In 2014, my family took a trip to Hawaii. Man, it was a great little vacation. We stayed at this hotel with a patio out back where we watched the sunset over the palm trees. We made day trips to the beach, we saw waterfalls, we went to a luau, we went snuba diving. That was a big trip for me because that was the first trip that I brought a video camera on. I recorded the whole thing!
It was honestly years later that I finally started trying to edit together those videos into a trip record. (I can’t publish my original edits because I set them to copyrighted music.) But while I was editing, one video jumped out at me.
It’s pitch black, no image at all. Just some audio. I’ve taken the camera out onto that patio in the middle of the night to tell it how much pain I’m in. I saw that and it all came back to me. I had the flu for that entire trip! I had a cough and body aches that kept me up at night, and an ear infection that I was sure, after a painful day snuba diving, was going to leave me with permanent hearing damage. It got so bad eventually that we had to cancel our plans one day to drive from the resort about half an hour to visit the nearest doctor. I was miserable. And I completely forgot the misery.
Around the beginning of 2019, I sat down to write my Seven Core Theses. Oh, how young I was! How innocent and naive! I wanted to talk about the foundational pillars of my philosophy on life. One was that I’ve always been extremely happy and optimistic, so I thought that everyone else ought to do the same. But even as I was writing it, I knew there was something not quite right.
I was 24 then. I’ve grown a lot; now I’m 26. Now I’ve had two major influences that have made it clear to me that happiness is not the foundation. Not even close.
The first thing to influence me is that interviews with a psychologist named Jordan Peterson came across my suggested videos on YouTube. And by the end of 2019, I’d listened to him speak for hours and hours about politics and work and history and suffering. He has personally suffered so much, especially since I first discovered his work, and the areas of history he talks about the most hold some of the worst suffering humanity has ever endured.
The second thing to influence me is that some Mormons knocked on my door and I talked to them. I had some great conversations. I still talk to them today, almost every week. Such amazing people! They encouraged me to pray more and that task helped me to articulate something important about myself. I’ve never been much for prayer. To pray is to ask, to ask for stuff from the King of the world, the Creator of the universe. That’s awfully presumptuous, especially when He’s already given me more than I would ever have conceived of.
That’s what the core thesis should have been about. That’s the actual foundation of my philosophy on life: Gratitude. I’m lucky enough that gratitude is just part of my constitution. I remember the good things in my life and I move past the bad. But unlike happiness, gratitude is a choice. Counting your blessings is something you can actually work on and get better at.
For example, you could read Progress by Johan Norberg and learn that between 1980 and 2015, 2.1 billion people gained access to sanitation facilities. Or that global life expectancy more than doubled in the last hundred years. Or that between 2000 and 2011, 90% of the world’s developing countries had more economic growth than the United States.
But it’s too easy to list meaningless sequences of numbers about no one. Knowing abstractly that good things happen doesn’t make your life any better.
After the Nazis aborted his first child in 1941, after his father died of starvation in Theresienstadt in 1942, after his mother and brother were murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz in 1944, after his wife died of typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, a man named Viktor Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
But it’s too easy to recite the horrible things that happened long before you were born to people you’ve never met in places you’ve never been. Knowing abstractly that some people have it worse than you doesn’t make your life any better. Words and numbers can’t change your life. I can’t change your life. But you can change the way you think about your life. And if you decide to, you can read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Johan Norberg’s Progress and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.
At the end of the day, you define the meaning of your life. You can’t choose what happens to you, you can’t choose whether you suffer or not. But you can choose to be grateful in the face of your suffering.
