Disillusionment. Some of us never quite recover from our discovery that the world is cruel. We don't become cruel ourselves; we become cynics.
Liberal Arts Education. A good education spoils us for life in the business world. After studying history or philosophy with any conviction, it is impossible to become a dedicated sales representative.
Bacteria and Business People. Just as some mutant strains of bacteria thrive on the antibiotics we've developed to eradicate them, some people flourish in settings that would be lethal to the rest of us. They can work 14-hour days and actually stride out of the office with more energy than when they checked in. They don't require vacations or hobbies or quality time with their pets. We call these mutants "winners."
Original Thoughts. I suppose it is possible to live one's entire life without entertaining an original thought. I used to dismiss the nonthinkers of the world as second-rate creatures, but now I almost envy them. How many of our proud ideas are truly original? And why strain our brains with pointless abstractions when there's music and ice cream to be had? You can't hear a hypothesis; you can't taste an aphorism.
The Limits of Civilization. There is a healthy optimum level of civilization, with barbarism on the one extreme and decadent excess on the other. When a civilization declines, both extremes engulf the center. Look around you; we're being engulfed.
War. We apologize when we inadvertently step on a stranger's foot, but we're full of righteous bluster when we bomb half a million strangers into oblivion.
Ideologies. No prefabricated political, theological or philosophical system ever satisfies an honest thinker. Ideologies are the second-hand clothes of the intellectual world.
Fears. Our fears tend to cluster around what we value most. The suburbanite fears losing his job or his family; the fop dreads losing his looks; the writer quakes at the thought of losing his mind.
Status Seekers. Blowfish and status seekers puff themselves up so as not to be devoured by more formidable creatures. If my car window sports a Princeton decal, you can't eat me.
Unknown Artists. How many original minds wither from chronic stress and hopelessness before they can make their mark? How many potential Shakespeares have been crushed by drudgery, rejection, failure or frustration before we could hear from them? The artists who prevail today tend to be the ones with a knack for schmoozing with the gatekeepers.
Modernism. The Modernists began by rejecting Victorian frippery and optimism. They finished by tossing out all that was noble and recognizably human in art and life, and they appeared to take inordinate pride in their feat. The only thing more objectionable than the degeneracy of their art was their infernal smugness.
Life Decisions. We humans are the only animals that require coaching on how to live. And despite all the coaching, most of us make a sorry mess of our time on this planet. A squirrel simply follows the ancient dictates of his tribe; he is genetically incapable of ruining his life. But the human animal is free to shun the customs of the herd, to light out for some enticing unexplored land on the far horizon, to thrive or come to grief through a bewildering array of choices. We ponder; we stall; we lamely hope for the best; we make the wrong decision anyway. The problem with most decisions is that all the available choices tend to be intolerable.
IQ. The world belongs to people with IQs of 120. Anything much greater or less amounts to a liability.
Kindred Spirits. Why is it so hard to find compatible souls in our human communities, when so many of us feel blissfully content in the company of a good dog? Most human relationships are like a pair of intersecting circles; the area of intersection is usually minimal and a true union is rarely found. The more individual we are, the harder it is to find a match. The behavioral repertoire of our dogs is smaller and more universal: they simply need to eat, sleep, excrete, defend their turf, have a little fun, give affection and receive it in return. So do we. Their circle is almost entirely contained within ours, and we sense nothing alien about them -- other than their peculiar penchant for sniffing each other's butts.
Fashion. It seems to me that the whole point of fashion, whether in clothes or ideas, is to proclaim loudly that we like the unlikable because the right people like it.
Capitalism. The free world appears to be founded on a system that rewards us for a single skill: the art of exploiting opportunities and people. Without this skill, we might as well pack up and move to Paraguay. I have to wonder who originally decided to base our success or failure on such a narrow and morally suspect criterion. In my ideal cosmos, we'd be rewarded for being able to write amusing essays or draw a reasonably accurate map of North America.
Winners and Losers. Those who succeed early and easily develop the energy and self-confidence to keep succeeding; those demoralized by early losses tend to keep losing. Occasionally a loser will break the pattern and prevail. Watch out for such men: our Lincolns and our Hitlers arise from the same stock.
The Great Flow-Chart. Life is a vast flow-chart, a branching river of contingencies that can lead us to happiness or misery. It's no wonder that a strange paralysis strikes so many of us when we come to a fork.
The Terrors of Work. How do we cope with a job establishment that regularly threatens to evict us from our source of livelihood? One mistake in 10,000 chances could be fatal. Even if we never make a mistake, we can be isolated and destroyed for not resembling our colleagues. Woe unto the employee who quotes Thoreau at a department meeting.
A Minor Tragedy. I will always regard it as a minor tragedy that goodness and whimsy are not survival traits.
School vs. Life. It turns out that real life resembles high school more than it does college: social skills almost always trump pure intellect; acceptance by the right crowd will get you farther than thinking for yourself. But postgraduate life also represents a return to the common sense that we temporarily abandoned in favor of seductive theories and ideologies. We can't survive in the real world unless we unlearn the theoretical.
Getting a Life. Too many of us waste our lives waiting for our lives to begin. At some point we just have to leap off the diving board in the dark -- and trust that the pool is filled with water.
The Character of the United States. The United States is neither as great as its own politicians assert nor as evil as its detractors insist. I'd like to believe that America is the Tigger of the world: essentially good-natured, unrefined, overendowed with energy and continually bouncing uninvited into other people's homes. In the end we exhaust them and break their china, and they plot to have us removed. But I can see one fundamental difference emerging already: Tigger wasn't cursed with self-righteousness.
The Limits of Introspection. Our most deeply held feelings resist introspection, almost as if they exert an electrical charge that deflects our thought-probes. We think we know what we think, but we can never really know what's down there.
