in fact he was a philosopher of moderation — distinguished between natural and necessary desires, natural but unnecessary desires, and vain desires. The vain desires, he warned, are the ones that have no natural limit: the desire for wealth beyond what is needed, for status beyond what is meaningful, for power beyond what can be exercised with wisdom. These desires, Epicurus taught, produce not satisfaction but anxiety, because their fulfillment is always temporary and their appetite is infinite. He could have been describing the boomer generation with surgical precision.

I have watched this unfold for decades. Smart, well-educated, accomplished people who do not want to walk away from the table if they are winning. It is a form of addiction — accomplishment addiction, wealth addiction, status addiction, relevance addiction. The need for external feedback to confirm that you are enough. And like all addictions, the tolerance builds. If your bonus this year was six figures, you think: maybe seven will change it. If you are working eighteen hours a day, you think: maybe twenty will fill the void.

It never does. Because the emptiness is not caused by insufficient achievement. It is caused by insufficient self-knowledge. And self-knowledge cannot be purchased, accumulated, or inherited. It can only be cultivated through the patient, uncomfortable, deeply unfashionable work of examining your own life.

The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh called this ‘stopping.’ Before you can see clearly, he taught, you must stop running. Not stop moving through the world, but stop running from yourself. Most of Western civilization is organized around the principle that more activity, more acquisition, more distraction will eventually produce the peace of mind that we are seeking. Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight is the opposite: peace of mind is already present, beneath the noise, and the only thing preventing us from experiencing it is our refusal to be still long enough to find it.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”  — Seneca

The Interconnectivity of Past and Present

We are so captivated by the moment we are in — so transformed by our distractions, so habituated to having non-living entities make important life choices for us — that stepping back in time to examine how we arrived here feels almost impossible. But it is essential.

There was a time when a person had their family, and to a larger extent the community in which they lived, and to an even larger extent the state of mind of the leaders who set standards and guidelines. And frequently, those standards were wrong. The information people thought was right was terrible. They did not understand hygiene, did not understand clean water, did not understand the power of healthy choices. They were not acting with any intent to harm themselves, but the consequence was that they lived short, painful lives — until we began to learn from our mistakes. Until we stopped allowing 12-year-old children to work 12-hour days in front of hot furnaces for a few pennies. Until Ralph Nader created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and over 200 other protections that did more to safeguard the American public than any politician in the nation’s history. And yet we did not feel that he was capable enough to run the country. Glucosamine Chondroiti... Check Amazon for Pricing.

Think about that. A man who demonstrably saved more lives through legislation than any president of the 20th century was considered unelectable. Meanwhile, we routinely elect pathological liars, sociopaths, people who use their power mercilessly to create wars and regime changes, who support manufacturers of products and services that cause us harm, who exploit our inability to pay bills, and who historically put us in debtor’s prisons. We have not been kind to one another more often than not.

The philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But the problem is deeper than memory. It is conditioning. We are being programmed, propagandized, groomed to be the perfect consumer, the perfect citizen. We do not examine the quality of the character of the person we are voting for, because if we did, we would say: You would not hire that person to babysit your children. Why would you hire them to be the most powerful person in the world?

And so we must understand the interconnectivity of our past and our present. We must be willing to dig into that past — into the family we came from, the culture that shaped us, the silent messages that were transmitted from generation to generation. The science of epigenetics tells us that this is not metaphor. Go back seven generations, and you will find that many of the positive and negative attributes of your ancestors are coming through your DNA as silent messengers, shaping your impulses, your vulnerabilities, your predispositions, your capacity for resilience or collapse. Our past does matter. And until we are willing to examine it honestly — to identify what kind of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents we had, and to understand which of their patterns we are unconsciously repeating — we will remain prisoners of a history we have never questioned.

Carl Jung called this the collective unconscious — the vast reservoir of shared human experience that operates beneath individual awareness, shaping behavior in ways the conscious mind cannot easily detect. He argued that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate. The epigenetic research now confirms what Jung intuited: the past is not behind us. It is inside us. And the only way to change its influence is to become aware of it.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  — William Faulkner

A Chance Encounter at the Checkout Line

Yesterday, I was in a health food store. I was at the checkout line, helping a friend who is going through a major transition in his life. At the age of 57, after working in a family business for decades and feeling unappreciated, underpaid, and overworked, he finally said: Enough. He made a big change. He had to. He has developed serious health problems. He is a genuinely kind human being. He just did not surround himself with equally kind people. They exploited him because he was not assertive. He went along with things. And now he wants to start over. Pure Encapsulations Vi... Check Amazon for Pricing.

He asked me for help, and I said: Sure. I have been learning for 40 years. Let us get your body cleaned up. And the remarkable thing is, he already knew what to do. He knew how to detoxify. He knew the difference between healthy and unhealthy food. He knew the power of exercise over sedentary living. He knew the value of meditation, of being in green space and blue space. He knew the dangers of tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medications. He knew that toxic relationships never have good outcomes. He knew that binge-watching Netflix at two in the morning instead of sleeping was destroying his immune system.

He was not unaware of the choices he had made. He just did not anticipate that one day karma would come knocking on the door and hand him a menu of all the diseases he had helped to manifest. Not a single person in his life had helped him see what was happening. But he had the courage, through his crisis, to say: I am done. I am starting over. I am going to be the architect of my own life from this point forward. I am going to be responsible for the choices I make. And every choice is going to honor the 37 trillion cells in my body.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would have recognized this moment as what he called radical freedom — the terrifying and exhilarating realization that you are free to choose, that no one else’s choices define you, and that the responsibility for your life belongs to you and to no one else. Sartre understood that most people flee from this recognition because it is overwhelming. We prefer to believe that we are determined by our circumstances — by our family, our upbringing, our economic situation, our biology. And those things do matter. But they do not have the last word. The last word belongs to the person who says: I am done. I am choosing differently. That person, in Sartre’s framework, has become authentic.

And then, as we were checking out, I happened to turn around. There was a very elderly couple behind us. I looked at them for a moment. They were both emaciated, out of shape, with thinning gray hair and excessively wrinkled skin. And I said, simply: It is good that you are buying some healthy food. They smiled and said: Yeah.

I said: Just out of curiosity, what year did you graduate from high school?

They told me. And I said: Me too. Same year.

And suddenly the smile turned to puzzlement. That is not possible, one of them said. They simply did not believe me. And what did they not believe? That if two of us graduated from high school in the same year, why did they look like my great-grandparents and I look like their grandson?

THORNE - Iron Bisglyci... Check Amazon for Pricing. The concept of cause and effect. The concept of cumulative negative behavior and cumulative positive behavior. Cumulative healthy choices and cumulative unhealthy choices. Obviously, none of this had been apparent to them. Perhaps a doctor or a friend had recently told them they needed to change. Perhaps that is why they were in a health food store. But then again, you can buy profoundly unhealthy food in a health food store — it is an oxymoron that would be funny if it were not so revealing. One of the biggest health food chains in America has an alcohol department as one of its largest sections. Another is confections. Another is meat. None of that is healthy. All of it creates disease. And it is labeled a health food store. People with money go there and feel virtuous about it.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and became one of the most influential thinkers in Western history, taught a principle so simple that it sounds almost too obvious until you realize how thoroughly we violate it: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Our opinions, our choices, our desires, our aversions — these are within our control. Other people’s behavior, our reputation, our circumstances — these are not. The source of almost all human suffering, Epictetus argued, is the confusion of these two categories: we try to control what we cannot, and we neglect to control what we can. My friend at fifty-seven had finally stopped trying to control the family business that would never appreciate him and started controlling the one thing that was always within his power: himself.

“No man is free who is not master of himself.”  — Epictetus

The Regression of Reason

Several of our nation’s most courageous social critics, including Morris Berman and Susan Jacoby, have — against much criticism — identified the growing anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism ravaging all levels of American society. Mark Twain’s remark remains as sharp as it ever was: there are no common people except in the highest spheres of society.

In 1965, approximately 75 percent of students entering college said they were pursuing higher education in order to discover something meaningful in life. By 2005, that same percentage of college students stated their goal was to become wealthy. Susan Jacoby noted that a National Science Foundation survey found one in five Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Approximately half of young adults between 18 and 24 are unable to locate Iraq on a map. A significant number are unable to locate the United States.

There is something seriously wrong with this scenario, and it forecasts a civic disaster. American culture is undergoing a collective, negative learning. The theory that each succeeding generation is actually regressing in its capacity for critical thought can be observed most clearly among today’s college students. A study of fourteen thousand students across 50 American campuses, published under the title “The Coming Crisis in Citizenship” by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found that students from the most elite universities — Yale, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Brown, UC Berkeley — performed far below students at lesser-known colleges. The schools in the top rankings included some I had never heard of: Rhodes College, Grove City College, Calvin College. This finding suggests that the principles for rational and spiritual character development, which contribute greatly to the healthy moral development of a society, are weakest among students raised in privileged families. Wholesome Story Myo-In... Check Amazon for Pricing.

One reason is that many of our so-called brightest students believe they are entitled to a prestigious education without having to achieve personal merit through hard work and effort. This goes back to the culture of entitlement that raised them. And because our elite universities are held in such high esteem, we perpetuate the myth that these are the individuals best suited to run our institutions in the future.

The American philosopher John Dewey spent his career arguing that education’s primary purpose is not the transmission of information but the cultivation of the capacity to think. A democracy, Dewey insisted, can only survive if its citizens are capable of independent critical thought — if they can evaluate evidence, question authority, and arrive at conclusions through reason rather than obedience. When education becomes mere credentialing — when the diploma is valued not for what it represents about the mind but for what doors it opens in the market — the democratic experiment begins to collapse. And that collapse is not theoretical. We are living in it.

Thomas Jefferson saw this clearly two centuries before it happened. He wrote that no people can be both ignorant and free. That statement should be read as a prophecy. Because we have produced a population that is simultaneously the most entertained and the most uninformed in the history of the republic. We have more access to information than any civilization that has ever existed, and less capacity to evaluate it, less patience to engage it, less willingness to let it challenge our assumptions.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”  — Martin Luther King Jr.

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