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Religion for the Nonreligious posts emailed to you.

 October 19, 2014 By Tim Urban email address

Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here. SEND ME NEW POSTS

The mind…can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ― John Milton Follow these special men

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The mind is certainly its own cosmos. — Alan Lightman 771,601

You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you’re pleased with yourself. But are you wiser?

You get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better company,
gain even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a parking spot, stop doing
your own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the stuff settles down to the bottom. But
are you happier?

You do all kinds of life things—you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things, take out the
trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt on things, have sex
with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, buy a couch, close the
curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set your alarm, fix your hair, order lunch, act
friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple juice, and put a new paper towel roll on the thing.

But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in a
meaningful way?

In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist—but how in my
satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active approach to
internal improvement—hindering my own evolution in the process.

This wasn’t just my own naiveté at work. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it doesn’t stress
the need to take real growth seriously. The major institutions in the spiritual arena—religions—tend to
focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal instead of self-improvement. The
industries that do often focus on the human condition—philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self-
help, etc.—lie more on the periphery, with their work often fragmented from each other. All of this sets
up a world that makes it hard to treat internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra-
curricular, icing on the life cake.

Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our reality,
working on what’s going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority. In the same way a
growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought-out strategy and measurable metrics, a Popular Posts
growing human needs a plan—if we want to meaningfully improve, we need to define a goal,
The AI Revolution
understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in the way, and have a strategy to get past
them.  1,144

When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving. The efforts
were there—apparent in many of this blog’s post topics—but I had no growth model, no real plan, no Why Procrastinators
Procrastinate
clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self-improvement in one area or another, whenever I
happened to feel like it. So I’ve attempted to consolidate my scattered efforts, philosophies, and  577

strategies into a single framework—something solid I can hold onto in the future—and I’m gonna use
The Fermi Paradox
this post to do a deep dive into it.
 1,416
So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you—you’ll want to
have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is.
The Elon Musk Series
____________  523

The Goal How to Pick a Life Partner

Wisdom. More on that later.  315

How Do We Get to the Goal? Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

 1,204 Privacidad - Condiciones

 By being aware of the truth. When I say “the truth,” I’m not being one of those annoying people who
says the word truth to mean some amorphous, mystical thing—I’m just referring to the actual facts of
reality. The truth is a combination of what we know and what we don’t know—and gaining and
maintaining awareness of both sides of this reality is the key to being wise.
Putting Time In
Perspective
Easy, right? We don’t have to know more than we know, we only have to be aware of what we know and
what we don’t know. Truth is in plain sight, written on the whiteboard—we just have to look at the  565

330 board and reflect upon it. There’s just this one thing—
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What’s in Our Way?  329

The fog. Why You Should Stop

Caring What Other
To understand the fog, let’s first be clear that we’re not here: People Think

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Religion for the

Nonreligious

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The Tail End

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From Muhammad to ISIS:

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We’re here:
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771,601

And this isn’t the situation:

This is:

This is a really hard concept for humans to absorb, but it’s the starting place for growth. Declaring
ourselves “conscious” allows us to call it a day and stop thinking about it. I like to think of it as a
 consciousness staircase:

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An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than a chicken,
and a human more than a monkey. But what’s above us?

A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can understand our
world and how we think.

There’s no reason to think the staircase doesn’t extend upwards forever. The red alien a few steps above
us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of an orangutan—they
might think we’re pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we don’t actually begin to
understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched by one of their toddlers.

To the green alien up there higher on the staircase, the red alien might seem as intelligent and
conscious as a chicken seems to us. And when the green alien looks at us, it sees the simplest little pre-
programmed ants.

We can’t conceive of what life higher on the staircase would be like, but absorbing the fact that higher
stairs exist and trying to view ourselves from the perspective of one of those steps is the key mindset
we need to be in for this exercise.

For now, let’s ignore those much higher steps and just focus on the step right above us—that light
green step. A species on that step might think of us like we think of a three-year-old child—emerging
into consciousness through a blur of simplicity and naiveté. Let’s imagine that a representative from
that species was sent to observe humans and report back to his home planet about them—what would
he think of the way we thought and behaved? What about us would impress him? What would make
him cringe?

I think he’d very quickly see a conflict going on in the human mind. On one hand, all of those steps on
the staircase below the human are where we grew from. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary
adaptations geared toward animal survival in a rough world are very much rooted in our DNA, and the
primitive impulses in us have birthed a bunch of low-grade qualities—fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed,
instant-gratification, etc. Those qualities are the remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part
of our brains, creating a zoo of small-minded emotions and motivations in our heads:
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But over the past six million years, our evolutionary line has experienced a rapid growth in
consciousness and the incredible ability to reason in a way no other species on Earth can. We’ve taken a
big step up the consciousness staircase, very quickly—let’s call this burgeoning element of higher
consciousness our Higher Being.

The Higher Being is brilliant, big-thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale, he’s a very
new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their coexistence in the
human mind makes it a strange place:

So it’s not that a human is the Higher Being and the Higher Being is three years old—it’s that a human
is the combination of the Higher Being and the low-level animals, and they blend into the three-year-old
 that we are. The Higher Being alone would be a more advanced species, and the animals alone would
be one far more primitive, and it’s their particular coexistence that makes us distinctly human.

As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and found
himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn’t understand who
or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high-level thought, but with animals tramping
around his work environment, it wasn’t an easy job. And things were about to get much worse. Human
330 evolution continued to make the Higher Being more and more sentient, until one day, he realized
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something shocking:

WE’RE GOING TO DIE

It marked the first time any species on planet Earth was conscious enough to understand that fact, and
it threw all of those animals in the brain—who were not built to handle that kind of information—into a
complete frenzy, sending the whole ecosystem into chaos:

The animals had never experienced this kind of fear before, and their freakout about this—one that
continues today—was the last thing the Higher Being needed as he was trying to grow and learn and
make decisions for us.

The adrenaline-charged animals romping around our brain can take over our mind, clouding our
thoughts, judgment, sense of self, and understanding of the world. The collective force of the animals is
what I call “the fog.” The more the animals are running the show and making us deaf and blind to the
thoughts and insights of the Higher Being, the thicker the fog is around our head, often so thick we can
only see a few inches in front of our face:

Let’s think back to our goal above and our path to it—being aware of the truth. The Higher Being can
see the truth just fine in almost any situation. But when the fog is thick around us, blocking our eyes
and ears and coating our brain, we have no access to the Higher Being or his insight. This is why being
continually aware of the truth is so hard—we’re too lost in the fog to see it or think about it.

And when the alien representative is finished observing us and heads back to his home planet, I think
this would be his sum-up of our problems:

The battle of the Higher Being against the animals—of trying to see
through the fog to clarity—is the core internal human struggle.
 This struggle in our heads takes place on many fronts. We’ve examined a few of them here: the Higher
Being (in his role as the Rational Decision Maker) fighting the Instant Gratification Monkey; the Higher
Being (in the role of the Authentic Voice) battling against the overwhelmingly scared Social Survival
Mammoth; the Higher Being’s message that life is just a bunch of Todays getting lost in the blinding
light of fog-based yearning for better tomorrows. Those are all part of the same core conflict between
our primal past and our enlightened future.

330 The shittiest thing about the fog is that when you’re in the fog, it blocks your vision so you can’t see that
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you’re in the fog. It’s when the fog is thickest that you’re the least aware that it’s there at all—it makes
you unconscious. Being aware that the fog exists and learning how to recognize it is the key first step to
rising up in consciousness and becoming a wiser person.

So we’ve established that our goal is wisdom, that to get there we need to become as aware as possible
of the truth, and that the main thing standing in our way is the fog. Let’s zoom in on the battlefield to
look at why “being aware of the truth” is so important and how we can overcome the fog to get there:

The Battlefield
No matter how hard we tried, it would be impossible for humans to access that light green step one
above us on the consciousness staircase. Our advanced capability—the Higher Being—just isn’t there
yet. Maybe in a million years or two. For now, the only place this battle can happen is on the one step
where we live, so that’s where we’re going to zoom in. We need to focus on the mini spectrum of
consciousness within our step, which we can do by breaking our step down into four substeps:

Climbing this mini consciousness staircase is the road to truth, the way to wisdom, my personal mission
for growth, and a bunch of other cliché statements I never thought I’d hear myself say. We just have to
understand the game and work hard to get good at it.

Let’s look at each step to try to understand the challenges we’re dealing with and how we can make
progress:

Step 1: Our Lives in the Fog

Step 1 is the lowest step, the foggiest step, and unfortunately, for most of us it’s our default level of
existence. On Step 1, the fog is all up in our shit, thick and close and clogging our senses, leaving us
going through life unconscious. Down here, the thoughts, values, and priorities of the Higher Being are
completely lost in the blinding fog and the deafening roaring, tweeting, honking, howling, and
squawking of the animals in our heads. This makes us 1) small-minded, 2) short-sighted, and 3) stupid.
Let’s discuss each of these:

1) On Step 1, you’re terribly small-minded because the animals are running the
show.

When I look at the wide range of motivating emotions that humans experience, I don’t see them as a
scattered range, but rather falling into two distinct bins: the high-minded, love-based, advanced
emotions of the Higher Being, and the small-minded, fear-based, primitive emotions of our brain
animals.

And on Step 1, we’re completely intoxicated by the animal emotions as they roar at us through the
dense fog.
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This is what makes us petty and jealous and what makes us so thoroughly enjoy the misfortune of
others. It’s what makes us scared, anxious, and insecure. It’s why we’re self-absorbed and narcissistic;
vain and greedy; narrow-minded and judgmental; cold, callous, and even cruel. And only on Step 1 do
we feel that primitive “us versus them” tribalism that makes us hate people different than us.

You can find most of these same emotions in a clan of capuchin monkeys—and that makes sense,
because at their core, these emotions can be boiled down to the two keys of animal survival: self-
preservation and the need to reproduce.

Step 1 emotions are brutish and powerful and grab you by the collar, and when they’re upon you, the
Higher Being and his high-minded, love-based emotions are shoved into the sewer.

2) On Step 1, you’re short-sighted, because the fog is six inches in front of your face,
preventing you from seeing the big picture.

The fog explains all kinds of totally illogical and embarrassingly short-sighted human behavior.

Why else would anyone ever take a grandparent or parent for granted while they’re around, seeing
them only occasionally, opening up to them only rarely, and asking them barely any questions—even
though after they die, you can only think about how amazing they were and how you can’t believe you
didn’t relish the opportunity to enjoy your relationship with them and get to know them better when
they were around?

Why else would people brag so much, even though if they could see the big picture, it would be obvious
that everyone finds out about the good things in your life eventually either way—and that you always
serve yourself way more by being modest?

Why else would someone do the bare minimum at work, cut corners on work projects, and be
dishonest about their efforts—when anyone looking at the big picture would know that in a work
environment, the truth about someone’s work habits eventually becomes completely apparent to both
bosses and colleagues, and you’re never really fooling anyone? Why would someone insist on making
sure everyone knows when they did something valuable for the company—when it should be obvious
that acting that way is transparent and makes it seem like you’re working hard just for the credit, while
just doing things well and having one of those things happen to be noticed does much more for your
long term reputation and level of respect at the company?

If not for thick fog, why would anyone ever pinch pennies over a restaurant bill or keep an unpleasantly-
rigid scorecard of who paid for what on a trip, when everyone reading this could right now give each of
their friends a quick and accurate 1-10 rating on the cheap-to-generous (or selfish-to-considerate) scale,
and the few hundred bucks you save over time by being on the cheap end of the scale is hardly worth it
considering how much more likable and respectable it is to be generous?

What other explanation is there for the utterly inexplicable decision by so many famous men in
positions of power to bring down the career and marriage they spent their lives building by having an
affair?

And why would anyone bend and loosen their integrity for tiny insignificant gains when integrity affects
your long-term self-esteem and tiny insignificant gains affect nothing in the long term?

How else could you explain the decision by so many people to let the fear of what others might think
dictate the way they live, when if they could see clearly they’d realize that A) that’s a terrible reason to
do or not do something, and B) no one’s really thinking about you anyway—they’re buried in their own
lives.

And then there are all the times when someone’s opaque blinders keep them in the wrong relationship,
job, city, apartment, friendship, etc. for years, sometimes decades, only for them to finally make a
change and say “I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier,” or “I can’t believe I couldn’t see how wrong that
was for me.” They should absolutely believe it, because that’s the power of the fog.
 3) On Step 1, you’re very, very stupid.

One way this stupidity shows up is in us making the same obvious mistakes over and over and over
1
again.

The most glaring example is the way the fog convinces us, time after time after time, that certain things
will make us happy that in reality absolutely don’t. The fog lines up a row of carrots, tells us that they’re
the key to happiness, and tells us to forget today’s happiness in favor of directing all of our hope to all
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And even though the fog has proven again and again that it has no idea how human happiness works—
even though we’ve had so many experiences finally getting a carrot and feeling a ton of temporary
happiness, only to watch that happiness fade right back down to our default level a few days later—we
continue to fall for the trick.

It’s like hiring a nutritionist to help you with your exhaustion, and they tell you that the key is to drink an
espresso shot anytime you’re tired. So you’d try it and think the nutritionist was a genius until an hour
later when it dropped you like an anvil back into exhaustion. You go back to the nutritionist, who gives
you the same advice, so you try it again and the same thing happens. That would probably be it right?
You’d fire the nutritionist. Right? So why are we so gullible when it comes to the fog’s advice on
happiness and fulfillment?

The fog is also much more harmful than the nutritionist because not only does it give us terrible advice
—but the fog itself is the source of unhappiness. The only real solution to exhaustion is to sleep, and
the only real way to improve happiness in a lasting way is to make progress in the battle against the
fog.

There’s a concept in psychology called The Hedonic Treadmill, which suggests that humans have a
stagnant default happiness level and when something good or bad happens, after an initial change in
happiness, we always return to that default level. And on Step 1, this is completely true of course, given
that trying to become permanently happier while in the fog is like trying to dry your body off while
standing under the shower with the water running.

But I refuse to believe the same species that builds skyscrapers, writes symphonies, flies to the moon,
and understands what a Higgs boson is is incapable of getting off the treadmill and actually improving
in a meaningful way.

I think the way to do it is by learning to climb this consciousness staircase to spend more of our time on
Steps 2, 3, and 4, and less of it mired unconsciously in the fog.

Step 2: Thinning the Fog to Reveal Context

Humans can do something amazing that no other creature on Earth can do—they can imagine. If you
show an animal a tree, they see a tree. Only a human can imagine the acorn that sunk into the ground
40 years earlier, the small flimsy stalk it was at three years old, how stark the tree must look when it’s
winter, and the eventual dead tree lying horizontally in that same place.

This is the magic of the Higher Being in our heads.

On the other hand, the animals in your head, like their real world relatives, can only see a tree, and
when they see one, they react instantly to it based on their primitive needs. When you’re on Step 1, your
unconscious animal-run state doesn’t even remember that the Higher Being exists, and his genius
abilities go to waste.

Step 2 is all about thinning out the fog enough to bring the Higher Being’s thoughts and abilities into
your consciousness, allowing you to see behind and around the things that happen in life. Step 2 is
about bringing context into your awareness, which reveals a far deeper and more nuanced version of
the truth.

There are plenty of activities or undertakings that can help thin out your fog. To name three:

1) Learning more about the world through education, travel, and life experience—as your perspective
broadens, you can see a clearer and more accurate version of the truth.

2) Active reflection. This is what a journal can help with, or therapy, which is basically examining your
own brain with the help of a fog expert. Sometimes a hypothetical question can be used as “fog
goggles,” allowing you to see something clearly through the fog—questions like, “What would I do if
money were no object?” or “How would I advise someone else on this?” or “Will I regret not having done
this when I’m 80?” These questions are a way to ask your Higher Being’s opinion on something without
the animals realizing what’s going on, so they’ll stay calm and the Higher Being can actually talk—like
when parents spell out a word in front of their four-year-old when they don’t want him to know what
2
they’re saying.

3) Meditation, exercise, yoga, etc.—activities that help quiet the brain’s unconscious chatter, i.e. allowing
the fog to settle.

But the easiest and most effective way to thin out the fog is simply to be aware of it. By knowing that
fog exists, understanding what it is and the different forms it takes, and learning to recognize when
 you’re in it, you hinder its ability to run your life. You can’t get to Step 2 if you don’t know when you’re on
Step 1.

The way to move onto Step 2 is by remembering to stay aware of the context behind and around what
you see, what you come across, and the decisions you make. That’s it—remaining cognizant of the fog
and remembering to look at the whole context keeps you conscious, aware of reality, and as you’ll see,
makes you a much better version of yourself than you are on Step 1. Some examples—
330
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Here’s what gratitude looks like:

Something good happening:

Something bad happening:

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That phenomenon where everything suddenly seems horrible late at night in bed:

A flat tire:

Long-term consequences:
 Looking at context makes us aware how much we actually know about most situations (as well as what
we don’t know, like what the cashier’s day was like so far), and it reminds us of the complexity and
nuance of people, life, and situations. When we’re on Step 2, this broader scope and increased clarity
makes us feel calmer and less fearful of things that aren’t actually scary, and the animals—who gain
their strength from fear and thrive off of unconsciousness—suddenly just look kind of ridiculous:

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When the small-minded animal emotions are less in our face, the more advanced emotions of the
Higher Being—love, compassion, humility, empathy, etc.—begin to light up.

The good news is there’s no learning required to be on Step 2—your Higher Being already knows the
context around all of these life situations. It doesn’t take hard work, and no additional information or
expertise is needed—you only have to consciously think about being on Step 2 instead of Step 1 and
you’re there. You’re probably there right now just by reading this.

The bad news is that it’s extremely hard to stay on Step 2 for long. The Catch-22 here is that it’s not easy
to stay conscious of the fog because the fog makes you unconscious.

That’s the first challenge at hand. You can’t get rid of the fog, and you can’t always keep it thin, but you
can get better at noticing when it’s thick and develop effective strategies for thinning it out whenever
you consciously focus on it. If you’re evolving successfully, as you get older, you should be spending
more and more time on Step 2 and less and less on Step 1.

Step 3: Shocking Reality

I . . . a universe of atoms . . . an atom in the universe. —Richard Feynman

_________

Step 3 is when things start to get weird. Even on the more enlightened Step 2, we kind of think we’re
here:
 As delightful as that is, it’s a complete delusion. We live our days as if we’re just here on this green and
brown land with our blue sky and our chipmunks and our caterpillars. But this is actually what’s
happening:

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But even more actually, this is happening:

We also tend to kind of think this is the situation:

When really, it’s this:

 You might even think you’re a thing. Do you?

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No you’re a ton of these:

This is the next iteration of truth on our little staircase, and our brains can’t really handle it. Asking a
human to internalize the vastness of space or the eternity of time or the tininess of atoms is like asking
a dog to stand up on its hind legs—you can do it if you focus, but it’s a strain and you can’t hold it for
3
very long.

You can think about the facts anytime—The Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago, which is about 130,000
times longer than humans have existed; if the sun were a ping pong ball in New York, the closest star to
us would be a ping pong ball in Atlanta; the Milky Way is so big that if you made a scale model of it that
was the size of the US, you would still need a microscope to see the sun; atoms are so small that there
are about as many atoms in one grain of salt as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
But once in a while, when you deeply reflect on one of these facts, or when you’re in the right late night
conversation with the right person, or when you’re staring at the stars, or when you think too hard
about what death actually means—you have a Whoa moment.

A true Whoa moment is hard to come by and even harder to maintain for very long, like our dog’s
standing difficulties. Thinking about this level of reality is like looking at an amazing photo of the Grand
Canyon; a Whoa moment is like being at the Grand Canyon—the two experiences are similar but
somehow vastly different. Facts can be fascinating, but only in a Whoa moment does your brain actually
wrap itself around true reality. In a Whoa moment, your brain for a second transcends what it’s been
built to do and offers you a brief glimpse into the astonishing truth of our existence. And a Whoa
moment is how you get to Step 3.

I love Whoa moments. They make me feel some intense combination of awe, elation, sadness, and
wonder. More than anything, they make me feel ridiculously, profoundly humble—and that level of
humility does weird things to a person. In those moments, all those words religious people use—awe,
worship, miracle, eternal connection—make perfect sense. I want to get on my knees and surrender.
This is when I feel spiritual.

And in those fleeting moments, there is no fog—my Higher Being is in full flow and can see everything
in perfect clarity. The normally-complicated world of morality is suddenly crystal clear, because the only
fathomable emotions on Step 3 are the most high-level. Any form of pettiness or hatred is a laughable
concept up on Step 3—with no fog to obscure things, the animals are completely naked, exposed for
the sad little creatures that they are.
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On Step 1, I snap back at the rude cashier, who had the nerve to be a dick to me. On Step 2, the
rudeness doesn’t faze me because I know it’s about him, not me, and that I have no idea what his day or
life has been like. On Step 3, I see myself as a miraculous arrangement of atoms in vast space that for a
split second in endless eternity has come together to form a moment of consciousness that is my life…
and I see that cashier as another moment of consciousness that happens to exist on the same speck of
time and space that I do. And the only possible emotion I could have for him on Step 3 is love.

In a Whoa moment’s transcendent level of consciousness, I see every interaction, every motivation,
every news headline in unusual clarity—and difficult life decisions are much more obvious. I feel wise.

Of course, if this were my normal state, I’d be teaching monks somewhere on a mountain in Myanmar,
and I’m not teaching any monks anywhere because it’s not my normal state. Whoa moments are rare
and very soon after one, I’m back down here being a human again. But the emotions and the clarity of
Step 3 are so powerful, that even after you topple off the step, some of it sticks around. Each time you
humiliate the animals, a little bit of their future power over you is diminished. And that’s why Step 3 is
so important—even though no one that I know can live permanently on Step 3, regular visits help you
dramatically in the ongoing Step 1 vs Step 2 battle, which makes you a better and happier person.

Step 3 is also the answer to anyone who accuses atheists of being amoral or cynical or nihilistic, or
wonders how atheists find any meaning in life without the hope and incentive of an afterlife. That’s a
Step 1 way to view an atheist, where life on Earth is taken for granted and it’s assumed that any positive
impulse or emotion must be due to circumstances outside of life. On Step 3, I feel immensely lucky to
be alive and can’t believe how cool it is that I’m a group of atoms that can think about atoms—on Step
3, life itself is more than enough to make me excited, hopeful, loving, and kind. But Step 3 is only
possible because science has cleared the way there, which is why Carl Sagan said that “science is not
only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” In this way, science is the
“prophet” of this framework—the one who reveals new truth to us and gives us an opportunity to alter
ourselves by accessing it.

So to recap so far—on Step 1, you’re in a delusional bubble that Step 2 pops. On Step 2, there’s much
more clarity about life, but it’s within a much bigger delusional bubble, one that Step 3 pops. But Step 3
is supposed to be total, fog-free clarity on truth—so how could there be another step?

Step 4: The Great Unknown

 If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came
from, we will have failed. —Carl Sagan

_________

The game so far has for the most part been clearing out fog to become as conscious as possible of
what we as people and as a species know about truth:

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On Step 4, we’re reminded of the complete truth—which is this:

The fact is, any discussion of our full reality—of the truth of the universe or our existence—is a
complete delusion without acknowledging that big purple blob that makes up almost all of that reality.

But you know humans—they don’t like that purple blob one bit. Never have. The blob frightens and
humiliates humans, and we have a rich history of denying its existence entirely, which is like living on
the beach and pretending the ocean isn’t there. Instead, we just stamp our foot and claim that now
we’ve finally figured it all out. On the religious side, we invent myths and proclaim them as truth—and
even a devout religious believer reading this who stands by the truth of their particular book would
agree with me about the fabrication of the other few thousand books out there. On the science front,
we’ve managed to be consistently gullible in believing that “realizing you’ve been horribly wrong about
reality” is a phenomenon only of the past.

Having our understanding of reality overturned by a new groundbreaking discovery is like a shocking
twist in this epic mystery novel humanity is reading, and scientific progress is regularly dotted with
these twists—the Earth being round, the solar system being heliocentric, not geocentric, the discovery
of subatomic particles or galaxies other than our own, and evolutionary theory, to name a few. So how
is it possible, with the knowledge of all those breakthroughs, that Lord Kelvin, one of history’s greatest
scientists, said in the year 1900, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains
4
is more and more precise measurement” —i.e. this time, all the twists actually are finished.

Of course, Kelvin was as wrong as every other arrogant scientist in history—the theory of general
relativity and then the theory of quantum mechanics would both topple science on its face over the
next century.

Even if we acknowledge today that there will be more twists in the future, we’re probably kind of
inclined to think we’ve figured out most of the major things and have a far closer-to-complete picture of
reality than the people who thought the Earth was flat. Which, to me, sounds like this:
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The fact is, let’s remember that we don’t know what the universe is. Is it everything? Is it one tiny bubble
in a multiverse frothing with bubbles? Is it not a bubble at all but an optical illusion hologram? And we
know about the Big Bang, but was that the beginning of everything? Did something arise from nothing,
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or was it just the latest in a long series of expansion/collapse cycles? We have no clue what dark
matter is, only that there’s a shit-ton of it in the universe, and when we discussed The Fermi Paradox, it
became entirely clear that science has no idea about whether there’s other life out there or how
advanced it might be. How about String Theory, which claims to be the secret to unifying the two grand
but seemingly-unrelated theories of the physical world, general relativity and quantum mechanics? It’s
either the grandest theory we’ve ever come up with or totally false, and there are great scientists on
both sides of this debate. And as laypeople, all we need to do is take a look at those two well-accepted
theories to realize how vastly different reality can be from how it seems: like general relativity telling us
that if you flew to a black hole and circled around it a few times in intense gravity and then returned to
Earth a few hours after you left, decades would have passed on Earth while you were gone. And that’s
like an ice cream cone compared to the insane shit quantum mechanics tells us—like two particles
across the universe from one another being mysteriously linked to each other’s behavior, or a cat that’s
both alive and dead at the same time, until you look at it.

And the thing is, everything I just mentioned is still within the realm of our understanding. As we
established earlier, compared to a more evolved level of consciousness, we might be like a three-year-
old, a monkey, or an ant—so why would we assume that we’re even capable of understanding
everything in that purple blob? A monkey can’t understand that the Earth is a round planet, let alone
that the solar system, galaxy, or universe exists. You could try to explain it to a monkey for years and it
wouldn’t be possible. So what are we completely incapable of grasping even if a more intelligent species
tried its hardest to explain it to us? Probably almost everything.

There are really two options when thinking about the big, big picture: be humble or be absurd.

The nonsensical thing about humans feigning certainty because we’re scared is that in the old days,
when it seemed on the surface that we were the center of all creation, uncertainty was frightening
because it made our reality seem so much bleaker than we had thought—but now, with so much more
uncovered, things look highly bleak for us as people and as a species, so our fear should welcome
uncertainty. Given my default outlook that I have a small handful of decades left and then an eternity of
nonexistence, the fact that we might be totally wrong sounds tremendously hopeful to me.

Ironically, when my thinking reaches the top of this rooted-in-atheism staircase, the notion that
something that seems divine to us might exist doesn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. I’m still totally
atheist when it comes to all human-created conceptions of a divine higher force—which all, in my
opinion, proclaim far too much certainty. But could a super-advanced force exist? It seems more than
likely. Could we have been created by something/someone bigger than us or be living as part of a
simulation without realizing it? Sure—I’m a three-year-old, remember, so who am I to say no?

To me, complete rational logic tells me to be atheist about all of the Earth’s religions and utterly
agnostic about the nature of our existence or the possible existence of a higher being. I don’t arrive
there via any form of faith, just by logic.

I find Step 4 mentally mind-blowing but I’m not sure I’m ever quite able to access it in a spiritual way like
I sometimes can with Step 3—Step 4 Whoa moments might be reserved for Einstein-level thinkers—but
even if I can’t get my feet up on Step 4, I can know it’s there, what it means, and I can remind myself of
its existence. So what does that do for me as a human?

Well remember that powerful humility I mentioned in Step 3? It multiplies that by 100. For reasons I just
discussed, it makes me feel more hopeful. And it leaves me feeling pleasantly resigned to the fact that I
will never understand what’s going on, which makes me feel like I can take my hand off the wheel, sit
back, relax, and just enjoy the ride. In this way, I think Step 4 can make us live more in the present—if
I’m just a molecule floating around an ocean I can’t understand, I might as well just enjoy it.
 The way Step 4 can serve humanity is by helping to crush the notion of certainty. Certainty is primitive,
leads to “us versus them” tribalism, and starts wars. We should be united in our uncertainty, not divided
over fabricated certainty. And the more humans turn around and look at that big purple blob, the better
off we’ll be.

Why Wisdom is the Goal

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Shares Nothing clears fog like a deathbed, which is why it’s then that people can always see with more clarity
what they should have done differently—I wish I had spent less time working; I wish I had
communicated with my wife more; I wish I had traveled more; etc. The goal of personal growth should
be to gain that deathbed clarity while your life is still happening so you can actually do something about
it.

The way you do that is by developing as much wisdom as possible, as early as possible. To me, wisdom
is the most important thing to work towards as a human. It’s the big objective—the umbrella goal
under which all other goals fall into place. I believe I have one and only one chance to live, and I want to
do it in the most fulfilled and meaningful way possible—that’s the best outcome for me, and I do a lot
more good for the world that way. Wisdom gives people the insight to know what “fulfilled and
meaningful” actually means and the courage to make the choices that will get them there.

And while life experience can contribute to wisdom, I think wisdom is mostly already in all of our heads
—it’s everything the Higher Being knows. When we’re not wise, it’s because we don’t have access to the
Higher Being’s wisdom because it’s buried in fog. The fog is anti-wisdom, and when you move up the
staircase into a clearer place, wisdom is simply a by-product of that increased consciousness.

One thing I learned at some point is that growing old or growing tall is not the same as growing up.
Being a grownup is about your level of wisdom and the size of your mind’s scope—and it turns out that
it doesn’t especially correlate with age. After a certain age, growing up is about overcoming your fog,
and that’s about the person, not the age. I know some supremely wise older people, but there are also
a lot of people my age who seem much wiser than their parents about a lot of things. Someone on a
growth path whose fog thins as they age will become wiser with age, but I find the reverse happens
with people who don’t actively grow—the fog hardens around them and they actually become even less
conscious, and even more certain about everything, with age.

When I think about people I know, I realize that my level of respect and admiration for a person is
almost entirely in line with how wise and conscious a person I think they are. The people I hold in the
highest regard are the grownups in my life—and their ages completely vary.

Another Look at Religion in Light of this Framework:

This discussion helps clarify my issues with traditional organized religion. There are plenty of good
people, good ideas, good values, and good wisdom in the religious world, but to me that seems like
something happening in spite of religion and not because of it. Using religion for growth requires an
innovative take on things, since at a fundamental level, most religions seem to treat people like children
instead of pushing them to grow. Many of today’s religions play to people’s fog with “believe in this or
else…” fear-mongering and books that are often a rallying cry for ‘us vs. them’ divisiveness. They tell
people to look to ancient scripture for answers instead of the depths of the mind, and their stubborn
certainty when it comes to right and wrong often leaves them at the back of the pack when it comes to
the evolution of social issues. Their certainty when it comes to history ends up actively pushing their
followers away from truth—as evidenced by the 42% of Americans who have been deprived of knowing
the truth about evolution. (An even worse staircase criminal is the loathsome world of American politics,
with a culture that lives on Step 1 and where politicians appeal directly to people’s animals, deliberately
avoiding anything on Steps 2-4.)

So What Am I?
Yes, I’m an atheist, but atheism isn’t a growth model any more than “I don’t like rollerblading” is a
workout strategy.

So I’m making up a term for what I am—I’m a Truthist. In my framework, truth is what I’m always
looking for, truth is what I worship, and learning to see truth more easily and more often is what leads
to growth.

In Truthism, the goal is to grow wiser over time, and wisdom falls into your lap whenever you’re
conscious enough to see the truth about people, situations, the world, or the universe. The fog is what
stands in your way, making you unconscious, delusional, and small-minded, so the key day-to-day
growth strategy is staying cognizant of the fog and training your mind to try to see the full truth in any
situation.

Over time, you want your [Time on Step 2] / [Time on Step 1] ratio to go up a little bit each year, and you
want to get better and better at inducing Step 3 Whoa moments and reminding yourself of the Step 4
purple blob. If you do those things, I think you’re evolving in the best possible way, and it will have
profound effects on all aspects of your life.

That’s it. That’s Truthism.

 Am I a good Truthist? I’m okay. Better than I used to be with a long way to go. But defining this
framework will help—I’ll know where to put my focus, what to be wary of, and how to evaluate my
progress, which will help me make sure I’m actually improving and lead to quicker growth.

To help keep me on mission, I made a Truthism logo:

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That’s my symbol, my mantra, my WWJD—it’s the thing I can look at when something good or bad
happens, when a big decision is at hand, or on a normal day as a reminder to stay aware of the fog and
keep my eye on the big picture.

And What Are You?

My challenge to you is to decide on a term for yourself that accurately sums up your growth framework.

If Christianity is your thing and it’s genuinely helping you grow, that word can be Christian. Maybe you
already have your own clear, well-defined advancement strategy and you just need a name for it. Maybe
Truthism hit home for you, resembles the way you already think, and you want to try being a Truthist
with me.

Or maybe you have no idea what your growth framework is, or what you’re using isn’t working. If either
A) you don’t feel like you’ve evolved in a meaningful way in the past couple years, or B) you aren’t able
to corroborate your values and philosophies with actual reasoning that matters to you, then you need
to find a new framework.

To do this, just ask yourself the same questions I asked myself: What’s the goal that you want to evolve
towards (and why is that the goal), what does the path look like that gets you there, what’s in your way,
and how do you overcome those obstacles? What are your practices on a day-to-day level, and what
should your progress look like year-to-year? Most importantly, how do you stay strong and maintain the
practice for years and years, not four days? After you’ve thought that through, name the framework and
make a symbol or mantra. (Then share your strategy in the comments or email me about it, because
articulating it helps clarify it in your head, and because it’s useful and interesting for others to hear
about your framework.)

I hope I’ve convinced you how important this is. Don’t wait until your deathbed to figure out what life is
all about.

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To print this post or read it offline, try the PDF.

Three other Wait But Why posts about things we should try to remember every day:

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

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