The self-help shelf in any bookshop is a monument to overcomplication. Forty-seven habits, twelve rules, seven levels, a morning routine that begins at half past four and involves cold water and a gratitude journal. I have read a depressing number of these, mostly in airports, and retained almost none of it past the departure gate.

Then Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, was asked on a Reddit thread in 2012 what drives him, and he gave an answer short enough to fit on the back of a receipt. Two philosophies, he said. Know more today about the world than you knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You would be surprised how far that gets you.

My first reaction was the one you are probably having. Lovely. Goes nicely on a mug. My second reaction, a few years later, was that the man had calmly described the only two things that have ever worked for me, and that the second one once stopped me making the stupidest decision of my career.

Know more today than you knew yesterday

The first one is the scientific method pointed at your own life, and it is far more modest than it sounds.

It does not ask you to be a genius, or to ever finish. It asks you to be slightly less wrong tonight than you were this morning. That is more or less the whole engine of science. Nobody in a serious lab is trying to be right in some final, permanent way. They are trying to be marginally less mistaken than the last person, write it down, and let someone else chip a bit further along.

The humility runs deeper than people outside science tend to assume, too. We have been studying gravity for three centuries and still only know Newton’s constant to three significant figures. Around ninety-five percent of the universe is made of things we have politely named dark matter and dark energy, mostly so we do not have to say out loud that we have very little idea what they are. The best-informed species on the only planet known to carry one spends most of its day confidently not knowing things.

I got this wrong for years in a particular way. I thought “know more” meant collect facts and deploy them to win. I was the man at the table with the correction loaded and ready. What I was doing was the precise opposite of the rule, because a person busy being right learns nothing. The truer version is duller and harder. Assume, every single day, that there is a fact you do not yet have. Above all about a person.

The cook I nearly sacked

That stops being abstract very quickly in a kitchen.

Years ago I had a line cook, a quiet lad called Tomas, who started arriving late. Ten minutes, then twenty, then a morning he missed altogether. In the economy of a busy kitchen that is close to a capital offence. The prep does not do itself, and one slow start poisons the entire service behind it. I had the conversation drafted in my head, the regretful, businesslike one that ends with a final pay packet. By the cold numbers, he had to go.

What stopped me was a flat, almost accidental question. I asked him, with no great warmth, what was actually going on. And it came out that his mother had been taken into a hospital on the far side of the city, that he was sitting with her until the small hours, and then walking ninety minutes to my door because the night buses did not connect and the fare, on a cook’s wages, was a genuine decision every morning.

None of that was visible from where I stood, which was the whole point. I had a full and confident model of Tomas, the unreliable cook, and it was missing the single fact that explained all of it. I knew less than I believed I did, which is the standard human condition and the exact thing the first rule is trying to beat out of you.

So I did something small. I shifted his start to the evening, which suited the kitchen anyway, and stopped docking him for the lost mornings. It cost me close to nothing. He stayed four years, became the steadiest pair of hands in the building, and covered for me more times than I can count when my own life later fell apart. You would be surprised, as the man said, how far that got me.

Lessen the suffering of others

People hear the second philosophy as the soft one. The charity bit, bolted on after the clever bit, to make the clever bit look kind. I think that is exactly the wrong way round.

They are the same engine. Knowing more about Tomas was worthless as trivia. Its only value was that it let me take a little weight off him at almost no cost to me. And easing what he carried was not me playing the saint. It was the most clear-headed thing I did that year, because it kept a good cook and bought a loyalty that no bonus on earth would have. Knowledge without the second philosophy is just cleverness, which is cold and gets you avoided at parties. Kindness without the first is good intentions fired blindfold, which mostly miss the target. You need the two of them aimed together.

That is what Tyson tucks into that last offhand line. He does not promise you enlightenment, or wealth, or a flat stomach by June. He promises only that two ordinary habits will carry you “surprisingly far,” which may be the single most honest sentence in the entire self-improvement trade. Nobody can tell you how far. You would be surprised. That is the whole claim, and it happens to be true.

I walked away from the restaurants a few years after Tomas, and I have since forgotten most of what I once knew about margins and stock rotation and the correct way to close down a kitchen at midnight. What stayed was the picture of a tired young man crossing a sleeping city on foot to stand at my stove, and the small, unheroic discovery that the cheapest thing I ever did, ask one question and move one shift, turned out to be the cleverest entry in the books. Two rules, typed into a website by a stargazer at his keyboard. They really will carry a person an absurd distance, though their author had the good manners not to say how far. He left you to walk it and find out.

The post Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” appeared first on Space Daily.

Thought of the week, from Hannah Arendt: “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”

We tend to treat those two words as different doses of the same medicine. Solitude is a bit alone, loneliness is very alone, and both come down to the simple business of not having people around. Arendt is saying something stranger and, I’ve come to believe, far truer. They aren’t two points on one scale at all. They’re separate states, and the proof is that the worst of one tends to strike at the exact moment you’re surrounded.

The two aren’t even related

Solitude is being alone, and it can be one of the better things in a life. When I’m in it, I’m not actually without company. I’ve got myself. There’s a quiet conversation that goes on between you and you when no one else is about, and in solitude that conversation has room to happen. You think, you wander, you settle. Alone, and entirely fine.

Loneliness is a different animal altogether. It’s the sense of not being met, of there being nobody, possibly including yourself, who registers that you’re really there. And its cruel signature, the thing Arendt puts her finger on, is that it doesn’t require you to be physically alone to do its work. It does its sharpest, coldest work in a full room.

Two evenings

I can hand you both states as two specific nights.

The first was a solitary one. An evening alone in my flat, no plans, nobody about, the phone face down. I cooked something slow, read for a good while, sat out on the balcony watching the city do its restless thing. Not a word exchanged with another human for hours, and I felt full, settled, perfectly good company to myself. That was solitude. Alone, and not lonely in the slightest.

The second was a crowded one. A big party here in Bangkok, packed and loud, a whole room of people I half-knew, a drink in my hand, laughter going off all around me. And somewhere in the thick of it, a cold wave of about the purest loneliness I know rolled straight through me. Surrounded on every side, and abandoned. Everyone present, nobody meeting me, the noise widening the gap rather than filling it. The strange thing was that I’d have sworn, walking in, that a big lively night was exactly what I needed. It turned out to be the precise opposite of the cure. I left early, walked home by myself, and felt better the instant I was out the door, because being alone had never been the problem. The un-meeting crowd was.

Why we reach for exactly the wrong cure

Because we muddle the two together, we reliably apply the wrong fix. Someone admits they’re lonely and we tell them to get out more, see people, fill the diary up. Sometimes that helps. Often it makes things worse, because we’ve prescribed company for a condition that sharpens in company. It’s handing a man dying of thirst a tall glass of saltwater. More people is the right answer to a solitude you didn’t choose. It is frequently no answer at all to loneliness, and now and then it’s an accelerant.

It runs the other way too. People who genuinely need solitude, real time alone with themselves, often grow frightened of it, because they’ve absorbed the idea that all aloneness is the dangerous kind. So they stuff their lives with company to dodge a thing that would actually have done them good, fleeing solitude as though it were loneliness, and losing the one dependably restorative sort of alone there is.

The company you keep with yourself

What sits underneath Arendt’s distinction is the relationship you have with your own self. In solitude you’re alone but not deserted, because you’re still keeping yourself company, still on decent terms with the only person guaranteed to be in the room. Loneliness, in her sense, is when even that company gives out, when you’ve been deserted by everyone else and, worse, by your own self too, and that is a desertion no crowd on earth can reach. A party can’t talk you out of it, because the party isn’t addressing the actual absence. Arendt put it with a precision I can’t improve on: in solitude I am with myself, two-in-one, but in loneliness I am truly one, left by everybody. The absence is closer to home than any room full of strangers.

That reframes the whole problem. If the loneliness that bites hardest in a crowd is partly the loss of your own company, then a real portion of the cure was never out there in a bigger guest list at all. It’s in rebuilding the ability to sit with yourself, so that you turn up to the party already in decent company, and the crowd becomes a bonus rather than a frantic, failing remedy. The people hardest to make lonely tend to be the ones most at home in their own solitude, the ones who never lost the thread of that quiet two-way conversation in the first place.

Working out which one you’re in

So the genuinely useful first move, when the alone feeling lands, is to figure out which of the two has actually arrived, because they want opposite things from you. If it’s solitude you’re flinching from, the answer is to stop bolting, sit in it, and rediscover that your own company isn’t an enemy to be drowned out. If it’s loneliness, especially the sort that flares up in a crowd, the answer was never simply more bodies in the room. It’s the harder work of being properly met by a few people, and of repairing the relationship with the self that’s gone silent.

I think about those two evenings whenever I catch myself reaching for company as a cure-all. The night alone that felt full, and the crowded night that felt like being left behind. Between them they taught me what Arendt put far more elegantly, that being alone and being lonely have almost nothing to do with one another, and that the loneliest I am ever likely to be is not in an empty flat but in a bright, loud room full of people, not one of whom, myself included, is fully there. Solitude I can always go home to. Loneliness is the thing that follows me into the party. Telling them apart is the first step to not handing myself the saltwater every time.

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Quote of the day, from Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

It’s the kind of line that can sound like a fridge magnet if you meet it cold, the sort of thing printed under a photo of a mountain. But it has a much heavier history than the mountain photo suggests. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, took this exact sentence as the key to who lived and who didn’t around him. The prisoners who held on, he observed, were rarely the strongest or the best fed. They were the ones who still had a why, a person to get back to, a piece of work unfinished, some reason waiting on the far side. Strip a man of his why and the how, however mild, became unbearable. Give him one and he could endure almost anything.

The how is never the deciding factor

We get this backwards most of the time. We assume people break under the weight of their circumstances, the how, and that if we could just make the how easier, lighter, more comfortable, people would cope better. So we chase comfort, and we treat hardship as the enemy, and we measure a good life largely by how few difficult hows it contains.

What Nietzsche saw, and Frankl confirmed in the most extreme laboratory imaginable, is that the how is almost never what does people in. People endure staggering hows, illness, grief, poverty, loss, as long as the why holds. And people crumble under remarkably gentle hows, a comfortable life, no real hardship at all, the moment the why goes missing. It isn’t the size of the burden that breaks a person. It’s carrying any burden at all without a reason to.

My grandmother, who refused to die on schedule

I watched this play out in my grandmother, my mum’s mother, in the last stretch of her life.

She’d been given a grim prognosis, a matter of a few months at the outside, and by every medical expectation she should have gone roughly when they said she would. She did not. She hung on, stubbornly, well past the date, and the doctors did that polite shrug doctors do when a patient ignores the timetable. What kept her going wasn’t medicine or clean living or luck. It was my cousin’s wedding, eight months out, which she had decided, flatly and without negotiation, that she would attend.

That wedding was her why. She talked about it constantly, planned her outfit, fussed about the seating, used it as a rope to pull herself along a corridor everyone else assumed she’d already reached the end of. She made it. She sat in the second row in a hat she’d agonised over for weeks, cried through the vows, danced one slow number with my cousin, and she died about three weeks later, the job done, the why spent. I have never seen a clearer demonstration that the body will keep going far past what seems possible if the mind has somewhere it absolutely intends to be.

The danger of a borrowed why

The trouble with a why is that not all of them hold, and we’re often running on ones that can be taken away. A why pinned entirely to another person, to your children, say, or a partner, is real and powerful, but it has a hostage quality. If they leave, or grow up, or die, the why goes with them, and people who built their entire reason for being on a single relationship can collapse spectacularly when it ends.

The sturdiest whys, I’ve come to think, tend to be the ones that renew themselves. A piece of work that’s never quite finished. A craft you keep getting better at. A cause larger than your own lifespan. Even, in my grandmother’s case, a next thing, always a next thing, a wedding and then a christening and then a great-grandchild she’d decided in advance she had to meet. She kept manufacturing new whys the moment the old ones were used up, which is, I suspect, the real trick. A why isn’t a thing you find once and keep. It’s a thing you have to keep renewing, because life keeps spending them.

Why comfort can be the quiet danger

What unsettles me about all this, as a reasonably comfortable man living a reasonably comfortable life, is the warning Nietzsche’s line carries underneath. If a why lets you bear almost any how, then the people most at risk aren’t necessarily the ones with the hardest hows. They’re the ones with the emptiest whys.

You can build a life with the difficulty engineered almost entirely out of it, smooth, cushioned, frictionless, and find yourself strangely unable to bear it, because comfort is not a why. It’s just an easy how. A person with everything and no reason can be far more fragile than a person with nothing and a fierce one. Which means the modern project of removing all hardship, if it isn’t matched by the harder work of building a reason, can leave people more breakable, not less. We optimise the how and forget to ask about the why, and then wonder why so many of the comfortable are the ones falling apart behind closed doors.

The question worth keeping in view

I don’t have my grandmother’s clarity. Most of us don’t, until something forces it on us. But the quote has changed the question I ask myself when a stretch of life gets heavy. The instinct is always to ask how do I make this easier, how do I reduce the load, how do I escape the how. Nietzsche points at the better question, which is whether the why is still there at all.

Because if the how feels unbearable, it’s worth checking whether the real problem is the weight or the missing reason underneath it. Often the burden hasn’t actually grown. The why has slipped out from under it, and the same load that was fine last year has become impossible, not because it got heavier, but because the thing that made it worth carrying went missing while you weren’t looking.

My grandmother couldn’t be killed on schedule because she point-blank refused to miss that wedding. None of us gets to choose our hows, not really. The one thing we have any say over is whether we’ve got a why strong enough to drag us through them, and whether, when one gets used up, we’re paying enough attention to reach for the next.

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