“I’m not telling you what I know. I’m trying to figure things out”
The human Operating System
The Three Voices
There is a running narration in your head throughout your day. As you navigate conversations and situations, there is a voice that sometimes guides, and sometimes comments on your decisions, your words, and your actions. Well, it feels like it’s all one voice, and that’s where the trouble starts. It’s actually three different voices that all sound like one voice.
This is not to say that everyone has “multiple voices in their head” in schizophrenic sense. We’ve already covered the context. The three voices that narrate your life are: your conscience, your ego, and your fear. The trouble starts when we are unable to distinguish one voice from another. When you “trust your instincts,” are you trusting your conscience, your ego, or your fear? They’re all instincts, and they all serve a purpose, but trusting the wrong instinct in the wrong situation can lead to some deeply frustrating tangents to your journey. So how can you distinguish one voice from another, and how do you know when to follow which voice?
Your Conscience
Your conscience calls you to be your most courageous, most authentic, most excellent self. Your conscience is the voice of your internal world. It is your true voice. Conscience is often curious; it asks questions. When you embody your conscience, you embody courage, authenticity, and excellence.
Facing your mortality amplifies and clarifies your conscience. It will tell you if you have been wasting your gifts and skills and wasting your life. That’s why people clean up their lives after hitting rock bottom. Rock bottom puts in direct contact with your mortality and that puts your conscience center stage. That is the reason the stoics say “Memento Mori.” “Remember that you must die” so that you can remember that you must live.
Meditation and prayer are practices that also clarify you connection with conscience. “Mindfulness Meditation” is more of a passive observation of your conscience, and prayer is more of an active inquiry of your conscience. If you are disinclined to practice “prayer,” you can practice active inquiry by considering the “Heroic Questions.”
Who are you when you are your most courageous, most authentic, most excellent self? And what do you want to do about it?
What is the biggest, most important problem you can solve with your gifts and skills, and what is your plan to solve it?
Travel also amplifies and clarifies your conscience. Taking a trip outside of the complacency that comes with comfort and routine quiets the external voice, and that lets you hear your internal voice. It puts fear in perspective, because travel forces you to deal with uncertainty, and proves that you can. Travel provides moments that prompt you to be courageous, authentic, and excellent. Travel puts you in proximity to people who are on that same path.
Exercise prompts all three voices to fight for your attention and to fight for control of your decisions and actions. Ego can pop up when you exercise, and it can motivate you to do more than you should in a way that leads to injury. Vince Lombardi said “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and it certainly can. Intense exercise will trigger the voice of fear to fight for control. “This pain will end if you just give up.” Everything about that is a lie. It’s not pain, it’s discomfort, and discomfort isn’t fatal. The discomfort will end when you give up, and that’s when the real suffering begins because you prove to yourself that you are a coward, and that lingers until you make the effort to push yourself harder. That is when intense exercise allows you to enlist your conscience to the struggle. “Let’s go, Champ! You’ve got this, Champ! Never surrender, Champ!” Your conscience is the voice that pushes you for one more rep, one more stride, one more minute.
Your Ego
The second voice is your ego. That’s the voice that has been influenced by the external world. Ego pushes you in the direction of comfort and convenience, and that is the path to mediocrity at best, and despair at worst. Ego is focused on garnering acceptance from the crowd. You want them to think you're clever so they will give you a good job so you can drive a nice car so more people will think you’re clever.
Ego is an invitation to mediocrity. It’s a call to only speak homogeneous opinions that maximize the number of people who feel safe and comfortable in your presence. It’s a call to sacrifice courage, authenticity, and excellence for acceptance.
Ego does serve a purpose because we’re social creatures. We need to find common language and common cause with other people so we don’t lose our minds. You do need to find a community of people who feel comfortable in your presence, and who allow you to feel comfortable in theirs. That is the dilemma of ego: there are times you need to rely on it, but if you rely on it too often, it will lead you to despair.
Your Fear
The third voice is fear. Fear is the voice you inherited from your hunter-gatherer ancestors. Fear is an editor. It manifests as self-doubt and second-guessing, and it exists to make sure your plans aren’t fatally flawed. Your ancestors had to overcome existential threats several times per day. A bad plan could be fatal, and a perfect plan cannot be created by a human mind, so the voice of fear pokes holes in your plans so your bad ideas can die instead of you.
Fear pushes you in the direction of safety, and that is another path to despair, because the path to courage, authenticity, and excellence is inherently risky. If you surrender your life to fear, self-doubt, and second-guessing you cannot abide the risks necessary to begin a heroic adventure.
All three voices sound the same, and they all sound like you, and that gets confusing. Your conscience is harder to hear because it’s outnumbered. An effective philosophy is one that develops your ability to differentiate each of the three voices, and to allows you to align your decisions and actions with the guidance your conscience provides. The practices that amplify your conscience are: travel, exercise, and facing your mortality.
Remember that you must die so that you remember that you must really live. “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die filled with regret.” Okay, well you have the opportunity to live the right life, and to live and die utterly fulfilled, so who are you, and what do you want to do about it?