From & To Sathish #7- Page 128

How to redesign your life

By Shoba Narayan, Wisdom Circle, 3 October 2023

In 2018, the Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called The New Map of Life. The headline for the initiative simply read:

“The 100-year-life is here, and we are not ready.”

What does this mean? Simply put, barring unforeseen circumstances, we all can expect to live longer than our parents or grandparents. But are we designing lives for longevity? I am not sure. But we need to think about this.

For our parents and grandparents, life was linear. You were a student, then a householder and worker, then you retired. Today, things are a little more complicated. People pivot mid-career to something quite different. Entrepreneurs take the plunge at 50. Students take a year off and sometimes drop out of college altogether. Women (and some men) take time off to raise kids and then come back into the workforce. People decide to be gig workers rather than employees. This zig-zagging is both frightening and freeing.

Say you are 54 and you are reading this essay. Okay, you think, let me redesign my life to adjust for the fact that I may live longer. What would you do? Would you buy that Lamborghini that you have been dreaming about with the money that you have put away for medical emergencies? Before you say, of course not, just think for a minute. You are only 54. If science is to be believed, and barring medical misfortunes, you have a good 20 years of productive life ahead of you. Isn’t that enough to replenish your savings? Isn’t it time to live your dream?

As you can tell by now, the old linear and rigid models of going through life may be turned on their head. In the past, we were told to slow down at 55 and retire at 65. This is no longer necessary. Instead, you can continue to incorporate work, pleasure, family, education and enterprise into your lives till you are 75—at least. How to do this?

One thing that seems to be obvious is a nimble mindset that learns and -- equally important – unlearns -- as you age. Let me make this personal.

For me, as a writer in my fifties, I have a choice right now: I can learn and engage with Chat GPT or not. I can engage with AI (Artificial Intelligence) or not. I can learn about new forms of content creation that include interactive personalized videos that play well on Tik Tok and Instagram -- or not.

Now, I don’t consider myself a tech novice. I have learned to maintain my own website and love apps. But it still scares me to go down the road of Chat GPT because it means unlearning everything I thought I knew about writing. It means learning to engage with an algorithm and improve on it. But if I want to stay nimble, I have to do it. I have to do those things that frighten me. I have to learn to do things that I did in the beginning of my career even though I think of myself as a “senior” journalist. I have to pitch editors on topics that I know little about— bitcoin, AI, block chain and NFTs because, guess what, that’s where the money is? Adapting to new fields is happening at warp speed in every profession, be it finance, medicine or journalism. We all have to keep up or run the danger of being left behind.

A good way to keep up is to start something new, be it a business or a product. A start-up forces you to cultivate the beginner’s mindset. Today, more folks are pivoting to second careers or start-ups in their forties and fifties. The rationale is that they will still get a good ten to fifteen years to grow the business. As a woman, I have been thinking a lot about this. Common wisdom says that you need to start new things in your twenties and thirties. But for women who elect to raise children, this paradigm could flip. You could ramp up your career after your kids are in high-school, when you are in your forties or fifties. My kids are not home now. I have the time and the energy to go full-steam ahead, take on multiple projects or even start something new. This too is liberating, and it must be said, a little scary.

Age and maturity have certain strong benefits though. A number of studies have talked about the U-bend of happiness, suggesting that we are unhappiest when we are middle-aged and that happiness increases as we age. Scientists give a lot of reasons for this. As we age, we face our mortality and adjust our expectations of what we expect from not just life but also from ourselves. We take stock and realise that we cannot be that hip millionaire rock-musician with perfect lives and kids. The ups and downs that we have surfed and endured teaches us humility, gives us perspective. Even ideas of what happiness is changes as we age. In an interview, Dr. Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity says that happiness in older adults is nuanced. “They are more likely to experience joy with a tear in the eye than younger people are. We see a kind of a savoring and an appreciation, that’s what captures the emotional experience. It is not a uniform, simplistic, happy.”

As we age, we are often asked to give advice to young adults starting their careers, and there are many things that we say about spending, saving, and forming relationships. But here is one mind-boggling fact. The way we humans are ageing, you may well be a young adult if you are in your forties. And 60 to quote the old cliché is the quite literally, the new 30.

Your best years are ahead of you. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

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Writing letters is a spiritual practice for our age of speed

by Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, writer

Handwritten letters seem like a remnant of pre-online life, but they connect us to ourselves and each other like nothing else

Before a long trip, my father would often hand me a white envelope with my name written on the front. ‘Do not open it until you land,’ he’d insist. I’d get to my final destination and tear open the letter with a sense of urgency – to read those words written just for me. I loved his handwriting, how his careful letters in black ink grew bigger and sloppier, until the letter concluded with his classic signature, and sometimes a smiley face with glasses. I used to carry around these letters as amulets. They were lifelines when I felt lost and insecure.

I also wrote many letters as a traveller, full of questions and conundrums, revelations and requests, or just to say, ‘I’m thinking of you.’ Writing letters grounded me in unfamiliar places – with a pen and paper in hand, I paid closer attention to the details of a place – and it helped me feel a little less lonely on the road. Years later, I still have hundreds of letters from friends and family who wrote back to say: ‘I’m thinking of you, too.’

Like so many of us, I stopped writing letters as I spent more time online. But in the past few years, I’ve begun to see handwritten letters anew, as a form of resistance against the doom and disconnection of our digital lives. For me, the act of writing a heartfelt letter is a spiritual practice – it deepens our ability to connect with each other and with ourselves. And we’re all so hungry for connection.

I set out to see if I could rekindle a love of letter-writing. Last November, I kicked off a workshop at my local library by asking participants to share what excited them most about writing letters. One young woman, a recent high-school graduate who came to the workshop with her mother, confessed that she’d never written a letter before, but wanted to learn how, so that she could repair a strained friendship. Text messages just weren’t cutting it, she explained. She needed a way to go deeper, to communicate something from the heart.

Everyone in the room nodded in recognition. We talked about how, in the age of texting, tapping, swiping, scrolling and refreshing, many of us struggle with feelings of isolation and despair. Many people now spend so much time online that they’ve forgotten (or have never known) what it felt like to tend to relationships entirely offline. Letters offer a way back into that degree of care, asking the letter-writer to show up fully for another person in a way that seems increasingly rare.

Like many spiritual practices, writing a letter calls for an elevated level of presence and patience, from composing it, to sending it in the mail, to awaiting its arrival. Since many of us are accustomed to immediate gratification and lightning-fast responses, it can feel uncomfortable, maybe a little threatening, to slow down and focus undivided attention on what you’re communicating to someone in the way that a letter invites you to do. But the beauty of letter-writing is that what you say matters less than the act of writing itself – I believe the ritual is the remedy. Putting pen to paper plugs us into the present tense.

Letter-writing stands out for being an embodied practice, according to Emily Grayson, a psychotherapist who sometimes assigns letter-writing to her clients to help them understand themselves and their relationships. She notes that the entire process is at once tactile and relational: the writing implement, paper and envelope you use, the words you carefully choose, and the act of ‘keeping another in mind’ through direct address are all essential elements. The physicality of handwriting brings you back to your body and creates a sense of urgency around the message. In my experience, it can also help you downshift from anxious and reactive to calm and reflective. When I’m writing a letter, I notice how I slip into a more meditative state, making it easier for my mind to wander inward in search of the memories and messages I want to express.

Writing a letter can help clarify complex emotions and dynamics, even when it never gets sent

Something happens, Grayson observes, when people give themselves permission to show up fully through the act of writing a letter, allowing for the unexpected feelings and thoughts that may surface when given the space. ‘A letter is a private dialogue, but it also has this intention of reaching someone from a deeper part of ourselves,’ she told me. Ideally, it’s the first part of a longer conversation that deepens when the letter lands with the receiver.

What’s more, you can’t write a genuine letter without at least trying to imagine what the other person might be thinking or feeling. In this way, each letter is an act of empathic perspective-taking, one in which you clarify your own viewpoint while simultaneously spending time with the (imagined) experience of another. Keeping the other person in mind – without the expectation of an immediate reply or reaction – gives you a chance to sit with that person and the relationship in its complexity.

Grayson’s clients come to her with complicated relationship issues, including estrangement between parents and children. Sometimes writing a letter can help clarify complex emotions and dynamics, she says, even when it never gets sent. Making the contents of one’s mind visible through a letter can generate what she calls an ‘energetic release’ of feelings that find their forms and symbols. A letter ‘gets things moving’, she explains, allowing the writer ‘to soften enough to see new perspectives.’

If all writing is a form of prayer, then letter-writing is a form of devotion to the messiness of human relationships, all the idiosyncrasies and imperfections. I think about writing a letter as taking a ‘holy risk’, an idea borrowed from the mystic and philosopher Martin Buber. About a century ago, Buber wrote I and Thou (1923) as a response to what he saw as an abounding ‘existential mistrust’ in the postwar era. Buber believed that the divine lives in the relational ‘between’ of a ‘shared lifeworld’, in the words of the historian and biographer Paul Mendes-Flohr.

When I first read Buber in college, this idea of mutual coexistence struck me as poetic. The notion of spiritual interdependence – that the self doesn’t exist without the other, that human relationships make us whole – served as a guiding philosophical principle. But I’m realising now that Buber’s ideas also highlight what’s so powerful about letter-writing as a relational act, especially in a disembodied world where so many of us feel alone. The letter-writing process evokes what Buber calls ‘the mystery of reciprocity’, the ever-present possibility of turning fully toward one another and relating not as transactional objects but as complex humans with the spark of the divine in each of us.

Letter-writing has the power to help restore a way of relating that is generous, personal and spiritual

Every letter reaffirms a connection, no matter how fraught or fragile, by reorienting us to the other. By the time I seal the envelope, I already sense a change in myself: I’m a little less alone, a little less guarded, and a lot more open to finding words to share my story.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ But we’re out of practice. As more of us attempt to wrest ourselves away from the addictive grip of our smartphones, letter-writing has the power to help restore a way of relating that is generous, personal and spiritual.

Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve written a letter yourself – or, like the young woman at my workshop, you never have. A letter is all about slowing down to sit with yourself in the imagined presence of another. Whether you’re struck with a longing to share feelings, confess a truth, offer encouragement, say thanks, share personal news or apologise, the letter lends itself as a place to process, reflect, express and connect. The form itself offers some structural guidelines – begin with greetings and end with goodbyes – but you’re free to improvise what happens in the space between.

That being said, you could start by simply thinking of a loved one, conjuring them up in your mind. Turn toward that person and imagine what you want to tell them, what you want them to know about you in this moment, and what you might long to know about them. Then, grab a piece of paper and a pen, find a quiet place to sit, and listen for the messages within. When you’re ready, begin to write in the direction of your chosen person. A letter starts with a turning inward, but the felt presence of another orients you toward your audience of one. Ask a question. Share a story. Speak with curiosity. Imagine it’s just the two of you meeting in a private room, defying the boundaries of time and space.

A letter is a testament to the unique spirit of the individual who produces it. From the curves of our handwriting to the ways we sign off, traces of our essence linger in the letter. And when you receive a reply, holding it in your hands can make you feel as if the other person is right there with you. Knowing that someone took the time to sit with their thoughts about you for longer than an instant makes the ritual worth the effort.

It might be time for a letter-writing revival. There are already projects such as Letters Against Isolation, which connects young people with elders through letter-writing, and Postcrossing, a global postcard exchange programme. In the workshops I’ve led, attendees vary on what draws them to writing letters, from the tangibility of it to the anticipation of receiving a reply in the mail, but nearly all say it’s a satisfying way to get offline and connect with greater intention and meaning. As proof of our collective desire to stay in touch, the letter lingers on.

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Al-Jazeera, CNN, The World and The Poetry Foundation, among other publications. She lives in Skokie, Illinois.

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Sometimes, the road to virtue comes by way of vice by Sabrina B Little, philosopher

To work your character into better shape, be like a carpenter who fixes warped wood by bending it the opposite way

Imagine you want to improve your character. You are a bit irresolute and would like to be able to persevere on tasks. Maybe you are a bore and desire to be humorous, or are impatient and need to learn to wait well. Perhaps you are stingy, aspiring to be generous, or cowardly and desire courage. How do you make these changes? How do you improve your character?

I have some advice you may expect: find someone you admire and emulate them. Read good books that clarify the human condition. Locate friends with similar character goals and hold each other accountable. Select your situations so you are not tempted by bad choices. Reflect. Say you are sorry and try again. Do good deeds until you are reliably disposed to perform them without thinking, and they define you in a stable way.

But I also have advice that may surprise you: sometimes the road to virtue comes by way of vice.

Several philosophers employ an image of warped wood to describe our moral character. Immanuel Kant wrote that 'from such crooked timber as humankind is made nothing entirely straight can be made'. When Xunzi made his notorious declaration that human nature is evil, he said that we must be denatured, straightened like warped wood to correct our naturally twisted moral condition.

In Plato's dialogue Protagoras, this image appears in a discussion about whether virtue can be taught. Protagoras offers a pedagogical sequence that is built around punishment and constraint, which are seemingly required because the student never comes to love what is choice-worthy. A student is given directives to 'do this, and not do that. If he readily obeys, - so; but if not, they treat him as a bent and twisted piece of wood and straighten him with threats and blows.'

Aristotle also used the image of warped wood. He viewed moral virtue as a mean positioned between two vices - a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. For example, courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness. Wittiness is the mean between buffoonery and boorishness. In the context of a virtue mean, the image of warped wood has interesting implications for character development.

This is like adopting hypothermia in response to heatstroke, or frostbite to fix a burn

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers advice for how to achieve the mean and attain virtue. First, we must notice the errors to which we are prone, since 'different men are inclined by nature to different faults'. Then we should 'drag ourselves away in the opposite direction, for by steering wide of our besetting error we shall make a middle course. This is the method adopted by carpenters to straighten warped timber.'

On the one hand, this is odd advice. People are like warped wood, which must be corrected not by inching closer to the mean but overshooting it entirely. You have a vice, so you should act in terms of a different vice, to develop a virtue. This is like adopting hypothermia in response to heatstroke, or frostbite to fix a burn. Both vices negatively impact one's ability to flourish. Both involve unfitting emotions, thoughts and actions. Though acting in terms of the opposing vice is meant to be an intermediate condition, not a final state, developing virtue through such an erratic process brings a novel set of concerns.

On the other hand, Aristotle's image matches folk intuitions about improvement. If you are inclined to be a bore, you might put yourself out there, making more jokes. Even if you get the balance wrong - making too many or unbefitting jokes - you can develop greater ease in joking, then find an appropriate balance. If you are a coward, you can take more risks - maybe too many risks - and thereby become comfortable in situations of threat. This seems like a reasonable suggestion.

There are a few things to note about Aristotle's warped timber advice. First, even if a practice in overcorrection results in consistently acting in terms of the mean, moral virtues have additional requirements. For example, the virtuous person acts for good reasons. This means that, as a tool for character development, the method of overcorrection is only partial.

Vices also have motivational components. So, when someone who is irresolute overcorrects toward intransigence in order to develop perseverance, this is not sufficient to qualify as possessing the vice. Regardless, intransigence can have negative consequences for the agent - injury, illness and relational costs. Acting in terms of a vice, even without possessing that vice, makes one vulnerable to these costs.

Additionally, some cases of overcorrection will not involve vices at all. This is because we may misperceive the location of the mean. A bore may imagine himself a buffoon when he tries to loosen up and partake in good humour. In reality, he is not acting like a buffoon; he is just acting a bit more humorous. What he perceives as overcorrection is merely drawing closer to the mean.

Misperceptions account for many cases of this phenomenon. Moreover, overcorrection will not work for every moral virtue, considering not all virtues are describable in terms of a mean. For example, there is no such thing as being too fair-minded or too wise. For virtues such as these, there are only vices of deficiency, not of excess. Even so, there are good reasons to think that sometimes our best bet for developing virtue is by inclining ourselves toward vice. A recent teaching experience suggests why.

In an ethics seminar, I assigned students a project in virtue development. They drafted plans to develop an intellectual virtue of their choosing, then journaled about their progress throughout the semester. Several selected open-mindedness, reporting that they had trouble engaging with ideas with which they disagreed. Upon reading their reflections at the end of the term, what I discovered was not a reduction in closed-mindedness by degree, but an exercise in overcorrection. Students surpassed open-mindedness, acting indiscriminately in an attempt to cure their closed-mindedness. They read and took seriously too many ideas - implausible, dubious, unthoughtful ideas from questionable sources.

My students' commitment to character change was admirable, but it resulted in a complete reversal of their previous tendencies to their detriment. They were in an epistemically vulnerable position throughout their projects, taking in both good and bad information uncritically. I also worried that this overcorrection might stick, with students developing a habit of indiscriminateness, rather than developing the virtue of open-mindedness, or even regressing to their original state. It is unclear whether this vice is preferable to closed-mindedness.

Moral development can involve overcorrection as a kind of fact-finding mission

In making a change, it can be easier to err in the direction of an opposing vice, as my students did, than it is to make subtle changes toward the mean. Emphatic corrections both signal one's commitment to change and can seem more actionable than making small adjustments toward a virtue. For example, to develop digital temperance, people often start with austere overcorrections, such as total social media fasts, instead of decreasing their usage incrementally.

Overcorrection can also help us to locate the virtue mean. Humility is defined as owning one's limitations, neither presuming too much nor too little of one's capabilities. Imagine a runner attempting to acquire this virtue. She may start races too quickly (presuming too much of herself) or too slowly (thinking too lowly of her ability) until she finds where her capacities lie. This is the erratic process of humility's development. The key is to make sure this process eventually ends - that the agent does not remain in a state of unstable egoism, toggling between presumption and despair.

Stated differently, moral development can involve overcorrection as a kind of fact-finding mission to discern where the 'mean' is located. Regarding humility, should the agent never exceed the mean, she may not be able to locate the mean. Should she fail to go the proverbial 'well' sometimes - pushing herself too far, presuming too much of herself - she may remain too comfortable and miss the mark of excellence. Overcorrection can help us more honestly evaluate constraints. We may need to do that to develop a virtue.

For some virtues, in exceeding the mean, we are not just locating it but actually shifting its location. Virtues are often bodily phenomena, and the body changes through strain. This can impact where the mean is located. For example, to become excellent in perseverance as an athlete requires exceeding the mean relative to oneself. The athlete persists, pressing past the point of discomfort. Eventually, the outer limit of her perseverance is raised, and the location where she previously felt strain becomes comfortable. The 'mean relative to oneself' shifts as one develops the virtue.

Excess and deficiency shift the virtue mean of temperance, too. Hunger and satiety cue changes in response to how much or how little one consumes. Should one grow in response to eating more, temperance rises to a new level of demand.

A final example is courage. Suitable fear, relative to oneself, shifts as we become more physically capable. As a rock-climbing novice submits himself to his craft, he does not simply locate where proper fear resides; sometimes, he exceeds that place - taking outsized (albeit still hopefully conservative) risks and growing through these risks. Suitable fear rises to meet his growing capacities.

I used to think of moral development as straightforward improvement or upward ascent. But if the wood-warping strategy is apt, then character change is messy and can involve toggling between vices. This is a process marked not by increasing degrees of flourishing but by different types of unflourishing as we incline in the direction of an opposing vice. This lack of flourishing may continue until we get it right, assuming that we eventually do.

Now you have learned about overcorrection. The next time you want to improve your character, you might consider Aristotle's advice. Identify the direction your lumber warps. Then cautiously attempt an opposing vice.

Sabrina B Little is an assistant professor in the Salmon P Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University, US. She also runs at an elite level and has been selected to represent the United States on five national teams. She is the author of The Examined Run (2024).