It’s time for a philosophy post. Haven’t done one of these in a while…

As you may have heard on the news, Ted Kennedy (US senator representing Massachusetts) passed away a few weeks ago. Amid all the press, stories of his life came out. Whether you agree with his liberal political ideology or not, he was indisputably an honorable guy. It says a lot about someone’s character when a bunch of conservative Republicans (including John McCain), who fought against Kennedy all their lives in the Senate, showed up at his ceremony and told stories of close friendship and camaraderie that one wouldn’t expect. One person who spoke at his ceremony offered this summarizing quote about Ted’s life: “he didn’t take himself too seriously.” And this got me thinking …. what does that really mean? Don’t take yourself too seriously? I usually take my life  seriously, and I had thought this was a good thing. After much thinking, I offer you my thoughts on this interesting piece of advice.

I’ll start off with pointing out some of the great ironies of life:

• We enjoy living the most when we’re not afraid to die (”Live life today like tomorrow’s your last day on earth…”)
• We often do our best work when we don’t regard it as “work”, but rather as play.
• We act the best when we aren’t self-consciously monitoring ourselves, and do not care how others perceive us
• Another irony can be found in taking an important test -  let’s say you want to do really really well on it. On the day of the test, you get very anxious with butterflies in your stomach, and all panicky because you want to do well so much. That anxiety ruins you; and you can’t keep your concentration on the test, and you start getting anxious when you don’t know the answers to all the questions. As a result, you do poorly.  Meanwhile if you had been calm and not cared so much about your grade, you probably what have done better because you would have been able to think more clearly.

All of these ironies share a central theme: Your conscious awareness of how bad you want something can actually get in the way of you  getting it. The moral is, be chill and just enjoy what’s going on around you. (But of course, don’t be too chill to the point where you do’t care about anything and hence become none-functional; that’s the other extreme. Find the happy medium). Be chill, take some risks, and just enjoy it. Don’t take your life to seriously, because then you’ll want your life to be good sooo much that you’re conscious awareness of this can actually get in the way of you living happily!

Here is another example that demonstrates this: Let’s say you want other people to like you. This is a reasonable thing that most people would like, no? One way to do this is to try to make yourself look really good and try to hype yourself up to all of your friends so that they’re all impressed by you. If it works though, those people won’t really see you as being a close friend. You’ll likely come across as distant and self-centered, and the “friendships” will only be unidirectional. A much better approach to getting other people to like you is to do the completely unintuivive thing of completely forgetting about yourself and your desire to be liked! Instead think more about your friends. Genuinely caring about them and there lives, will mean much more and hence develop much closer personal relationships. And then everyone is happy: you won’t be making yourself sick by self-consciously worrying about your image, your friends will have someone who truly cares about them, and they will of course like you for this. Win-win situation for all. This is what Ted Kennedy did, and this is how he had so many friends in the Senate, at both ends of the political spectrum. I heard countless stories in the news and at his ceremony about  how whenever a friend or political foe was going through a tough time, Kennedy would literally be the first to call and offer help. He made it his top priority to care about the personal lives of his fellow Senators. And because of this, Kennedy was liked by all, and turned almost into a martyr upon his death. I’m sure he had a better quality of life because of it too, since all of these friends genuinely admired him for it just as much as he cared about them. Irony: to lead a more happy and fulfilling life, forget about yourself. Don’t focus on improving your life; think more about others and you’ll end up having a happier life in the end. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

So, “don’t take yourself seriously” just might be my second favorite quote (right after “I’m on a boat” ). I think it means to be chill, content with yourself (even when you’re unsure), and not care too much about where you are right now. Because if you do that, you’ll necessarily find yourself on higher ground down the road.