“It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.
We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.
We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.
So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. ”
"I let you know that I knew the true nature of your heart-
that it was evil
that it convinced me that darkness is real "
To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action and it is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
We all know someone who subscribes to a particular conspiracy theory, whether they are driven by political ideology or were just innocently watching YouTube videos and got sucked in. But conspiracy theories are as old as human civilization itself; for as long as the powerless and disenchanted have resented being kept in the dark, they have speculated about matters they do not comprehend. Though they may truly have been lied to and deceived, it is just as likely that their theories are completely unfounded. And this is not to say that anyone who believes a particular conspiracy theory is simply not smart enough to see through it. Many intelligent and otherwise well-informed people may have valid reasons for believing in something that is not true, whether it’s because of a legitimate distrust of authority based on some past experience or simply because they don’t have access to all the facts. In this case, it does no good telling them they are wrong because they are not clever enough to see the truth. They will feel exactly the same way about you.
In science, an explanation that has survived the scrutiny of the scientific method can become an established fact about the world, adding to our cumulative scientific knowledge … and that fact is not going to change. Let me give you my favourite example from physics. Galileo came up with a formula that allowed him to calculate how quickly an object falls when dropped. But his formula was more than ‘just a theory’. We still use it over four centuries later because we know it to be true. If I drop a ball from a height of five metres, it will fall for one second7 before it hits the ground—not two seconds or half a second, but one second. This is an established, absolute truth about the world that is never going to change.
Firstly, contrary to what many people think, science is not a collection of facts about the world. That is called ‘knowledge’. Rather, science is a way of thinking and making sense of the world, which can then lead to new knowledge. There are, of course, many routes to gaining knowledge and insight, whether through art, poetry and literature, religious texts, philosophical debate, or through contemplation and reflection. That said, however, if you want to know about how the world really is—what physicists like me sometimes refer to as the ‘true nature of reality’—then science has a big advantage, for it relies on the ‘scientific method’.