In ancient times, people walked across the earth, and wondered what was beneath them. What could be so vast? What is beyond the vast horizon?
One answer was it’s all on the back of a giant turtle.
And what, you may ask, is that turtle standing on?
Well it’s turtles, all the way down!
All our ideas and our relationship with the unknown is built on turtles. All of our ideas and understandings are built on premises that are essential to come up with a logical idea (that is how logic works).
But if you come up with another, deeper premise, it often completely changes the results of your logic.
In practice, that means that as we probe the unknown for deeper meaning, it tends to rock our world and change all the conclusions that we had been guiding our lives by.
That’s critical right now because, while the unknown has always been there, the rate of unpredictable, unprecedented change in our society is incredible right now.
There is a lot of friggin unknown.
And each time we discover something new from the unknown and bring it back, it changes what logical conclusions we can make. It changes the rules we live by. It changes priorities, hopes, desires, dreams, and daily habits.
Why Foundations Matter
That’s why it’s so essential in times like these to dig deep for the foundations of your ideas.
That’s why we need to go as far down the turtle chain as possible to find what is timeless, what is always true. What will still be good and meaningful and right in 50 years, even if almost everything else changes.
Aristotle called these ideas “good in themselves” vs. “good as a means”. Something like happiness or peace is good in itself. We want it just because we do. But something like money or prestige we want because it promises something else. It’s just a means to something better. We want money and prestige because we hope, once we are chilling on a yacht and everyone thinks we’re great, then maybe we will feel happy and peaceful.
Shaky Foundations
The trouble is that, for one thing, our society gives us a lot of crap examples of what happiness and peace feels like.
Happiness is not a Folger’s commercial. It’s not the feeling of a new smart phone.
Our obsession with emotion-driven sales has clouded out our ability to identify the conditions of real feelings in our real lives.
Likewise, our culture has taught us a lot of confusing ideas about what will lead to things like happiness and peace. It’s not the yacht or the coffee or the the wealth – although not starving is also probably a precondition.
Happiness research tells us that, once people have their basic needs met, more money makes them increasingly less happy.
And indeed, most of us have a happiness set point – you may feel very happy when you win a million dollars, say. But within a few weeks, that radiant joy will start to wear off, and within a few months, you will find new reasons to be about has miserable as you were before.
We can cultivate a happier outlook, but that’s inner work, not something you can buy.
Towards a Lasting Foundation
So what matters most? What doesn’t change?
I think we’ll have to look to world religions for that.
Socrates argued that unconditional love of beautiful ideas was one of the highest goals. Agape.
Jesus loved his fellow man.
Buddhism sought release from suffering by non-attachment from the world’s outcomes, and something more, compassion, the love to give back and help others.
Those are just what resonates most with me – there are a lot more. Concepts like mastery, meaning, service, connection, truth, union with the universe.
(Notice these are not things our culture ostensibly values, like happiness or a sense of security… that’s a story for another day.)
I think it’s something we each have to find in ourselves, as a lived experience, a feeling, more than a word or idea.
That’s what we cling to amidst the unknown, when the house blows down, and the fields are barren, and everything is changing. That is how we know what we are doing is right.
And the challenge is to restack our turtles. To let that one true thing be the guiding light, in all we do. No matter what.
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