If I was asked to condense how to live into something that would fit on the back of an envelope, I might opt for something close to Buddhism's Eightfold Path:
1. right understanding: see things as they are.
2. right intention: resolve to follow the Path.
3. right speech: abstain from deception.
4. right action: practice compassion and abstain from aggression.
5. right livelihood: choose work compatible with the Path.
6. right effort: promote good and avoid evil.
7. right mindfulness: be aware of your thoughts, words, and actions.
8. right concentration: meditate on Oneness.
I don't consider myself a Buddhist. (As Ferris Bueller said, "Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.") And I disagree with several of Buddhism's fundamental tenets (such as that attachment is undesirable because it necessarily causes more suffering than joy). But as a first approximation I think it's a fairly reasonable approach to living the right way.

I recently read Steven Levine's A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last. Here are the lessons I took away from the book. (Note that these weren't necessarily the author's intended lessons.) Some of these are closer to procedural knowledge than declarative knowledge; that is, just accepting that these facts are true may not be enough to change behavior, thinking and experiences that reinforce the fact may also be required.
- By default, we don't live as urgently as we should.
- Once you have enough money to live comfortably, it's usually a bad choice to trade time for money, and it's usually a good choice to trade money for time.
- The difference between living as if you have one year left and living as if you have fifty years left is one of magnitude, not kind.
- Fear of death, fear of dying, fear of pain, and fear of not having lived or of having wasted your life are four very different fears that are often mixed together.
- If you live every day the same way, then in one important respect you're already dead.
- People consistently regret the things they didn't do more than the things they did do.
- Act as if you have only one year to live, and count down the days starting today, and see how it makes you feel and act differently.- Make a list of the things you want to accomplish in your life and then trying to accomplish them in the next 365 days (to the extent that it's practical).

Peter Singer: "In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B -- all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live."

The next time someone tries (successfully or unsuccessfully) to deceive you, consider the following. Successful deception requires a complex set of skills:
- the knowledge that other people have beliefs
- the knowledge that those beliefs can be manipulated
- the knowledge that one's behavior will be examined for clues about the truth of what they say and the genuineness of how they behave
- the ability to deploy the appropriate markers to be believed
In the same way that cheetahs and gazelles both became faster runners in response to the other, I believe that a similar evolutionary co-escalation has occurred among humans in the last 50,000 years or so: deception and deception-detection. And I think this positive feedback loop contributed to the rise of human consciousness (i.e. self-awareness). You've probably noticed that children often lie even after being told they shouldn't. They're merely testing out deception strategies to see how often and in what circumstances different strategies work and to hone those skills. So the next time someone tries to deceive you, remember that if such tendencies hadn't existed in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, we might not now have the beautiful gift of consciousness, or at the very least we might not have as much of it as we do.
By the way, I won't ever intentionally deceive you. If I say something, that means I believe it's true.

I have found that as a first approximation, regret avoidance is a good life strategy. In other words, when faced with a decision, opting for the choice that you're least likely to regret is a fairly good approach. The reason is that the "now you" is the only one who gets a vote but the "future yous" are the ones who have to live with the choice, so there is a natural tendency for decision-making to favor the now over the future, and by considering what future yous would or wouldn't regret, you can give them an opportunity to vote as well. However, I included the qualifier "as a first approximation" because this approach isn't optimal, for at least two reasons. First, by strictly following it, it's possible to be too future-focused and insufficiently now-focused. For example, if you consistently work hard over a long period toward a goal, it's unlikely that the future yous who benefit from that hard work will regret the hard work, because it wasn't "them" who had to put in the effort and sacrifice, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the goal was worth working toward. Second, regret avoidance can lead to an overabundance of caution. People often have the opportunity to invest (time, money, effort) in opportunities for which success is far from guaranteed but for which the payoff justifies the investment. For such long shots, a regret avoidance approach would dictate not taking the risk, but this would be a mistake. In light of the fact that most people are too risk-averse by default, this approach would push them even further in the wrong direction. The best approach seems to be one that factors in both the destination and the journey, thinks about costs and benefits probabilistically, and gives all future yous a vote based on their individual costs and payoffs.

Some words of wisdom from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis: “If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.”
Coincidentally, my intention is for this site to be simultaneously philosophical, psychological, and poetic, because I think all three disciplines reveal important truths about how to live.

Here is an interesting thought experiment from Robin Hanson: "Assume you know that you are sometimes irrational, and so want to consider appointing agents who you will authorize to intervene sometimes and stop you from doing what you were otherwise going to do. You might want to give such agents veto power over your choices to sell your organs or your sexual favors, take up smoking, have an abortion, quit your diet, or to quit school for a life of fun on the beach, etc. A big question is: how can you hold such agents accountable? If you were just going to hire agents to give you advice, to change your actions just by persuasion, that would be a different and easier matter. We often collect and hire folks to advise us on our actions. No, these agents could be authorized to stop you from doing things even when they have failed to persuade you they are right. (Perhaps you could overrule their advice only if you paid some large previously-agreed on penalty.) One approach is to limit yourself to situations in which your agent can, given enough time to argue with you, later convince you of the wisdom of their advice. A wise uncle whose advice often doesn't seem right at the time, but whenever you've gone back to question him about it later, he usually seems to be able to convince you he was right. More formal rationality agencies might perhaps hang out shingles, validating themselves to customers based on the frequency with which they were later able to convince customers of the wisdom of their interventions. But the case where your agents are never able to convince your their intervention was appropriate seems much harder. How could you decide that such an agent was trustworthy? I suppose you could use agents where you agreed that their intervention with other people was what those other people would have wanted, had they been rational, but this sounds tricky. It seems that many folks think that legislators often serve as such rationality agents, preventing their voters from taking certain supposedly irrational actions. But it is not clear to me that electoral methods of accountability are up to this task. Has anyone ever asked people forbidden from actions by law, many years later, if they are glad they were so forbidden?"

Can you learn more from those who agree with you or disagree with you? (Thanks to my friend Kel for the question.)
People tend to spend most of their time with others who think like them, and they would benefit from seeking out people with different beliefs, ideas and experiences. But I can think of one important exception to this general rule. Knowledge builds on top of knowledge, so to explore the boundaries of your beliefs, you need to have a common base to build from. To take an extreme example, if I want to know whether the common tendency to gravitate toward like-minded people has a genetic component, it won’t do me any good to discuss it with a religious fundamentalist who believes the world was created 6000 years ago and that evolution is “just a theory”. They could still be my friend, but this subject would probably be off-limits. Similarly, right after I’ve read a book it’s nice to be able to find others who have also read it to get other opinions, but this means that they have to share my interest in that book to begin with.
But this is a fairly minor exception. There are so many causes of inertia in life (genes, culture, institutions, media, tradition, peer pressure, apathy, laziness, etc) that it’s probably a mistake to give people this loophole justification for spending all their time with people who think like them, because that would just add to the inertia. Most people are not exploring the boundaries of their beliefs and would definitely benefit more from people who think differently than from people who think alike.

As I've mentioned before, I believe that creativity is an essential part of a well-lived life. Whenever I play a game, I usually look for ways to change the rules, either to make improvements or just to try something different. Here's one of my favorite pool variations that you might enjoy trying. (The rules are so simple that I doubt I'm the first one to think of it.) The game is for two players, and is played with all 15 numbered balls. Before starting, one player calls high and the other calls low. Each player's turn continues as long as they keep sinking balls without scratching. (Better players should be required to call their shots.) All that matters for scoring is the last numbered ball on the table. The score for each game is equal to the difference between the final ball's number and 8. For example, if the last ball is a 5, the person who called low would get 3 points. It's important to note that unlike in standard 8-ball, each player can sink any ball, even one that's on "their" side of 8, for instance if they've already hit most of the other balls in or if it helps them set up for their next shot. Decide before the first game what total to play to (21 might take about two hours). If you try this game, please post here to let me know what you think of it. I have played it with several groups of friends, including both beginners and advanced players, and everyone liked it once they got the hang of the basic strategy.

People use the term "conscious" to mean many different things:
- awake (to contrast it with unconscious)
- aware of the existence of the world
- aware of some fact (to contrast it with subconscious)
- aware of oneself (i.e. "I exist")
- aware of one's own mental states
- the experience of qualia (what it subjectively feels like to be you)
As is often the case, difficult concepts are made even more difficult by unclear labels, in this case using the same label for several distinct concepts.
Whenever I discuss consciousness in this blog I'll try to be clear about which concept I'm referring to. Whenever you read about consciousness elsewhere, I encourage you to keep this point in mind as well.

Warning: writing this post made me cry. Fragile readers should skip it.
Some species of parasitic wasps (such as the ichneumon) paralyze, rather than kill, a caterpillar and lay eggs in its body. Once the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae slowly devour the still living host caterpillar from the inside out, saving the beating heart for last. At this very instant, this is occurring trillions of times, and similarly horrific acts are happening to quintillions of living things, on this planet alone. Far from being an exception to the rule, such suffering IS the rule in nature. As Allen Wheelis said in The Scheme of Things: "With the advent of man, for the first time, one form of life gains a vision of life as a whole. The immediate horror man perceives is his own death, but beyond that he begins to see the entire life process as carnage, as eatings and being eaten. A terrible screaming pervades the universe. Man is the first to hear it."
And, I would add, the first to be able to do something about it.

Some of my favorite Emo Phillips jokes...

I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming. They don't know I'm only using blanks.

I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."

How many people here have telekenetic powers? Raise my hand.

I went from stool to stool in a singles bar hoping to get lucky, but there wasn’t any gum under any of them.

Happiness and meaning are both important for a well-lived life. And the sources of both happiness and meaning tend to be the same (value, purpose, efficacy, and self-worth), so the two are often well-aligned. But what should a person do when the two conflict? Which should a person sacrifice for the sake of the other? I haven't seen much in the literature to address this question. In practice I think most people consistently choose happiness over meaning (we're designed to be happiness-seekers more than meaning-seekers), and when a person seems to be seeking meaning it's often the case that they believe that happiness will result from the meaning, but I don't think that's the right approach.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, a great technique for being happy is to feel grateful, and to find ways to express that gratitude. In studies where subjects wrote down things they were grateful for on a regular basis, they showed a measurable rise in well-being. Alternatively, writing a letter to someone who has meant a lot to you is also effective. In studies, this technique worked even if when the writer had no intention of sending the letter. I'm not sure why this technique works so well; perhaps a persistent feeling of gratitude is sufficiently incompatible with negative emotions that it prevents them from imposing themselves on an appreciative mind. But regardless of the reason, it does seem to work for a lot of people, and that makes it worth a shot. Even if it sounds silly, I encourage you to give it a try. There are other techniques for happiness that rely on having an unreasonably positive view of the world, and I have mixed feelings about the use of those, but feeling and expressing appreciation seems to me to be genuine, not contrived. In numerous ways we are designed to not feel as grateful as we should, and what this technique does is to raise the perceived appreciation level to where it should've been all along.

Martin Israel: "It is a well recognised discipline of the spiritual life that a period should be spent each night in recollection of what we have done, and how we have comported ourselves during the day. This period of recollection brings us back to the way we have revealed ourself to others (and ourself) during the stress of relationships, and as such gives us a useful self-portrait of how we stand at the moment. This discipline should not be regarded as one of morbid introspection or a painstaking analysis of possible motives for every action we have performed... The practice of awareness in everyday life is one way of developing a conscious response to the details of our surroundings instead of moving around in the witless state of a sleepwalker which too often characterises unawakened man. Nevertheless, this type of exercise in willed awareness and response is tiring and mechanical; in itself it will eventually wane through sheer fatigue and boredom. This same criticism applies to those schools of inner development which teach their disciples to think and observe themselves carefully before they say or do anything. If this advice were carried out to the letter, the person would lose his spontaneity and his capacity for lightning changes in conduct that may follow fluctuations in outer circumstances. The right way to cultivate self-awareness is to act spontaneously as the situation demands, and then later to meditate quietly and earnestly on that response. Was it part of my desired reaction to such a situation? If not, how did it betray my good intentions, and why did I do it? A few fairly mundane experiences of this type can shatter the imposing façade of learning or respectability we have built around ourselves (Jung's "persona", or mask), and reveal depths of fear, envy, jealousy, and resentment that are seldom confronted directly. The important point is that we of ourselves cannot know, in our present state of development, what is our best way of progress in life. Certainly it is possible to develop a particular aptitude or talent by painstaking practice, but life, and how best we are to live it, is above any personal cultivation."

Carl Sagan said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology... This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." This is probably true, but if the general population had more scientific knowledge (and therefore more power), it seems to me that this would result in even less predictability and more risk. If in a hundred years one entity (government, cult, terrorist group, wealthy eccentric, etc) with a million dollars can destroy all of humanity (which seems quite possible by extrapolating from current trends), perhaps it would be better if power were limited to the smallest number possible? Obviously that entails its own set of risks, but isn't it more dangerous to trust millions if each had the power to destroy all life on the planet? Another possibility would be for scientific knowledge to be widespread (e.g. to encourage intelligent law making and law enforcement) but for the resultant power to be limited, but I don't see any way to achieve this.

You're probably familiar with motivational posters like the kind made by Successories and purchased by companies in an attempt to make their employees more productive. If you find such corporate propaganda to be less than inspirational, you're going to enjoy this site. It's truly hilarious.
http://despair.com/viewall.html

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I only partially agree, I do think that self-evaluation can contribute greatly to a well-lived life. One effective way to learn about yourself is through personality tests. Here's a set of questionnaires to help you examine your attitudes toward happiness, meaning, and other related subjects.
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/questionnaires.aspx

From a recent interview with Steven Pinker: "In The Blank Slate I argue that Homo sapiens has much to be modest about. We are prone, to varying degrees and in various circumstances, to ethnocentrism, violence, adultery, ambition, superstition, and self-deception, among other vices. Take the kin-selected limits on altruism, which tempt us to form dynasties, hire our relatives, spend money on luxuries for our children (orthodontics, summer camp, expensive educations) that we could have used to save the lives of unrelated children in the developing world, and bequeath our estates to our heirs—one of the biggest impediments to economic equality. Unjust, perhaps. But our close relatives have a special place in our hearts because the place for everyone else is, by definition, less special. Would we really be better off if our relationships with our parents, siblings, and children were not uniquely precious? Or take romantic love, with all its perfidy and heartbreak. Donald Symons has pointed out that if people belonged to a species in which each couple was marooned on an island for life, the absence of romantic rivals would not select for lifelong bliss; it would select for no consciousness at all. There would be no falling in love because there would be no alternative mates to select from, and falling in love would be a huge waste. Nor would there be pleasure in sex, which would be done for reproduction and would provide no more feeling than the release of hormones or the production of gametes. The richness and intensity of the emotions in our minds are evolutionary testimony to the preciousness and fragility of our relationships in life."

You are in possession of the most complex (and coolest) thing we know of in our universe: a human brain. Its collection of about 100 billion (!) neurons and about 500 trillion (!!) synapses is somehow capable of thought, emotion, self-awareness and other magic. You have a miracle in your head. So respect it, and treat it well. Nourish it with healthy beliefs, thoughts and ideas. Wear a helmet when you go biking. Avoid addictive substances and destructive memes. And don't ever give control of it to anyone.

Some random stuff I've stumbled across recently, thought they were cool enough to pass along...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B00032G1S0/
http://flickr.com/photos/rebba
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnHsqtWiDOU
http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/jugar.php?id=3751

Why is higher consciousness important? Here's what Pete Russell says: "In the past, becoming more self-aware was essential for one’s personal salvation. Today it has become an imperative for our collective survival. Our knowledge of the external world has grown far faster than our knowledge of ourselves, bringing with it an unprecedented ability to control and manipulate our surroundings. The technologies we now have at our disposal have amplified this potential so much that we can now create almost anything we dream of. Unfortunately, however, technology has also amplified the shortcomings of our half-developed sense of self. Driven by the dictates of a limited identity, and by our belief that inner well-being depends upon external circumstances, we have misused our newfound powers, plundering and poisoning the planet so much that our collective future is now at stake. We have reached what Buckminster Fuller called our "final evolutionary exam." The questions before us are simple: Can we move beyond this limited mode of consciousness? Can we let go our illusions, discover who we really are, and find the wisdom we so desperately need? These questions face us everywhere we look. Our degradation of the environment is forcing us to examine our priorities and values. Our disillusionment with materialism calls us to ask what it is we really want. The ever-accelerating pace of change demands we become less attached to how we think things should be. Our personal relationships are challenging us to move beyond fear and judgment, to love without conditions. Social problems often reflect the meaninglessness inherent in a materialist worldview, while various political and economic crises reveal the short-comings of our self-centered thinking. From all directions, the message is 'wake up!' "

Economist and blogger David Friedman recently posted some interesting musings on what matters and why, and the post elicited equally insightful comments from his readers.
what matters and why
main page

The latest issue of Scientific American has an interesting article about how studying the mental processes of chess grandmasters has revealed clues about how people become experts in other fields. Two interesting quotes from the article:
"Motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families."
"Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but 'effortful study', which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time."
Thanks to my friend Tom for pointing me to this article.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945

Some of my favorite "Deep Thoughts" from Jack Handey:

I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then I could keep both Dracula AND Superman away.

Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.

I'd rather be rich than stupid.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.

Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.

Complexity is in the eye of the beholder. To most people, a cat is simple and an atom is complex, but for a physicist the reverse is true. We need to be careful when defining complexity, so it isn't distorted by our biases. Human intuition expects simple behavior to have simple causes (i.e. a simple set of rules), and complex behavior to have complex causes, but this isn’t always the case. Do we perceive physical laws and processes (e.g. thermodynamics, molecular forces, interatomic forces, electrical firings in our own brain, the fact that objects appear to persist over time even though the subatomic particles comprising them blink into and out of existence, etc.) to be simple because they really are simple, or because our brains were shaped by evolution to perceive them in this way because it was survivally advantageous? In other words, it's obviously evolutionarily beneficial for us to perceive these things as simple, but can we step out of this bias and determine whether they really are objectively simple or not? Observed simplicities can't be totally incorrect misperceptions due to human ignorance, since they do have predictive validity (e.g. interpreting molecular velocities as temperature). But how close are our perceptions to the way things really are?

Forbes Magazine recently asked: "What if you could pick one thing and start over from scratch? What would you change? Would you choose another career, a different home, a new spouse? Or would you choose to remake the world around you? Why not fix America's prison system, make schools more efficient, or make your political leaders more intelligent? That's the question we posed to the contributors to our Blank Slate special report. We asked experts in a wide variety of fields to step back and imagine what it would be like if we didn't have to accept the status quo, if we could reinvent things without regard for cost, politics or practicality."
I like this type of question-everything, we-can-do-anything thinking. Some of the articles are better than others, but all in all it's a worthwhile read.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/15/reinvention-blank-slate_cx_mn_de_06slateland.html