You've got to live your life

YOUR LIFE HAS A LIMIT but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain! If you do good, stay away from fame. If you do evil, stay away from punishments. Follow the middle; go by what is constant, and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, look after your parents, and live out your years.—Zhuangzi, Chapter 3, The Secret of Caring For Life (Burton Watson translation)

The skeptic sage Zhuangzi tells us to not go to not pursue limitless knowledge and to understand the limitations of your life, to keep yourself in one piece, alive, look after your parents (a high ideal in ancient Chinese philosophy), and to live out your years.

I've been thinking about living out your years recently, and wrote a piece on this newsletter. There, I argue that old age is a special stage of human life history. Many organisms do not have it. Moreover, old age only arose late in our evolutionary history, somewhere between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago (we diverged from other primate lineages, notably the chimpanzee-bonobo ancestor around 5 million years ago).

Crucially, old age arose before humans had access to modern medicine. Our best guess is that we could become so old, because human communities began to cherish and cared for their older members, subsidizing them with food and, in turn, benefiting from their wisdom.

The context in which I now think about “living your life” is people who, because of significant societal pressure and the difficulty of continuing to protect themselves against a virus that mutates quickly and spreads unmitigated, have given up. “You've got to live your life.”

To my surprise, my son's pediatrician, an excellent physician who had not gotten covid yet in spite of working in healthcare (and testing herself with any symptoms) who had always masked up had ditched the mask at our fall wellness appointment. “Well,” she said “I'm living my life, it's here to stay.” She knows the risks, yet she gave up.

So I understand the sentiment behind the phrase. I understand why people are doing this, but I want to ponder it a bit more. I talked to a man recently who said he thought he ought to take some precautions against getting reinfected, because his wife was still suffering from the long covid she acquired in early 2020. “I really should be careful to make sure she doesn't get it again, but…” He added, “Everything has risks.”

I've heard this argument before in the context of living our lives. Living our lives comes with risks. Like many, I've taken various risks because I wanted things of great value: an academic career (super-risky to do a PhD), a long-term loving relationship (many marriages end in divorce), children (many people do not enjoy the experience of parenthood, and there's a risk you may fall into financial or other hardship that makes care very difficult, pregnancy and childbirth is risky), and so on.

The risk that is often brought up in this context, though, is driving. Here's a familiar car analogy: you can be killed in traffic and it's a risk we accept. Ergo, we also have to accept to live our lives to the full, maskless, free, and unafraid. Those people who still advocate for covid mitigations then will often say, “Yes but we also wear seatbelts, and we have airbags, and there are traffic rules.”

But I often think, “Okay but why do we have to accept this high risk of car death?” It's not exactly an inexorable force of nature. In the US, traffic deaths have risen significantly the past few years. And of course, car exhausts also pose health risks and lead to many deaths by air pollution: quiet, unspectacular deaths, of people who could have had more years.

It's one thing to accept car death in the abstract as a risk you take to get from A to B (and to not consider other ways our society might be structured so A and B might be closer together, or A and B could be connected with cycle lanes, or better bus lanes…) It's quite another to accept it as a reality. Just recently, I received a message from an international project I am loosely connected to on the philosophy of mathematics. One of my fellow collaborators, a man in his early thirties, was killed in a car accident. He does not get to live out his years.

Living your life means, in Zhuangzi's terms, living out your years. Short lives aren't necessarily worse. They can be beautiful and meaningful for the person and their loved ones. But it is such a blessing to have a long and full life, where you get to experience different things, take different risks, feel sorrow and joy within the span of time. Here's just one joy I want to share that you need age for: rereading works of great fiction. I am rereading Lord of the Rings, probably my favorite novel ever, for the fourth time, and each reread brings me something new. It reveals different layers of insight that Tolkien had, and I feel a different relationship with the work and the characters each time. It is telling me something new.

Obviously, eventually we all die. Death is not bad. But I can't but help thinking there's a certain fatalism in well-intended messages like the one below I had on X/Twitter when I discussed the increased dementia risk that covid poses:

And I totally agree with the sentiment, even with the risk mitigation. I am not isolated from society. I would just want that it didn't need to come with a constant risk of health complications.

We can as a society do a lot to make lives safer, healthier, happier, that individuals cannot do on their own. Safer roads is one such example. Public health is another. I am very worried and I am especially worried that our governments seem to be mired in complacence as measles, TB and other scours on human health and happiness are making a comeback. These diseases have seriously shortened our lives, and the prolonged assault, politicization, and downright complacency of public health are endangering us all. I very much wish, if at all possible, to live out my years.