You are the greatest accomplishment of the After Age.
By “you” I mean the modern individual. Of course, in a literal sense, individuality was not invented in the After Age, or any other time. The moment you exit your mama’s womb, you are an individual. But only recently in human history have you, and your individual opinions, pursuits, rights, and property had any objective importance. They are protected by law, and they are recognized, respected, nurtured, and encouraged by society. If you live in the After Age, your individuality exists, it matters, and it is defended and respected more than ever before.
In fact, today, we are so free and so empowered we assume we don’t have any obligations to society at all, beyond paying taxes and obeying laws. Or perhaps I should phrase it differently: It is not that we assume we have no obligations to society, it is that we assume society does not need anything from us. If all we want is to be OK, that may be true. But if we are to go from OK to great, then it is not.
Individual freedom and rights are awesome. I wouldn’t trade them for the world and I would defend them with my life. But what follows moves in a different direction. Having been discovered, cherished, protected, and promoted vigorously in the After Age, it is now time for the individual to start thinking about everyone else for a change. Where it concerns you, the individual, and your place in the society around you, it’s time for a bit of a correction.
The truth is, the After Age does not ask that much of us individuals in return for quite a lot. Technology allows us to be very independent with little effort. Tasks that in the past would have required weeks of organization and work can be done with the push of a button. We do not have to plow the fields for months to grow a meager amount of food, or organize the help of dozens of other people to erect a home, send a letter, or travel across the country. All of these things can be obtained from a vast system already in place, humming along, ready to fulfill our wish and command. Machines, better organization, and anonymous others spread across the planet collaborate to deliver what we want. Compared to the effort once required, all of the tasks of life are, in the After Age, relatively effortless.
Freer and more equal government and societies do not burden us like those of the past did, either. In the After Age we are not required to bow to our social betters or limit the clothes we wear or what we say or believe. Government is less threatening, as its ability to control what we can or cannot be or do or think or say has been gradually chipped away.
To be clear, we are freer and more equal – not perfectly free or totally equal. But the magnitude of the change that has occurred is enormous. If we don’t feel it is because that is not how we experience life. Our perspective is narrow and focussed on our own in the moment, not in comparison to what was or might have been.
But we need that wider perspective. If you live in the After Age you are among a lucky minority of all the human beings that have ever lived. It is so important that the rest of humanity, today and in the future, join you there. It is equally important that you and your descendants remain there. What can you do to help ensure that happens?
The After Age is making demands on us as individuals all the time. You can ignore them. Or you can start listening, and learn from what you hear, and by doing so empower yourself to make the most of the world we live in.
Stop taking us for granted. Never have we had so many relationships in our lives. True, most of them are trivial: the customer I sell a cell phone plan to; the sales clerk that sells it to me. The fellow employee who sends a machine part, legal document, resume, or shipping container your way, and the other employee you send it off to when you’ve done your job. The anonymous people behind the internet store that make, sell, and ship to you clothes, appliances, food, or who knows what – and the anonymous people that purchase the stuff you make, sell, market, and otherwise push out into the world. You and them may be in the same town or on opposite sides of the planet. You may never meet in person, and may never communicate directly at all.
These relationships are very weak compared to our relationships with our families or friends. And they are mostly economic in nature. But there are an awful lot of them. An enormous amount of them. A staggering amount of them. Never before have we been tied to so many other people, all over the world. Individually, each tie is weak, easily broken, and brief. But together they are a dense web spreading out from every single one of us, and we depend on that web to survive, and to thrive.
Every aspect of our modern lives, what makes the After Age such a miracle of human progress, is absolutely dependent on this web of relationships. We really do depend on people hundreds or thousands of miles away for our food, shelter, power, medicine – everything. Without those connections, those relationships, weak though they may be, many of us would quickly die. And we are more and more dependent on them every day.
Let me be clear: This is not a bad thing. Personally, I find the idea that I am connected to so many people around the world awe-inspiring. The After Age is constructed out of the dense interconnections, both in space and time, of billions of people and their actions in the world. Like all awe-inspiring things, it is a little scary. But if you’ve thought about it enough to be scared by its immensity, then you can also be inspired. You have been born into this wonderful thing that can deliver what would have once been considered miracles, and do it on a regular basis.
This web of connections is incredibly powerful and empowering. But it does require us to change the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. As individuals living in the After Age, it is our job to respect, support, and maintain these relationships. It is one of the few things that modern societies truly need from us as individuals. We have been given once-unimaginable freedom and wealth, but to support that freedom and wealth, we must tend to the web of relationships that make it possible. The good news is it is not that difficult to do your part.
Humility is a reality and a virtue. Humility is a modest view of your own importance. This happens to be an accurate description of reality: You are not that important. I am not trying to put you down, just pointing out the obvious.
Here’s one way to think about it: There are nearly eight billion human beings alive on Earth, as of this writing. If all of us stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, and you drove past us going 55 miles an hour, it would take you over four years of continuous driving, day and night, to reach the last person. That’s a lot of people.
Nearly eight billion people living their own lives, pursuing their own individual wants and needs, making their way through the 24 hours in each day we all share. Compared to this collective ocean of human activity, the needs and desires of one person don’t amount to a hill of beans. Individual humility is the only honest reaction to this reality.
Humility is not necessary just because it is true, however. Humility is necessary because it helps us as individuals to see and accept the enormousness and complexity of this ocean of humanity we find ourselves in. If we live in the After Age, chances are we live in a society and country that is diverse, technologically advanced, and economically complex. It is interconnected within itself and with the rest of the world in ways no one can fully understand or measure.
Life in the After Age is not on the scale of the individual, and yet we individuals are pulled into it, and must swim with its currents, whether we like it or not. Because of this, the After Age demands flexibility and understanding from us. We cannot possibly expect that the world should be shaped to serve us alone. We certainly cannot act that way. Humility is the best way to achieve that acceptance.
A little humility – that is all that is necessary or appropriate, a little – does not require dramatic changes in our behavior or even any change in our behavior at all. It is first and foremost a different way of looking at the world and our place in it. Humility is an acknowledgment that our needs, wants, opinions, desires, possessions, priorities, history, culture, family, friends, business, race, religion, politics, gender, fashion, language, investments, job, favorite color, and everything else that matters to us cannot possibly be all that matters.
If humility does change our behavior, it is by allowing us to consider the wants, needs, and viewpoints of others when pursuing our own. We accept and respect that others have their own reality, their own points of view, and we try to accommodate them. When you realize you cannot be the only person that matters in the world, you gain a new perspective on what really matters to you.
Being a little humble doesn’t mean you as an individual don’t matter. We all matter, at the very least to ourselves (I hope), and likely to many other people. In fact, to live in the After Age means to live somewhere where your individual worth is protected by law. The legally recognized inalienable worth of every individual is one of the most hard-won and valuable achievements of the last 200 years, and we should never give it up, for anything.
Instead, by not taking this gift for granted, we are then more willing to graciously bend our individual identity and rights to the needs of the society around us for all of our benefit. Our absolute importance as individuals is large, but our relative importance is small compared to the massive whole of which we are a teeny tiny part. That is one of the paradoxes we must live with in the After Age.
A little humility is a central trade-off for the individual in the After Age: In exchange for a future of peace, prosperity, and stability, we accept our own lesser importance relative to the whole. By doing so, we become more willing to forego some of our needs and desires in exchange for things that benefit everyone, including ourselves.
Your individual beliefs are just some of billions. Given how many different, and often conflicting points of view there are in the world, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of your own could possibly be correct, if such a thing as “correct” even exists. It is not necessary to be humble to realize this, but it helps. Certainly, acknowledging that you are likely wrong about some things makes humility easier.
This does not mean that we should suppress or ignore our beliefs and opinions. Rather, humility means both believing something to be true, and at the same time accepting the fact that millions of other people appear to believe something very different. A willingness to hold conflicting ideas like this in your head while continuing to function is a requirement of life in the After Age, and is something I will bring up again and again in this book. (It also encourages humility.)
You know chocolate is best, yet so many prefer vanilla. How is that possible? Maybe those who prefer vanilla are deluded and evil, or maybe the world is a mysterious, complex place and you can’t possibly understand it completely (Indeed, you may not even understand yourself completely: maybe you like vanilla, too). You and those who disagree with you are expected to share the same world, if not the same country, if not the same street, if not the same building, if not the same apartment in that building, and get along well enough to avoid killing each other, at a bare minimum. How? I recommend a little humility.
Preference for chocolate or vanilla may seem like a trivialization of the differences of opinion that divide us. But if you accept that other points of view exist and are not going away, then what that point of view is is, on one level, irrelevant. It might as well be chocolate versus vanilla. This is not about which is correct, or what course of action society should take. I am not saying there are no right or wrong opinions, or at least better or worse, about many, many things. There are. But right now, what I am talking about is you and me, as individuals, coexisting with others, when we have no power over how they think or what they believe. Chocolate vs. vanilla.
Some might argue that even acknowledging the existence of another point of view, let alone contemplating the possibility that it is valid or even better than your own, weakens your convictions. I agree, it does weaken your convictions. You become more uncertain compared to those who are absolutely sure. This is a good thing. Conviction without humility is a dangerous charade.
Dare to see the world from another person’s point of view. Do it alone, in private, if you must. But do it. It is terrifying and exhilarating and enlightening and fun. But more importantly, it is necessary. Anyway, if you can’t do it voluntarily, you will be forced to do so soon enough. Get your practice in now – you’re going to need it.
Some might also argue that being humble or even-handed about some subject where there is, or appears to be, an obvious right and wrong position is a mistake, that it is accommodating evil. All I can say is if something is truly intolerable, you’ll know because you won’t be able to stand it, not with all the humility in the world. That is one good thing about injustice: sooner or later it forces the issue.
Merely get along. The prosperity of the After Age is utterly dependent on a network of relationships between people all over the world, most of whom will never meet. As mere individuals in a sea of humanity, our influence on the whole is very, very small. But it is still there, and, of course, combined with everyone else’s it is immense. You still have a part to play.
One thing we can do to contribute to our mutual well-being is to get along with the people we do encounter. This means both people we come into contact with directly, and those we only interact with in passing or from far away. By making the effort to get along with other people, even in the most casual, brief, or superficial interactions, we help keep the whole healthy and strong. Make way for other people, rather than force them to make way for you. Yield. If the society around you is a web, you want to be a strand, not a pebble thrown into it.
This advice is so bland, so obvious, and yet so important. We all know we should be kind to strangers, hold the door open, say please and thank you, all that other stuff they taught you in grade school. But I want to remind you of it again, this time in the context of the After Age and The Destiny of the Entire Human Race. Your mom told you being polite matters. I am telling you the fate of the world depends on it.
While it seems like an effort to accommodate other people, especially people very different from you – and it is – in some ways it is more of an effort not to. Coexistence requires effort, but nothing like the friction generated when people are indifferent or hostile to each other. Take the example of traffic rules. We stop at stop signs and traffic lights, we drive on one side of the road but not the other and we (more or less) obey speed limits. All of these things make driving more complicated and more work. But if everyone ignored traffic rules, no one would get anywhere.
All the individual rights and freedoms in the world do not change the fact that the best outcome is one where the individual and society coexist without harm coming to either. And while we are individuals who can decide and choose for ourselves, society is just a big, dumb thing that only exists because we have willed it into being. It relies on us to do the work of cooperation.
Urging individuals to “just get along” has a bad reputation because it can be used to defend unfair, oppressive, or destructive conditions. If you are fighting for your rights in a society that refuses to recognize them, then you should not try to get along. Deliberately not getting along, deliberately not being in harmony with those around you, is how every improvement in the value of the individual has been won. It is a choice made by people seeking to make the world a better place.
That does not make conflict or turmoil good or desirable, however. It is another contradiction of the After Age that a peaceful and harmonious society may only be achieved by doing the opposite, at least some of the time. Only by first understanding the value of society, by cherishing it, by humbling yourself to it, can you make it better. But if you do not value society to begin with, then you are not trying to make it better by disrupting it. You’re just trying to destroy it.
But let’s face it: Most of us are not fighting to make the world a better place. We are living for ourselves, our families maybe, our friends possibly, our jobs perhaps. We have no excuse for not making an effort to live in harmony with everyone else.
When you pursue your own goals without any concern for how they will affect the people around you, that is an act of nihilism. If everyone acts that way, the After Age ends.
Maybe I am alone in this, but one of the greatest pleasures I get from being in the world is pleasant encounters with strangers and minor acquaintances. The more different from each other we are, the more pleasure I get from peacefully interacting with them. This stuff, this petty intercourse between anonymous human beings, is what makes the world go round. There is no substitute for it, no way to fake it, or force it. Either it happens or it does not, and whether it does is all in the hands of each one of us, every day.
Get some perspective on your suffering. I can show how far humanity has come in the last 200 years. I can argue that we live much longer, healthier lives, have more personal freedom and legal rights, and are better educated and less violent, among a host of other improvements. I can prove that we have achieved things that our ancestors would not even know how to dream about, and do so on a daily basis.
And yet, I am not sure we are happier than they were. I believe we are, but not as much as we should be, given the improvements in our lives. Civilization has leapt forward, but it can seem quite underwhelming to those of us living in it.
The problem is we are never satisfied, even when we get what we think we want. It’s just not how we are wired. And if we never earned these luxuries to begin with, if we were born with them, then we truly take them for granted, and our expectations are reset higher and higher.
If we have enough food to eat, we complain that our diet lacks variety. If we can choose our leaders, we complain when our choice isn’t the one that wins. If we can travel farther in one day than our ancestors did in their entire lives, we complain about the traffic or the lines at the airport, or are jealous of the people traveling first class. These things don’t just make us annoyed, either. We can get genuinely, profoundly unhappy in circumstances that would seem luxurious to others and miraculous to those that came before us.
What happens is that profound suffering – starvation, violence, serious disease, oppression – occurs to us individually less, or not at all, but our capacity to feel mental suffering stays the same. We become stressed or anxious about difficulties or challenges that are not even close to being serious, let alone life-threatening, yet we allow them to fill nearly as much space in our minds. Or, in a similar way, we see what other people have and we feel bad because we have less – even though we have more than was once thought possible. This happens to me all the time.
In the After Age, most people are unhappy not because they are experiencing profound suffering. They are unhappy because they don’t have the job or lover or house they wanted and someone else does, or because they aren’t getting along with the people around them, or because they are worried about things that have not happened, but might, or because they heard about something bad that happened far away that they have no control over and does not directly affect them in any way but are nonetheless anxious about.
Or, most frequently, because of vague and conflicting yearnings, desires, regrets, confusions, and bad memories that make them uneasy, moody, depressed, dissatisfied, angry, etc., etc. You are probably one of those people. I am definitely one of those people.
As William Shakespeare’s most famous character said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” While that is not 100% true, Hamlet had a point. Especially when you have plenty of food to eat, live in a climate-controlled home filled with entertainment devices, and will live twice as long as your ancestors. Which is nearly everyone in the After Age, a group of people that numbers in the billions and is growing every day. The only way you could possibly remain unhappy for a sustained period in those circumstances is if you think your way into that state, which is exactly what we do.
It is true that some sources of unhappiness may be unique to the After Age. We live longer, but suffer more in old age (maybe). We can travel and communicate across vast distances, but we are lonely because we’ve lost touch with the people next door. We have more than enough to eat, so we eat too much and get heart disease or diabetes. We create amazing stuff, but we destroy the environment doing so. And so on. Clearly, the After Age is not all rainbows and ice cream. Clearly, we have work to do.
It is also true that this is a vast generalization. I am guessing about the content of your life based on an average. I have no way to know and no right to judge the hardship of your life. Only you can say if any of this applies to you. But whether it does or not, it is still relevant. Regardless of the circumstances of your life, our collective tendency to be dissatisfied with our lives – no matter how good we have it, objectively speaking – will continue. As citizens of the After Age, we need to be aware of this short-sighted tendency of ours so we can do our part to reduce its negative consequences.
One thing you can do to help is to not project your problems onto the world at large and then conclude it is hopelessly corrupt and going to hell. The world is not going to hell. It is going in the opposite direction. If you’ve read this far, you ought to understand that by now. Even global warming, the ultimate, literal going-to-hell scenario, would have to get very, very, very bad to outweigh all the improvements in human life over the last 200 years. I am not going to guarantee global warming won’t get that bad, but it is highly unlikely.
When we start thinking everything is falling apart, one frequent reaction is to devalue what we have already. We mentally prepare for (incorrectly) predicted disaster by giving up on the present. Once that happens, we become open to extreme, drastic, risky, and foolish decisions in our politics and behavior. We become like the desperate man who spends his last dollars at the casino. Collectively, this attitude can be disastrous. When enough of us forget how much we have to be thankful for, we stop defending it. When we stop defending it, we may lose it. Let’s not lose it.
The other thing you can do to help is remind yourself how lucky you are to live in the After Age. To keep going and expand to include everyone, the After Age requires some sacrifice, voluntary or otherwise, from those who already enjoy its privileges. Having some perspective on your own suffering (or lack of it) helps to make this burden easier to bear.
As I have pointed out earlier, accepting that the world is not falling to pieces can also have a positive impact on our own life and personal happiness. No one enjoys living in a place they think has no future. Let the very real and continuing improvements of the After Age inform your view of the world, and uplift it.
Don’t mistake selfishness for greatness. Humility, modesty, compromise, “getting along”. These values are not inspiring, noble, or heroic. No one ever says, “when I grow up, I want to be a humble and productive member of society!” This is especially true for my fellow Americans. Humility is not a virtue in this country. It’s not how we are raised or the kind of behavior we have been taught to respect.
We make heroes out of people who stormed through the world, living their lives how they wanted. Those people are entertaining if nothing else. We admire them for the impact they had on the world, or what they did for themselves. Their stories are inspiring, and they fuel the desire all of us have to be recognized by other people as deserving of praise and admiration.
I am not going to dispute the charm or value of individual accomplishment. But I want to throw up a warning flag: Just because these things are awesome for the individual involved, and entertaining or inspiring for the rest of us, does not mean they are not also in conflict with a healthy society.
The problem here is that because we so often see selfishness associated with greatness, we assume selfishness is great, too. It is not. We all act for ourselves, there’s nothing remarkable about it. But the people who do amazing things for themselves very often can do them precisely because they do not care about other people or society at large. It is often their extreme indifference to others that allows them to pursue extreme greatness.
We might think that only people like that – strong-willed, relentless, single-minded – can change the world for the better. We might think that the only way to accomplish things is by battering through the society around you. Which may be true, some of the time. But there is another way to accomplish things, and in fact a much more common one: Cooperation. That is, compromising your individual desires to contribute to a greater whole.
Furthermore, is it not equally true that such people, once they have power, are often exactly the ones standing in the way? We have seen, over and over in history, what happens when such people gain control over societies through government. They start to destroy them, and if not not stopped, they succeed. Similar egoism has a similar effect on organizations of all kinds.
In the After Age, so much good has been created by people peacefully cooperating, rather than favoring themselves at the expense of others. To upend such a world you need a really good reason. Personal glory is not one.
We all have the urge to stand out from the crowd, to accomplish “great” things. I am not trying to convince you to do otherwise. Everyone is a mix of motivations and desires, selfish and selfless. In us humans, the drive to help other people or create beautiful things is inseparable from our desire for personal glory and recognition. After all, personal glory is one reason I wrote this book. (I’d like to think I would have written it anyway, but who knows.)
This advice is for you and I. You and I are unlikely to ever be so “great” that we could threaten the stability of our society or the After Age. (If you think you might, go for it. YOLO, right?) This is about what we humble, everyday people value not just in our leaders but in ourselves. When we glorify selfishness, it shows up in our own behavior and the way we treat other people in our humble, everyday lives (whether we want to see them that way or not).
I urge you to consider where most of the glory lies, indeed where most of life is. You could dream of having your face chiseled into a mountain top, literally or figuratively. Or you could aspire to live the life you want that is also in harmony with the people around you, and then, in a sense, the whole world is your monument.
Those who get along best, win. This book aims to provide advice and insight that benefits both the individual and society at the same time. This next tip however is excellent advice for you whether it benefits society or not.
It is an open secret, never more true than today, that the better you get along with other people, the more success in life you will have. Those with the most friends and acquaintances receive the most rewards. They rise fastest in the diverse human organizations that populate every corner of our lives. They learn of new opportunities the earliest. They gather networks of supporters, and those supporters isolate their enemies and lift them up with them. We are the descendants of those who got along best with others, and this trait has never been more of an advantage than it is today.