Crafting Your Life Program

Crafting Your Life Program

Dan Polansky

Base version, of which what follows is a modification and slight expansion: Version of date 2009-01-28.

Preface

This is a draft of a philosophical book about what to do in life and what to value.

The text was written mostly in 2007 and 2008. It has not been reviewed by a philosopher or an academic.

I did not publish the draft since I was unhappy/uncomfortable with it and I still am. I am now publishing the draft as a contribution to a discussion and analysis of ideas, in the hope that at least some of the presented material is good or inspiring and that it may perhaps provoke some interesting/inspiring criticism.

In so far as I respect your autonomy as an independent human, it is not my proper business to tell you what to do in life. Any attempt to deal with the question of what to do in life runs the risk of influencing you in a way you will be sorry for later. In case of doubt, you are well advised to stop reading now, and do your own thing and figure it out for yourself.

Introduction

What is Value and How You Define It

How to live, what to do in life, what to value in life, whether to have some goals in life or just live from moment to moment, are all difficult questions. It is above all unclear how answers given to them could be true or false. In the past several centuries, scientists and philosophers of science have developed tools with surprising reliability for answering questions about the world, among them the formal empirical scientific method. Unfortunately, the empirical scientific method only decides how things are, not how things should or ought to be.

This book highlights one option for what to do in your life: to value and maximize the power of life over matter—a shorthand for the power and control of all the living things over the matter and the universe—seeing everything else but truth and human freedom as subordinated to this goal. However, grave objections are raised against this option, especially when not constrained by truth and human freedom. Instead, you can choose to do something else, and the book can help in your choosing your own thing to do in life. It presents various answers already given by people and philosophers, like that you should seek pleasure, wisdom, understanding, money, power, pleasure, or entertainment, or like that you should listen to your heart, making your decisions without words; also that you should aim at your pleasure or wisdom or common pleasure and wisdom. It also presents some answers not yet given, like that you should maximize the time to death of all the life on Earth, or that you should aim at increasing the number of all possible shapes that have ever appeared in the world. The book also has a glance at the structure and the properties of the space, realm, or zoo of all the answers. It shows many awkward creatures are living in the zoo, including the death of life on Earth, the power of foxes over matter, and the randomness of your life given your survival.

Dealing with what to value in life has something to say on what the supposed purpose of life is. The option I mentioned on what to value can be rephrased as that a purpose of life is to maximize the power of life over matter. The purpose of your life is ultimately your choice.

This book is not about execution. It does not tell how to actually set and follow goals, how to maximize things or keep them in range, and how to keep track of everything related. There already are good books on the subject. Instead, this book should help you find a way to choose some goals while refusing other ones.

To introduce many of the possible answers, I need to introduce some terms used in the book. In the following sections, I introduce life program—an answer to what to do in life, and valuation—and answer to what to value.

What to Do — Life Program

An answer to what to do in your life is a life program, which I define as a set of general verbal instructions telling a person what to do in the long run, from his birth to his death. Let me give you summaries of several simple life programs.

• I should have an ordinary occupation, many friends, several children, and have a lot of fun and good time.
• I should take care that I survive and be idle beyond that.
• I should become a great man or woman; I do not need to have a family.
• I should kill myself as soon as possible.
• I should kill as many people as possible.
• I should get to know as many women (or men) as possible.
• I should maximize the number of guitars in my house.

These were only summaries; the bodies of life programs can be as long as several paragraphs, or, with some creative people, as long as a book.

This list of life programs should make some things obvious:

A life program may be used by no one; no one is going to maximize the number of guitars in his or her house.

A life program can be generic and vague. A computer could not execute a life program; it would need detailed instructions of what to do. Such a generic life program does not even contain a choice of a specific occupation.

The true life program of a person is not necessarily what the person tells other people that he is trying to do. Ultimately, it is only each person himself who knows for sure what his life program is.

Importantly, life programs are neither true nor false; they are not better or worse maps of a territory. In this they differ from scientific theories, like Newton's theory of gravitation, and many everyday observations, like that it is raining in San Francisco today.

What to Value — Valuation

Before I embark on saying substantial things about what to do in life, let me define one more concept—that of a valuation. While an answer to what to do in life is a life program, an answer to what to value is a valuation, which I define as a way of deciding for two possible outcomes of your actions which one you prefer. So a particular valuation is one particular meaning of the word better in the expression better decision. A common, though not the only one, way of determining which of two outcomes of your actions is better is to assign to each a number, and take the outcome with the higher number.

The following examples should clarify the meaning of valuation:

• Money on your account
• Your fame
• Two times your money plus three times your fame
• Your peace of mind
• Global economic product per year
• Your happiness
• The happiness of your family
• Average happiness of the world
• Beauty of all the things you have
• Beauty of all the things in the world

It is easy to come up with a long list of valuations, combining different aspects—like money, fame, and happiness—with centers of these aspects—like you, your family, and the world. In fact, this list could be extended until infinity, as so many there are ways of combining different elements of which valuations are composed.

Not all of the mentioned valuations can be effectively measured, neither with meter, nor with scales. Still, people intuitively find ways how to estimate them, especially when looking back.

Valuations are related to life programs in that they are parts of many of them. The way in which a valuation is embedded in a life program ranges from simple to more complex, like in the life programs "Maximize the money on your account", "Maximize the money on your account while being honest," "Be honest above all, and when feeling like it, maximize the money on your account," or "Be honest above all, keep yourself alive, and when you have time to spare, roll a dice, and if the outcome is 6, maximize the money on your account." Whatever the exact way, valuations are not something in addition to life programs; they are part of them.

So once you have found a complete answer to what to do, that is written a complete life program, you must have answered what to value along the way.

Although for every valuation there is a life program requiring its maximization, that program is not necessarily effectively executable. For many valuations, no one in the world knows any reliable recipe or method of how to maximize them. Just take the life program "Maximize the money on your account while being honest"; there are many ways how to earn money, and no one can prove about one or the other it is the most effective one.

The Unfounded Choice

You are a free person. Your choice of what to do and value in life—the choice of a complete life program—is ultimately unfounded. It has no basis, no rock-solid foundation. Before I explain it in more detail in the following paragraphs, let me point out that, as unfounded as your choice may be, you will ultimately make some choice. The various foundations that people use for that choice are shown in the next chapter; some of them could appeal to you.

To say about a program—life program or any other kind—that it is right or wrong, we need a valuation that evaluates programs, evaluating some of them as better than the other ones. Also, a life program may be wrong in that it fails to maximize some valuation of outcomes of your actions. But how do we know that a valuation is right or wrong, that some valuation is better than another one? We would need some valuation evaluating valuations, called meta valuation. But how do we know that the meta valuation is the right one? Perhaps by consulting a meta meta valuation? So it goes until infinity, as the following bulleted scheme shows.

• ...
• 4-meta LP-valuation

  of

• 3-meta LP-valuation

  of

• 2-meta LP-valuation

  of

• meta LP-valuation

  of

• life program (LP)

  which possibly maximizes

• valuation

  which evaluates

• the state of the world

One can also disregard life programs and only consider the sequence of valuation (evaluating the state of the world), meta-valuation, 2-meta-valuation, etc.

Moreover, one can ponder whether one wants to go far beyond, to infinite ordinal numbers from mathematics (e.g. epsilon-zero-valuation), but the result is fundamentally the same.

If you are to choose a life program, either you will choose it without using any valuation, out of the blue, or you will have to choose it using some valuation, which you may have chosen using another one, but somewhere at the bottom of the sequence, there must be a valuation that you have chosen without using any other valuation.

Noncommittal Option

You may refuse to choose any life program at all. If you do, you still have to make choices, which unfold into a stream of your actions in your life. That stream has substantial consequences, as if you were executing a certain life program. If you do not have any life program, the substantial consequences of your actions may well be the same as those of the life program "be idle".

You may want to choose a life program step at a time, choosing one for one period of your life, and choosing another one in another period of your life. Still, these life programs can be joined together to form a new compound life program; the unfolding of your life can still be described as an execution of a complex life program.

Life Programs Losing All Their Agents

As unfounded and random as your choice of a life program may be, it has consequences for you and for other people, most notably death. People have been able to satisfy themselves with and endure various conditions including severe bodily deterioration and complete isolation from other people. Death is the only consequence that you cannot revalue or claim to be all right when it occurs to you, as then you are no longer there to perform the revaluation.

Your choice of a life program also has consequence for life programs; one life program gets a new agent, while another one may have just lost one.

When an agent of a life program dies, the life program has one agent less. Usually, one life program is used by many agents, and if one of them dies, his or her children or other agents do not die. Still, eventually, the life program may lose all its agents.

Note that, for a person, to know a life program is not the same as to use it and be its agent. You know the life program "Kill yourself as soon as possible", just that you do not execute it. So even if all the agents of a life program die, the life program may still be known by many people.

In the long run, some life programs invariably lose all their agents, like "Kill yourself as soon as possible", while other are used widely, like "Earn a lot of money while being honest".

Having lost all its agents at some point, a life program may still get new agents at a later point, if its text is stored on paper or in a computer in between. Also, the text of a program that has lost all its agents and whose text has been lost can be invented anew.

By eliminating a life program's agents, nature can be said to have eliminated the life program. Nature can be said to choose certain life programs, in that they have not been eliminated. Put differently, nature or reality or the world is a place hostile to certain life programs; it is hostile to a great majority of all conceivable life programs.

There are several kinds of causes of life programs ending up without agents, either by losing all their agents or by not gaining any.

• Some life programs kill their agents, like parasites killing their hosts.
• Some life programs ask their agents not to reproduce. Such a life program may still be successful, if it succeeds in copying itself into new agents who are not biological descendants of the program's agents. Such is the case of the Catholic Church; priests do not have children, and still priests do not die out in the long run.
• Some life programs have no agents because agents do not like them.
• Some life programs never get written in the first place. To have any agents, a life program has to be developed first.
• All life programs are without agents when all their potential agents are dead. This would happen if the humankind would be destroyed.

There is probably no life program that will never stop being used, as chances are all the living things on the Earth will eventually die out.

The Power of Life over Matter

Highlighted Life Program

As pointed out, the choice of a life program is unfounded; it has no basis. You are in reality free to choose any life program whatsoever.

One program that I find strangely attractive is to maximize the power and control of all the living things over matter. I show what it means and what intuitive reasons support it. Either, upon further reading, you find the reasons appealing, or you may have a look at elements of life programs discussed in the next chapter, so that you can put together your own life program. However, there are also grave counter-arguments against this life program. If this book were properly neutral, it would not highlight this life program.

First, a minimum requirement on a life program seems to be that it has a chance to stay in use. A notable counterexample is "Kill yourself as soon as possible".

Second, a further choice is necessary, as there are many candidates for staying in use. Among those candidates, I find something strangely attractive, but also disconcerting, about The power of life over matter. I will say more of it in the following section. I will show that it is a candidate for significant presence among all the life programs supported by people, and that, in a vague sense, supporting this life program is indirectly what all the living things have been doing all along. It is not the only candidate though; there are many candidates that are trying hard. Another particularly notable one is The death of life; a life program that, figuratively speaking, tries to conquer as many human hearts as possible and lets them work on the complete destruction of life on the Earth. Further candidates are those world religions that are expansive and intolerant to unbelievers.

A more detailed meaning of the power and control of all the living things over matter is given in the following section, in which I shortly clarify what I mean by life, and then proceed to a definition of sorts of the power of life over matter.

The Definition of Life

There are various definitions of life and living things, of varying complexity, none of them perfect, and none of them required to forming a vague idea of what is meant by life. Instead of providing a definition for the concept for which you already have an idea—life, let me only emphasize that when I speak of life and living things, I do not require that it is based on DNA and carbon chemistry, as shown in the following bulleted scheme, starting from the narrowest thing and continuing through broader groups, some on subsequent levels in fact uncomparable:

• human individual (selfish focus)
• human family (selfish focus)
• nation (focus with elements of racism and culturalism)
• race by skin color (racist focus)
• broad cultural group, e.g. Europeans or Chinese (culturalist focus)
• religious group (religion focus)
• humankind (supposedly unselfish focus)
• mammals
• animals
• life based on DNA and carbon
• OR life based on silicon digital storage, including robots
• OR life based on yet another thing
• life (generic focus)

As a reservation, the use of the word "life" above is unconventional. While one can superficially plausibly think of silicon-based life (as presented in some sci-fi stories), this does not mean that human-like robots are alive: they lack key features of life as traditionally defined, including growth, metabolism, reproduction, being set up from tiny cells, etc.

If one rejects the above interpretation of "life" and yet is interested in the broader concept, one may coin a new word, perhaps quasi-life.

The Power of Life over Matter

By the power of life over matter I mean the capability and performance of all the living things. Specifically, the power of life over matter is increased when the following things are increased.

• The mass of matter of which the bodies of life are made, including the bodies of trees and animals
• The mass of matter of which life-made artifacts are made, including the bodies of technology and buildings
• The information gaining and processing capability of life including
  • The ability to model and simulate the world
  • The ability to map the Earth
  • The ability to perform instantaneous photographic snapshot of the Earth
  • The ability to map the universe
• The distance to which life can travel
  • Including the ability to travel to the moon
• The self-sustaining and self-healing capability of life
• The amount of free energy that life can release within a limited period of time
• The maximum speed that a living thing can reach
• The ability of living things to give matter an arbitrary shape
• The maximum height of a structure created by life
• The diameter of the area of the universe occupied by life
• The volume of the area of the universe occupied by life
• The power of life to destroy itself

Objections to the Power of Life

At a minimum, there are the following objections to the Power of Life:

• It appears fundamentally unethical. It appears ready to sacrifice individual humans for a large overarching aim. It appears to be some form of ethical collectivism; one can invent arguments that ethical individualism supports it as well, but such arguments do not appear unequivocally conclusive.
• The construction of this life program seems to imply that technological development is something like biological evolution, and that humans can increase the Power of Life via technology. A skeptic can charge that the technological development of last centuries is, in terms of geological time, a brief period of rapid and steep rise to be followed by equally or more rapid steep fall, and that humans were deluded all along about their ability to outperform the analogue of God (the Darwinian evolutionary processes that created the biosphere) in their creative capability in the middle run.
• Unless one starts adding exceptions to the specification, the power of life entails the power of life to destroy itself. (Similarly, the power of humankind includes the power of humankind to destroy itself.) Increasing life's power to destroy itself in its entirety appears objectionable.
• If one accepts a broad non-traditional definition of life, perhaps to be called quasi-life, a consequence is that the existence of the biological life as traditionally understood does not matter other than as a means to whatever the human-like robots (androids) or other robots plan to do with their power over the matter and the universe. That seems rather disconcerting, at least to some of us humans, members of a species that, from a certain view, is considered to be a mere obsolete DNA, eukaryotic, mammalian platform to be replaced with the shiny new thing, the result of the greatest and cleanest engineering unburdened by the evolutionary history. Needless to say, the shiny new thing is yet to achieve the closure of material loop and anything remotely resembling sustainability. Even if the sustainability problems the new thing faces get solved, for a human, this kind of individual selflessness and species selflessness (what do I human care about my species, the main thing is that the quasi-life prevails and gets powerful) is rather unnatural, and unacceptable for many humans.
• Even if one constrains the concept of life to a traditional one and excludes human-like robots, one can think of a biological species with superhuman capabilities appearing one day. A true human devotee to the power of life would seem to be quite content to be replaced by the superhumans, a strange prospect of species-selflessness. Thus, even if the power-of-life-driven species-selflessness can be strangely attractive, it also appears bizarre.

One strange thing about life programs is that they are defined as ultimates and therefore, they are not really amenable to objections. Since, to criticize a life program is to subject it to value judgment of another object, and then, it is the other object that is closer to being the ultimate, not the life program so evaluated. But psychologically, this is implausible; one would have to give up all criticism of all life programs. It is a conundrum, something like a paradox.

Emotional Building Blocks

Overview

When choosing or composing your life program, you may want to have a glance at what offer there is. Also, you may want to see the elements of which various life programs are composed, so that you can use them in your own custom life program, of your own composition. Things people generally seek in their life and that philosophers have been selling as the purpose of life include happiness, pleasure, money, fame, achievement, success, good conscience or freedom from remorse, knowledge and understanding. This chapter looks at these elements and shows where they come from, observing about many of them that they stem from an outdated and partly capricious biological design of human bodies.

Evolutionary Defects in Emotions

The ultimate goal in life is thought by many to have to do with feelings, emotions and sensations; it is supposed to be achieving happiness, maximizing pleasure, reducing pain, stimulating excitement , increasing entertainment, and loving. Some of these emotional goals have been endorsed by notable philosophers, including Epicurus, and John Stuart Mill. Let me point out some properties of these goals that you may find discouraging.

Above all, as far as we know, the bodily structures producing these emotions have been created by biological evolution. This is also true of human brain, the location of intelligent thought; so far so good. However, the structures of the human brain responsible for emotions are much older than the latest parts of the human brain, responsible for distinctively human thought. That the human emotions are of much older descent is, apart from being scientifically verified, apparent in the eyes of the man's best friend—the dog. The assumption—made by many—that whatever has been created by evolution is automatically good and trustworthy is seen in different light when we look at some of the old parts of human bodies, containing some strange and troublesome parts like wisdom teeth and appendix. Suspicion has it the parts of the brain steering the production of the chemicals responsible for emotional feelings are problematic too, ridden with evolutionary defects.

Implicit in emotional goals is the goal of survival, which has shaped the process through which the parts of the brain responsible for the creation of emotions came about. The goal of survival as implicit in emotional goals is however twisted by suboptimal and only seemingly adaptive evolutionary process.

If you would think that survival is good in the first place, other goals being only means to that end, why would you not follow the purpose of survival directly, without first consulting pleasure, pain and happiness? If you start to see your survival and health as of value, even if not as your ultimate aim, you will see that emotions and sensations are not always helpful in achieving that goal. Consider going to the dentist: before you even plan a visit, you may have to deal with the emotion of fear; after you finally make it to the dentist, you would have not until recently to deal with the acute sensation of pain. In this modern situation, both fear and pain have done little to improve your health; quite to the contrary.

That the goals of emotions and sensations are problematic, easy to see for fear and pain, is less obvious for pleasure, happiness and entertainment. A person with pleasure as the ultimate aim is vulnerable to drugs; if the pleasure of the present moment appeals to you, getting high is the right thing to do, regardless of the consequences. For happiness, consider the following. In the prospect of your chronic pain, aiming at the goal of your happiness runs the risk that you are going to commit suicide, as the sum total of the happiness over your life is constantly diminished. Also, a person threatened with torture, aiming at his happiness, could betray his companions.

Now that emotions and sensations are unreliable is not to say that they should be ignored; they still provide valuable information. It is just that this information should better be treated with distrust, as a hypothesis that is yet to be tested. Likewise, myopic eyes should be distrusted, and if possible treated with glasses.

Happiness and Joy

Many people believe that the purpose of life is to seek happiness. Some believe that happiness is obviously the only thing that is pursued for its own sake.

Happiness is mostly considered a feeling of a long-term character. Still, one definition of happiness is that it is the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain and suffering.

But if we define value as happiness, we cannot investigate whether the brain, senses and hormones, all the things producing the feeling of happiness, are reliable or in align with anything; the whole of these is in align by our definition.

Making seeking happiness all right by definition has some disturbing implications. Different people have in general different systems in their brains producing the feeling of happiness. While some are happy when solving problems, others are happy when cheating, stealing and robbing people. Moreover, if we modified the biological system producing the feeling of happiness, we would get yet another behavior produced by steering on the goal of happiness.

So although everyone can use happiness as the indicator of what to do, such an indicator leads in different people to very different concrete life programs.

Whoever would take his individual happiness seriously as the highest norm of what to aim at would be forced by his choice to develop drugs that provide happiness regardless of the circumstances. The most probable result would be a soon death; the organism would lose any regard to the outside circumstances, upon which its survival depends.

Currently, we cannot modify the biological system producing the feeling of happiness. At least, we are able to interfere with the biological system by means of music, alcohol and drugs in general. Drugs enable us to control some of our emotions directly, without any regard to the outside and inside situation in which we find ourselves.

What has been said about happiness is also true of joy and other similar emotions.

Pleasure

Some see the purpose of their life in their individual pleasure. Pleasure is an instant, pleasing feeling, of various kinds, resulting from a great variety of activities, including eating, drinking alcohol, dancing and singing, making love, seducing women, going to theater and movies, taking part on sports, slaking, going for long and slow walks, conversing with friends, arguing about controversial topics, or solving hard intellectual problems. Also included in some people is tormenting other people or themselves, collecting money, achieving social ranks, raping women, or gaining social power. In fact, even entertaining the idea of aiming at something else but pleasure may produce pleasure in people.

Because of this great variety, it is unobvious what these various activities have in common that lends the feeling that results from them the name "pleasure". One thing should be granted though: that the various specific feelings called "pleasure" are perceived as positive.

Many people find pleasure in eating. The biological systems for rewarding eating with pleasure are outdated. The consequence is that most people who take instant pleasure as the measure of value and have enough food available are overweight. The pleasure system for eating has been designed at times where there were periods with plenty of food, and periods with little food available. It was all right to eat a lot and keep the energy stored as fat in the times of affluence of food. He who rigorously sticks to pleasure when eating dies younger.

Enjoying unrestrained sexual pleasure before the advent of contraception pills threaten the health and life of both mother and her infant. It may be desirable to conceive a lot of children if you can realistically expect that many children will die. Also, with men, sexual pleasure is usually not directly connected with pleasure of staying with one woman, which in preindustrial age led to spreading of infectious diseases.

Some people find that what is most pleasing to them is idleness. Being idle beyond measure has all kinds of negative consequences, like the decrease of your expected lifespan also because of bad health resulting from lacking exercise. Getting money, knowledge, and understanding, unless overdone and when aimed at the right direction, increases your expected lifespan, and provides more options in your life, including the option of benefiting other people.

It is not that a pleasure maker has to aim at pleasure in short-term, ruining his health to gain one night's high resulting from the use of drugs. To gain more pleasure in total, a smart pleasure maker gives up some pleasure now to gain more of it later, and chooses these kinds of near pleasure that do not threaten the foundation upon which the future pleasure rests—the life and health.

Given that parts of the brain producing pleasure are outdated, it does not follow that things that produce pleasure are automatically wrong. It is just that the pleasure they produce cannot be used as an indicator that they are automatically right. The fact that having sex with contraception produces pleasure does not make it wrong.

Some pleasure makers strangely argue that you have no other option than aiming at pleasure.

Pleasure maker: Whether you want it or not, you are maximizing the pleasure. Everybody does just that, even masochists and ascetics.

Dan: If indeed whatever I do maximizes pleasure, then pleasure cannot be used as an indicator of what to do; it is going to be achieved no matter what you do. So if you get pleasure no matter what you do and how you decide, pleasure fails completely as the measure of value; it does not provide a direction as it is always there regardless.

Entertainment and Boredom

Some people consider entertainment as their ultimate goal in life.

Entertainment is the counterpart to boredom. The older parts of the brain have evolved to issue negative emotion when the mind is idle. They issue positive emotion of entertainment when there is dynamic, interesting information to process. Unfortunately, those old, simplistic parts are poor at distinguishing between information relevant to survival and prosperity and information that just appears to be relevant. When you go to see a movie, the brain receives through your eyes fast moving images, that is information which would be highly relevant if it were about the real world.

Often, you need to be bored before you are able to get into a new area of interest or activity. That is why entertainment may be damaging to your welfare, giving an illusion of real problem solving.

Entertainment in the form of computer games is in effect simulated problem solving. Problem solving is essential to survival in both short-term and long-term. In addition, many computer games are a form of direct learning. When you are learning in manageable speed, some parts of your brain issue positive emotion, related to the general fact that mastering new skills and capabilities increases the chances of survival.

Love

Some say the purpose of life is love. They may mean love between sexes, love of a person towards another person even of the same sex, or love of a person towards a thing, an organization or a group of people in general.

Whatever emotion they mean exactly, it is a pleasing one, distinct from pleasure though. The biological tendency of seeking pleasing emotions may lead to the idea that this feeling could be the purpose of life.

A downside of aiming mainly at the emotion of love between sexes is that it is temporary. Sex—the oldest force of attraction between sexes—is short-lived in the extreme. The emotion of love—a newer force—improves upon sex by being more long-term; but for the human purpose of rearing children, its duration of three to five years is no more up to date than the support of the upright posture in the human skeleton. Another downside is the vulnerability to suicide in case of the loss of the loved ones.

The expression love is also used in the expressions love of money and love of power. In the context of these expressions, the measure of value is not the love, but the object of love, like money and power in the examples above. So if you would think the purpose of your life is love of money, that would in effect come out the same as saying that your purpose in life is to maximize the money you have.

Suffering

Some think of suffering as of value. Viktor Frankl sees suffering as performance and as one of the purposes of life.

John Stuart Mill sees suffering as that which diminishes happiness; happiness is, according to Mill, the purpose of life, or the highest value.

Physical pain, a species of suffering, is a signal of the lower biological systems that something has gone wrong. It is however not something which we may observe, and if fit, ignore. Rather, pain launches a physiological reaction that may decrease the performance of the brain in decision making, and as a consequence, endanger the survival. At some cases, we feel pain in a situation improving our health, like at the dentist.

Some believe that suffering is inevitable. As long as the biological design of humans remains intact, suffering will probably be there. However, we may learn to switch the suffering signal off whenever we see that it is useless, which is what we have already been doing to an extent using medication.

Now switching off the physical pain is far less problematic than switching off the emotional pain. I suggest that emotional suffering is the result of brain's attempt to perform large scale computation, taking into account huge amount of information available in the long-term memory of the brain. Without this kind of suffering, certain kind of information processing would not take place.

Given that emotional suffering may present large scale information processing, it is indeed performance, as Frankl suggests. It is just that suffering occurring five minutes before you die is of little value, be it performance or not.

Peace of Mind

Some think that it is peace of mind that you are or should be after in the first place, near-synonyms of which include tranquillity and calmness. But it is up to you what you are after; it is not written out there that you are after being calm at the expense of everything else. John Stuart Mill concluded that tranquillity offers little pleasure and excitement, but that the pleasure and excitement is often accompanied or followed with pain, for which people tend to alternate the tranquil rest on one hand, and excitement and stress on the other hand.

The term "peace of mind" implies the opposite term "war of mind", rendered in psychological literature as "inner conflict". That can be sometimes solved by writing everything down, consulting a psychotherapist, a priest, or a trusted mentor.

If you choose to aim at peace of mind, as a means, the options of how to do it include avoidance of anxiety-producing situation, avoidance of stress, getting immersed in an activity, meditation including Yoga and Zen, and prayer. Calming down can also be achieved by sports, which stimulate the body to produce drug-like substances. Avoiding anxiety-producing situations, and excessive avoidance of stress is guaranteed to get you into trouble.

Satisfying Human Needs

Psychologists investigate human needs. They do so to investigate the human behavior and sources of human motivation, but some also imply that the satisfaction of human needs is the purpose of life.

As long as these needs are human and not specific to a particular culture, they are stemming from the biological setup of man. The assumption that the satisfaction of these needs is the purpose of human life amounts to the assumption that what has evolved in the course of biological evolution is good. However, depending on the time of development of these needs, they are more or less outdated and ridden with strange properties.

The focus on human needs also seems to be chauvinist in a way; all humans are also living beings. By the same token, men could focus on men's needs, to the detriment of women.

Car Driving to a Gas Station

The attempt to derive value from biological and psychological needs and signals can be modeled by imagining a driver in a car who does not know where to go. As he has a smart speaking car of the future, he ask the car.

Driver: Car, do you have an idea where we should go?

Car: Let us drive to a gas station to pick some gas and oil.

Driver: What shall we do after that?

Car: Why, we'll just drive to an auto mechanic.

Driver: And afterwards?

Car: Then we'll drive to another gas station.

A car that only drives to gas stations and auto mechanics is not really going anywhere. Of course a car also has to visit gas stations and auto mechanics, but these are only deficiencies of the car; a perfect car would not need any gas and repair.

Tim: If the car in the dialogue was supposedly the whole of human needs, then the dialogue is misleading. It only refers to the lower biological needs, but the higher psychological needs are implemented in the biology too.

Dan: The point is that the destination of the journey cannot be derived from the car. You need the driver for that. The driver should decide where to go, not the car. The driver should only stop at petrol stations and auto mechanics to ensure that he can get to the destination to which he chose to get in the first place. The driver is what I have called life program. A life program can be completely independent on the biological design of the human body. It could even be chosen randomly. A random or unfounded or not derived choice of a life program is the essence of human freedom.

Tim: Artifacts like cars are designed by their conscious goal-seeking makers to be subordinate to the maker's ends and purposes. By contrast, biological individuals do not really have makers, do not have real purposes (only quasi-purposes) and are not really subordinate to anything. This renders the analogy fundamentally flawed.

Non-Emotional Building Blocks

Overview

When composing their life programs, people choose various elements that are not directly emotional, so may be called rational, like success, power, money, knowledge and understanding. Although these elements are not directly emotional, their choice may still depend upon a rewarding emotion.

You may read the following sections one after the other, but also in a non-sequential fashion. If a section seems intriguing to you, you may read it first, and skip those that seem unuseful for your life program. Eventually, you may want to read all of them.

The elements treated are the following:

• guilt
• peace of mind
• success
• power
• wealth
• prestige
• freedom
• knowledge
• understanding
• truth
• justice
• wisdom
• health

Guilt

Few people would choose to aim at feeling guilty. What can be a part of a life program however is the freedom from the feeling of guilt. I propose to distinguish emotions of guilt from the faculty of conscience—the ability to discern what is right and what is wrong even without relying on the emotions of guilt. Emotions of guilt are a signal that an imaginary internal trial should take place, not that you are automatically guilty. At least three imaginary speakers should be present at the internal trial—the plaintiff, responsible for the feeling of guilt in the first place, the defendant, and the judge. Just like in the court of law, both the plaintiff and the defendant should be allowed to use all their wits in advocating their positions.

If you choose to avoid remorse and the feeling of guilt, writing down what you consider ethical and non-ethical can help. It does not need to be cast in stone; your ethical code—the things you have written down about what is acceptable and what is not—can evolve with your experience and understanding.

Success

Some people assume that the purpose of life is success. If what they mean by success is the achievement of goals that you have set for yourself, having success as the purpose of life is a considerably incomplete answer. It does not tell what kind of goals to aim at, whether internal and emotional such as the peace of mind and love, or external such as being successful in your profession; neither does it help you in the least to choose your profession. Consistent with this choice, you may try to become a successful artist, a successful Casanova, or a successful international criminal. Upon closer look, to say that you should aim at any abitrary success is to say close to nothing, as it amounts to "aim at succeeding in what you aim at". The little meaning that remains comes from the fact that aiming at something implies the systematic application of effort. But people who aim at effortless life do not aim at it in the same way in which, say, a physician is aiming at becoming a distinguished one. With such aims, aiming too hard at them becomes an obstacle to achieving them, as can be seen in a person who is trying too hard to fall asleep; the result is a failure.

If what they mean by success is achieving something recognized as success by the society, such as the property, successful academic career, or social power, the choice of what you should be successful in is still largely left open. You can try to become a successful doctor, a popular singer, a successful sportsman, an eminent scientist, or a wealthy entrepreneur. As said, aiming at this kind of success is at least more specific than aiming at any success whatsoever, as it excludes such options as to aim at the peace of mind, at Buddhist enlightenment, or at having a good time.

Power

Some people choose to seek social power—the ability to directly control other people, to review their work, to determine their tasks, or to set regulations. Obvious cases of social power include those of politicians, wealthy people, managers, and military officers. Less obvious cases include the power teachers have over their pupils or students, the doctors have over their patients, and parents have over their children.

On the downside, the aim of social power sometimes requires people to give up personal freedom and independence, freedom from commitment to organizations, and privacy and anonymity; some of the most powerful people become public figures.

Social power is often linked to prestige, but not always.

Related to power is influence, commanded by journalists or marketing people, or the long-term one of classical authors and philosophers.

The greater the social power of a person, the greater the moral performance consisting in avoiding the misuse of power. But as the moral strength and self-control of even the most excellent people is limited, given enough power, all characters are shallow. If you seek to be a moral person, you need to make sure your power does not exceed your ability to act to your responsibility, but also that your moral performance does not become negligible for your lack of power.

Wealth

Material wealth, including money and property, is a means to a great variety of ends, important to most people.

Money is not needed by monks, recluses in the desert, or certain ascetics trying to free themselves from their body by malnutrition. If you come from a well-to-do family, your need of money may be absent too.

Some decide to play the game of earning as much money, acquiring as much property as possible, such as the notable J. D. Rockefeller. Acquiring great wealth may produce joy of success and provide the option to finance whatever the rich chooses, any arbitrary whims like spending on luxurious goods, or going to wherever you please, but also schools, hospitals and other projects beneficial to the society.

Aiming at money and wealth is a well-defined, easily measurable game, unlike many other ones. The ease with which you know whether you win or lose makes it attractive to some. Money, although exposed to risks of inflation and bankruptcy of banks, is more stable than swings of moods. Also, it is a scaling game, not a yes/no one.

Aiming at money regardless of moral norms easily leads to immoral behavior, for which money is notable. Such an immoral behavior need not be apparent, as acting morally pays itself to an extent.

To aim at money requires hard thinking, giving up mental leisure, gaining a lot of skill, commitment, and know-how. Hard unskilled work is unlikely to produce considerable wealth.

Prestige

Prestige is the esteem of you in view of other people. Obviously, some occupations are more prestigious than others. Prestige can also be increased by the purchase of luxury items such are cars, homes, or clothing.

The occupational prestige is only partly flexible; once you have successfully made an entry into a prestigious occupation, your prestige can no longer grow, unless you are able to climb up in the corporate ladder, which is an option for managers, not for, say, surgeons. For this reason, prestige is a poor ultimate end. For some people, prestige is an important part of the choice of occupation. The occupations that are considered prestigious include doctors, lawyers, and professors. For a longer list, check the latest statistics. Prestige is about the perception of other people, not about how things really are. Nevertheless, disregarding prestige can have practical real consequences, like the loss of sales because a salesman would be driving a poor car.

An occupation considered prestigious by the large populace may be held in low esteem by your parents or by some particular community. When aiming at prestige, it is important to know which group you are trying to impress.

Fame

As other vague words, fame is a different thing to different people. You may choose to aim at the fleeting fame of a fashion model or a rock star, or the supposedly immortal fame of great statesmen, inventors, scientists, and artists—fame that sometimes comes only after death. You may want to be known across your country, across the globe or in the community of your professional colleagues.

Your initial chance may seem feeble. But then, as some say, the overnight success comes after a long and hard work.

The success in being famous can have some effects that you may dislike, like the loss of privacy and anonymity.

To make the aim of fame truly continuous, you need to find small degrees that already mean first success. On the other hand, with some risk, you may aim at the overnight success, so that the fame and recognition will increase all of a sudden, instead of step at a time. In any case, you should get emotionally ready for disappointment and failure. The game of fame is one of chance, one of chances that are unknown and low.

Freedom

Some people seek freedom. There are some vastly different things people mean by freedom. One group of the meanings of freedom relates to common level, to social scale: political freedom and economic freedom. Another group pertains to the individual: financial freedom, freedom for creativity and inventiveness in the chosen work, and freedom in the sense of independence.

The aim at political freedom and economic freedom is probably best served by donating to a non-profit or by working for it; also by cooperating with a non-profit, by providing services to them. Many people were willing to risk their life to fight for the political freedom of their country, going back to their social impulse or instinct, the feeling that an unfree life is not worth living. It did not need to be an ultimate aim, but an aim of such an utter importance that other aims seemed to be completely dominated by it.

Financial freedom of a person is of a completely different kind, even though it shares the word "freedom" in the name. While political freedom is a social aim, financial freedom is the personal aim at not needing to earn money for living, which is distinct from not wanting to work. Financial freedom as the ultimate end in life is a poor goal for the reason that it is a yes/no goal; once it is achieved, your life is over, so to speak.

Knowledge

Some people choose to seek knowledge—for their own pleasure or joy, for the usefulness of it for their various other aims, and for the sake of maximizing the knowledge that the humankind has of the world and of itself. Some learn all the geographical facts about the Earth or learn the Guinness Book of Records by heart, straining their memory. Contrasting to this is aiming at the knowledge of the words and language. Some acquire the knowledge by learning from books, others try to discover for themselves.

Knowledge is a powerful means. Practical knowledge is indispensable to all kinds of aims. You can do your work better if you get to know it, and if you read magazines and books to stay on top of what's going on.

If you choose to multiply the theoretical knowledge that humankind has of the laws of the universe, becoming a scientist is an option, or supporting scientific undertakings financially. If you want to take part on the adventure of discovery, you can do it even on your own, as a hobby, with the probable consequence that the results will be either already known or incomprehensible to other people. But if you are passionate about invention, reinventing the wheel may still be more fascinating than inventing nothing at all, only implementing inventions of other people. Given enough money and courage, you may also become an independent scholar.

Not all the knowledge is fascinating or useful, such as the content of astronomical tables used for sea navigation. In the absence of printed publication, knowing boring details and little facts can be useful too. Everyone relies in their daily life on knowledge of little facts that have no universal application, such as where to go shopping in a particular city. Password is a type of little piece of information that has only one, special use, but that single use can give you access to a lump of money.

When coming in vast amounts, knowledge is for most people impossible to keep in head. Unless you are different, you need to write down what you have found out, and find ways how to organize it. A proven method of organization is by keywords, and alphabetically; the choice of keywords is key, so is the choice of multiple keywords. This method can be seen in encyclopedia and in the alphabetical indices of books. When you are in a hurry, a short list of keywords can do instead of several paragraphs; such a list of keywords will be understandable by you, but not by other people.

Understanding

Some seek the understanding of the world we are living in. If lucky, they become professional scientists or philosophers; if less lucky, they become amateur ones. Others choose to support the aim of understanding by developing technology that supports it, including measuring devices, and computer hardware and software. Understanding is also supported by its disseminating, through teaching.

Related aim is the one of understanding the languages of the world, and the ways of various cultures, trying at least for a moment to see the world with their lens. The understanding can be acquired through learning from books and media, and, for the luckier people, from direct experience. To understand someone is to see the world with their glasses, to imagine to know what they know, to not know what they don't, and to value what they do.

To understand the world is to get an insight into its laws. To understand an object is to know where it came from, what causes have shaped it, and what consequences its current way of existence can have.

To aim at understanding the world is not to want to understand everything, including refrigerator. A single person cannot understand every detail in every branch of science and technology; one has to be selective. Also, interestingly, in many situations, in order to successfully repair a device, you do not need to have a perfect understanding of its function. Apart from that, leaving the job to an expert is often the best option.

Truth

The search for truth is chosen by many as one of their major life goals. It is related to the search of knowledge and understanding. But it can be seen not as the goal of acquiring as extensive knowledge as possible but rather to acquire as great certainty about that which one knows as possible. The certainty of knowing something is increased by providing a proof, of which there are many kinds. Proofs, in their turn, require precision in meanings of the words of the propositions, enhanced by the technique of definition.

Justice

Justice—deciding in align with law and based on common principles rather than individual sympathies—is sought by judges around the world, but also by most of those people whose decisions concern groups of other people, such as managers and parents. If you want to make justice the main aim of your life, trying to become a judge or a politician is an option. Being just requires keen interest in truth, and understanding the written law or the principles of justice.

Wisdom

Some choose to seek wisdom. Wisdom is made up of painful personal experience, skill and experience in judgment and estimation, track record of making decisions that impact other people, knowledge of human character, of the ways of your native society but also of foreign cultures. It requires the ability to advise to people on common human problems, to choose words carefully so that they do not hurt, to choose words in judgment that do not make the judgment invalid, to consider as many relevant facts and people as possible when making decisions. It is required from the occupations of a judge, a priest or a psychotherapist.

Given wisdom is seen on a continuous scale, you may aim at wisdom without ever becoming wise, that is, without ever passing the threshold above which other people would judge you wise. Still, the game that you are going to play should be expressed in continuous terms, so that there is something to be maximized, not a threshold to be passed in a yes/no fashion. You can meaningfully choose to seek wisdom above all regardless of your limitations.

Health

Health seems to be a strange part of a life program, as life programs are about ultimate ends, not about means. What is about means is the life plan, a concretization of the life program.

Even if accepted, health as an ultimate end seems strange too. Still, related to aiming at health is aiming at longevity, which can be a fascinating game.

That said, health is a key means, some of the most important ones. It limits what you can and cannot do, whether you can be adventurous or need to be very careful. It is worth paying attention to it.

Longevity

One's longevity, the maximum length of one's life, seems like a candidate ultimate aim. However, there are objections or complications.

In a thought experiment, let us leave someone hibernated for a 1000 years—unconscious, not dreaming—, to be waked up, live for a day and then die, as an alternative to living a normal conscious and active human life for, say, 50 years. Does one really want that? Does one not care about conscious experience, about the possibility to leave mark in the world, and leave descendants?

We can modify the experiment by allowing vivid pleasant dreams during the hibernation. Does one really want that? Will one be satisfied with the prospect of having pleasant subjective experience—dreams—although in reality one has no impact on the external environment, leaves no children, and dies soon after waking up?

We can consider a related scenario: would one accept greatly reduced existence—half-awake, one's thinking ability dulled, barely functioning—but for a long time, in preference over a life that is much more aware, awake and productive as for various aims but lasts much shorter?

Another related scenario, much more realistic given current medical technology and not so speculative, is one in which someone is kept in coma or a more severe state of unconsciousness for a very long period of time, spanning many years or even decades. There are different grades of severity: there is prolonged coma, permanent vegetative state, and brain death. For all these cases, especially for the more severe ones, one can ask whether one wants to ask others to cease providing artificial life support. If one does want a support cessation, it means one does not consider longevity only but also something else as ultimately worthwhile.

Aiming at one's longevity alone seems biologically unnatural: one would not care to have children or risk one's life to save one's children as long as one's longevity is maximized. By contrast, it is selfish-gene-explained and natural for many people to risk their life to save their children in certain situations.

Aiming at one's longevity alone is unethical: one would be forced to sacrifice an arbitrary number of humans (killing them or allowing them to be killed) as long as one's longevity would thereby get extended even a little.

The above objections do not apply to longevity as an instrument. All else the same, a person living longer can create more creative works if that is what they are after, or accumulate more experience.

The candidate aim of longevity can be centered on other entities, e.g. life as the accumulation of all living things. Here, one can wildly speculate using philosophical imagination: If we cast all the living things as a person (which it arguably isn't), would that entity prefer to exist longer even if it means a kind of existence that is reduced in some way? For instance, would life prefer to have a longer existence provided there are no animals, no trees but there are grasses and flowers, over shorter existence that features animals?

On a less grand scale, one can focus on the longevity of, say, a nation or a religious group.

Usefulness

Some feel that usefulness is an important goal to which they want to contribute. The idea of usefulness however seems to postpone the end to be reached: something is useful if you can do something else with it. Some philosophers see usefulness, in their words utility, differently: as a postponed pleasure or happiness; that is, the end to be postponed is not left open; it is set to pleasure or happiness. A notable proponent of this view is John Stuart Mill.

In spite of usefulness being about means and not about ultimate ends, the philosophers' redefinition notwithstanding, you can make usefulness your ultimate end; you only need to be practically able to decide what is useful and what not, and to what degree, without asking, useful for what. One way of seeing usefulness without object (without saying for what) is to see a thing as useful if it is useful for a great variety of purposes; another is to deem a thing useful if it is useful for at least one another purpose. Whatever meaning of "useful" you choose, you should stick to it throughout your life program. The paragon of usefulness are tools and technology, a universal means.

A useful person is one whom other people have use of. Being a useful and needed person tends to feel good in most people.

Sentience

One may choose sentience (a related concept is consciousness) as the center of focus instead of self, family, tribe, nation, humankind or living things. One may claim that it is sentience that is the implied objective of biological (and other) evolution, especially human sentience. One would aim e.g. at the power of sentience or longevity of sentience. A chimpanzee sentience would be treated as mere quasi-sentience or sentience-in-the-making.

Sentience stands in sharp contrast to living things as the center of focus. A sentience (collective of sentient beings) aiming at survival of living things could shut itself down as too dangerous for them, whereas sentience aiming at itself would accept destruction of living things as perfectly acceptable in its aiming at its own power or longevity. The sentience could argue: we must develop technology to avert a future asteroid impact on the Earth even if by doing so we risk creating an ecological catastrophe, to extend the longevity of sentience at any and all costs.

One may consider artificial sentience as a possible kind of sentience, and if so, sentience could well give up on natural/biological sentience as long as artificial sentience goes on. Alternatively, one could treat the word "artificial" as alienans and refuse to consider artificial sentience to be a kind of sentience; thus, aiming at only the true/biological sentience would refuse to hand over the Earth to robots.

One may treat animal quasi-sentience as a matter of degree of sentience. Thus, one may be in a dilemma: should we protect the quasi-sentience of chimpanzees (as better than nothing) by greatly restricting the human embodiment of sentience as too dangerous to the aggregate of the sentience and quasi-sentience?

One may counter that the self-centeredness of sentience is perhaps as unsurprising as it is unconvincing. If birds could speak, they might say that the objective is not sentience but flight and that the only reason why the biological (and other) evolution brought about humans is so that there can be flight past Pluto. As a Greek philosopher said, if horses could make gods, they would make them in the form of horses.

Designing the Game

One way of living your life is to see it as a maximization of a numerical figure, representing your underlying goals. The easy way to do it is in monetary terms, possibly not meaningful to you. Aside from money, you may try to represent most of the expressions of natural language in figures, or you may find proxy figures helping you to see whether you are hitting or missing the mark that you have set to you.

One way of composing the game is (a) finding the center of focus, and (b) finding the figure. The center may be you, family, occupation, humankind, all the living things, whatnot. The figures include power, viability, money, health, pleasure, entertainment and the like. Not all combinations are possible though.

Once you have chosen or designed the game, it is time to play. Playing such a game, however, is an intellectually demanding undertaking. Now you have determined what to achieve, but not yet how to achieve it. For this purpose, there is e.g. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and other books on how to follow goals.

The Zoo of Life Programs

The space, the zoo of life programs is vast. The zoo is the one of all the life programs, not only of those that people actually use. To get an overview of such a zoo borders on impossibility. How do you browse it? Is there an alphabetical index? A topic index, a catalog, or categories? There is such a vast number of animals. In the following, I will attempt something of an overview nevertheless. I include not only awkward and weird but also disgusting creatures.

What needs to be understood is that the part of the zoo that is relevant to real people is extremely small.

• Global
  • The power of life over matter
  • The death of life on Earth
  • The time to death of life (The lifespan of life, of the time of existence of all the living things, on the Earth and outside)
  • The power of sentience over matter
  • The death of sentience
  • The time to death of sentience
  • The power of humankind over matter
  • The time to death of humankind (The lifespan of humankind)
  • Destroy humankind ASAP
  • The power of obscurity over human mind
  • The number of living people
  • The number of living frogs
  • The number of living cockroaches
  • The number of living biological species (biodiversity)
  • The planetary gross economic product
  • The number of shapes that have ever made it into the world
  • The political freedom of the countries of the Earth
  • The total pleasure minus total pain of the people of the Earth
  • Minimizing suffering of the people of the Earth while preferring a suffering person over dead person
  • Minimize the world poverty
  • Minimize the world injustice
  • Maximize the world literacy
  • The quality of life of people of the planet
  • Advancement of sciences
  • Advancement of pseudosciences
  • Advancement of astrology
  • Advancement of engineering
  • Advancement of arts and culture
  • Convert the world to communism ASAP
  • Convert the world to capitalism ASAP
  • Convert the world to socialism ASAP
  • Convert the world to ..name your economic system.. ASAP
  • Convert the world to Christianity ASAP
  • Convert the world to ..name your religion.. ASAP
• Individual
  • Your lifespan
  • Your money—legacy
  • Your happiness
  • Traveler: The number of visited places on the Earth
    • Make sure you visit as many places on the Earth as possible, earning money for that purpose
  • Sensualist, seeker of experience
    • The number of various experiences, tastes and the like
  • Idler, layabout
  • Sleeper
  • Adventurer
  • Earn to feed hobbies.
• Collector
  • Collect as many different time stamps in my house as possible.
  • Collect as many cars as possible, even if going for cheap ones.
  • Collect as many books of as many genres as possible.
• Destructive
  • Kill yourself
  • Kill your family
  • Kill a specific another family
  • Kill as many people as possible
  • Make sure as many people as possible get killed
  • Extinguish a nation
  • Extinguish members of all other religions
  • Extinguish all sellers of ice cream
  • Maximize the number of raped old ladies
• Accidental
  • Travel randomly around the United States
    • Variant: Do so using a detailed written method that relies on rolling a dice.
  • Travel randomly around a city
• Indirect
  • Live as close to the way my parents lived as possible
• Sophisticated
  • Keep my heart rate within the range of 70 and 120 beats per minute, below the possible 130 beats of aerobic, using a heart rate monitor, and avoiding jogging and running.
  • Maximize the lower 10-percentile of the world gross domestic product of the next five years, using the discounting rate of 0.96.

To get a list of global names usable in a sophisticated life program, you can pick any global index or indicator, such as the index of freedom, gross domestic product, an index of literacy, one of democracy and the like.

Instead of only looking at the individual life programs, let us also have a look at their properties.

• Person-centered vs world-centered: Maximizing the GNP is world-centered, while seeking meaningful work and family life is person-centered.
• Length: some are one-liners, other one paragraph long like a life motto, some as long as a manifesto.
• Copying: whether the life program requires you to tell about it everyone, create or join an organization supporting that life program, or convince other people that it is the right life program
• Sophistication: expressed using plain words or using measurable quantities or arcane mathematical concepts
• Viability: whether the life program has the tendency to kill its holders, or to prevent their reproduction
• Morality: whether it takes other people into account. Even a moral life program can be self-centered, meaning person-centered, as is the case with ethical egoism.
• Sociality: Socializing and outgoing on one pole while isolated hermit on the other pole.
• Greed: How much it uses it up the person: his money, attention, time; inverse: how much freedom it leaves to the person.

The life programs listed are ultimate aims, requiring finding of immediate aims. With the global life programs, for the purpose of practical living, you need to break them down to concrete lower-level subgoals. If you want to fight for freedom in the world, you need to fight for freedom in your country, in another country, or you need to earn money and donate to an organization that is fighting for freedom.

Methods

Whatever method of creating your life program you choose, there are certain things that you will need to judge for yourself. Even if you do not dare to write or choose your own life program, the choice of whom to trust is your choice, based on your judgment.

Crafting a life program is a verbal approach to managing and guiding your life in the very long run. It is not for everyone and it presents certain risks, like the unintentional misuse of words. Your understanding of what you mean by various words and what other people mean will be put to test.

The following treatment of methods is dense; to get benefit from it, please read it slowly, and take time to try to imagine what the covered items refer to, relating it to your own personal experience.

Importantly, your life program does not need to be fixed once for all times. You may review and rewrite it after a year or few. At some point in life, you may find the need to rewrite your past life program altogether or start from the scratch, heading toward a new view of your life and your aims and norms, based on new experience and insight that you have gained during your life. Rewriting your life program is nothing to be ashamed of. In the absence of data and significant experience, your life program can be seen as an estimate. The less experience you have in live, the bigger the chance that a rewrite will be needed. Even scientists, with all their resources that they can spend on getting as close to truth as possible, are forced by new empirical findings to revise their theories, at some periods drastically.

One of the simplest methods is to spontaneously start writing several of your candidate life programs, say ten to fifty attempts, take a break, and pick one of the candidates after the break.

Another popular method is death fantasy, requiring you to vividly imagine your own death, and to find what you value based on that fantasy. In one bent of this fantasy, you may ask yourself what you want other people to tell about you at your funeral. That variant implies that what matters is the opinions of other people, and that your life has no more value than what remains of it in the minds of other people at the day of your funeral.

A crisis in your life can change the way you see the world you are living in. Instead of waiting for the crisis to come, you may create it artificially. This method is however dangerous and difficult to manage. Poor ways include getting fired from an occupation, dropping out of university, getting addicted to drugs, or getting divorced or pregnant. A helpful distinction can be made between an emotional crisis and a substantive one. Getting into an emotional crisis by, say, becoming more open with yourself is generally less dangerous than getting into a substantive one.

Buying a mission builder is another option. A mission builder is a questionnaire that guides you through the process of writing what is called your mission statement, a concept similar to the one of life program. It does so by asking you questions but also possibly by providing some model simple answers and the answers of model people. Most of questions asked by mission builders are open ended ones, giving you a lot of freedom of expression. Some of the mission builders are available online free of charge. However, mission builders may be socially biased, proposing as key verbal elements of your life program those ends and concerns that are found important by the society at large, or by the particular group of people behind the mission builder, such as one of the various religious churches. At least, they provide you with some vocabulary, structure of questions, and ideas to start with.

A key question of the method is where your life program comes from. You may start from without, asking your parents, your good friends or a mentor whom you trust, or taking the advice of a trusted book as your guide. Or you may start from within, trying to write the life program yourself, relying on your past experience, your present vocabulary, your understanding of that vocabulary, and your current mastery of the language.

The external approaches involve hiring a life coach, if you are well off.

Instead of trying to be smart before the act, experimenting with life approaches of which you have no idea whether they work, you may search for model people. Using notable models from biographies has the danger of making you accept a set of rules that the notable person preaches but not always follows. Autobiographies tend to by stylized; Benjamin Franklin proscribed taking revenge but took it covertly anyway. More realistic is the use of model living people, such as your parents; but depending on your individual situation, you may find only poor models for living. One tricky thing about it is that you do not really see what goes on in the minds of other people; you only see what is apparent about what they do. If they are using a conscious philosophy, they may not want to tell you everything about it. And they may not even know everything that actually drives their actions, so following their stated philosophy may lead to poor results with you while it worked perfectly well with them.

That is why I think that you would do best to find out yourself, maybe even find out yourself about the best method of finding out what to do in life, on a meta-level.

Some people choose to travel, to get out of their ordinary environment, to enlarge their perspective, and come back refreshed, with a new perspective, new insights, and new emotions, some good and some bad.

Reading a lot of books can be helpful too. Books show a lot of model heroes. But the lives of real people are seldom like the heroic stories of the books.

Movies can be useful in showing you unfamiliar situations, and exposing you to your unpleasant emotional reactions. However, most movies do not depict the real world. Also, they are harder to criticize and comment on than written word.

Evolution and Optimization

Earlier in the book, I have mentioned that biological evolutions is non-optimizing. I have used this claim to disparage the reliance on emotions and to discourage choosing emotional goals as major parts of the ultimate aim in life. Let us now have a look in more detail at what's involved in this claim.

The human brain is a product of biological evolution—the process of variation combined with various kinds of eliminations, including what has been called natural selection—the result of certain individuals dying—and sexual selection—the result of certain individuals being refused by all potential partners. The human mind—that which is in the human brain—is the joint product of biological evolution, and a different kind of evolution, sometimes called memetic, social or cultural evolution. Compared to the cultural evolution, biological evolution is extremely slow. During the last 3000 years, the biology of man has changed only slightly; the ability of man to shape his environment and produce objects on the Earth that have been here never before, has increased dramatically. Because of its speed, cultural evolution could evolve schemes of behaviors—codes of conduct, and aims—that are much more suitable to the end of the survival of the genes than the genes alone. That, along with the evolution of technology, has multiplied the number of people nourished on the Earth from some 10,000 to today's 6,200,000, which, in terms of the interests of the genes, of the species, but also of the mind, is a major success.

The biological evolution is non-optimizing, non-transparent, and muddled. Supposing that the survival of the genes is the major driver of the shapes of the organisms, it is now obvious that human bodies including the brain are imperfectly adapted to the current environment. This leads some people to suggest that human bodies are almost perfectly adapted to some no longer existing environment. But that is improbable on the observation that too perfect adaptation to temporary conditions is disadvantageous to a long-term adaptation and that the slow biological evolution cannot perform such short-term adjustments anyway. But even the theory that human bodies are perfectly adapted to long-term conditions is flawed. The process of biological evolution is heavily dependent on what kind of variations of features are possible, and these in turn are dependent on the complex, poorly understood process of gene expression. A major shaping factor are the processes of growth; the factor is the fact that these are the processes of growth, also found in non-living nature, and not processes of cutting, cropping, polishing and assembling, found in human technology.

A further source of imperfections as regards the goal of survival of the genes and the functional goals of organ systems is the history of traits of the human organism: once a trait creeps in and further traits get dependent on it, getting rid or substantially modifying the trait gets difficult or impossible.

In humans, certain remnants of evolutionary history have attracted the curiosity of scientists. The usefulness of vermiform appendix is unclear, and the troublesomeness of wisdom teeth well known. Compared to these bodily structures, human behavior is more difficult to imagine. Still, the biological drivers that steer human behavior can be located in certain organs, whose age can be investigated. The organ systems taking part on control in human body are the nervous system and the endocrine system, including brain, spinal chord, and the autonomic system. The older the system, the higher chance there is that it is burdened with evolutionary history. Basically, any bodily structure or organ that is old should be suspect.

In the evolutionary search for designs of cells, tissues, and organs, even these functions that could be handled by simple rules are discovered as a complex muddle of rules; it is more so difficult to discover smartly complex rules, leading to smartly complex behavior, able to differentiate and distinguish between many grades of shade. That is why the smartest rules of of behavior are not hard-wired; they are learned.

Is cultural evolution—the variation and elimination of ways of doing things and of ultimate unanalyzed aims—optimizing? Hardly. Where biological evolution appears to be blind, cultural is not omniscient. Humankind has committed all kinds of mistakes during the history of technological evolution. A single human mind is very small; the capacity of humankind to predict the consequences of actions is still quite feeble.

This sketchy outline cannot replace a rigorous scientific debate. The topics addressed are surrounded by ongoing controversial discussions among scientists and philosophers. For more in-depth treatment, there is scientific literature.

Real People

Having seen these arcane otherworldly lists of life programs, and having considered the ways of deciding which one to take, modify, what not, you may wonder: That is all very well, but how do real-world people ever get decided, without this super-rational, overblown approach?

Well, often they don't. Many people in the world have limited options. This books is aimed at people who have plenty of options, or who at least need to make some major choice, and are wondering what kind of considerations could be relevant.

When viewed broadly, often, people are living their lives without having a guiding principle, life motto or life philosophy, not speaking of having an articulated written text of the length of a manifesto. They need to make some major decisions in their lives, but these need not be made based on any deep philosophy. Many say that their purpose in life is to be happy. Their lives are in the main influenced by their parents, family, buddies and colleagues, their training, but also by the words and the images sent by popular books and movies. They are often driven by other people, or by what other people believe.

Now what does happen when I am picking the life program? How does it get chosen? If I read your book and apply some of its techniques, how does the decision ultimate get made? I do not know, and as far as I know, no one does. Obviously, what you are currently reading has the chance of influencing you life program. You can get convinced by some of the points I make. During your writing, you may get convinced by some of the things you will say; along your life program, you may write other some text that supports it, argues it one way or another. If presented with a complete life program, you may just happen to like it, see it as a good one, feel moved by it, and feel disgusted by other life programs. You may try to watch what happens in your mind during the process. You may try to uncover the psychological motivation that leads you to choosing that life program. But it is improbable that you will ever be sure about these motivations. The persons behind you, in the background, who really are controlling you, are not that talkative to tell you everything about their own motives. Beware, however, that to ask about motives is to ask a causal question "why". The knowledge of motives does not make the life program less ultimate in terms of the question "for the sake of what". Also, it is the very process of choosing the life program that influences the result. If you have chosen death fantasy, you have made the first step in actually choosing your life program. The result is not yet determined but probably different from the process "write the first life program that occurs to you and has 100 words and accept that one". All the images and experiences, including the early ones, that have accumulated in your head may take part in co-deciding about your life program. All the perceived peer and social pressure can take part. You may subliminally choose such a life program that your peers would like and can understand. When you take the brave choice of actually writing your life program, you are emancipating yourself from some masters while accepting other masters. If you take your life program seriously, it becomes your master, or that which has chosen that life program, those things that influenced that life program, are implicitly co-controlling you. By writing this book, I have attempted to influence you too; I have attempted to take over your body in certain sense. So are attempting many people every day. Sense your options. Sense your freedom, even if only perceived one. Make use of it. When choosing your life program, try to get rid of all the influences, even if it is literally impossible.

Now if you are short of time, the approach of generating some twenty to fifty cases and picking the one that you like most could do for you. You can review and modify your life program later, when you have more time. If, however, you are before your major decision, one noncommittal trick to use is to decide in such a way that in the future you have as many options left open as possible. In the meanwhile, you can get time to study the questions related to your life program more deeply.

Now maybe you do not like the idea of committing yourself to a particular life program. The non-committal trick just mentioned will do for you. But if you think you can escape all the life programs, I think you are mistaken. Can anyone perform anything complex without words and verbally specified aims? I am not saying that these aims have to be perfectly specified. I am just saying that if it is not words that are driving your life, then it is some other people. Maybe it is all right with you. You may be content to always have to decide on the spot, even in a morally critical situation.

If you have now passed to the state at which you have a life program, you may have learned that its execution may be tough. Keeping everything in mind may become difficult. If you use paper notes, you may achieve more; a computer can be even more helpful. But even with these enhancements, you will run into your limits. In any case, your life program is your guide, not your manager or master. Sometimes, you need to make choices that only seem to be in align with your life program, without being sure that they will indeed perfectly correspond to it. We know nothing or close to nothing.

You may want to rebel against all the life programs. But beware that "rebellion against all the life programs" is a life program of sorts, even if lacking most of the details. Still, a rebellion could consist of breaking all kinds of rules imposed on you by other people whenever they appear. You could be watching yourself, trying to avoid any too patterned behavior. When truly suspicious of yourself, you could even adopt some formally randomized method. But a randomized method is also a method. A randomized life program is also a life program. A true rebellion would consist of behavior and choices that are difficult to describe using words.

Values of Philosophers

Notable philosophers may be a source of inspiration for your life program. Let us see what values some of these philosophers had. However, as a whole, the group has views slanted in certain direction. A variety of views is found especially at ancient Greek philosophers though. Interestingly enough, many of them argued from what is the case to what a person should do in life.

Heraclitus valued sound thinking and action based on truth and understanding above all; also moderation and self-control. Notably, he valued fame, of which he said it is everlasting, to be achieved in the battlefield; the best death is the one in a battle. He despised excessive eating and drinking, and scorned lying.

Pythagoras valued ability to remain silent, loyalty to friends, honor the men show to their wives, and the begetting the children; in general, he valued strict observance of religious rituals. It is estimated that he valued not eating and not torturing animals, for his conviction that human souls are reincarnated into them.

Plato valued wisdom above all, but also justice, moderation and courage. For him, though, justice is a state of affairs in which everyone minds their own business and performs the assigned function in a state.

Socrates valued wisdom, virtue, obedience to his community, and strict adherence to truth. He showed his wish to obey by submitting himself to the sentence of death awarded to him by Athens citizens.

Diogenes of Sinope valued courage, reason, and natural, simple way of life, such as living in a wine jar and drinking water from his hands, and despised social convention, dependence on society, and life driven by passion.

Aristotle valued excellence in all arts, sciences, in all that a person is doing, including moral excellence. That said, he considered intellectual life devoted to the search for truth to be the best kind of life.

Epicurus valued quiet life, in a circle of close friends, undisturbed by the rush of busy life, accompanied by a reduction of needs. His realization of these requirements was by living in a garden surrounded by high walls.

Marcus Aurelius valued calmness, avoidance of complaining, doing the moral duty, humility, detachment from the pains and desires. He argued that everything vanishes into oblivion, including accounts of heroic deeds.

Immanuel Kant valued above all acting from one's duty instead of from inclination, tendency or feeling like doing something. The duties of a person as conceived by him include speaking truth under all circumstances, never committing suicide, and not cheating, roughly matching the Christian commandments, but also the duty to develop one's talents and to be charitable, giving away money when you can afford it. Interestingly, duties indirectly include ensuring your own happiness, as a means; Kant reasoned that an unhappy person is much more likely to transgress his duty.

Arthur Schopenhauer valued intellectual honesty and peace of mind, which he thought could be created through seeing of beautiful objects and hearing of beautiful music, and by giving up the bodily desires, becoming as much without will as possible, to overcome what he thought was the unavoidable suffering of human life. He valued moral life, into which he included refraining from violence, reduction of suffering in the world and cultivation of compassion toward other people. Also, he wanted women to obey men, claiming women have no sense of justice. He valued that animals are protected against human cruelty, seeing them as compatriots of people.

Karl Marx seemed to value the free development of talents and potential abilities of a person, and the overall reduction of human suffering.

In his words, Friedrich Nietzsche valued breaking the social norms and morals, contempt of mankind, cruelty, and quest for individual power over other people. He did not turn these professed values into action though.

These short summaries can hardly do justice to the convictions of the philosophers. If some of the summaries has raised your appetite, you may find it worthwhile to have a more detailed look at the philosopher's teaching. Academic sources include Encyclopedia Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For a less intellectual and more story-like account, see Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy.

Language

Crafting a life program and then living it is a verbal approach, based on words, phrases and verbal images contained in the program. Great many words like happiness mean different things to different people. The more obscure words you are going to use, the less clear it will be to you what to do in life, how to determine subgoals, but also, what it is that you are controlled by, what it is that you have voluntarily submitted yourself to.

The problem of varying meanings of words also applies to this book. I am unable to send you the meanings of the words, only the words. I rely on meanings of words that are shared between you and me.

The problem of obscure meanings can be partly solved by the technique of definition. For instance, if I set "inner happiness" as my ultimate end in life, I can try to define it as "A state in which I am not crying." Is this a plausible definition of happiness? Not to me, but it comes quite close. The virtue of such a definition is that I have bound what was originally unclear to me—happiness—to something that I can easily observe and decide—absence of crying.

A common objection to the idea of defining your terms is that the process of defining need to come to a halt; there must be some undefined terms. That is true enough. The point is that some undefined terms are clear and easy to decide while other not so. You can easily decide whether a person is crying; it is more difficult to decide whether a person has been crying recently. The point of the definitions that you may use in your life program is to link what is obscure to you to something that is clear and straightforward to you. In logical sense, such a definition might be not a definition proper. The definition of a term in other terms does not need to claim perfection though; you can see it as an approximation useful in the absence of perfect definition.

For the purpose of your life program, you do not need to provide definitions of terms that other people would approve of. As you are the main user of your life program, it is important that you find the definitions fitting to what you had in mind. That said, it is preferable that you use words in standard way; the way your family, friends and colleagues use words. However, sticking only with words in their standard meanings robs you of the option of making the life program highly individual. What you could do is that you would invent new terms, and define them in your own way. But there are great many words that are actually used by people widely differently, so reusing these words to binding to them your own meanings makes sense.

Writing your own definitions may at first seem like a challenge. To get started, you may use a dictionary; for great many words, you would not want to modify the definition already found in the dictionary. The definitions found in the dictionaries can serve as a model; you may take a definition from one and adjust it, refine it and extend it for yourself.

One simple and accessible way to refine the definitions is by providing examples. Like "For me, happiness is a state in which I feel all right, in which I am not disappointed, not crying, have basically the things that I need, like good friends, place to live, an interesting work, and still have some further goals to achieve."

That said, not everything in the world can be easily expressed in words. The words for your life program are coming from the culture; they are a heritage that you have at your disposal. Maybe you do not want to limit yourself to the words and meanings someone else has provided you with. If you have a clear meaning in mind for which you do not know any word yet, just coin a new word. If a newly coined word does not seem quite right at a later point, you may modify it. If you try to at least imperfectly define the meaning of the new word, you may still know what you meant by the word some months later.

Apart from a dictionary, other sources that abound with definitions are philosophical works. However, you may be surprised to find what some philosophers think the words mean. You may find many of their definitions unfitting or completely incomprehensible. Use them at your own risk of confusion and bewilderment.

Analogies

There are many analogies for human life, for living. These include life as a game, a journey, perhaps a nautical one, a business, and art. The model of game has been implicitly present in this book. However, often, games are something to be won or lost. By having a program that drives you, never to be met in a hit or miss fashion, your life becomes quite different from board games and card games.

Life as a journey is implied by those who claim you need a map. In a sense, that is correct, as if you choose your destination, your aim, it may be quite helpful to know how to get there. But the destination, the normative principle, is not the map; it is the destination. And it is you who has chosen the destination. Or is it the interaction between what you are what what you know?

Some people view their life as a business undertaking, with the need to account for gains and losses.

Other people view their life as a work of art, such as a painting, perhaps a movie. Human lives, however, do not look like movies, and cannot. If taken as a movie, the life of anyone would be extremely boring. Only when condensed, with the quiet periods edited away, can a life resemble a movie; one, which no one is actually going to look at. The work of art may imply an activity that is far from as tightly planned as an engineering project.

An important analogy for living is one also at least verbally used in this book, of a life lived by a program. So just like a computer executes a program, so can a person. But first, the person needs to have such a program; he has to write it.

When invoking analogies in your own life program, be careful. Analogies can lead to all kinds of side effects, leading to a perception of similarity between two situations that is not there. When using an analogy, you should examine carefully what parts of the source situation are carried over to the target situation and what parts not. For instance, if a person is supposed to execute a program in an analogy to a computer, it does not mean that the person is equipped with a fan or peripherals. Neither does it mean that the person is unable to do more things at once, just like a serial computer.

The Self

For the design of your life program, it may be helpful to understand what you mean by "I", but also what other people mean by "you" when speaking to you. Try to take an external view of yourself, a view of a person speaking to you, seeing your face, your movements, your animated smile, of a person hearing your voice. What does that person think that "I" refers to? Does it include the body, the limbs, the trunk? The whole of the brain, or something in the brain? Also, what is it that controls the body that the person is seeing? For a change, imagine that you sit in a remote room and control your body, or, precisely, what other people think is your body. Does the observing person still think you are sitting in the controlled body?

Some of the best models that I have found is to see the self as a driver in a car with one-way transparent windows, with, say, three other people sitting in the same car. You can see what is around, but also the driving wheel, the seats, the inside of the card, including dashboard, which shows you the status of the fuel. The people outside the car do not see you; they only see the car and its windows. Neither do they see that there are more passengers in the car. This analogy has its limits as any other, but it still highlights certain facts: you see much more of the inside than other people see, other people do not feel your hunger and your pain, and they have no idea that your steering wheel is broken or that the inside of the car is getting overheated. On the other hand, the driver in a car has limited means of showing the emotion to the outside standing observers.

Means and Ends

Your life program determines the ultimate ends you are going to pursue, that is, those ends that are not only intermediate to other ends. You may find it helpful for deciding on the ultimate ends to see what relationship there is between means, ends and the human society in which they are pursued or aimed at.

In human society, great variety of goals find their hosts, the people and organizations that aim at the goals. Put in a simplified manner, each goal is hosted by some people as a means while by others as an end. Put more precisely, one person can host a goal as both an end—requiring no further explanation—and as a means to another goal. End-only-goals need means-goals, but not the other way around. A set of mutually serving means-goals is perfectly consistent and viable; a set of isolated goals that do not serve each other is at least unstable. A society in which only means-goals are hosted is possible; one in which only end-only-goals are hosted is not.

Given human freedom, the choice of the ultimate ends is arbitrary, that is, not based on previously chosen criteria, kind of chosen without the use of information. But the choice of means is less arbitrary. An external observer, a Martian, could predict that humans are going to be hosting the means, and given the knowledge of the setting—the Earth, he would be able to estimate the kinds of means; he would be much less likely to predict what kind of ends they are going to choose. If you feel disturbed by the arbitrariness of ultimate goals, choosing universal means as your ultimate goals is an option. The universal means include money, technology, skills, human knowledge, and the willingness of people to cooperate without the use of violence.

However, your life program does not need to have the ends-means form. Surely you will need some means to execute your life program. But other than that, the life program "travel randomly around the United States" can only artificially be rephrased in terms of goals. Surely you might say that your goal is to travel randomly United States. But then, your goal is specified in terms of process, not in terms of the results of the process.

Planning and Execution

A life program is of little worth if you cannot turn it into action, if you cannot execute it. Executing a life program may prove to be a daunting task, especially if it is an abstract and global one, such as "The power of obscurity over human mind." This book covers execution only briefly. Some good books on execution are mentioned in the last paragraph.

An abstract life program is not something a person can directly aim at. If you have such one, you need to find some lower-level, concrete subgoal, which also needs to incorporate your limitations, things that you cannot do, or disabilities you may have. A direct way of supporting a larger goal is to work for an organization that supports it, or supporting it on your own, if you have the skill, courage, financial buffer, and support of your family, friends or other social backing. An indirect way of supporting it is through donations, if you feel you cannot contribute in your occupation directly.

Even when you have a view of what concrete goal you aim to achieve and you think that is it as regards writing and documenting, it is better to create a written plan. Writing plans requires you to collect a lot of information that you would not have otherwise. You need to find out what information to find, and how or from whom to get it. Given your subliminal self is still going to play a major role in the day-to-day decision making, it needs information based on which it can support your decision making in the background. If you build reserves into your plan, like money and time, you make the plan more realistic and workable. Also, unless you commit yourself to the plan in every detail, you may revise the plan later—if you have no plan, there is nothing to revise. However, too much emotional commitment to a plan can lead to unpleasant disappointment and depression. Apart from emotional losses, you may suffer financial ones if you bet a bulk of money on an insecure plan.

You may doubt the feasibility of your aiming at your life program, if you feel you do not have the skills and talents. Surely for a male to give birth to as many babies as possible is a daunting task. Still, a life program such as recommended by me is such that it is not a yes/no business; it is about degrees, it is a thing to be maximized. Say that you aim at becoming a successful Casanova, and as a proxy figure, you take the number of women you have had intercourse with. First, there are more proxy figures related to this ultimate aim, such as the number of women you have had a date with, or the number of women who enjoyed being on a date with you. But this aside, you may feel your dating and conversation skills are so poor that you have absolutely no chance. However, if you have made becoming a successful Casanova you life's ultimate aim, all your resources—time, money, attention, even pain—should be summoned to support your aim. You should read books on how to become a Casanova. You should take classes if there are some. You should write down how you think could be possible to become a Casanova. You may practice on your own. You may imagine you are about to invite a lady or a girl to a date, and say out loud what you are going to say. You may ask your friends to help you. You may hang a poster in your room reminding you that becoming a Casanova is the most important thing for you. You may come up with all kinds of options that I have failed to mention because of my lack of imagination and know-how. With the progression of time, your documentation and experience with aiming at the goal will grow. You will have found out what does not work for you.

Whatever breakdown of the larger goal into subgoals you are going to pick, you always need to take care of yourself, apart from your life program. Dead and poor people are poor hosts of life programs, which is not to say that you should turn into a financial manager. Regardless of the wording of your ultimate aim, you will need generic means: skills, money, reputation, and network of family, friends and colleagues. Depending on your ultimate aim, some may be more needed than the others.

When you start to write everything down, keeping lists of to-do items, and documenting all kinds of things, you may at some point run into limits of your mind and memory. The limits can be shifted using computers, but they are still going to be there. This may require you to reduce the variety of activities and projects that you are taking part on, or reduce the amount of detail that you are writing down. Information overload can lead to unpleasant mental states; keep in mind that there is such a thing and learn to manage it.

A lot of information work is done for you by your brain in the night. While you sleep, the mind is trying to tackle the problems you were trying to solve during the day, to file new things you have learned, to link them with your previous knowledge. Getting enough sleep is key to let the brain get these things done. On the other hand, there is not so much need of sleep after a boring day.

You will need to develop many skills. Which skills to develop depends on your ultimate aim. Still, some skills are more universal than other skills. For instance, the ability to talk convincingly is more universal than the ability to solder. The universal skills include the ability to read, write, listen and talk; the emotional stability under stress, and general physical health; you need not be an accomplished athlete though. Depending on how much money you have, you may gain skills on your own with the help of books, hire a private teacher, attend classes, or learn from a self-professed teacher willing to teach you not for money but in exchange for some service that you provide to him. Almost everyone has something to teach you.

Apart from finding out what to do, written down in your life plan, it is also important to find out what not to do, what to avoid, not because of its harm, but because it steers you away from your major aims. Things in themselves harmless yet of secondary importance take away your time, but, sometimes more importantly, also your attention and energy, including your limited short-term memory, your ability to think things through in your mind during the sleep, and your ability to do it during the waking hours in the background of your head.

If at first you have no time left beyond making living and feeding all planned and running activities, you cannot do anything in addition, regardless of how useful the additional activity might be. To get started, you need to find at least a small time slot to begin with. As you find ways to become more effective in what you're doing, your time available for whatever it is you aim at will expand.

Better than reading this sketch of a chapter, you may consult popular literature that focuses on or covers execution—turning plans into action, such as Stephen R. Covey's the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Managing Emotions

There is a false dichotomy between emotions and reason, easily misleading people into believing that they have to say either yes or no to emotions. However, there are various things you can do with emotions: suppress them, let them guide you, discharge them, show them or hide them, or feel guilty because of them. To what degree and whether you want to do these things with emotions can be decided by you basically independently for most of these actions, and also depending on the kind of emotion in question. You may want to show happiness, suppress anger when in public and discharge it when alone, and let yourself be guided by regret.

Assuming that emotions are driven by outdated parts of the human brain, and that you decide to aim at things unrelated to emotions, nowhere does it follow that you need to suppress your emotions or that you should never take them as a clue for action. Instead, emotions need to be managed, like a sometimes naughty, sometimes nice, funny and creative child, which you cannot easily get rid of, and even if you did, the consequences could easily hurt your aims, like you would have difficulty getting along with people. Further, even if you choose to aim at a particular emotion such as happiness or love, you will need to manage the other emotions.

Emotions like love, anger, joy, or sadness should not be confused with rational intuition, with an idea that occurred to you, felt certainty, or seeing certain things as apparent. Your brain is able of doing a lot of thinking for you in the background, and lets you know the results of that thinking once in a while. To recognize the contribution of that background thinking is not to attribute it to emotions, regardless of the accompanying emotions such as the joy of discovery or insight that you may feel when you get the results delivered.

Emotions are only under your imperfect control. When you decide to move your hand to the right, you just do it. When you decide to calm down, that may fail. However, emotions are obviously not completely out of our voluntary control. To an extent, you may control emotions directly just like you control your muscles, but you have to learn that. A child has to learn how to coordinate and control muscles, by mentally trying to do various things and observing the results. Likewise, you can learn how to control emotions at least partially, by focusing on the required resulting emotion and letting your background self try various mental things to achieve that result. There is no way I can describe this method any further, just as I cannot describe how to coordinate your muscles. Furthermore, you can also control your emotions indirectly. By reading a book that you know will make you angry, you are ensuring you will be angry. By going to a calm place that you have associated with tranquillity, you can calm down. By drinking alcohol, you ensure that you are going to get relaxed, if you usually get relaxed by alcohol.

Decision Making

While executing your life plan, you will need to make decisions. This section treats them in a general way. There are various approaches to personal decision making, ranging from the completely intuitive one, based on immediate sense and perception of what is the best option, without being able to explain why, and a decision made based on words, measured numbers and estimated numbers. If you would want to decide everything in your life intuitively, on the spot, without previous collection of information, you would not probably be reading this book. I assume that at least certain decisions are important and difficult enough to deserve a non-intuitive approach.

Types of decisions vary in their complexity and importance. Choosing the yogurt is of little importance and consequence; you can review the yogurt decision often, it has high degree of repetition, and both yogurts and the consequences of choosing a bad one are cheap. The really interesting decisions are the big ones, like choosing a spouse, house to buy, occupation, and the general direction in life. They may take a lot of research and preparation, and are executed in short time compared to the time of preparation, with major consequences.

There are mutual dependencies between the important decisions in your life; the results of one decision influence the options available for the other ones. A decision is important if the options available to many other decisions depend on it. Choosing the place to live influences your job choice and other opportunities.

Trying to make a big decision in the absence of personal experience can be painful. Unfortunately, big decisions in life provide little opportunity for learning from your direct experience. If possible, you can try a test run. First go for a vacation, then marry; first rent an apartment in an unknown quarter, then buy it. The sources of information include your experience, typically unavailable, reports of friends and acquaintances and family, printed information, information available through telephoning, and counseling such as career counseling. You may also rely on one of the time-tested philosophies, propounded by various religions.

Sophisticated methods include listing of available options, listing numeric attributes of the options and their weights, estimating the values of the attributes, and computing which one is the best, with the help of spreadsheet. This method can be simplified to several variants, such as plainly listing pros and cons and counting them. The simplest method is making the choice based on previous similar choices, without considerations. Even if the sophisticated methods seem too complex for you, you may give it a try anyway, try to estimate the values of attributes, and feel the pain of the brain trying to estimate something for which it has no clear definition and no clear input information. Repeat the method several times, making several weeks lasting pauses before the iterations, and see how the estimates and results change. Find out what more information can be gained in this way.

Research. Although quite fast, estimation relies only on that information that its author already has available in memory, even if buried in the long-term one. The really big and important decisions in industry and organizations require research, including field research and desk research. Desk research means that you research and collate sources of textual information and try to analyze and put the things together. In field research, you observe the world or people, and possibly inquire yourself. Some of your life's major decisions are important enough to deserve research.

The results of research need to be collected systematically, unless you have an exceptionally good memory. Technological options include paper and computers. With paper, organize the material alphabetically, and pay attention to choosing the keywords under which you file, so that you are able to find the material later.

Review. Document your planned decisions and review them with someone whom you trust, if there is such a person. Different decisions have different degrees of personality and need of privacy; there probably are at least some decisions whose documentation you would show to close to anyone. Reasons for the need of privacy include exposition of one's convictions, and disclosing of one's lack of skill, knowledge, information, or experience.

Life Decisions

During the execution of your life program—a statement of what to value and what overarching aim to have—and based on your life plan—a more concrete fleshing out of the details of your life, much more individual than the life program—you will need to make some major decisions; a decision where to go for a vacation is not such one. Although execution is out of the main focus of the book, the following chapter covers the major decisions you will need to make in your life, helping you to identify the areas in which to search for them.

The most important decision in life is whether to live at all. This decision is entirely in their hands for most people.

More mundane and relevant decision areas are the choice of the source of making livelihood, which affects the choice of education, occupation or business; of relationships including marriage and friendships; of place of living including the country of living and the city, town or village; there are major health decisions like whether to undergo a surgery or induced abortion. For the luckier, there are major financial decisions like the choice of a house to purchase or the investment into which to place the savings.

For a major decision, you should begin the preparation and information gathering long before the decision is made and executed. Important decisions with considerable impact on your future may require extensive research and burning your fingers, like executing them in a test mode.

The three major sources of information for your decisions are your own experience, the experience and expertise of living people, and what is written in the books, magazines, the Internet and other sources of written information that is publicly available for purchase or free of charge.

I propose what many don't like to do: to document your major decisions. Write down the options that you had, which options you ruled out, and what the pros and cons of the options were. The approaches range from informal and hazy to formal, but the least that you can do is write your verbal thoughts about the decision down. Review your decisions with other people. Get ready to feel hurt by their reactions and views; the point is to solicit disagreement from them rather than agreement.

Try to commit the decision in a test run. Like, when you are ready to make the decision at one day, write it down, perform a rite or physical transformation representing that decision, and let the decision ripen for some more time.

Livelihood. One of the major difficult decisions is the choice of livelihood, which influences your education, your occupation or business, but also the kind of people you are going to meet, and the amount of time you will have for your family, friends, and hobbies. This decision does not need to be executed at once, unlike some of the decisions influenced by it. You may study one field at university and later work in another field; along with specific skills, most university programs teach you some universal thinking skills, as a side-effect. A key distinction is how the livelihood is planned to contribute to your life program—it can contribute merely as a source of livelihood or it can contribute directly. Important aspects of a source of livelihood include money, fascination, enjoyment, social power, prestige, leisureliness, people, and security of employment. Considered broadly, it is the lucky people who can consider all the various aspects and choose rather than being happy to earn their living. What of these components is important for you depends on your life program; money always matters though, as it is a universal means, unlike social power, prestige or fascination that you derive from the work.

Finance. People blame money for inflation. Still, it is not only money but also other results of human work that are subject to depreciation, including bread, apples, hammers, machines, computers, and buildings. Compared to all these, money is still a good place where to store the results of your work. An alternative to money are various types of investment possibilities, which differ in security—how secure they are against loss, liquidity—how fast you can pick your money out of them, and profitability—how much yield they provide. What they also differ in is the amount of your attention that they require on daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and the amount of attention and mental effort they require you to take upfront, before you commit the investment. Before you commit an investment, you should test your investment strategy at least by evaluating its performance on past events, as if you had chosen the strategy in the past. However, in finance more than elsewhere, the future may be much unlike the past.

Relationships

While making your life plan happen, based on your life program, you will rely on and cooperate with a number of people, unless you choose an isolated, solitary life program such as those that require people to live in a lonely cottage in the mountains.

The kind and degree of cooperation varies vastly. By buying food in a supermarket, you surely directly and indirectly cooperate with the selling person, the producers of the food, the managers of the supermarket, those of the chain, and the like. However, there is nothing tricky about that cooperation. The communication is almost absent, so there is negligible risk of misunderstanding. What you need to learn about the food you find printed on the labels. When buying industrial goods, there is mostly little or no negotiation with the seller, and there is a guarantee provided. The cooperation gets critical when there are no formal standards and there is the need for a lot of communication or negotiation; as is the case in family relationships, working relationships, the one with a landlord, or in business partnerships.

You need to be clear about what you say and what you don't say to other people. You need to understand what information to pass and what to keep secret. Your life program may be such that you may want to keep it completely private, not telling a single person about it.

Communication skills are key to all kinds of purposes. There is a considerable variety, with different kinds of skills coming easy to different kinds of people. One kind is the ability to describe things exactly, listing the details of things, with precision that prevents misunderstanding, but also accuracy, in align with reality. A contrary and complementary skill is the ability to describe things vaguely or indirectly using figures and hints, so that only certain people are able to discern the message. Related are the ability of giving praise in the right time and quantity while avoiding flattery, and of giving inconspicuous, discreet, sometimes indirect criticism, or, difficult for some people, calm and non-angry expression of disagreement. To make things more difficult, communication is not only verbal but also non-verbal. Your ability to describe things with precision may be perfect but the overall effect may be worsened if you communicate fear through your eyes, face, tone, body, and gestures.

Communication is closely related to negotiation, the ability to describe what you want, explain it, disclose not too much, and in the end, get what you want without letting the other party give too much in. It requires that you do your homework, clarifying your requirements, sometimes painfully discovering them, writing them down, illustrating them with vivid examples, and writing everything down and yet being able to remember great part of it. It involves the art of not attacking people, as much they may seem to deserve it by what they say and how they behave. Required is the ability to distinguish what part of your partner's argument pertains to logic and what part only vividly describes something intense in order to stir emotions, and still telling it the finding to the partner in a non-assaulting way. Controlling anger may be particularly difficult when the partners use tricks against you, such as an overheated room, or an environment that in other way makes you hurry up the negotiation and the involved decisions.

As long as you do not need tight integration, above all negotiation, you are basically in privacy.

It may be difficult to avoid offending other people. If you do, and you feel you should not have, apologize.

Apology is understood by various people in various ways. In the most generic meaning, an apology is letting the other people know that you are aware of an error or offense that you have made, that you are willing to compensate the other party for that error immediately, and that you will try to avoid making a similar error in the future. Even acknowledging an error is important; you could as well have been unaware of the error. Still, it does not mean that you will be able to prevent the error next time around. It is a bit like parents apologizing for the misbehavior of their children: the parents will try to prevent their offspring from misbehaving again, but they have only imperfect control over them, so no perfect guarantee can be made.

An apology can be accompanied with a remedy or a compensation. If you destroy a thing that can be bought for 10 €, the apology can be accompanied with a provision of the same thing or a replacement.

An insincere apology stands chance of being rejected and decreases the chance that future apologies will be accepted by the hurt person. Apologies do not need to be done publicly and often should not; ideally they should be done discreetly. If a face-to-face apology does not work, write a letter. Even if trying face to face, you can write a letter as an exercise before.

An important part of your dealing with other people is managing your emotions. That has been covered in the "Managing Emotions" chapter.

Buy services of other people if you can. Buying services can be more complex than buying goods, depending. Goods are often highly standardized, under tight industrial quality control, so that items in one category of goods are much more alike than items in one category of services. Service can leave an imprint in your head, leading to recollection or a wound that you would prefer not to have. Consider for how long you will be in contact with the person providing the service, how intense the emotions will possibly get and whether there is a way of terminating the service in the middle. A haircut is a service that lasts only shortly and won't leave you scared, unlike poor driving lessons.

Make friends. Distinguish friends from buddies, who come in certain period of life, quite automatically, and then go away, and from acquaintances. Aristotle thought that in each friendship, three ingredients are present in various degrees: friendship for pleasure, friendship for utility, and friendship for what I would rephrase as respect. Learn to distinguish those. When you enjoy the other person, that's pleasure; when that person knows some contacts important for your aims or can help you, that's utility; when you have high regard for the person above all, and find way to talk to him in spite of occasional pain, that is respect.

Learning

Whatever you are going to aim at, you will need to learn—to gain skills and knowledge. How to learn depends a lot on the specific area of learning: learning maths is vastly different from learning a foreign language or learning to swim. Still, let me show you some general considerations that can improve your ability to learn in a great variety of areas, depending on how skilled in learning you already are.

First, there are major differences between leaning of academic subjects and learning of skills, such as the ability to write well. Let me first focus on learning of knowledge in an academic way. Although learning of skills is different, even that benefits from having learned by heart some facts that help during the learned activity.

A typical way of acquiring academic knowledge is at schools and courses. The result of such a learning is your ability to answer certain groups of questions to the satisfaction of the examiner or your own. Some questions can be answered immediately, other require preparation or calculation; some questions require an elaboration, other are answered with one sentence, or with a plain or hierarchical list.

Some of the most useful aids for learning of verbal knowledge are hierarchical outlines. Whether you are going to learn knowledge at school or on your own, you will need to verify whether you know what you should have learned, and to be able to tell what there is to cover in the first place. The hierarchical outline contains heads about which you should be able to talk, or terms that you should be able to define or explain. The outline contains keys to which your memory should be able to associate some material. Once you have such an outline in your hands, it may look boring enough, surely not something you would want to read for fun. Still, the task of creating such an outline is a major one, which, if you go through it, will teach you to appreciate the amount of information and hard organizing work that a good outline contains. It is you who, upon review, should provide the flesh to the skeleton that the outline presents. You can get an outline from a textbook, where you can also find a list of questions to be answered, or you can create it yourself from a teaching text, which has the advantage that, in that outline, you can use such keywords that you find most telling. Although unpleasantly resembling examination in school, reviewing and testing what you have learned is key. Unless you are exceptional, there is no way to actually learn some knowledge by plain listening or reading. You have to verify that you have actually learned the material.

If textbooks or other learning materials are not available, and there is no course that you can attend or you cannot afford it financially, you have to be much more creative and the whole process is going to cost you a lot more attention and research. In that case, the academic knowledge still has to be located somewhere, but it may only be at scientific articles or books that are difficult to read. The whole subject may be poorly organized, with texts scattered and using inconsistent terminology and structuring the subject differently. The task of learning becomes much more of the demanding task of secondary research.

The other type of learning is the one of learning skills, such as swimming or good writing. For most skills, there is some verbal knowledge to be learned by rote that is helpful, but it alone will not do. Skills require the gaining of habits—automatic reactions to certain stimuli, which you do not need to focus on consciously. That is clear in shifting gears of a car; you only have to think of "gear up" and the rest kind of happens on its own, without your intervention. It is as if you have trained your internal dog to react in a certain way, the dog doing the work for you. But the dog only does the work after you have trained it. Also, the terms of the theoretical knowledge about skills may be difficult to apply before you actually experience the learned activity. Many things are much easier to show than to describe. Especially with motor skills such as those needed in sports, learning happens even if you just practice without paying much attention to it.

An important part of learning of skills is learning from mistakes. Extending the dog metaphor, your internal dog learns from mistakes even without your intervention. But there are kinds of mistakes that it does not even recognize as mistakes and thus cannot learn from. You can improve your performance in any activity by actively, deliberately reviewing your recent past activity, searching for mistakes and pondering their remedies. A future mistake can be either altogether avoided or at least a measure taken to limit its impact. In a more sophisticated vein, a future mistake can be seen as a future risk and managed using the methods of risk management.

Active search for mistakes has some drawbacks, though. It takes time and it takes away part of your attention—your memory and thought—that you could have devoted to the learned activity otherwise. Also, it changes the way the dog behaves next time around. As the dog expects another review, it becomes more careful. That is a good thing only if the dog still has reserves. In effect, you are instructing the dog to take away part of your attention for preventing mistakes in the future.

It may be difficult to distinguish a mistake from a non-mistake. Often, people can realize something has gone wrong, but an undesirable result does not make the action that lead to it automatically wrong. If you bet in a 1:1 rate that a dice will not roll 6 and it does, you have still chosen the right strategy, just that you were unlucky. To recognize a mistake, you need to know what causes what, and that in general requires experience or expertise.

A reviewer can help a lot with finding mistakes. Even with best efforts, you may be unable to see a mistake that another person spots immediately, as is the case with poor pronunciation of a foreign language that can quickly be corrected by a native speaker.

Learning from mistakes requires your willingness to accept that you make mistakes, which may be an emotionally painful process. Admitting a mistake to yourself is difficult enough; admitting your goof to another person or even publicly more so.

Learning in privacy is vastly different from learning in a group, and that further vastly differs between a tamed group of note taking students, with clear subordination to the teacher, with close to no cooperation and mutual interaction, and a group of peers working together to solve some problem, with unclear power structure. The presence of the group consumes part of your available attention, the more so, the more there is to learn about the group. Errors that you make in privacy are not exposed to other people.

Many skills can be practiced in privacy, including those whose ultimate results are going to be shown publicly. Such is the case of an aspiring speaker, who practices public speaking in privacy in a barn, imagining his fictional audience. He can learn a lot even if certain aspects of public speaking are left unexposed, including the stage fright. Another case is a group of actors rehearsing for a public performance; among themselves, the actors are in privacy as compared to the ultimate public show.

Imagination can be a powerful helper in learning. The effect of imagination can be likened to the effect of a physical driving simulator, which helps people to learn to drive, or at least to automatically shift gears. Imagination can help to create a mental simulator of sorts, one that is physically absent but can still be used to produce your required reaction. For instance, you can sit on a chair, close your eyes, put your hand where you expect the gear handle to be, and ask yourself to change to various gears, and see whether your hand automatically moves to where you expect it to. Parts of this model can be taken over to other situations.

Observing other skilled people is an important method too. You may ask yourself what it is that they are doing and you are not doing, and why. Sometimes, just being around experienced people suffices for picking some of their ways subconsciously. However, this method mostly fails with teachers, unless the skill that you want to pick is teaching.

You can learn on your own, enroll in a university, buy a course, or join or organize a self-organized group of learners. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, so they are best combined. Formal education provides you with a degree, standardized curricula and teachers who provide instruction, assign tasks, and correct your errors. Degrees and certificates are recognized by hiring people. A standardized curriculum, even if too extensive, makes sure you have a basic coverage of knowledge and skills in the given area. Grades provide an aim against which to measure your performance, even if grading is an imperfect process. Classes lead by professional teachers are tested by the participants. The teachers correct your mistakes and provide praise and blame, increasing your motivation.

Many skills can be learned on your own. Before you decide to learn on your own, you should consider the alternatives: taking classes and learning in a self-organized group. Self-teaching should be distinguished from the homework and practice that classes and courses require. With self-teaching, you are completely on your own. You need to decide which textbook to buy, what exercises to make, what kind of and how much practice to take. When you're learning alone, instruction materials such as textbooks and workbooks help a lot. Many skills cannot be learned exclusively in classes. Especially learning of foreign languages requires a lot of practice on your own, your own attempts to speak and write. If there are no textbooks, as is the case especially with lucrative kinds of knowledge and know-how, the expertise can come from instruction manuals, which are not tailor-made to students. Although learning on your own may be a lot of joy, there are some risks too. You may miss the conventions that the field uses, such as the letter "v" for velocity. You may assign too much work to yourself, leading to excessive practice. In the absence of other practitioners, you may lose motivation and a sense of where you stand as compared to other people, leading to possible underestimation or overestimation of your achieved level. The benefits of learning on your own are considerable too. You may learn in the tempo and learning style of your own. You may pick your own time and scope of learning. You may decide what is relevant for you and what is not. And importantly, you may learn skills and knowledge that are difficult to gain from courses or the courses are expensive.

Apart from learning on your own and taking classes, another model is the one of a self-organized group. That is, a group of people plan to come together on a regular schedule and present or discuss certain topic of academic knowledge. The task of determining the scope and the best learning materials can be divided between the members, as can be the task of presenting the matter to other participants. Compared to self-teaching, you have much less autonomy as an individual learner, but you do not carry all the organizing work on your shoulders, and more of the discipline to keep the regular schedule comes from the outside of you. Downsides include that the participants may vary in their starting knowledge, their speed of learning and their preferred learning styles, leading to all kinds of frustrations.

Yourness

You may want your life program to be truly yours. It is unclear what "yours" means exactly, but a life program that you have written yourself is more yours than one that you have taken over from someone else. But even a life program that you have written yourself may contain ideas or suggestions from other people or books that you have read and have forgotten what they said. That touches on the question of where the life program that you have written comes from. You may use your own words, but are they truly yours? What makes you accept one life program in favor of another one? For an external observer of you, the life program or its choice results from the combination of your innate faculties, tendencies, and motives in you, and all your past experience that have shaped your mind, including parents, close family, books, movies, buddies, friends, teachers, and other people and media.

Individual Impact

If you have been considering one of the universal life programs, those expressed in terms that span not only the earth but also the universe, such as the power of life over matter, a seed of doubt could creep in. Making a difference on Earth is hard enough. The groups of living things possibly living on distant planets threaten to overshadow any impact that you alone or even the whole of humankind could make on the chosen universal goal. It is a matter of probability. As we do not know whether life is present elsewhere in this universe, there is a chance that the impact that you can make on Earth actually does matter universe-wide.

Even if you do not fear the doubt resulting from considering other civilizations in the universe, you may still feel that you cannot influence such planetary goals as maximizing the gross world product or minimizing the world illiteracy. There are situations such as the one of a dying person in which influencing them seems indeed impossible. But a small influence is almost always possible. Even a cleaner in a hospital contributes a small share to the result of the whole organization, and if the cleaner sees the furthering of health as his larger goal, contributing in this way is still better than not contributing at all. One sentence that you pass to another person stands a chance, as small as it can be, of making a difference in what matters most to you in the long run.

Let us consider the various kinds of contributions to your larger goals that you can make. Many people take part in the production of physical objects including tools, houses, and cars. Other produce information objects such as books, movies, reports, documentation or software. Great many people make it to leave offspring, an important contribution to almost any global goal, as a goal without hosts is a dead goal. Other people help shape the minds of the future generations. Some people maintain what has already been discovered and developed, other develop new designs, still other manufacture them.

It is pleasing to see the results of your efforts during your lifetime. But if your goals are large and spanning the Earth or the universe, you may be satisfied with supporting the chance that your goal will be achieved in three hundred years time. Many a notable person has become influential through their writings only after their death.

It is nice to see that your individual impact was unique, different in kind from that of other people. But the impact does not need to be unique. The point is to aim at the larger goal, even if your influence on that goal is of the same kind as the influence of other people. If your goal is to let as many books as possible to make it from the imaginary Borges library of all conceivable books into this world, then the fact that the book that you have written is completely unexceptional does not diminish your contribution to that goal.

I run the risk of repeating a cliché by saying that there is always hope of affecting the chosen aim. We know nothing for perfectly sure. Purely theoretically, the laws of the world can change in the next moment. This may seem unreasonable to human intuition, but that is exactly what the laws of logic say. Put differently, there is no perfect guarantee that the future will be like the past in any regard. This is not a suggestion to rely on a divine intervention, only a recognition of our ignorance. Also, our understanding of the laws of the world is limited. For the world to violate the laws as we know it, it does not need to violate the real laws. There are times when scientific theories change drastically. At these times, it is not the world that changes, only our image of the world. Thus, everything considered, and strictly logically speaking, even a dying person has a minute hope of acting to affect his distant long-term goal.

Free Will

Some people object that they cannot write and turn into action any life program, because their life is already determined. They believe the world is governed by physical laws and so are their decisions, as they get made in their brains. Even on this account, if you are such a person, the text that you are currently reading stands the chance of influencing you to write a life program, or to choose a specific method of creating it. The idea that we make choices, well known from everyday experience, is in no logical contradiction to the idea that the future course of the universe is already determined; it is determined by the choices that we make, that can possible determined, but we do not know them. If you will, you can read it as that we do not make our choices, we discover them.

For your choice and execution of a life program, what matters is that you actually have the option to choose, not how the choice is done in your brain. Imagine a glass of water standing on your writing desk. You can choose to move the glass to another place on the desk, or let it stand where it is. Choosing your life program is much more complex than choosing whether to move a glass, consisting of a myriad of subdecisions, but ultimately, the alleged problem of free will does not depend on the complexity of the decision but on the fact that a decision is being made at all.

That said, your freedom of action is limited. There are things which you know you most probably cannot do, no matter what life program you choose and what set of strategies and tools you use for turning it into action. But that has nothing to do with the fact that you can make choices. A prisoner has his freedom of movement drastically limited and yet can to an extent choose the verbal ideas running through his head.

At times, the strength of your will can be put to a test. A strong urge, an impulse to do something you have previously decided not to do, can seem irresistible. Also, the pressure on you other people create may have a similar effect. This however does not diminish the possibility of the will, only its strength. For one thing, you can make your will stronger if you regularly exercise it. For another one, if an urge, impulse or drive was at some point stronger than all your concentrated will, then what you were trying to achieve using your will was in fact not possible, at least not in that moment.

Some people could argue that all your action is merely a combination of external pressure and internal impulse, but in order to adjudicate the two, you need some other source of information, some other principle than those coming from those two sources.

The Big Picture

Unless you choose to focus all your efforts on the time scale of your life, you may express your life program in terms of larger time scales and larger areas and groups of beings, including centuries and millennia, collective enterprises, grand causes, human cultures, the human species, or the biological life on the Earth. If you do, a fundamental obstacle you are going to face is that long-term prediction is difficult and very long-term one borders on impossibility, and so is influencing distant future through present deeds. Although direct aiming at very long-term goals is impossible, what you can do is to aim at those short-term goals that are likely to create stepping-stones to very long-term goals. The obvious short-term goals are various means to long-term ends, such as further existence of people, maintenance and growth of knowledge and technology, or keeping and growing of human culture.

Any entity or process you choose to focus on or identify with is exposed to threats, close and more distant. The life on Earth is exposed to threats, also other threats than the technological activity of humankind. The Sun is going to expand, and before that, there is going to be a new ice age. There is the possibility that life is going to expand from the Earth to other planets. Humankind can be helpful in this expansion. Without human technology, it is unobvious how biological life will leave the Earth. No form of biological life that we know, neither all the forms of biological life taken together as a whole when humankind is excluded, has as far as we know ever managed to leave the Earth.

At some point of time, all the living things on Earth are going to die. At that point, the game of life will be over. But so far, the game of life is on. Go and play it.

The Power of Life Programs

I have endeavored to help you with writing your own life program. You may have believed that you should then execute it. If you imagine people executing various life programs, of their parents, of their own making, or of whom they consider their superiors, you may start to see that it is the life programs that control the people. Many people zealously distribute basic tenets of their life programs, threatening those who won't accept with eternal torture while promising those who join them an eternal life. Seen from a different perspective, it is the life programs that ask their hosts to reproduce them, to get copied from minds to books and from books to minds, in search of their new hosts.

Apart from conscientiously executing a life program, you have another, difficult option. Do your own thing. By writing your own life program, you make a step in that direction. Still, you also step in the direction of being controlled by your own life program.

You may try to rebel against any life program. However "to rebel against any life program" is a life program of sorts too. You may exclude this particular one from your rebellion. That comes quite close to being capricious and unpredictable.

Ethics

In the following, by ethics I mean the investigation of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, rather than the investigation of what is a good life. An ethical norm is exemplified by the ought-statement: one ought not make an arbitrary killing of a human. That is a very weak statement and we usually have much stronger requirements concerning killing of a human; its purpose is to anchor the concept of ethics to an example. The kind of ethics investigated in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is something else.

Most very simple life programs are unethical: their specified aim, being the sole ultimate one, overrides any ethical concerns unless they happen to be instrumental to that aim. The only way for a very simple life program to be ethical is to have ethical requirements be derivable from it with the use of logic. If one wants genuine ethics, as many of us do, it seems one has to explicitly codify ethics as part of the life program. Thus, the life program has to specify the ultimate objective but also ultimate constrains on how one is allowed to achieve the objective. However, one can have quasi-ethics as something serving as an instrument for a large aim. Thus, if one aims at maximizing the copies of one's genes (approximately, have as many descendants as possible), one can probably derive kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and display altruism from this aim. Thus, one can be motivated to show ethical and altruistic behavior by realizing the other person is a relative, by expecting a reciprocation of a favor, and by accepting other benefits from ostensive display of ethical conduct. The genuine ethics gets revealed from how one accepts or refuses to take an unethical advantage of opportunities when no one is looking and one cannot be found out, as well as in the situations where the only witnesses are accomplices in an unethical act.

A solution used by some religions to the problem of genuine ethics, meaning ethics as revealed in private dealings, is to abolish privacy by positing a constant observer capable of administering very harsh punishment in hedonistic terms, that is, eternal pain with no relief. However, this trick does not seem to work very well, as the Christian European conquest of South America, North America and Australia suggests; true believers would seem to be afraid to commit violence for the fear of the eternal damnation. By contrast, if the invaders use Christianity as a mere pretense cloak, and are in fact driven by the selfish-gene-coded hidden desire to acquire natural resources instrumental for supporting more bodies to carry these genes further, things make sense.

One thing we can do is develop various well-designed ethical codes together with justifications and debates serving as quasi-proofs. This way, those who happen to care about being ethical can access decent ethical codes to start with without having to invent their own. As for those who could not care the least about being ethical, ethical codes seem powerless against them, and the prospect of scaring them by untrue stories into ethical conduct seems very uncertain.

Politics

Your chosen life program may have political consequences. I have proposed from the very beginning that you respect political freedom. It is the political freedom that you have, if you in fact have it, that makes a search for a life program so much meaningful and acute, although it is basically meaningful even without political freedom. Also, it is the value of thinking in align with truth that makes such a search meaningful. If you do not honor knowing and finding truth, you do not need to honor the meaning of the words in your life program either.

Tentative eclecticism

Instead of writing a rigid life program, one can take a stance that involves tentativity and eclecticism while still recognizing the value of a written life program.

As for tentativity, one can say: I am not going to stick to any fancy set of doctrinaire ideas, echoing phrasing of Robert Pirsig. Any life program expressed in words is tentative, and open to revision. If a life program were a declarative/descriptive object rather than imperative, one could say it is conjectural.

As for eclecticism, one's position may be this: I am not going to name a single primary concept to drive my life. I will not seek the ultimate but rather something like multiple penultimates or ultimates that appear to be ones only because they are the last items seen on the current horizon, but there are in fact deeper ultimates beyond the horizon. Thus, I may pick goodness, virtue, excellence, kindness, live-and-let-live, intellectual honesty, personal longevity, personal health and other items as desiderata, realizing that they are in conflict and need some balancing. Moreover, I will realize that it is fine for different people to put emphasis on different desiderata.

An objection to eclecticism is this: it is unclear what brings the parts into a coherent whole. The culture spreading the commonly recognized desiderata may well be wrong about them.

Literature

The following literature played the role of an inspiration and source of ideas:

• Berne, Eric. What Do You Say After You Say Hello. 1964.
• Cameron, Donald. The Purpose of Life. 2001.
• Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 1989.
• Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 1976.
• The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition online in Wikisource
• Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach. 1979.
• Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred. 1992.
• Moravec, Hans. Mind Children. 1988.
• Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 1974.
• Poincaré, Henri. The Value of Science. 1913.
• Popper, Karl. Open Society and its Enemies. 1945.
• Popper, Karl. All Life is Problem Solving. 2001.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online