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With all the wealth and education and technology that we have today, why does life feel disorienting and confusing?
Why are supposedly smart people saying and doing things that are absurd and contradictory?
Why do we feel like basic morality has collapsed and we’re headed the wrong direction?
Welcome back for the third blog in a series that tells the story of how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it.
As we discussed in earlier blogs, the confusion and disorientation we are feeling are big-time indicators that we are in the wrong place headed the wrong direction.
The collapse of morality? Important people saying absurd things? A dramatic increase in depression and suicide? More obvious signs that we’re in the wrong place headed the wrong way.
We drifted off-course somewhere, and life and society have slowly broken down ever since.
We’re looking at life the wrong way. We’re disoriented. We need to find our anchor points and get back on course.
Let’s find the best way to understand life—let’s find the Truth about life—so we can pursue Happiness and thrive.
So, what was our original course? What was the original paradigm—the original way of understanding life—that we drifted from?
The Wisdom Paradigm.
The more you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the better you will understand life, and the happier and more successful you will be.
The Wisdom Paradigm is the basic way that people have understood life for thousands of years. It is common to all the world’s great philosophies and religions.
Here are the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm:
- We all have the same human nature. Times change, technology changes, but human nature has stayed the same through cultures and history
- We all have the same purpose in life: Happiness. Happiness is the fulfillment of our human nature, it’s our purpose, our destination in life.
- Happiness comes from having good relationships.
- Our lives are our unique stories of pursuing Happiness. Happiness is our destination in life. Reason tells us how to get there.
- Our relationships can only be as good as we are, so become a good person with good character. Practice virtues like love, courage and wisdom until they become who you are.
The Wisdom Paradigm
The Wisdom Paradigm has been around for thousands of years. At its core, the Wisdom Paradigm is based on the idea that we all have the same human nature and therefore the same purpose in life—Happiness.
Happiness simply is the fulfillment of our human nature.
Looking back in history, no matter what culture or time period, we can see that human nature doesn’t change.
That’s why we all understand things like love, fear, courage, and joy largely the same way no matter our culture, ethnicity or time. The fact that we have the same human nature, the same concerns about life and death, and family, is what unites us as one humanity across cultures and time.
While our DNA is what makes us homo sapiens, it is our shared human nature that makes us all human.
We can read Shakespeare today because, 400 years after his death, what he said about love, betrayal, humor and ambition remains wise and relevant to us.
King David wrote the Psalms 3,000 years ago as a reflection on the challenges, achievements and joys of his life. We read them today because we find their wisdom and guidance valuable even though we live in a completely different culture and time.
Confucius wrote The Analects 2,500 years ago in a distant culture and time. We read them because they contain valuable insights into human nature and life that apply today.
Even when we go back 4,000 years to the most ancient written story we have—the Epic of Gilgamesh—we can relate to Gilgamesh’s experience of brotherhood, love, meaning in life, and mortality. Why can we do that? Because Gilgamesh shares the same human nature with us. Because human nature is timeless.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, times change and cultures change, but human nature remains the same.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, since all people have the same human nature, all people seek the same kind of fulfillment in life.
Christians call that fulfillment salvation. Others refer to that fulfillment as nirvana or moksha. Some refer to human nature being fulfilled as flourishing. Aristotle taught that humans seek fulfillment that he called Happiness.
While there are important differences between each of these understandings of fulfillment or Happiness, they all share fundamental qualities:
- Meaning and purpose in life
- Joy
- Freedom
- Total contentment
- No more pain or suffering
- The sacred
- Participation in something deeply profound and transcendent.
For our purposes, we’ll bring all these concepts of fulfillment, like salvation and nirvana, together under the term Happiness. For us, fulfillment and Happiness are the same.
The anchor point to remember here? It’s this: Because we all have the same human nature, we all have the same destination, the same purpose in life. Fulfillment. Happiness.
So, how do we get Happiness?
Happiness is All About Relationships
Happiness is all about having good relationships in life.
For more than 80 years, Harvard has been conducting the Study on Adult Development. They’ve followed thousands of people through life, measuring them in more than 100 different ways.
One of the clearest conclusions of the study is that Happiness in life is all about having high-quality relationships. When you have good relationships, you are not only happier and more fulfilled, but you are healthier and live longer.
The link between Happiness and relationships shouldn’t be a surprise.
We are happiest when we are in love or in relationship with a good people. When we have a big achievement in life, we want to share that with someone.
On the other hand, when people don’t have good relationships, they get unhappy and depressed.
Want to drive a prisoner crazy? Put him in solitary confinement.
The worst kind of bullying isn’t when someone is yelling or intimidating you. The worst kind of bullying is when you are shunned. Cut off from relationship.
One of the most important relationships for Happiness is the relationship you have with yourself. Have you developed virtues like love and self-discipline so that you are in control of yourself? Or do things like addiction, lust or food control you?
Here’s the anchor point: Happiness in life is all about good relationships with family, friends, God and yourself.
Purpose and Reason
We know our destination, our purpose, in life. That’s Happiness. Now we need to use reason to figure out how to get there.
This combination of purpose and reason is very important. It has everything to do with the wrong turn we made that took us off-course and got us in the mess we’re in. So, let’s go deeper into this critical combination of purpose and reason.
Imagine that we’re a community of people living in New York City and our purpose is to travel to San Diego, California.
When we know what our destination is, San Diego, we can use reason to figure out how to get there. Reason tells us that if we want to travel from New York to San Diego, we must travel southwest.
It is a fact that if we travel southwest from New York, we are headed the right direction to get to our destination. It is also a fact that if we travel any other direction, east for instance, we will be headed the wrong direction.
That seems obvious enough, but there’s something really important here. After we travel southwest for a while, its tempting to think that “traveling southwest” is the right direction on its own.
In reality, though, traveling southwest is only the right direction because that’s the way to go to get to San Diego.
If the destination changes to London, then it’s a fact that southwest is the wrong direction.
And if you lose the destination, then any direction becomes ok.
We’re going to find that honesty, justice and courage are moral facts because it’s a fact that they help us become good people traveling towards our destination—Happiness.
And it’s a fact that dishonesty, cowardice and addiction are wrong because they take us away from our destination—Happiness.
When we lose our destination of Happiness, then we lose the justification for saying that it’s a fact that honesty, justice and love are right. Over time, they will change from moral facts to just personal opinions.
When our society no longer has a destination, then it becomes impossible to say that it’s a fact that one direction is right and another wrong. Anything goes.
So, this combination of purpose, destination, and reason is the very thing that unites our society. It is absolutely essential.
No surprise here. Leaders know that teams are united by having the same goal.
Society is built on the reality that we all have the same human nature and therefore the same purpose in life: Happiness. Reason tells us that to get there: we have to be good people who can engage in good relationships.
Without a shared purpose and reason, our society will fall apart as everyone heads off in their own direction for their own reasons.
Sound familiar?
The anchor points here? Our purpose, our destination in life, is Happiness. Reason tells us how to get there. Drop the destination, drop our purpose, and everything inevitably falls apart.
The Virtues
So, what does reason tell us about how to achieve good relationships and Happiness?
Good relationships are grounded in mutual trust. The more trust, the stronger and better the relationship.
To have high-trust relationships with good people, we need to be a good people ourselves.
We become good by practicing the virtues like honesty, justice, courage and love. The more often and intensely you practice these virtues, the more they become your character. They become who you are.
Flip it. You become what you do. You become what you practice.
The more you practice the virtues, the more you become a good person ready for strong relationships with yourself and others—and the more likely you will achieve Happiness in life.
Lead the Story of Your Life
So, what is life about?
Your life is your unique story of how you pursue Happiness using your talents to build strong relationships.
Just because we are all headed the same direction towards the same destination doesn’t mean we are all taking the same route to get there. Your particular route will depend on the talents you have.
Some will pursue good relationships and Happiness using their talents as doctors, businesspeople or as public servants.
Others will pursue Happiness through service as teachers, artists, ministers or parents.
It doesn’t matter what your work is or what you do as long as your work and activities give you the opportunity to practice virtues like love, honesty, justice, courage and wisdom.
So your life is your opportunity to practice the virtues in everything you do—work, play, family life, spiritual life—to make those virtues a fundamental part of who you are so you can become good, build great relationships and achieve Happiness.
Everything you do in life—everything—either moves you towards goodness or moves you away from goodness.
Everything includes your work, your family, your church, your neighborhood, your interests and ‘outside’ activities—everything.
Even your thoughts.
Everything you do or think in life should be focused on becoming good.
I emphasize everything because there is a Modern thread in our society that teaches the opposite. This Modern approach teaches that life is separated into public and private, and what happens in one doesn’t affect what happens in the other.
In the Modern Paradigm, you can be a bastard at work in the business world while somehow being a good parent to your kids.
The Wisdom Paradigm brings everything in life together to focus on good relationships and Happiness. What you practice at work directly affects how good a parent you are.
So, your story is your character development through your life. Just like a great book or movie.
Here’s the best part. When you are a good person with good relationships, it will make you more successful in all aspects of your life.
More successful as a parent raising your kids. More successful at work. More successful as a community. More successful achieving Happiness in life.
Let’s recap.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that human nature doesn’t change. Times change, cultures change and technology changes, but human nature has stayed the same throughout.
Because we all have the same human nature, we all have the same purpose in life, to fulfill our human nature, to achieve Happiness.
Happiness is all about good relationships. To have good relationships with good people, we need to become good people ourselves. We become good by practicing virtues like love, courage and wisdom until they become fundamental parts of our character.
The Wisdom Paradigm’s understanding of life is built on the foundation of purpose and reason. Our purpose in life, our destination, is Happiness. Reason tells us how to get there. This combination of purpose and reason is the critical foundation for things like moral facts.
Finally, your life is your unique story about how you use your gifts and talents to pursue Happiness in life. We should all be leading the best story of our lives that we can.
That’s Part One on the Wisdom Paradigm.
In the next session, we’ll learn about the way the Wisdom Paradigm thinks about human relationships—another critical anchor point.
We’ll also talk about how the Wisdom Paradigm looks at Morality, Truth, Beauty and success in life.
Remember, the Wisdom Paradigm is a whole, integrated way of understanding every aspect of life. The better you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the more successful you can be in life.
Finally, what did you find valuable in this session? Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think!
I’m Pete Bowen.
