Kleos lay very near the core of the Greek value system. Their value system was at least partly motivated, as perhaps all value systems are partly motivated, by the human need to feel as if our lives matter. A little perspective, which the Greeks certainly had, reveals what brief and feeble things our lives are. As the old Jewish joke has it, the food here is terrible — and such small portions! What can we do to give our lives a moreness that will help withstand the eons of time that will soon cover us over, blotting out the fact that we ever existed at all? Really, why did we bother to show up for our existence in the first place? The Greek speakers were as obsessed with this question as we are.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, thinking about what Plato would Tweet.

If depression is a foul miasma wreathing the brain, elegant sadness is more like a peacock’s tail, coloured in blue-gentian and rich marine greens

Adam Roberts makes the case that I’ve long espoused- that sadness can be one of life’s most profoundly great things. Beautiful, necessary read.The mysterious beauty of sadness

Or does it? The question that Goldstein’s book sets out to consider is what we mean by progress, and also what we mean by meaning. Her goal is to do more than prove how relevant philosophy still is. She aims to reveal how many of our most pressing questions simply aren’t better answered elsewhere. Much of what we take for progress delivers answers that miss the point, distort issues, ignore complications, and may be generated by badly formulated questions in the first place. Goldstein also wants to show us that figuring out how to live a meaningful life is something very different from understanding the meaning of special relativity or evolution. We are deluged with information; we know how to track down facts in seconds; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us? As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, is without a doubt my next read.Playing With Plato

In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality. The data all point to the fact that as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.

Inequality has been an abstract political debate for awhile now, but it has real consequences on us as individuals, too.How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul

1. Hiding Your Flaws People fall in love with each other’s rough edges. Paradoxically, it’s our flaws and vulnerabilities that make us unique and endearing towards others. The more we’re willing to reveal where we come up short, the more intimacy and connection we’ll generate in our personal lives, and the happier and healthier we’ll be in the long run.

Mark Manson (one of my favorite writers) lays out 12 things people care too much about. Making the cut: sexual jealousy, politics, being offended. Couldn’t agree more. 12 Stupid Things People Care Way Too Much About - The Good Men Project

Balls and similar gatherings are wont to attract all that is bad and vicious; all the quarrels, envyings, slanders, and indiscreet tendencies of a place will be found collected in the ballroom. While people’s bodily pores are opened by the exercise of dancing, the heart’s pores will be also opened by excitement … while you were dancing, souls were groaning in hell by reason of sins committed when similarly occupied, or in consequence thereof.

I’m not sure I like the patron saint of writers. In Dan Piepenbring’s words, “Buzzkill, Francis!”. Paris Review – The Patron Saint of Writers and Journalists.

Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. It depends only on the requirement of atoms. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

In light of the recent discovery of gravitational waves that all but prove the Big Bang, and get us closer toward the multiverse, this is all the more appropriate. I’ve always thought we pay too little attention to the mind-boggling implications of the multiverse, which is starting to look (at least to physicists) more and more like reality.

We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist | Brain Pickings

1. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”

Teddy Roosevelt dispenses advice on reading. I find some of these, especially #4, especially refreshing. I spend so much time trying to figure out what I should read, what would make me better, that sometimes I forget to just read what I want to read.

Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules for Reading

The divergent Greek and Hebrew approaches went into the mix that is Western culture, often clashing but sometimes also tempering one another. Over the centuries, philosophy, perhaps aided by religion, learned to abandon entirely the flawed Greek presumption that only extraordinary lives matter. This was progress of the philosophical variety, subtler than the dazzling triumphs of science, but nevertheless real. Philosophy has laboriously put forth arguments that have ever widened the sphere of mattering. It was natural for the Greeks to exclude their women and slaves, not to mention non-Greeks, whom they dubbed barbarians. Such exclusions are unthinkable to us now. Being inertial creatures, we required rigorous and oft-repeated arguments that spearheaded social movements that resulted, at long last, in the once quixotic declaration of human rights. We’ve come a long way from the kleos of Greeks, with its unexamined presumption that mattering is inequitably distributed among us, with the multireplicated among us mattering more.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, on the human need to make ourselves heard, and how that need explains the popularity of Twitter: What Would Plato Tweet?

The net is the Promethean substance of this age. It can consume, it can destroy, and it can empower. Like fire, we have to learn to use it and live with it.

Quinn Norton offers some exquisite wisdom on what she’s learned about living on the web: Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

He was nervous. “I feel like I love you,” he said. “I know it’s crazy, but I do.” Then he carried me to his bed. At some point during our love fest I borrowed his iPhone, and that’s when I realized he had been using it to send me messages. Everyone knows the mistakes that can lead to. James wasn’t the best speller, but technology wasn’t doing him any favors, either.

A moving story of love, neuroses, and bad spelling: Learning to Silence My Inner Editor

Fragile people and systems seek to eliminate variability, noise, and tension. Because fragile people and systems don’t have built-in responses to stress and variability, they naively try to eliminate it completely from the equation.

But trying to eliminate randomness and variability is a loser’s game. It’s simply not possible. Remember, randomness and variability are the rule, not the exception.

Not only is trying to eliminate stress and variability a lost cause, it ends up making an already fragile person or system even more fragile.

Brett and Kate McKay summarize Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s case for moving beyond resilience to “antifragility,” or becoming stronger in the case of chaos:

Becoming Antifragile: Beyond “Sissy” Resilience

The Significance of Insignificance

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You can’t know how incredible it is in here. The beauty and the majesty, and, at the next corner, the depravity. There are whirlwinds and windows and trees and even the occasional clown. There is misery and triumph and heartbreak and somber reflections.

It’s cozy here, where I live, but it can sometimes feel as if the walls are closing in. It has the effect of making me feel important, and then of snatching that importance away and leaving me to consider my insignificance.

I live inside my mind.

We all do, of course, but for some the concept is comforting, for others, terrifying. Regardless, this is where we live. Even extroverts- who venture far from home and into the physical world much more often than I- return home each night, when their heads hit the pillow.

Humans have between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. Some of these are concrete notions (”I need to buy some milk while I’m out”), while others are fleeting notions that we recognize only by their effect.

The vast majority of those thoughts will differ from person to person, but my guess is that the degree of similarity would surprise us. Pamela Druckerman said it nicely in a recent piece in which she looks back on what she’s learned in her 40s:

More about you is universal than not universal. My unscientific assessment is that we are 95 percent cohort, 5 percent unique. Knowing this is a bit of a disappointment, and a bit of a relief.

Most would tend to agree with her, after some thought. Our arms and legs and ears and eyes are so very similar- why would our internal makeup be any different?

There’s a lot of room for variance in that five percent, though. Experience, environment, genes- these all play a part in the small percentage of uniqueness in each of us. And not only are the differences many, they’re often stark. Our beliefs, our biases, our aptitudes reach each end of the spectrum. Some believe in small government, some believe in socialism. Some like order, some chaos. Some live to make music, others to run their business. All these characteristics, though, fall within that slim five percent. How can such a slight difference cause such gaping rifts in our thinking?

Nowhere is this difference more evident than in the effect of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Sagan’s entire premise hinges on our seeming insignificance in the universe, whether we occupy a privileged position or an inconsequential one. For some, that concept of insignificance—espoused long before Sagan, but perhaps captured most elegantly by him—is a source of wonder. It fills those who contemplate it with a sublime feeling of cosmic order. For others, it inspires dread. For those, insignificance is a dagger to the heart: if we are so insignificant, what’s the point?

There seems to me no greater symbol of the contrast in our ways of life than in our approach to insignificance. But if we are so similar, how does the difference become so stark in the first place? How do creatures with 95 percent similarity come to occupy realms of thought so completely in opposition to each other? If we’re so similar, there must be some fundamental point of departure, some point at which, early on, our thought processes begin to diverge.

Think of two saplings growing side-by-side. At first, the similarities are uncanny- but what if one sapling sprouted from the ground leaning just a bit to the right, while the other leaned a hair to the left? The difference wouldn’t be immediately obvious, but if we could fast-forward to the trees’ maturity, we’d see the difference much more clearly: they’ve grown apart, quite literally, since the point at which the direction of their growth diverged.

So it is with us. The things we experience while young change our direction, and our differences become stark when we reach maturity. It’s easy to see, then, how creatures so similar could have drastically different reactions to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, and to our insignificance in general.

That begs the question: what is that point of divergence? What is the catalyst that sends one of us off in one direction, and others in another? There are bound to be many such catalysts, of course, but one may rise above the rest. Costica Bradatan provides some insight:

Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all when there is no reason that we should. Knowing that gives us some dignity.

Failure. Is there a better example of the thread that binds us all together? We are all human, we are all fallible, we all make mistakes, we all fail. It’s a fundamental truth of human existence. It would make sense, then, that how we approach failure would have a powerful impact on the way we approach life.

Bradatan goes on:

In this role, failure also possesses a distinct therapeutic function. Most of us (the most self-aware or enlightened excepted) suffer chronically from a poor adjustment to existence; we compulsively fancy ourselves much more important than we are and behave as though the world exists only for our sake; in our worst moments, we place ourselves like infants at the center of everything and expect the rest of the universe to be always at our service. We insatiably devour other species, denude the planet of life and fill it with trash. Failure could be a medicine against such arrogance and hubris, as it often brings humility.

Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are.

Failure is not optional. We all experience it- much more often than success, in fact. But failure doesn’t have to be failure. It need not occupy such a lofty status. We can bring it back down to earth with a simple shift in perspective: we will fail, so we need only be concerned with what we learn from it, and how quickly we move past it. Once we demote failure from feared demigod to everyday citizen—once we get familiar with it— we can look to the stars, and thus to ourselves, with the wonder they and we deserve. Our insignificance need not be so significant.