Some people never grow out of conditional relationships. They hold onto the belief that love and acceptance are contingent on some benefit they’re providing to people, some condition that they must fulfill.

Mark Manson (getpocket.com)

We sit silently. My friend stares deeply into her empty glass, occasionally shuffling the ice around with her straw. “Wow,” she says. I sit and wait for her to say something else. What started out as a festive night somehow became a long, deep discussion about love, what it consists of, and how rare it actually is.

Finally, I say, “Wow, what?”

“I’m just thinking that I’ve never experienced that.”

“Well, maybe you just haven’t met the right person yet,” I say — the totally cliche thing that every friend says in this situation.

“No,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never experienced that with anyone. My parents, my family, even most of my friends.” She looks up at me, her eyes glassy and wet, “Maybe I don’t know what love is.”

The Conditional Coolness Economy

When you’re a teenager, being “cool” is traded like a currency. You accumulate as much coolness as possible and then you find other kids with a lot of coolness and you bargain to share that coolness to make each other even cooler.

And if at any point you come across a kid with far less coolness than you, you tell that nerd to fuck off and stop being such a loser and dragging your coolness down because the other cool kids might see you, like, actually talking to each other.

Your coolness balance determines the level of demand for a relationship with you. If you suck at sports and sports are cool, then there will be less demand for your friendship. If you’re awesome at playing guitar and guitars are cool, then your coolness stock will rise appropriately and people will like you again. In this way, high school is a constant arms race to cultivate as much coolness as possible.

Most of the bullshit and stupid mind games teenagers play are a result of this coolness economy. They fuck with each other’s heads and brag about shit they didn’t do and think they love people they actually hate and think they hate people they actually love because it makes them appear cooler than they are and it gets them more Snapchat followers and a blowjob from their prom date.

Conditional relationships are all smoke and mirrors where you never actually know who the other person is.

These high-school-level relationships are conditional by nature. They are relationships of I’ll-do-this-for-you-if-you-do-this-for-me. They’re relationships where the same person who is your best friend one year because you both like the same DJ is your worst enemy a year later because they made fun of you in biology class. These relationships are fickle. And shallow. And highly dramatic. And pretty much the entire reason why nobody misses high school or wants to go back.

And this is fine. Trading in the coolness economy is part of growing up and figuring out who you are. You have to participate in all of the bullshit in order to learn to rise above it.

Because at some point, you grow out of this tit-for-tat approach to life. You start just enjoying people for who they are, not because they play football well or use the same brand of toilet paper as you.

Getting Stuck on Conditional Relationships

Not everyone grows out of these conditional relationships. Many people, for whatever reason, get stuck in the coolness economy and continue to play the game well into adulthood. The manipulation gets more sophisticated but the same games are there. They never let go of the belief that love and acceptance are contingent on some benefit they’re providing to people, some condition that they must fulfill.

The problem with conditional relationships is that they inherently prioritize something else above the relationship. So it’s not you I really care about, but rather your access to people in the music industry. Or it’s not really me you care about, but my fantastically handsome face and witty one-liners (I know, I know — it’s OK).

These conditional relationships can get really fucked up on an emotional level. Because the decision to chase “coolness” doesn’t just happen. Chasing coolness is something we do because we feel shitty about ourselves and desperately need to feel otherwise.

Conditional relationships often cause you to feel one thing about a person and show them something completely different.

So it’s not really you I care about, but rather using you to make me feel good about myself. Maybe I’m always trying to save you or fix your problems or provide for you or impress you in some way. Maybe I’m using you for sex or money or to impress my friends. Maybe you are using me for sex, and that makes me feel good because for once I feel wanted and seen.

Draw it up however you’d like, but at the end of the day, it’s all the same. These are relationships built on conditions. They are built on: “I will love you only if you make me feel good about myself; you will love me only if I make you feel good about yourself.”

Conditional relationships are inherently selfish. When I care about your money more than you, then really all I’m having a relationship with is money. If you care more about the career success of your partner than you do about her, then you don’t really have a relationship with her, just her career. If your mother only takes care of you and puts up with your little alcohol habit because it makes her feel better about herself as a mother, then she doesn’t really have a relationship with you, she has a relationship with feeling good about herself as a mother.

When our relationships are conditional, we don’t really have relationships at all.

We attach ourselves to superficial objects and ideas and then try to live them vicariously through the people we become close to. These conditional relationships then make us even more lonely because no real connection is ever being made.

Conditional relationships also cause us to tolerate being treated poorly. After all, if I’m dating someone because she has a rockin’ bod that impresses all my guy friends, then I’m more likely to allow myself to be treated like crap by her because, after all, I’m not with her for how she treats me, I’m with her to impress others.

Conditional relationships don’t last because the conditions they are based upon never last. And once the conditions are gone, like a rug that’s pulled out from under you, the two people involved will fall and hurt themselves and will have never seen it coming.

Relationships Based on Unconditional Love

This transitory nature of conditional relationships is usually something people can only see with the passage of a sufficient amount of time. Teenagers are young and just discovering their identities, so it makes sense that they are constantly obsessed with how they measure up to others. But as years go on, most people realize that few people stick around in their lives. And there’s probably a reason for that.

As most people age, most of them come to prioritize unconditional relationships — relationships where each person is accepted unconditionally for whoever he or she is, without additional expectations. This is called “adulthood” and it’s a mystical land that few people, regardless of their age, ever see, much less inhabit.

The trick to “growing up” is to prioritize unconditional relationships, to learn how to appreciate someone despite their flaws, mistakes, bum ideas, and to judge a partner or a friend solely based on how they treat you, not based on how you benefit from them, to see them as an end within themselves rather than a means to some other end.

Unconditional relationships are relationships where both people respect and support each other without any expectation of something in return. To put it another way, each person in the relationship is primarily valued for the relationship itself — the mutual empathy and support — not for their job, status, appearance, success, or anything else.

Unconditional relationships are the only real relationships. They cannot be shaken by the ups and downs of life. They are not altered by superficial benefits and failures. If you and I have an unconditional friendship, it doesn’t matter if I lose my job and move to another country, or you get a sex change and start playing the banjo; you and I will continue to respect and support each other. The relationship is not subjected to the coolness economy where I drop you the second you start hurting my chances to impress others. And I definitely don’t get butthurt if you choose to do something with your life that I wouldn’t choose.

People with conditional relationships never learned to see the people around them in terms of anything other than the benefits they provide. That’s because they likely grew up in an environment where they were only appreciated for the benefits they provided.

Parents, as usual, are often the culprits here. But most parents are not consciously conditional towards their children (in fact, chances are that they were never loved unconditionally by their parents, so they’re just doing all they know how to do). But as with all relationship skills, it starts in the family.

If dad only approved of you when you obeyed his orders; if mom only liked you when you were making good grades; if brother was only nice to you when no one else was around; these things all train you to subconsciously treat yourself as some tool for other people’s benefits. You will then build your future relationships by molding yourself to fit other people’s needs. Not your own. You will also build your relationships by manipulating others to fit your needs rather than take care of them yourself. This is the basis for a toxic relationship.

Relationship Hypotheticals

Conditions cut both ways. You don’t stay friends with a person who is using you to feel better about themselves unless you too are somehow getting some benefit out of the friendship as well. Despite what every girl who posts cheesy Marilyn Monroe quotes on Facebook thinks, you don’t accidentally get suckered into dating someone who uses you for your tits because you’re unconditionally loving yourself. No, you bought into that person’s conditions because you were using them to meet your own conditions.

Most conditional relationships are entered into unconsciously — that is, they are entered into without conscious thought about who this person is or why they like you or what their behavior towards you indicates. You just see their sweet tattoos and envy their rad bike and want to be close to them.

People who enter into conditional relationships enter into them for the simple reason that these relationships feel really good, yet they never stop to question why it feels so good. After all, cocaine feels pretty good, but you don’t run out and buy a bunch the second you see it, do you?

(Don’t answer that.)

Create hypotheticals with your relationships. Ask yourself:

• “If I lost my job, would dad still respect me?”
• “If I stopped giving her money, would mom still love me and accept me?”
• “If I told my wife that I wanted to start a career as a photographer, would it wreck our marriage?”
• “If I stopped having sex with this guy, would he still want to see me?”
• “If I told Jake that I strongly disagree with his decision, would he stop talking to me?”

But you need to also turn around and ask them about yourself, too:

• “If I moved to Kentucky, would I still keep in touch with Paul?”
• “If John didn’t get me free tickets to concerts, would I bother hanging out with him?”
• “If Dad stopped paying for school, would I still go home and visit?”

There are a million hypothetical questions and you should be asking yourself every single one of them. All the time.

Because if any of them ever has an answer other than, “It would change nothing,” then you probably have a conditional relationship on your hands — i.e., you don’t have a real loving relationship where you think you do.

It hurts to admit, I know.

But wait, there’s more!

If you want to remove or repair the conditional relationships in your life and have strong unconditional relationships, you are going to have to piss some people off. What I mean is that you have to stop accepting people’s conditions. And you have to let go of your own.

This invariably involves telling someone close to you “no” in the exact situation they want to hear it the least. It will cause drama. A shit-storm of drama in many cases. After all, what you are doing is you are taking somebody who has been using parts of you to make themselves feel better and denying their ability to do so. Their reaction will be angry and they will blame you. They will say a lot of mean things about you.

But don’t become discouraged. This sort of reaction is just further proof of the conditions on the relationship. A real honest love is willing to respect and accept something it doesn’t want to hear. A conditional love will fight back.

But this drama is necessary. Because one of two things will emerge from it. Either the person will be unable to let go of their conditions and they will therefore remove themselves from your life (which, ultimately, is a good thing in most cases). Or, the person will be forced to appreciate you unconditionally, to love you in spite of the inconveniences you may pose to themselves or their self-esteem.

This is really fucking hard, of course. But relationships are difficult by nature because people are difficult by nature. If life was just all fun and fellatio, then nothing good would ever get done. And no one would ever grow.

This article was originally published on March 17, 2016, by Mark Manson, and is republished here with permission.

Mark Manson is the author of Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope.

Of people with false speech   
they first deceive themselves,
afterwards deceiving people.

With the true as false,
with the false as true, with the false and true inverted,
not receiving the good Dharma teachings.

For example, like a covered jar, 
  with water not gaining entry.
Of people with false speech,
with minds without shame (for repentance)
They close and block the doors
of the heavenly realm and Nirvana.

    Contemplating and knowing these transgressions,
Therefore do not be with false speech.

(Submitted by Sue Beck, Ph.D.)

CliveNBAParody Steven Adams Saves Mason Plumlee From Scary Fall Instead Of Scoring! Thunder vs Nuggets December 14, 2018-19 NBA Season

Translators:  Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen

SENSE TESTIMONY:  Beliefs keep out-picturing in our lives until we no longer believe them.

5th Step Conclusions:

1)  I believe that I am Reality, that I am whole, complete, perfect Mind knowing Itself as Mind, believing all things, permitting all things, loving all things, seeing through all things as the appearance, apparency of my/our own Being.

2)  There is only this ONE, fathomless fullness, Knowing Being, That I AM — always expressing, completely and absolutely, the whole/sound/totality of Perfect Reality — this is all I do know, all I can know, and all I now forever accept !!

3)  I Am All life, All Being, All Consciousness, absolute, innate, emanating, evidencing, instantaneously and universally only sound whole complete powerful abundant Truth I Am. // The Integrity of Truth is All there is.

4) Truth is Wholly, sound Consciousness Aware Completion, this Principled Pre(Mise), is the Ultimate Assumption, Complimenting its’ individualized Universal Androgynousness, this persistent adherence is the Symphony of the Rhythm, and Harmony of love, this Semantic Housekeeper, the Inter – Acting unification is the seeing through lifes; Universal Minds’ Heavenly Painting.

All Translators are welcome to join this group.  See Weekly Groups page/tab.

Sunday Meeting by Richard Hartnett, H.W.,M.

https://www.theprosperos.com/smtg-20191215

“No one can bar the road to truth.”

–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (from A Soul in Exile)

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag labor camp system.

“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

–Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. Wikipedia

Men are 10 times more likely than women to commit murder, nine times more likely to end up in prison, and commit 99% of reported rapes and sexual assaults. Why?

Mark Manson (getpocket.com)

This article contains strong language.

Meeting Pablo Escobar’s brother turned out to be one of the more disappointing moments of my life. In Medellin, Colombia, you can go to the Escobar house. In fact, there’s a whole tourism industry that’s sprouted up around Escobar and the old cartel. Much of this tourism is promoted and encouraged by the Escobar family themselves, as it’s ostensibly the only way they have to make much money these days.

When you meet him, Roberto Escobar is a short, hunched-over old man. He’s nearly blind and deaf from a letter bomb that blew up in his face years ago. His eye sockets sink into his skull leaving two golf-ball-sized craters in his face. His gaze is lifeless. It passes through you when he speaks to you, as though you were some sort of hologram.

There’s an emptiness when he speaks. His Spanish tumbles out of his mouth in a monotonous slur, sometimes indecipherable. Occasionally, when he speaks to you he reaches out and puts his hand on you in the way a politician might. Except the way he does it, there’s no emotion to it, no charisma. It’s as if he’s making sure you’re still there — that he’s still there.

When you meet him, there is a small table on his porch stacked with assorted DVD’s, postcards, and, of course, his book. You can purchase them and then pay double for an autographed copy.¹

He reminds us of this multiple times.

For the uninitiated (or those who don’t have Netflix), Roberto’s more famous brother, Pablo Escobar, was the leader of the Medellin Drug Cartel and likely both one of the richest and most violent drug dealers in human history. Beginning in 1975, Pablo built a multi-billion dollar empire by introducing the world to the wonders of cocaine. His smuggling would inspire the drug craze in the US of the late 70’s and early 80’s, the crime waves that followed in its wake, the crack epidemic, and ultimately the US government’s draconian War on Drugs policies which are still in effect today.

At his peak, Pablo’s power was incomprehensible. He literally bought his way into Colombian parliament by building entire neighborhoods of houses and then gifted them to thousands of impoverished Colombians. He then ran in their district. In the 80’s, Forbes estimated him to be the seventh richest man in the world with a net worth of approximately $35 billion US dollars (that’s $82 billion in 2018 dollars). In his book, Roberto claims that at one point the cartel was making so much money that it spent $2,500 each month just on rubber bands to stack the bills.

To maintain his power, Escobar was ruthless. He didn’t just use violence to punish foes, he used it to send a message. He once had a man skinned alive and then tied him to a tree to bleed to death in the hot Colombian sun. Castration wasn’t an unusual punishment for enemies–nor, as we’ll see, a coincidence. When the government threatened to extradite him to the US on drug charges, he exacted terrorist attacks on thousands of civilians as a form of blackmail. Parliament called an emergency session and amended their constitution to make extradition illegal, just so Escobar would stop bombing malls and busy intersections. During his reign, Pablo slaughtered judges, paid off entire prison staffs, flew in the best soccer players in the world to play with him on his ranch, and leading up to his demise, wrought full-blown urban warfare in the streets of Medellin, killing almost 500 police officers in the process.

Thirty minutes into our visit, I conclude that Roberto Escobar might be the biggest sociopath I’ve ever met. In between regaling us with stories of Pablo’s smuggling heroin through Panama, and how he threatened to murder the families of any police who arrested him, he says he’s also willing to take pictures with us for a small fee.

Drugs, money, violence, drugs, money, violence — the afternoon repeats itself. Desperate to be convinced this man has any sort of humanity at all, I ask him what his favorite memory of Pablo is. I want to sense some sort of emotion from this man, some level of depth beyond simple cost/benefit analysis of the living and dead.

He meanders into a vague story about the time he helped Pablo escape from prison. I press further, “Por qué esa memoria?” Why? Why that memory?

He replies, “It was the first and only time he told me I did a good job.” The only time? Roberto was Pablo’s accountant, his most trusted employee for almost 20 years. His own brother. That’s it?

Roberto’s anecdote contained a sliver of emotion, but I still get the blank stare, the empty eyes. So I keep pushing. “What about your childhood? What were you and Pablo like when you were kids?”

A pause. “We used to go fishing a lot.”

And we’re done. He turns around and reminds us that if we buy a DVD, the second one is half off.

Why are the Worst People in Human History Almost Always Men?

A question occurred to me as we toured the Escobar home: why are the most ruthless and violent people throughout history always men? If there’s ever been a mega-violent, drug-slinging dominatrix, I’ve sure never heard of her. Or what about a murderous dictator? Rebel military commander? Serial killer? Playground bully? Again and again, almost all men.

Men perpetrate over 76% of the violent crime in the US. Worldwide that statistic is likely much higher.²

Men are 10 times more likely to commit murder and nine times more likely than women to end up in prison.³ Men commit 99% of the reported rapes and sexual assaults.⁴ And boys perpetrate 95% of the violent crimes at the juvenile level.⁵

Anyone who’s grown up with a penis or around someone with a penis knows that boys can be cruel. When I was a kid, we used to steal matches from the kitchen and catch bugs and burn them alive and then laugh about it. Some boys would set fireworks off in people’s mailboxes to see if they would explode. There was a girl down my street named Cynthia. We once made her cry because we threw eggs at her. We were little assholes. And when I think back, I can’t comprehend any logic or reason behind it.⁶

But I wasn’t unordinary. Most of the other boys my age were just as mischievous and cruel.⁷ My older brother beat the crap out of me on the regular. And where do you think I got the idea for my shenanigans anyway?

Why are men such dicks? Even the word itself, “dick,” the male sex organ, refers to someone who is being rude and offensive. Why us? Why men? Is it in our biology? Did we evolve this way? Or is there some broader cultural force at work?

The answer, as with every nature versus nurture question, is: it’s both.

A Brief History of Male Violence

Human history is rife with competition and violence. There has pretty much never been a point in human evolution that we weren’t killing each other in one way or another.

This competition and violence existed for the simple reason that resources are scarce, and the advantages given to one tribe/society for conquering/controlling those resources were huge. Therefore, people fought over them. And they had to keep fighting over them because once you won the land or gold or sweet ass river with a lot of bananas growing by it, then you had to protect it.

Back before drone strikes and cruise missiles, the people most adapted for conquest and discovery were invariably young men. One, because they were physically the strongest and most able. But also because they were disposable. If you want a new generation of children, you need a full generation of mothers to birth those children. But you only need a couple men. Therefore, if you were young, broke, and unproven, then off you went to kill something and prove yourself.

The most successful societies were therefore generally those that developed cultures praising and rewarding young men for mastering violence and conquest. These young men not only served as purveyors of a society’s further growth and wealth but also acted as protectors. They protected the community from wild beasts, fought off invaders, and killed icky, icky spiders.

Masculinity has historically been all about the three P’s: protector, provider, procreation. The more you protect, the more you provide, the more you fuck, the more of a man you are.

For the most part, this is still widely considered masculinity today, although the 3 P’s look slightly different in different cultures. It’s why a frat bro who bangs half a sorority is a stud, while the sorority girl who blows the baseball team is a slut. It’s why a woman who speaks up at board meetings is seen as shrill and bitchy, and a man who talks over people and demeans them in front of others is seen as bold and a strong leader.

But this version of masculinity evolved for a particularly socially-beneficial reason — to protect us from invaders and protect the town and kill bears and stuff. We needed men to fuck a lot because something like half of your kids didn’t survive into puberty. We needed them to provide because you never knew when the next horrible winter was around the corner.

And the fact that this form of masculinity came at a cost — both to the men in terms of their own health and mortality, and to society in terms of violence and patriarchal dominance — was discounted. Who cares if men die, suffer, and lose their minds at startling rates? It’s simply the price we pay for protection and prosperity (and babies).

The problem is that today, things have changed:

1. Violence has largely been automated or outsourced or just plain eliminated. Factory farms provide our food. Small, specialized militaries protect our borders. But given how economically interdependent and wealthy the world has become, violence has declined.
2. Service economies mean that women are just as capable (and perhaps even more capable) to work and earn a living than men are at most professions. Male advantages in strength and expendability are no longer necessary for a healthy society.
3. We have like, women’s rights and equality and stuff. Fact is, we’re much more conscious and moral than we used to be. Therefore, the drawbacks of masculine aggression and dominance present not just economic liabilities, but ethical ones as well.

Truth is, when all is said and done, the ancient bargain of strength, durability and expendability for prestige, dominance and tons of hot babes doesn’t evolutionarily make sense anymore. The male body is becoming outdated tech.

The Hidden Costs of Being a Man

When I was a kid, if I fell down on the playground and started crying, my cries would usually be met with some form of, “Get up. Be a big boy.” If I got beat up by my brother, my father admonished me to hit him back. The other kids at school would make fun of boys who were weak or were bad at sports. As a teenager, I was bullied at times in the locker room for being nerdy.

This stuff is normal. So normal that it feels stupid to even write because my guess is every single male reader can relate to one of the above experiences. It’s often written off as “boys being boys.” And it has a long cultural history.

Again, for most of civilization, young men were the ones responsible for protecting society. By the time they were adults, they needed to be battle-hardened and physically strong — the survival of the community often depended on it. As a result, brutal, physical violence among men (through organized sport) was celebrated (and still is today, although this is beginning to change). And men who weren’t able to make the cut were shamed for their physical weakness, for their emotional displays and vulnerable demands for affection. Men were meant to be ruthlessly competitive, and emotionlessly self-contained.

And this was the hidden cost for their physical, and later political dominance, in human society — as men, we are taught from a young age to hide from our emotions rather than to engage them.⁸

Well, this may not surprise you, but repressing emotions fucks people up. And shaming people for weakness and vulnerability can result in all sorts of mental health problems, not to mention encourage them to lash out in anti-social ways (i.e., shoot up a school, or ram a car into a crowd of people, sign up to be a militant in some crazy religious organization — sound familiar?).

Men commit suicide at a rate five times that of women while teenage boys commit suicide nine times more often than girls.⁹ They are also diagnosed with depression and ADHD at a rate of 4-to-1 to girls the same age.¹⁰ Men make up 2/3 of the homeless population,¹¹ are more than twice as likely to become alcoholics and are approximately three times more likely to become drug addicts.¹² It’s widely documented that men are far less likely to ask for professional help, medical or otherwise, even when experiencing significant health problems or depression.¹³

Men are the victims of the majority of violent crime, but also far less likely to report it for fear of appearing weak. One survey found that 40% of the victims of domestic violence are men, yet they were far less likely to report the violence and far less likely to be taken seriously by police.¹⁴ Men take on more dangerous jobs and are less likely to report any injury suffered at work. Men work far longer hours, take fewer vacations and sick days, and suffer worse symptoms of chronic stress and fatigue. Men even die on the job at a startling rate. In short, most men treat themselves as nothing more than a walking paycheck.¹⁵

And, in fact, it’s this objectification of their own lives that kills men faster. One research summary of emotional suppression went as far to say: “emotional restrictiveness is the leading cause to why men die earlier [than women].”¹⁶

Men are so emotionally incompetent without women, that getting married may statistically be the best thing a man can do to improve his longevity and mental health. Married men live longer and score higher on pretty much every quality-of-life metric there is, including happiness and life expectancy. Marriage is apparently so important for men’s emotional stability that some sociologists go as far as to state that simply being married can raise a man’s life expectancy by almost a decade.¹⁷ Elderly men who are in good marriages have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, and stress than elderly single men.¹⁸

But then we’re often woefully equipped to handle that. Women initiate more than 70% of divorces and separations with the most common cause cited as “emotional neglect” from their husbands.¹⁹ Those divorces also hit men the hardest: recently divorced men are more likely to suffer depression, alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide than women are.²⁰

Let me state that more clearly: Not dealing with your emotional baggage can literally kill you or make you go crazy.

For all of our strength and power, we sure do die quickly and often. For all of our cunning ambition, we regularly end up miserable, violent, and even suicidal. And for all of our self-sufficiency, we rely on women for our emotional and physical well-being to a startling degree.

Ironically, manhood does not seem very manly.

What’s So Wrong With Getting Rich and Killing Things?

Later on in the day, we’re touring the old Escobar home. It’s filled with pictures and memorabilia from the 90s. In between prattling on about Pablo’s exploits, Roberto mentions he competed in the Tour de France when he was a young man. A quick Google search on my smartphone shows this to be false. Earlier he tried to convince us that he had found the cure for AIDS in the 1990s, but the U.S. Government suppressed his research. I didn’t bother to look that one up.

For all of his power, his wealth, his domination over a country and a culture and a people, Roberto struck me as something pathetic. On the surface, this is a man who had experienced as much power as anyone in the world. Yet his attempts to impress us bordered on the delusional. How could a man who was this powerful be so insecure?

And yet, as we walk through the corridors of the Escobar house, riddled with triumphant family photos and bullet holes, the home that bore a thousand broken lives and left a billion-dollar bloodstain across two continents, I find myself trying to empathize with the man.

It’s easy to look at the results of a man’s life and judge without looking at the process that led him to those results.

Perhaps Roberto Escobar wasn’t always so heartless and delusional. Perhaps investing his entire life and identity in a brother who couldn’t even be bothered to tell him he was proud of him pushed him to accept a sicker fate. Perhaps growing up a poor boy in rural Colombia with a dozen siblings and absent father made him feel more alone than he could handle. So he shut down. He shut down and chose to see the world in the only way that made sense — as a bunch of numbers and profitable opportunities. Perhaps that letter bomb that exploded in his face so many years ago stole more than just sight and sound.

The problem with the traditional masculine formula – protection, providing, procreating – is that they require men to measure their self-worth via some external, arbitrary metric. They require men to mortgage their emotional health for the sake of their physical safety. But in a cushy first world where security is more or less guaranteed, those interest payments start adding up.

Men don’t just do this to themselves though. They do it to each other. Hell, women do it as well. Educated women will complain that men are superficial and only want to date women who look like a Victoria’s Secret model. Yet ladies, how many of you are running out the door to date a janitor?

We unfairly objectify women in society for their beauty and sex appeal. Similarly, we unfairly objectify men for their professional success and aggression.

But the biggest problem with these external metrics – making more money, being stronger and more domineering than the competition, having sex as much as possible – is that they never end. If you measure yourself by how much money you make, then whatever you earn will never be enough. If you measure yourself by how strong and dominant you can be, then no amount of power will ever satisfy you. If you measure yourself by how much sex you can have, then no number of partners will ever be enough.

These are metrics that, while on a population level, were good for society for thousands of years. On an individual level, they fuck a man up, destroying his self-esteem and encouraging him to objectify himself, to see himself not as a human with strengths and weaknesses, virtues and flaws, but rather as some vessel with no other prerogative than to accumulate as much power and prestige as possible.

And what do you end up with?

A former billionaire drug lord, trying to lie to a group of strangers, claiming he was a world-class athlete and a world-class medical researcher. It’s like, “Dude, what more do you need?” And the answer with men like Escobar is: more. Always more.

And it’s this “more” that ultimately destroyed his own family, aside from an entire country and millions of lives. It removed a father from his children. A husband from his wife. It removed a part of him from himself.

In the 21st century, we need to evolve our definition of masculinity. Yes, we’re still protectors and providers. And you’re damn right we want to keep pro-creating.

But there need to be new internal metrics for a man’s worth as well — his honesty, his integrity, his emotional openness and ability to remain strong in the face of vulnerability.

Some lament the “pussification” of men happening today. But dropping the bullshit tough-guy act isn’t the same as weakness. On the contrary, it’s an even deeper form of strength.

***

Our Escobar pilgrimage fittingly ends in a graveyard. On December 2nd, 1993, Pablo made a phone call to his son to wish him a happy birthday. Pablo didn’t normally make phone calls himself, but on this occasion, it seemed justified. He then sat down to eat lunch with his mother. “He was always a family man first,” Roberto claimed, without any irony. Minutes later Pablo received a tip-off that the police had tracked him and were on their way to raid his house. He escaped, but only for a few hours. That afternoon, Pablo was shot hopping across Medellin rooftops, one last ditch effort to escape himself.

Whether Pablo was shot by the police or he shot himself is still disputed. Either way, a bullet entered Pablo’s skull behind his ear and killed him instantly. He fell to the ground below, where police took pictures posing with his corpse. Not just another death, not just another achievement—one of the cruelest and richest men in modern history taken down by the ricochet of his own violence. The photo would be sickening had it been anyone else: piles of debris and guns waving, all smiles between the flow of blood.

In the graveyard, we’re led to a small grove. The landscaping is clean and well-kept. Gravel is spread out in a square framing a plot of earth containing half a dozen gravestones lined up in a row. Two stones are bigger than the others. It’s the Escobar family plot. There is no defacing or signs of tampering. Death is unprejudiced.

One of the larger headstones reads Pablo’s name. The stone is humble: just a name and some dates. Next to him are his mother and his sister. Further down are his other siblings and lost family members.

The only one missing is his father.

Footnotes

1. Roberto’s book is called The Accountant’s Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellin Cartel.↵
2. U.S. Department of Justice. “Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2008 Statistical Tables.” National Crime Victimization Survey.↵
3. “Sex Differences in Crime.” Wikipedia.↵
4. Greenfeld, L. A. Sex Offenses and Offenders: An Analysis of Data on Rape and Sexual Assault. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997.↵
5. Kindlon, Dan; Thompson, Michael. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. Ballantine (2000).↵
6. Cynthia, if you’re somehow reading this, I’m sorry.↵
7. Yes, girls can be very cruel too, but even though a lot of people think girls are more “relationally” cruel while boys are more direct and physically cruel, some studies suggest that might not actually be the case: boys might just be crueler than girls all around. See: Orpinas, P., McNicholas, C., & Nahapetyan, L. (2015). Gender differences in trajectories of relational aggression perpetration and victimization from middle to high school. Aggressive Behavior, 41(5), 401–412.↵
8. The exception here often being anger.↵
9. “Suicide Statistics” From Suicide.org.↵
10. Parker-Pope, Tara. “Suicide Rates Rise Sharply in U.S.” The New York Times Online, 3 May, 2013.↵
11. “Who Is Homeless?” National Coalition for the Homeless.↵
12. “Differences in Patterns of Drug Use Between Men and Women.” European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.↵
13. Addis, Michael E. Mahalik, James R. “Men, Masculinity, and the Contexts of Help Seeking.” American Psychologist. Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 5-18.↵
14. “More than 40% of Domestic Violence Victims are Male, Report Reveals,” The Guardian. 4 September, 2010.↵
15. For an exhausting list of statistics like this, check out Warren Farrell’s brilliant The Myth of Male Power, Berkley (2001).↵
16. Jansz, Jeroen. “Masculine Identity and Restrictive Emotionality.” Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives. Cambridge (2000), pp. 167-186.↵
17. “Marriage Linked to Better Survival in Middle Age; Study Highlights Importance of Social Ties During Midlife.” Science Daily, 10 January, 2013.↵
18. “Study: Married Couples Live Longer.” CBSLocal Cleveland, 14 November, 2012.↵
19. Meyer, Cathy. “Why Most Divorces Are Initiated By Women.”↵
20. Morrison, Kyle. “Men After Divorce: Ego, Self Esteem, and Recovery.” The Huffington Post. 1 May, 2013.↵

This article was originally published on January 19, 2019, by Mark Manson, and is republished here with permission.

Mark Manson is the author of Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope.

It’s the testosterone, don’t you know.

Nautilus|getpocket.com

• Richard G. Bribiescas

Years ago when I was conducting my doctoral research on the evolutionary history of men among a remote indigenous community of hunter-gatherers living in the forests of South America, I came across a man donning a well-worn baseball cap likely donated by missionaries. The cap read, “There are three stages to a man’s life: Stud, Dud, Thud.” Indeed. It is somewhat sobering to see one’s life’s research summarized on a piece of headwear that can probably be found for a few dollars at a roadside truck stop. But such is the elegance of interesting science.

It’s no secret that mortality due to accidents and risky behavior is much higher in young men, particularly those in their late teenage years and early 20s. This, by the way, is not news to insurance companies. It’s also true that men die earlier than women, regardless of their environment or lifestyle, and are often more susceptible to some cancers and heart disease at an earlier age. In fact, men are at a higher risk than women when it comes to most of the top 15 contributing sources of mortality in the United States—which account for nearly 80 percent of all deaths.

In the words of a Yale evolutionary biologist, “Macho makes you sick.”

Evolutionary factors are clearly at play. The question is why. What is natural selection’s deal with men? It’s a compelling academic question, for sure. But now that I’m in my 50s, I have to admit the issue of aging gets more relevant with every new gray hair.

As it turns out, shorter lifespans and higher male mortality risk are quite common in many species. Natural selection doesn’t necessarily favor traits commonly associated with health, vigor, and longevity. Instead, it promotes characteristics that provide greater lifetime reproductive success, or in the parlance of evolutionary biology, fitness. If the benefits of increased fitness are greater than the cost of a shorter lifespan or poor health, biology will prioritize those traits. In essence, sex trumps birthday candles.

This trade off between longevity and reproduction takes an obvious form in women: Pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation are all physically taxing and energetically costly. Research has shown that bearing more children is associated with higher oxidative stress, which can in turn lead to accelerated aging in post-menopausal women.¹ A 2006 historical study of rural Polish women, for example, found a correlation between having more children and a significantly shorter post-menopausal lifespan.² Although more research needs to be done, it would seem that reproductive effort can literally take years off your life.

Male quolls (above) experience a dramatic one-time rise in testosterone that triggers intense bouts of mating – and very high mortality. Wikimedia Commons

But what about men? While they obviously don’t bear the costs of pregnancy, they do still allocate a great deal of energy—also to their own detriment later in life—to improve their chances of reproduction. This “reproductive effort” takes place through engagement in riskier behavior and the accumulation of greater body mass, particularly sexually dimorphic skeletal muscle mass, the extra male-specific muscle in the shoulders, back, and arms. The metabolic costs of maintaining this muscle in men over a lifetime are comparable to the energy expenditure women experience during pregnancy and breast-feeding, but they and their associated health challenges are somewhat manageable. After all, it would be a good idea to evolve physiological mechanisms to manage the tradeoffs that result from the often conflicting needs of body functions. Hormones are one of the most vital agents in managing these tradeoffs. In men, testosterone regulates investment in muscle and reproductive behavior. But like everything else, it, too, has its price.

Testosterone is often described as the male sex hormone. Women also produce testosterone, but in much smaller amounts. Aside from its sexual effects such as stimulating beard growth and deeper voices, testosterone is an important anabolic hormone that has a significant impact on the energetic costs in men. That is, it promotes anabolism, or muscle-building, and increases metabolism, the rate at which that muscle burns calories. Testosterone also promotes the burning of fat tissue. And yes, it can also boost libido and mood. So testosterone does a lot of things that sound healthy—but it can be a double-edged sword.

Burning fat may make you look better in the mirror, for instance, but in the wild, less fat makes you more vulnerable to food shortfalls and infection. This is apparent in many organisms, whose acute rises in testosterone signal an increase in reproductive effort, only to cause challenges to other physiological demands related to well-being. Take the northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus), a medium-sized Australian marsupial. Male quolls experience a dramatic one-time rise in testosterone that triggers intense bouts of mating—and very high mortality due to male/male aggression and fat depletion. Females live up to three years, whereas males are lucky to make it a year. As ecologist Jaime Heiniger so eloquently states, “It could likely be that they [males] shag themselves to death.”³

The cap read, “There are three stages to a man’s life: Stud, Dud, Thud.”

To get a better picture, then, scientists have had to examine the effects of testosterone supplementation in “intact” males as well. Ornithologists have shown that experimentally increasing testosterone levels often improves a male bird’s ability to establish multiple nests, ward off competitors, and father more offspring compared to unsupplemented males.⁶ Moreover, males that have naturally high testosterone levels exhibit the same advantages. If testosterone is so beneficial for reproductive fitness, then why don’t all males maintain such high testosterone levels? Again: There are costs. While testosterone-supplemented male birds had greater reproductive fitness, they also exhibited compromised survivorship. Supplemented males put on less fat and had a harder time making it through the breeding season.

Moving beyond birds, testosterone supplementation in otherwise healthy men has become increasingly popular and could provide insights into the tradeoffs between reproductive effort and longevity. Although it is still too soon to determine whether men on testosterone have shorter life spans, evidence is emerging. According to one 2014 study, older men taking testosterone were more likely to experience an acute, non-fatal myocardial infarction 90 days after the first prescription, as compared with prior to the treatment.⁷ Higher testosterone might be beneficial for muscle growth, but other organs in older men may not be able to tolerate the metabolic burden. Clearly more research is necessary.

As an ecologist eloquently states, male quolls, a small marsupial, “shag themselves to death.”

Testosterone doesn’t just cause metabolic changes: It’s also responsible for significant immunological effects during a man’s lifetime. In the words of Yale evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns, “Macho makes you sick.” Indeed, men often have a harder time than women fighting off infections. There are several potential underlying causes for these differences. Perhaps males are simply exposed to more opportunities for infection than women are. Or it may be that men are at a chemical disadvantage when it comes to fighting off infection—a hypothesis for which there is mounting evidence. Testosterone suppresses immune function, while estradiol, the primary sex steroid in women, bolsters immune function. (The latter does, however, also increase women’s risk of autoimmune disease—again, a compromise nature is willing to make in return for estradiol’s beneficial role in reproduction.) In wild bird, reptile, and mammal populations, testosterone has been found to compromise immune function, and increase the severity of infection and consequentially mortality. Whether this is true for humans remains to be seen, but it seems to fit data collected from men living in regions with high infection risk. In 2005, researchers conducting a study in Honduras found that testosterone levels were lower in men with malarial infections compared to uninfected individuals. When infected men were treated, testosterone rebounded to levels exhibited by uninfected controls.⁸

And infection isn’t the only kind of disease men have to worry about. Testosterone and other sex hormones are also associated with greater cancer risk, particularly when it comes to prostate cancer. Populations with higher testosterone levels, for example, tend to also exhibit higher incidence of prostate cancer.⁹ Once again, sex trumps candles.

So why do males tolerate the negative effects of testosterone? The Darwinian explanation is that the potential reproductive payoffs are huge in mammalian males compared to females. Mating opportunities are an important constraint for male fitness. Hypothetically, a male mating with 100 different females in a year could potentially father 100 offspring or more. The same is not true for females. The prevalence of polygyny in mammals, other primates, and many human societies is evidence of the influence of this difference in fitness constraints between males and females. Women can also increase their fitness by obtaining more mating opportunities, but not through bearing more offspring. In essence, mammalian males are willing to deploy costly hormones such as testosterone, invest in expensive tissue, and engage in risky behavior because the potential fitness payoffs are so high.

This makes sense if you’re hominid living in the Pleistocene a couple million years ago. But is this relevant for men today? Perhaps. While humans are tremendously influenced by culture, the conditions of natural selection—trait variation, trait heritability, and differential reproductive success—are difficult to escape.

This does not mean, however, that men cannot evolve other reproductive strategies. Despite their propensity to engage in risky behavior and exhibit expensive, life-shortening physical traits, men have evolved an alternative form of reproductive effort in the form of paternal investment—something very rare in primates (and mammals in general). For paternal investment to evolve, males have to make sure they are around to take care of their offspring. Risky behavior and expensive tissue have to take a backseat to investment that reflects better health and perhaps prolongs lifespan. Indeed, men can exhibit declines in testosterone and put on a bit of weight when they become fathers and engage in paternal care.^{10, 11} Perhaps, then, fatherhood is good for health.

I doubt that natural selection is done with men, or humans, in general. We may still endure shorter lifespans and worse health due to our evolutionary history, but the essence of evolution is change over time. At our core, humans are incredibly malleable. The physiology that supports this malleability is probably why our species has evolved the traits that define us: big, expensive brains; long lives; extended childhood; offspring that require lots of care. It might also help explain why there are over 7 billion of us. That is a lot of reproductive fitness. Men have evolved novel reproductive strategies such as paternal care that likely contributed to their evolutionary success. But that doesn’t change the fact that they still require testosterone to reproduce. It is unlikely they will ever do away with the associated costs to lifespan and health—but that being said, it’s certainly better than being a northern quoll. Although it is a hell of a way to go.

• Richard G. Bribiescas is Professor of Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and Deputy Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, at Yale University. He is the author of How Men Age: What Evolution Reveals About Male Health and Mortality, and Men: Evolutionary and Life History, as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles on human evolutionary biology.

References

1. Ziomkiewicz, A., et al. Evidence for the cost of reproduction in humans: High lifetime reproductive effort is associated with greater oxidative stress in post-menopausal women. PLoS One 11, p. e0145753 (2016).

2. Jasienska, G., Nenko, I., & Jasienski, M. Daughters increase longevity of fathers, but daughters and sons equally reduce longevity of mothers. American Journal of Human Biology 18, 422-425 (2006).

3. Dunlevie, J. & Daly, N. Sex life of northern quolls: Reproduction rituals on Groote Eylandt exposed. www.abc.net (2014).

4. Wilson, J.D. & Roehrborn, C. Long-term consequences of castration in men: Lessons from the Skoptzy and the eunuchs of the Chinese and Ottoman courts. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 84, 4324-4331 (1999).

5. Min, K.J., Lee, C.K., & Park, H.N. The lifespan of Korean eunuchs. Current Biology 22, R792-793 (2012).

6. Reed, W.L., et al. Physiological effects on demography: A long-term experimental study of testosterone’s effects on fitness. The American Naturalist 167, 665-681 (2006).

7. Finkle, W.D., et al. Increased risk of non-fatal myocardial infarction following testosterone therapy prescription in men. PLoS One 9, e85805 (2014).

8. Muehlenbein, M.P., Alger, J., Cogswell, F., James, M., & Krogstad, D. The reproductive endocrine response to Plasmodium vivax infection in Hondurans. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 73, 178-187 (2005).

9. Calistro Alvarado, L. Population differences in the testosterone levels of young men are associated with prostate cancer disparities in older men. American Journal of Human Biology 22, 449-455 (2010).

10. Garfield, C.F., et al. Longitudinal Study of Body Mass Index in Young Males and the Transition to Fatherhood. American Journal of Men’s Health 10, NP158-NP167 (2015).

11. Gettler, L.T., McDade, T.W., Feranil, A.B., & Kuzawa, C.W. Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, 16194-16199 (2011).

This article was originally published on March 1, 2017, by Nautilus, and is republished here with permission.

The neurology of flow states.

Nautilus|getpocket.com

• Heather Berlin

Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and subjective—it changes in response to changing contexts and input, and it can be distorted when the brain is damaged, or affected by drugs, disease, sleep deprivation, or naturally altered states of consciousness. However, a new set of neuroscience research findings suggests that losing track of time is also intimately bound up with creativity, beauty, and rapture.

Time is most commonly manipulated by the kinds of things we do to fill it. When our minds are under-stimulated, time often feels like it is moving in slow motion, as in the scene in The Simpsons where Bart is made to lick envelopes for Principal Skinner all afternoon and groans when the clock starts ticking backward. On the other hand, when we are fully engaged, especially in the kind of “flow state” familiar to artists, athletes, and other top performers, our sense of time appears to speed up, or even to disappear entirely.

Many people describe being “enchanted” or “transfixed” when watching a live performance or viewing their favorite work of art. For example, when exploring the European paintings section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I enter into a kind of dissociated, transcendent state, which many people report experiencing. All of our cares and worries disappear and time seems to stand still or fade away as we become lost in the world of the story, or work of art, or the virtuosity of the performer. This loss of time-awareness mirrors the process occurring in the brains of the performers or artists while they create.

The inner critic must be shut down, and the inner Picasso turned up.

During what psychologists call “flow states,” where one is completely immersed and absorbed in a mental or physical act, people often report an altered sense of time, place, and self. It’s a transportive and pleasurable experience that people seek to achieve, and that neuroscience is now seeking to understand. A great example of flow state is found in many improvised art forms, from music to acting to comedy to poetry, also known as “spontaneous creativity.” Improvisation is a highly complex form of creative behavior that justly inspires our awe and admiration. The ability to improvise requires cognitive flexibility, divergent thinking and discipline-specific skills, and it improves with training.

Not surprisingly, the frontal regions of the brain that have been shown to be involved in time perception and impulse control are also involved in spontaneous creativity. Improvisation appears to take place in an altered state of mind/brain, and studies of the neural mechanisms of musical improvisation have identified a network of prefrontal brain regions linked to improvisation. The creative act of improvisation, at least in the musical realm, appears to be a result of changing patterns of activity in two key areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

During musical improvisation, in jazz or freestyle rap, studies show a distinctive increase in medial prefrontal cortex activation. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is a brain area known to be involved in intentional, internally generated self-expression and the pursuit of goal-oriented behaviors. This makes sense, since improvised performance requires you to come up with new material in a rapid stream, and deploy it just as quickly for a listening or watching audience. The other aspect to this pattern is a decrease in lateral orbitofrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation (DLPFC). The lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are brain areas involved in conscious self-monitoring, effortful problem solving, focused attention, and evaluation and regulation of goal-directed or planned behaviors. These lateral areas assess whether behaviors conform to social norms, and exert inhibitory control over inappropriate or maladaptive behavior. But as any skilled performer will tell you, inhibitions are the enemy of improvisation.

When mPFC activation is turned up, it encourages the internal generation of ideas. And when lateral PFC brain areas are simultaneously turned down, it allows novel thoughts and behaviors to emerge uninhibited, leading to divergent thinking and unfiltered creativity. In other words, the inner critic must be shut down, and the inner Picasso turned up. Deactivation of lateral PFC regions is associated with free-floating, defocused attention, allowing spontaneous associations between ideas to arise, and sudden realizations or insights to occur. Creativity appears to occur when the DLPFC decreases its regulation of the contents of consciousness, allowing for unconscious, unfiltered, or random sensations and thoughts to arise in the flow state. Just as children will play more wildly when the teacher isn’t watching, when we reduce the influence of the DLPFC on our behavior, it allows us to think more like artists.

Improvisation appears to take place in an altered state of mind.

Future research could explore whether this pattern of brain activity is in fact a neural signature of improvisation that occurs across all art forms, for instance during painting, theater, comedy, and dance improvisation, or whether the signature is unique to the musical and verbal forms it has been found in so far. When the lateral PFC regions—where our sense of agency is created after ongoing actions take place—decrease in activation, a performer’s moment-to-moment decisions and actions may feel as if they are occurring outside of time and without conscious intention, as if they are “coming from somewhere else.” This is consistent with the sentiment many artists express that their creative process is being directed by a “muse” or outside agent.

However, improvising performers are not oblivious; momentary “check-ins” to see how your performance is going can provide necessary environmental (or audience) feedback, helping to revise your approach and optimize performance in real-time. Creative thought also involves the “default mode network” (DMN), a set of brain regions active when attention is directed internally and suppressed when a person engages in externally directed tasks. The DMN is active when you’re daydreaming, but not when you’re filling out an application form, which requires executive control areas like the DLFPC. Improvisation requires a balance in activation between these two networks, reflecting the extent to which creative thought and behavior needs to be responsive to environmental input, and constrained by certain rules to meet the specific goals of the task at hand. But if you become overly self-aware or self-conscious for too long, you can lose the flow state and the performance will suffer. Of course, you don’t need a cognitive neuroscientist to tell you that. Just listen to Eminem:

You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime  

Luckily, you do not need to be able to improvise (or take drugs) to achieve flow states. Deactivation of the lateral PFC also occurs during other altered states of consciousness such as meditation, hypnosis, and daydreaming. And a similar pattern of dissociated activation in PFC has been identified during REM sleep, where dreaming usually occurs. Dreaming involves unplanned, irrational associations, defocused attention, an altered sense of time, and a feeling of lack of agency or volitional control (with the exception of lucid dreaming). These same characteristics are associated with creativity when one is fully awake.

The sense of time passing, producing its changes and progressions, is a capacity our brains evolved for adaptive reasons. How long have I been sleeping? How soon do the kids need to eat? How fast will I have to walk to make it home before dark? Keeping track of time is something we do instinctively, and our instincts have recently been supplemented by cultural inventions such as clocks and calendars, which train our brains to map its instincts onto scales and increments. However, we have also evolved the ability to turn off this constant time-keeping, in moments of artistic rapture or contemplation, and that adaptive sense of timelessness gives our lives much of its beauty and meaning. How we choose to spend our time, which remains our most limited and valuable resource, is one of the greatest gifts, and responsibilities, we are given.

Heather Berlin, Ph.D., MPH is a cognitive neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She practices clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Department of Neurological Surgery, and is a Visiting Scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She hosts Startalk All-Stars with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has hosted series on PBS and the Discovery Channel.

This article was originally published on June 7, 2018, by Nautilus, and is republished here with permission.