Reason for Living Newsletter No. 6 | The Dangers of Evading Reality
Also in this issue: Keeping Yourself Accountable, Reason for Living Book Update
Issue no. 6, 21 May 2024
Welcome to the Reason for Living newsletter!
In this issue:
Feature Article: The Dangers of Evading Reality
Keeping Yourself Accountable (including Reason for Living Book Update)
Recently Posted: Reason & Emotion: In Harmony for Happiness
Feature Article: The Dangers of Evading Reality
Imagine you’re driving cross-country with the radio playing. You’ve got hours of driving ahead of you and no time to lose. As you head down the highway, you hear a report of icy conditions further ahead. As you get closer, you hear more reports, each worse than the last. Still you speed on, determined to reach your destination on time. You ignore six warnings of ice ahead and speed on into the danger zone. After all, your car is modern—it will protect you if anything goes wrong.
How do you imagine this story ends?
The crew of the RMS Titanic ignored six warnings transmitted by other ships that had encountered icebergs ahead of them. Determined to reach New York at the advertised time to maintain the reputations of the ship, crew, and company, the captain ordered full speed through the ice field. Believing the ship could withstand any collisions with the ice, he took little heed of the warnings he received.
When the Titanic’s crew spotted the iceberg in their path, it was already too late to avoid it. Their speed was too high to stop or turn in time. They tried to turn anyway, resulting in a side-scraping collision that did more damage than a head-on one likely would have. The ship—whose lifeboats were designed to ferry people to a nearby rescue vessel, not carry the whole ship’s complement in one go—went down with the loss of more than a thousand lives.
The Titanic disaster was the result of a series of evasions—cases in which people ignored information readily available to them. The ship’s designers advertised it as “unsinkable” thanks to bulkheads that would contain floodwater in one section in the event of a hull breach—ignoring the fact that a long breach flooding multiple sections would tip the ship enough for the water to overrun the tops of the bulkheads. They also fitted it with an inadequate supply of lifeboats, ignoring the possibility of a disaster happening too remotely and too quickly for a rescue ship to arrive in time. Then the captain and radio officers ignored the reports of ice ahead. Lastly, the helmsman ignored the fact that the ship was traveling too fast to avoid the collision and tried to turn.
If any one of these people had acknowledged reality and acted differently, the thousand people that died that day might have survived.
It’s easy to see the practical parallels between this example and an everyday situation such as driving your car. Speeding down an icy road is an obvious recipe for disaster, and yet, every year there are spectacular freeway pile-ups caused by drivers speeding in icy conditions. Once drivers hit the ice and lose control, they panic, and their futile reactions exacerbate the impending collision as their vehicles slide sideways into the melee.
This lesson doesn’t just apply to physical actions. Evading reality can have all sorts of consequences in other areas of life too. If you’re in a bad relationship and you have clear evidence that it’s unhealthy for you, but choose to evade that knowledge—perhaps because it’s painful to face it, or it would mean disappointing your family, or it would entail financial challenges—you commit yourself instead to years of depression, unhappiness, and strife. If you give money to untrustworthy people, buy from unscrupulous sellers, or engage in destructive habits such as smoking or drunk driving, you gamble with your money and your life. These decisions are mere errors of knowledge if you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into, but they’re errors of morality if you willingly evade knowledge you possessed.
In a world in which these kinds of evasions are commonplace, having your mind fully connected to reality is like a superpower. A detail-oriented, rational mindset can empower you to spot connections and opportunities others miss, recognize irrational ideas, and build your understanding of the natural laws that govern the world around us.
Survival and flourishing depend on keeping your mind connected to reality. Evading facts disconnects your mind from reality. If you want to survive and flourish, cultivate a respect for reality and ensure that you are always cognizant of the relevant facts in any given situation. If you catch yourself avoiding something, make a special point to focus on it.
Keeping Yourself Accountable
(including Reason for Living Book Update)
If, like me, you have a wide array of interests and ideas, and struggle to maintain focus on one thing over long periods, writing a book can be very challenging. It requires a considerable amount of concentrated effort over a long period of time. Good writing requires an extensive process of pre-planning, drafting, and multiple rounds of editing—a daunting prospect that overpowers many aspiring writers.
Fortunately, I have an accountability buddy to keep me on track. About a year ago, when I was first planning the Reason for Living project, I made an agreement with my friend and author Tim White: I would read and edit all of his horror novel, and he would read and edit all of my personal development book. The only catch: We both had to have progress to report at each weekly meeting.
A year on, and his book is published. (To be fair, he started before me.) Mine, on the other hand, is fully drafted and deep in editing. That process is taking longer than I had hoped, but for a very good reason: Tim is finding lots of places where I could make my points more clearly and effectively. It’s taking me extra time to implement his suggestions, but the book is already a lot better for it.
This arrangement has had two major benefits for me: It’s kept me accountable to working on the book even when other priorities threaten to distract my attention, and it’s driven up the quality of the end product immensely. The lesson here is one that goes against my natural inclinations as a rather self-driven person: There really is no substitute for having somebody else keep you accountable if you want to consistently produce high-quality work. However smart and capable you may be, another person’s perspective will always pick up things you’ve overlooked. And as motivators for staying productive go, few are as effective as the disappointment and judgment of a trusted friend—especially one who has been productive in the same time and in a similar manner.
Currently, we’re aiming to complete the editing process on Reason for Living by July this year. After that, there’ll be a process of typesetting and setting up publication arrangements, but the goal is to publish in the third quarter of 2024. In the meantime, keep an eye on this newsletter for more updates, articles, and upcoming talks and events based on the book’s content.
Recently Posted:
Reason & Emotion: In Harmony for Happiness
What roles do reason and emotion play in your life? Is there an inherent conflict between them? Should you “trust your instincts” or “follow your heart” even when they disagree with your mind? Or should you suppress your emotions in favor of “cold, calculating logic,” as Spock does? Or can you achieve harmony between the two?
In this talk from Objective Standard Institute’s recent LevelUp Europe conference, I discuss what reason and emotion are, their relationship, and how they can work together to help you achieve a lifetime of happiness.
Check out the full talk here:
This Week’s Reason for Living Quote:
“A human being is an integrated whole—the mind cannot be separated from the body. Living fully as a human being requires exercising both. . . . If you’re more intellectually inclined, make sure you still get outdoors and get a few workouts in every week. If you’re more physically inclined, make sure you think about your values and be knowledgeable and well-read about whatever aspects of the world interest you.”
Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life will be available for preorder in mid-late 2024.
Upcoming Events
June 12-14, 2024: Active Minds Conference, Atlanta, GE.
June 19-22, 2024: LevelUp 2024, Atlanta, GE. Register here.
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Find out more about my work at reason-for-living.com.
Prosperity and long life,
Thomas Walker-Werth