Finding Security In An Insecure World

-Gary Null PhD.

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

Overcoming Self-Deception and Self-Delusion.

I see a society and its citizens in crisis. Too many things are going wrong. Collectively this is not what we signed up for. The bigger question is, how to resolve this. We should start by paying attention to the everyday problems that we feel helpless to change. Also, we should begin to see how many people are fighting to get out of the class they’re in, into a higher socioeconomic ranking. Probably one third of all Americans find little to no satisfaction in their achievements, they feel they need and want more. As an example of how many people are separated from the average person’s daily reality, this week there was a featured article in the New York Post which begs the question, How insecure are we today? Here is the headline from the New York Post: in high places, the rich kids of summer fly private planes to twenty-thousand-dollar-a-week sleepovers — camps for elite friendships and “life-building skills.” Some parents will do and pay anything for their youngster’s future.

There are estimated twenty four million millionaires in the United States today, and that figure excludes the value of their property. If you were conservative and assumed three people to a family, you would be dealing with roughly seventy four million Americans. The rest of us are left to wonder whether there is enough money to buy the food we need, the medicines we need, to pay our mortgage, our utility bills, our college loans, our car payments, and all the other expenses necessary just to exist.

And what happens when the average cost of an ordinary apartment in New York runs over four thousand dollars a month? It means you have to earn well over a hundred thousand dollars a year just to live in New York City — and that is before you spend a dime on everything that makes this great culture worth enjoying. When I came to New York City on June 5, 1965, I arrived with twelve dollars on a Greyhound bus. While I was shaving and brushing my teeth in the bus terminal, someone made off with the twelve dollars I had come with.

I wasn’t angry. After all, I had been told: it’s New York, there will be some very highs and some very lows, so just roll with it. And I did.

I asked a police officer where a person who had no money could sleep for the night. He said that if I had three dollars and fifty cents, I could spend the night at the Sloane House down on 34th Street — but since I didn’t, I should go sleep across the street from the Plaza Hotel. It was safe, he said, but I couldn’t put my legs up on the bench; the police would tell me to move on, so I should just sleep sitting up. That was it.

Well, that didn’t quite work. The bench was fine and the weather was great, but they played wedding music all night, and that is what I heard until I finally got some sleep around three in the morning. But it was my first day in New York City. I could have called home collect and said, “Mom, send me some money and I’ll take the bus back.” Or I could stay, and with the few skills I had — not much, but some — see what this great city has to offer.

I knew what my hometown had to offer. It had security and a lot of certainties. While I was growing up there were exceptions, of course — the man whose father owned the bank, another who owned a big department store, the twenty or so people we called the country club crowd. They could afford the fees to join the country club set.

I remember so many times my mother would say, “Okay, it’s summertime, it’s Saturday — go cut this person’s lawn, and this one’s, and this one’s.” So, I’d take my lawnmower over, knock on the door, and say, “I’m going to cut your grass.” They’d say, “Okay, Gary.” Everyone knew everyone. I cut the grass of everyone who was too old or too frail to cut their own. No one had to ask. They had the security of knowing that many of their needs would simply be taken care of. No one ever wondered whether they had to lock their doors and windows at night, whether someone would burglarize their house or hurt them — because it never happened. Because everyone cared for everyone else.

I remember going down to Little Italy, a stretch of streets in Lower Manhattan. Walking past the little stores and restaurants and bakeries, you’d see women leaning on pillows in their windows, talking to one another across the narrow alleyways, the pillows there so they wouldn’t have to rest their arms on the bare window frame. I asked my buddy, who was Italian, what it was all about. He said, “You go anywhere in Italy, to any small town, and everybody’s eyes are always open, always aware. When a stranger comes into the neighborhood, someone is always watching in case he means harm — something to steal, someone to hurt. And if he does anything that looks like a threat to the community, someone makes a phone call, and a few men who look like their heads are sitting on a refrigerator come and escort that person right out of the neighborhood.” That was true of every neighborhood in my hometown.

There was no ghetto. Even the ordinary working-class person had beautiful lawns and victory gardens out back — the kind that came about during World War II so families could grow some of their own produce. Some people kept beautiful flowers and beehives and fruit trees. And there was always the invitation: go ahead, climb up the cherry tree, the first cherries are just coming out, get yourself some. That’s the way it was.

There was a philosophy buried in those gardens, though no one in my hometown would ever have called it that. Thomas Jefferson had dreamed of a republic of small farmers, believing that a man who could feed himself could never truly be enslaved by anyone. Henry David Thoreau, who went to the woods at Walden to live deliberately, wrote that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” My neighbors had not read a word of either man, and yet they lived both philosophies every single day. They knew, in their hands and in their bones, the difference between having enough and needing more — a distinction we have spent a half-century unlearning.

You knew that when you had a job, you had a job for life. The Shovel factory, DuPont — the highest-paying work but the most dangerous — the Internal Revenue Service: you simply worked there until you chose to retire. There was no forced retirement. Schoolteachers never retired; you’d have teachers in their eighties and nineties. And people had a clarity of thought.

I wrote the first book on the history of my hometown while I was still in school. It was called Parkersburg and Early History. I went first to the oldest part of town, Julianna Street, and talked with people who lived in those beautiful old homes — exquisite homes where the same family lineage had remained generation after generation, some reaching clear back to the early 1800s. I would ask them what life had been like, what the most remarkable moments were that they could remember. And they all said the same thing: there was a comfort in knowing your family was always with you, that your friends would never leave you, that you’d have one another until death. There was an ease of living. There was none of this stress of constant activity, no hyperkinetic energy. People actually sat and talked. People were highly literate. Everybody read. Everybody belonged to one of the book clubs, which were everywhere then — the Reader’s Digest book club and the rest.

Then I went out to the country, which in those days was just two miles across the bridge that separated Parkersburg proper from the farmland. All the houses, all the farms, overlooked the Ohio River. It was bucolic. The sunsets were magnificent. The people had a “come on in” attitude. You knocked on the door and walked right in. There was no hesitancy, because there was a sense of security.

The people respected one another. Someone would say, “Okay, we’ve got a deal?” “We’ve got a deal.” And that was it. No need for contracts. People shook hands, and that settled it — because if you broke your word, everyone would know you broke your word.

There was also a deeper sense of community. My Aunt Virginia was a historian, she once told me a story about working at her first job at the Parkersburg National Bank, during the Great Depression. The bank manager came to her one day and handed her a list. “Here are twenty-one people we’re going to have to foreclose on,” he said, “because they’re not making their payments.” She looked at the names and said, “Hold on a second. These people all belong to the First Christian Church, where I belong and where you go. So you’re telling me I should go to people who are poor, but who are in church every Sunday and tell them we’re taking their home? Because they didn’t make a payment? They’re only as good to you as the payments they make? How do you think you’re going to feel walking into that church after you’ve taken twenty-one families’ homes — probably more than a hundred people? Are you going to feel like a good Christian? Is that following Christ? Would Christ say, go forth and repossess the house? No.”

She said, “I’m not going to do it.” “Then I’ll fire you.” “So fire me.” “You’ll never find another job.” “There are no jobs anyway. I can go live in the country with my sisters and brothers on the farm. But I will not take something from someone who has nothing.” And he backed off. And as my mother later put it, Virginia did the right thing, because she was secure in the knowledge that even when you risk your own job, you do the right thing for yourself as a moral and ethical person.

My aunt had never heard of Sophocles, but she had just lived out the oldest drama in Western literature. In the play Antigone, written nearly twenty-five centuries ago, a young woman defies the king’s decree in order to honor a higher and unwritten law, and she accepts the cost of doing so. That is precisely what conscience is: the willingness to obey the law written on the heart even when the law written on paper — or handed to you on a banker’s list — commands otherwise. The Romans had a single word for the glue that held their republic together: fides, good faith, the kept promise, the honored handshake. When fides dies, contracts multiply, lawyers prosper, and trust quietly withers. My hometown ran on fides. It had almost no need for the rest.

So here is what I did not see growing up: I did not see stress-related illness. I saw poor people who adapted and still made their lives a quality life, even though they were poor. I saw almost everyone who wanted to work hold a job. They weren’t earning much, but they earned enough to pay for the house, to put good food on the table, to own a car, to keep some savings, and to carry no debt.

And yet we called those people backward. Illiterate. They didn’t go to college — that part is true. I was the first person in my family to go to college, even though I had engineers among my relatives, the Gabriels. And yet I learned more about life from that common, ‘everyday experiences of life’ world than from anything else, and it gave me the security to believe I would be able to do all right when I came to New York. I grew up among working people. Most homes were a thousand, twelve hundred square feet. But the people were happy, because they knew what they were doing, they knew where they belonged, and they were content with it. Was it perfect? No. They drank. They smoked. They ate a lot of bad food. They didn’t exercise. Many of the beliefs they carried were built on superstition and misguided information handed down from earlier generations.

But now look at our college graduates today. Officials at Berkeley have been asking for help because layer upon layer of administration has, by their own account, degraded the student learning experience to the point where many students are not proficient in English, in math, or in other basic subjects. I remember going out there years ago to film the molecular biologist Dr. Peter Duesberg — Berkeley was then considered one of the finest, most liberal campuses in America. Brilliant work came out of there, as it did from Caltech and UCLA. Now look at them.

And look at how little the average teenager knows today, or the average person in their twenties and thirties. Too many Americans have become insecure precisely because we no longer know how to act in the real world — how to function, how to reason, how to exercise sensibility and common sense. It has been a slow process, but it is here now. The phone has become the third hand, the feed has become the inner monologue, and the artificial intelligence that writes the term paper has become the substitute for the mind that used to do the thinking.

And mind you, during the Great Depression there were no free handouts. The only help you got came when a church gave you food, or when neighbors and cooperatives pitched in to help one another. But we survived it. We survived the Great Depression and we survived World War II. That sense of security, that fundamental understanding of how to live, was given to all of us, the baby boomers. We gave it to our children. And then, for many, those doors began to close. People detached themselves from the family — from the ethics of the family, the morality of the family, the character-building of the family. The new creed became: if you want to get ahead, take everything off the table.

It is worth remembering what that generation actually walked through. The Dust Bowl drove a quarter of a million people off their land; whole families loaded everything they owned onto a truck, as Steinbeck recorded in The Grapes of Wrath, and went west looking for work that often was not there. And still they did not come apart. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, observed that a human being can endure almost any hardship so long as the suffering has meaning — and that we collapse not under deprivation but under emptiness. Our grandparents had little, but they had meaning: faith, family, neighbors, and a place that was theirs. We have far more, and far less. We traded meaning for comfort, and then wondered why comfort never made us secure.

Just look at what happened in the markets recently. A company that lost billions of dollars in a single year can become one of the most valuable enterprises on earth, its valuation soaring into the trillions and minting thousands of new multimillionaires overnight — many of them people who were betting against it. What does it say when a person can be worth a trillion dollars and still be insecure? Because I believe all of these people — the hedge-fund managers, the equity partners, everyone who needs other people’s money in order to feel secure — will never feel secure. And, unfortunately, insecure people make foolish mistakes that, in an earlier time, someone would have caught. Someone would have said, “Hold on a second. What is the likely outcome of what you’re doing? Step back and look forward.” Instead, they take shortcuts. They make every kind of assumption. They lie to themselves — and so they surround themselves with people who lie to them. There is no security in any of it.

This is an ancient lesson wearing modern clothes. Two thousand years ago Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that “it is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” The Stoics understood what our hedge-fund managers have forgotten: that wealth is not measured by what you accumulate but by what you no longer need. Epictetus, who had been a slave before he became a philosopher, taught that the only real security is found in knowing the difference between what is within our power and what is not. Your craving, your fear, your own judgments — these are yours to govern. The market, the headline, the opinion of strangers — these never were. The man worth a trillion dollars who still cannot sleep has simply staked his peace on the one thing he can never control: the next number on the screen.

There is a story about Diogenes, the philosopher who lived in a clay jar and owned almost nothing. When Alexander the Great stood before him and offered to grant any wish in the world, Diogenes asked only that the conqueror step aside, because he was blocking the sunlight. Alexander said afterward that, were he not Alexander, he would wish to be Diogenes. The most powerful man on earth envied the most contented one. In twenty-three centuries, nothing about us has changed.

And what do you make of a child who can say, “There was a camp two hours upstate, but I didn’t want to get on a bus. My parents sure as hell didn’t want me to get on a bus with other kids. Do you realize how embarrassing, how humiliating that would be for my father and my mother — famous, rich, powerful people who got me into the private schools, got me the tutors, told me it was fine to cheat, fine to let the AI write my thesis? Can you imagine if I had to be seen with normal kids on a bus going to camp? No. My parents got me a private jet. Of course there’s no airport near the camp, so they got me a limousine to pick me up at the private field, and by the time I check in and fly and get picked up, the two-hour trip has become a five-hour trip. But they paid twenty thousand dollars just for me to be there. And we got a gourmet chef — we’re not going to rough it. We want a bidet. We want a toilet indoors. We want someone to cook and someone to clean, so we can spend the whole day gossiping and checking our phones every five seconds.”

Too many children are like that. Almost everyone in the camp. There are a few exceptions, but nobody pays them any attention. So is this one isolated case, or is it a thousand cases? It is everywhere in America. People are so deeply insecure that they have to show you how important they are — and that importance, in their minds, is what makes them relevant. And being relevant today means being someone others feel they must acknowledge. So acknowledgment by others has become more important than life itself. That is where the lack of ethics, the lack of concern, the lack of spiritual motivation keeps us making the wrong choices.

But let us go through all of this in detail now — because it did not start yesterday.

Our society reveres high-level achievers. But rarely do we ask, what is the purpose of achieving all that? What are you trying to prove? What’s missing in your life for you to devote so much of your time to this success chase? Why do you always need more?

During the 1980s a large portion of the baby boom generation was engaged in doing as much with their education and careers and lifestyles as they could. But they never stopped to think whether life had a purpose outside of attaining things. They never realized that they were covering up an insecurity.

The symptoms were there — the workaholism, the marijuana and or cocaine use, the spending that got people into debt — but no one saw the signs. Society welcomed these high-level achievers, and the baby boomers themselves didn’t think anything was wrong with their approach to life. People who are succeeding at whatever they are doing generally don’t see themselves as dysfunctional. To the contrary, they congratulate themselves on taking every opportunity that comes their way.

What legacy have these people left? Today, every major corporation in America — from the old industrial giants like IBM and AT&T to the modern tech titans like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with the chemical and pharmaceutical companies — is eliminating tens of thousands of jobs at a stroke, a process now accelerated by automation and artificial intelligence. People are trying to save money and stop buying things they don’t need. People are learning some hard lessons. They’re trimming down.

The people who lost their homes, went into bankruptcy, and became loaded down with excessive debt are very insecure people. A lot of them have gone into recovery programs — self-help and twelve-step programs and therapy — to understand why they didn’t take time for themselves, their families, and their physical, emotional, and spiritual health. They’re analyzing why they spent all their time making money.

They were substituting money for self-esteem. It made them feel secure. It made them feel that they were somebody. But it doesn’t work that way — not in the long run.

Guess who really had self-esteem. Guess who wasn’t insecure. Guess who wasn’t spending money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need just to prove they were okay. The people we thought were the losers, the people we thought weren’t hip and stylish, weren’t the shakers and breakers of the world — our Depression-era families, our aging moms and dads. When the boom hit they didn’t sell their homes to get new ones. They were happy with the homes they had. Yet many were insecure because of the eleven years of the Great Depression. But they became more stable from those years, appreciating everything they had because of what they endured.

As a result, these people own their own mortgage-free homes today. They’re able to live off modest incomes and have money in the bank. They can enjoy their lives and spend quality time with one another.

A lot of the baby boomers with their MBAs, after all is said and done, have less financial stability than their parents. It goes to show that money is just a substitute for the security people feel they need. When security is lacking, money is spent to fill the void. When security is there, money is not used to prove anything. It’s seen in a different, more utilitarian, perspective.

How Did You Entertain Yourself Before You Had Money?

A friend of mine confided in me that he wasn’t happy because he was broke. “What used to make you happy before you had money?” I asked. We spoke for awhile, and I realized that it wasn’t the lack of money that was making him unhappy; it was his mindset. I reminded him that if you don’t have money to entertain yourself, you’ve still got you.

Think about the enjoyable times you’ve had without money. What did you do? Perhaps you engaged in hobbies or spent time reading. Sixty percent of all Americans never read a book after high school, and thirty percent read only one book a year. 42% of college graduates never read another book after college and the rest only average two book a year. They stop reading because they don’t have to; they forget how enjoyable reading is. Today the problem has only deepened: the average adult now spends several hours a day staring at a phone, trading the quiet pleasure of a book for the endless scroll of a feed that leaves them more agitated, not less.

Blaise Pascal diagnosed our condition more than three hundred years ago when he wrote, in the Pensées, that all of humanity’s problems stem from a single inability: the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. We have since built an entire civilization devoted to never having to. And yet the people who seem most at peace are almost always those who have made friends with their own company. Cicero said that if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. He was not talking about real estate. He was naming the two inexhaustible forms of wealth — the living world outside your window and the life of the mind within — neither of which can be downsized, repossessed, or taken from you in a market crash.

Without money, you may have spent more time with friends or family. Maybe you traveled and played. Most people need more time for play.

List ways to enjoy life without money.

How Does a Lack of Security Affect You?

The psychologist Abraham Maslow placed security near the very base of his hierarchy of human needs, just above food and shelter, and beneath love, esteem, and the self-actualization we all imagine we are chasing. His insight was simple and profound: a frightened animal cannot grow. When the ground beneath you feels unstable, every higher faculty narrows and bends toward mere survival. So before we speak of purpose or creativity or love, we must ask honestly how the absence of security quietly distorts each room of the house we live in.

Relationships

When you lack security within yourself, your relationships suffer. You feel victimized, depressed, and fearful. Somehow, you think you’re not worthy, and that comes across to others.

You may place more emphasis on material success and your image than on people. Being yourself and relating honestly is not good enough. You brag about your children: “My son is a doctor.” You ask friends, “How much did your engagement ring cost?” or “How much did that car set you back?” You judge people by how much they have and what they can do for you. You talk about money all the time. You think, “I shouldn’t be happy and playing. I should be earning more money to have more security.”

Where You Live

A lot of people refrain from moving to a new locale because they want to maintain a certain lifestyle and stay connected to the people they know. Giving that up provokes anxiety. It means readjusting their self-image.

It becomes especially difficult to lower one’s standard of living. Today, because of the economic situation, we have more people going from middle class to lower middle class than ever before, but downscaling is not easy to do if you identify yourself with how you live.

Scheduling

When you feel secure you schedule your time differently than you do when you feel insecure.

When you feel secure, you plan time for personal growth. You make time for play, relating, introspection, meditation or prayer, joy, and friendship. You organize your day around what is essential to your happiness.

When you feel insecure you will generally devote each day to earning money. The trouble appears when you start giving up all your time in pursuit of the dollar and you neglect your family and friends. You don’t get to see your children grow. Before you know it, they’re gone. Life loses its meaning. One day you wake up and look in the mirror and you’re old. You wonder where the years have gone. You regret not having used your time more wisely.

Time is a precious commodity; in fact, it’s priceless. So do something with your time that acknowledges its value. If you enjoy art, spend an afternoon visiting a museum. If you enjoy music, go to a concert. Make time for friends. Have the confidence to live your day in a way that will enhance your life.

When you feel insecure you cannot fully experience life. You lack confidence and are afraid to take risks.

Society encourages this risk-fearing attitude. You’re supposed to maintain the status quo, to work for monetary success and never see possibilities beyond that. You are expected to become addicted to the things that money can buy and go into debt over them.

If you’re like most people, you buy into this prescribed way of life because it’s supposed to make you happy. Instead, though, it makes you less and less free, and the very things you thought would make you happy keep you imbalanced.

To be free, you need to go outside the boundaries of predictability and try something completely new. No one can tell you how far you’re supposed to go or what you’re supposed to feel. There’s no feedback; you just have to experience and become the architect of your life.

The existentialists called this the vertigo of freedom. Kierkegaard wrote that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” — that the sheer openness of our possibilities is what frightens us back into the safe and the predictable. Sartre put it more starkly still: we are “condemned to be free,” sentenced to author our own lives whether we wish to or not, with no script handed down and no one else to blame. Most people, terrified of that blank page, hand the pen to someone else — an employer, a fashion, a feed, a crowd. But the page is yours. It was always yours. To refuse to write on it is itself a choice, and usually the saddest one a person ever makes.

Examine how completely you experience and enjoy the following areas of your life:

Sex

When you feel secure about yourself, you are free to experience your sexuality. You are willing to try things that you wouldn’t otherwise try.

You are never told to have happy sex. No two people think of sex in the same way — differing perceptions are based on the messages received from parents, religious authorities, friends, teachers, and the various media. Confusion occurs when what should be a pleasurable experience between two consenting adults is tainted with fear on one side and guilt on the other: fear because what you’re experiencing is condemned by parents, religion, and society, which causes shame and brings up childhood guilt because “good little boys and girls don’t do that.” Which in turn creates an artificial constraint — a sort of psychic chastity. How much more would you do or allow yourself to feel if you were not constrained by fear? In my experience, most people live with far less sexual pleasure than they are capable of and sublimate their passion by bingeing romantic dramas on a streaming service, consuming an endless supply of online pornography, or obsessing over the carefully curated lives and love affairs of influencers and reality-television celebrities. Whereas someone with a healthy, fulfilled sex life will be much more interested in his or her own experience than in that of other people, most repressed individuals will pay obscene amounts of attention to, and lavish endless clicks and likes upon, the frequently exhibitionistic displays of strangers, in order to relive their own fantasies and pleasures vicariously.

So, after experiencing pleasure followed by guilt, what now? Should you deny the pleasure? Who could you tell? Those who will listen are more likely to listen to your stories with a feeling of envy or jealousy, and then adopt the moral high ground, perhaps admonishing you — but probably bad-mouthing you and backstabbing you. There is nothing worse than this sort of betrayal of trust. It might be better, I think sometimes, to put everything on video — call it the “No More Confidences Channel.” Because everyone seems ready to betray everyone else, especially when a tabloid site or some viral gossip account is ready to buy the story and broadcast it to millions. It makes you realize that you’d better not share anything you don’t want others to know about — otherwise, chances are that everyone will know, sooner or later.

Could you imagine suddenly having the freedom to experience sex the way you want to instead of playing by the rules? You could explore and let go of all the preconditioned notions of how sex should affect you. You could stop thinking about what’s right or wrong. You would no longer be limited by what your class says you can do. Instead, you would express the feelings you have without fear of condemnation.

Creativity

When you feel secure you are free to express and experience creativity. There are no limits to what you can do. Don’t acknowledge limits just because you are told to. They’ll keep you locked in a nonproductive mode. Decide what feels right to you. If I were to follow the norm I’d be sleeping eight hours, even though I don’t need to. I’d have less time to create. I also take certain nutrients during training for a faster recovery. If I were to listen to the advice of physicians who say that nutrition doesn’t matter, I would be limiting myself as an athlete.

If you accept limits imposed on you, you lose your creativity and spontaneity. You never go beyond artificial boundaries. Ask yourself what limits keep you from being who you want to be and remove those constraints from your life. Give yourself what you need in order to be more creative.

Intellect

Intellectual freedom allows your mind to process and understand new concepts. You discard fixed notions of how things should be and start looking at things from an enlightened, expanded perspective. You are open to seeing things the way they are and are not limited to a biased viewpoint.

I watched an old television show featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci who said megavitamins have nothing to do with health. They don’t help the immune system, he said, therefore they cannot help people with AIDS. I’m sure he believes that, even though it is a false statement. The problem is that, intellectually, he’s not free. His beliefs are fixed. He thinks that only chemotherapy or a vaccine can stop the AIDS virus because he hasn’t been open to looking at the evidence to the contrary that’s been piling up.

I would offer a different perspective from that of Dr. Fauci, one based on the evidence provided by the experience of many individuals. From this I can see that antioxidants have made a great deal of difference in AIDS treatment, both in terms of delaying the onset of AIDS from HIV and lessening the devastating effects of the illness. But in order to appreciate the value of antioxidants, you have to approach the subject using a different type of therapeutic model than the one Dr. Fauci is familiar with. And it’s not unusual for a person to be down on what he’s not up on.

Decades later, that same Dr. Fauci became the most recognizable public-health official in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic — and to my mind the very same intellectual rigidity was on display. Once again, the entire conversation was narrowed down to pharmaceuticals and vaccines, while the role of nutrition, vitamin D, a robust immune system, and basic metabolic health was brushed aside as irrelevant, or treated as dangerous even to bring up. I am not here to tell you what to believe. I am telling you that a free mind keeps asking questions precisely when it is told that “the science is settled.” Settled science is a contradiction in terms. Science is not a fixed body of conclusions handed down from authority; it is a method of perpetual inquiry, and the moment it stops questioning itself it stops being science at all.

People have a mistaken notion that as long as you have a degree — an M.D. or a Ph.D. — you automatically have intellectual insight. That is absolutely wrong. I’ve met people who have never been to college who possess a greater sense of reasoning and problem solving abilities than people holding advanced degrees. They’re not confined to one belief; they’re breaking through old paradigms and establishing new ones. And that’s how we progress intellectually. That’s how Einstein dissolved the notion of Newtonian physics and developed quantum physics. That’s how Enrico Fermi was able to split the atom. Their intellects weren’t limited by the traditional thinking of their time.

Middle-class people are not encouraged to be intellectual although society says upper-middle-class and upper-class people can be. In truth, of course, intellect has no class. Never believe that you are as smart as people have told you. Believe you are smarter.

Travel

We can travel anywhere. We can see our own city. We can see our own country. We can see the world. But I know people living in New York City who have never seen what New York has to offer. They limit what they’ll experience.

When you free your mind then you free yourself to experience any place, and you get a completely new perspective on life.

Learning About Other Beliefs

When you are free to experience other beliefs you get to learn from people with a completely different outlook on life. That will either enhance or challenge your own beliefs.

In order to be open to experience other beliefs, you have to be willing to let go of your own fixed ideas. Being closed-minded is a very dangerous thing. It causes you to become anti-cultural and nationalistic. It makes you unable to benefit from other cultures. If you visit other countries but see only the tourist attractions, you’re missing the most important aspect of travel — getting to know people who lead lives different from yours.

Do You Equate Security with Being Overly Responsible?

Most people believe that if they have failed to meet their responsibilities they have failed at life. Other people look down on them and criticize them. I expected so-and-so, they say, and you let me down. You didn’t provide. You’re supposed to be this, you’re supposed to be that.

Now the person feels a tremendous sense of guilt. Now he or she is motivated for the wrong reasons: guilt and fear. That drives him into desperation and frequently traumatizes him. It ties him up so he can’t do anything, or it drives him to succeed in ways that are excessive. The person may become compulsive, and addicted to appearing responsible.

How many people do you know who are overly responsible? They never know how to say no. They always take on the responsibilities of everyone else, and rarely take time out for themselves.

Are You Using Your Skills to Your Best Advantage?

A good way to find greater security and happiness is to use and develop new skills. Sometimes this means using them in creative ways. To give you an example, a graphic artist, working in a major clothing store in New York City, told me that he wanted to make a career change but that he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He said that outside of graphic arts he didn’t believe there was anything else he could do.

I helped him review his situation. He discovered that it wasn’t his skill that was making him unhappy. He enjoyed being a graphic artist and working with computers. What was wearing him down were the schedules and deadlines. He needed to take his basic skills and use them in a completely different environment, one in which he could do what he wanted in a way that honored his time and energy.

As a result of our conversation, he started traveling around the United States to find the place in which he could best live and work. It took him three months to decide to settle in Texas. Then he investigated how he could best adapt his skills to his new environment.

Today this person works with Native Americans, helping them to preserve their history and culture in computer art designs. His is a unique and special business that combines Native American knowledge and one person’s skills.

This man is as happy as he can be. When he visited me recently, he told me his business is thriving. His pleased customers tell others of his work, and people from many walks of life ask him to make their ideas into artwork.

Money is no longer his main motive for working. He loves his new environment. He sets his own schedule and has more time for himself. I asked him how much money he needs and he told me he needs just enough to get by. He said, “I’m happy being out there with people and animals. I’m happy just talking, reading, giving time to myself. I never in my whole life lived this way. I get to do something creative and in the process help other people.”

Look at your skills and talents. Are you using them? And if you are, are you using them in the environment that best suits your needs?

Whom Do You Emulate?

Frequently, we emulate people beyond our class. That’s why we’re so preoccupied with reality-TV stars, celebrity gossip, and the carefully curated lives of social-media influencers, scrolling through their feeds and counting their followers. We look up to these models even when we know we will never live like them.

What does that tell us? It says that we don’t want to look at our own lives. We’re afraid to acknowledge our own dreams and to actualize them. We simply accept other people’s idea of how we should live if we had the resources. So we often end up living vicariously.

Plato saw this twenty-four centuries ago and gave us the image we still cannot improve upon. In his allegory of the cave, prisoners are chained so that they can see only shadows flickering on a wall, and they mistake those shadows for the whole of reality. We have merely changed the wall; now it glows in the palm of the hand, and the shadows are the curated lives of people we will never meet. The philosopher René Girard spent his career arguing that nearly all human desire is borrowed — that we do not want things for themselves so much as we want them because someone we admire appears to want them. Every advertiser and every influencer has always known this in their bones. The only escape is to turn around, walk out of the cave, and discover what you actually want when no one at all is watching.

How Does the Struggle for Security Affect You?

Striving for security prevents you from taking chances. You’re never willing to do anything you’re not accustomed to because that would make you feel insecure.

I remember being interviewed on a television talk show by a physician and a reporter. The physician asked me, “Gary, what would you change about the American diet?” I said I would eliminate caffeine and sugar.

People called in from all over America and asked me what was left, to which I replied, “Are the only things in your life caffeine and sugar? There’s so much more to life than what you eat and drink. You’ve got to realize that it is necessary to let go of the negative in order to create something positive.” The physician later said to me, “People are just too lazy to change. They’re just not going to do it.”

It’s true, but it has more to do with insecurity than laziness. People feel so insecure that they won’t even change the bad foods in their diet. They eat meals day after day that result in symptoms such as puffy eyes, indigestion, diarrhea, gas, and arthritic pains. But they won’t give up the bad foods for a healthier diet because repeating habits they’re used to makes them feel secure.

Are You Prepared to Make Your Life Simpler?

What are you willing to do to make your life simpler? Take an inventory of the different areas of your life.

Relationships

Stop fighting. Stop trying to make relationships work. It’s nonsense to work on another person’s psyche, to mold and readjust your partner, to make compromises. If my feet are a size ten, I’m not going to wear a size six shoe and cripple myself in the process. A relationship either works or it doesn’t.

When you’re with someone you know if it feels right. If it doesn’t, you need to look for someone else. It’s that simple. There is no scarcity of people. Our ethic says, you made your bed, now lie in it. People think that because they’ve become involved with someone they’ve got to remain in the relationship for the rest of their lives no matter how good or bad the relationship is.

What happens when you adopt this attitude? Well, you may stay together and try to find ways to distract yourself from your unhappiness. One of you becomes an alcoholic, the other becomes fat and depressed. You numb out in front of the television and doomscroll your phone for hours. You have an occasional affair and feel guilty about it. You’re married and you feel bound by the law.

Why not feel good about being by yourself? Be free to explore life and the experiences you want. If you meet someone and it works out, fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine also. No one is in the wrong. Let’s stop blaming. Let’s look at what’s right.

There are no shortages of people to be happy with in this world. Somewhere out there are people who complement your personality. If you make your life uncomplicated and meet someone else who is uncomplicated, you’ll have the basis for a good relationship.

Possessions

In order to make your life simpler, you’ve got to give things up. Make a list of what you’re willing to give up to make your life less complicated. What do you own that you don’t really use? Why not just give away the things in your life that you’re not using? Give it away, throw it away, or use it. But stop cluttering. Clutter keeps you from being free.

What Risks Have You Taken in Each Important Area of Your Life?

Your growth is directly related to the challenges you give yourself. But challenges entail risk, and change, and you may be afraid of what those changes might mean. Maybe other people’s attitudes toward you will change. Maybe your attitude toward other people will change. Maybe the circumstances of your existence will change. All of these possibilities may make you feel insecure, and if they do you may avoid risks at all costs.

An example of appropriate risks: Is your schedule very predictable? Then sit down and make up a brand-new schedule where every hour will be done differently. Instead of TV and the phone, go for a power walk or a bike ride or take a fitness class. If you don’t know how, you can get lessons.

At work, if a person gossips and it’s bothering you, take a risk. Sit down privately. Are they aware of the effects of gossip on everyone, and how it affects you? You have no right to ask them to change their behavior to meet your needs. You do have the right to let that person know you don’t like it and you won’t accept it.

Instead of working over lunch, take your full lunchtime to go out each day and try a different type of food. Sit with people you don’t know to try to create new friendships.

Instead of talking to friends and family about problems, have device-free nights when you power down the phone. Plan your evening in advance. One night a week, enjoy some cultural event — possibly a play, folk festival, orchestra, or cabaret. Plan a night of something — bowling or billiards — something out of character — pottery or glassblowing — become a Big Brother or Big Sister one night a week. In short, take some risks. These are minor things that break old habits and routines, and in turn enlarge life-enhancing perceptions and expand your reality base. This, in time, gives you confidence to take bigger risks, including career moves, possibly selling a home you’re a prisoner to because of upkeep and maintenance, and how you may really want to see other places in America but can’t afford to.

What Can You Depend On?

In the world we live in, nothing is guaranteed. Human beings have trouble with this concept. The problem is, we don’t like to think that something we consider permanent could be tenuous. Pink slips are handed daily to people who thought they had secure jobs. The biggest mistake most of these people have made is living beyond their means. The first thing they generally do upon being laid off is use their savings to maintain a stupid lifestyle they no longer need. Then they borrow from their friends and families and the bank. Now they’re in debt.

Here the ancients were wiser than we are. Heraclitus taught that you cannot step into the same river twice, because the river is always flowing and so are you. The Buddhists built an entire path around a single word, anicca, impermanence — the recognition that everything which arises also passes away, and that our suffering comes from gripping what was never ours to keep. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the most powerful empire on earth, reminded himself each morning in his Meditations that loss is nothing but change, and that change is the very thing the universe most loves. If you build your security on things that cannot change — a job that lasts forever, a house that holds its value, a body that never ages — you have built upon sand. Build instead on what no one can take: your character, your resourcefulness, your capacity to begin again.

Learning to be comfortable with less can ease much of the burden of life’s stress. If you are laid off, get rid of everything and start over. Starting over is a whole new and exciting experience.

When I went to my high school reunion, many of my ex-classmates told me how their neighborhoods had changed for the worse. I asked why they didn’t move and many replied that they couldn’t leave because they had always lived in the same house or on the same street. It was home. They preferred to remain prisoners in their unsafe homes rather than give up the familiar.

Is any square footage worth your emotional health? It’s just square footage. The energy that you have when you’re there is what makes it special, and you can put out that same energy anywhere. You, and not the house, are the energy. But we give our homes a life of their own. We give them power that they shouldn’t have. A house is an inanimate object that we make more powerful and controlling than it should be. We indebt ourselves to stone, brick, or wood. It’s absurd when you think about it.

We need to have the willingness to let things go and say, thank you for allowing me to enjoy that when I did. Now it’s time to move on.

Cultivating Resourcefulness

Did you ever think about what you should have done but didn’t? Have you thought about what opportunities you missed because of something you neglected to do?

Don’t beat yourself up about what you didn’t do. Learn from your mistakes. The next time an opportunity arises, be willing to take some risks. And if an opportunity isn’t there, go out and make it happen. That’s what people who succeed do.

The majority of people want someone to make their lives work for them. In the middle class, for instance, people are waiting for someone else to make things the way they used to be. They want to live like Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers did. They’re waiting for the politicians to give them back safe neighborhoods. They’re looking for government or industry to give them a secure job so that they can have a nice backyard with flowers and swings for the kids. They’re waiting for someone to intervene and make it all nice again. But that will never happen.

It’s fruitless to sit around and wait for someone to come and rescue you. You have to take whatever skills and assets you have, network with others, go to groups that support and strengthen you, and make life happen. You can either make your life work or become victimized.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the American gospel on this in his essay Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Envy, he said, is ignorance; imitation is suicide. There is an older version still, in one of Aesop’s fables: a wagoner whose cart sinks to the axle in mud falls to his knees and begs Hercules to save him. Hercules appears only to tell him to put his own shoulder to the wheel and goad his oxen first — and then to pray. The gods, the fable concludes, help those who help themselves. Twenty-six centuries later, no one has found a way around it.

Do You Go into Debt to Impress Others?

Are you concerned about projecting a certain image? Do you buy clothes you can’t afford or don’t need just to be fashionable? Do you impress people with the size of your house? Do you feel you have to live in a certain neighborhood for reasons of status? Do you buy a seventy-thousand-dollar SUV when a twenty-five-thousand-dollar vehicle is all you really need? Do you travel to where you want to go, or do you visit only fashionable places that will impress your friends?

So many people are wrapped up in maintaining an image. Recently I was working out in my health club with two people from my running group. The owner walked in and said, “We have rules in this building. Only two people in here at a time. There’s also a dress code.” I said, “We’re wearing appropriate workout attire.” (We had on shorts, tank tops, and tennis shoes.) He said, “It’s a little Central Parkish. You look like you’re running out there.” I said, “No, we’re in here working out.” He said, “We like things that don’t look so down there in the park.” “In other words, I should wear a Calvin Klein top and Armani shorts?” “Yeah,” he said, “something like that.” I said, “Are you going to have fashion police come and arrest us if we don’t dress right?”

More than a century ago the economist Thorstein Veblen gave this behavior its permanent name: conspicuous consumption. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, he observed that the wealthy buy not to meet their needs but to broadcast their standing — to be seen consuming. What he could not have imagined is a world in which everyone, at every income, performs the identical ritual for an audience of strangers on a glowing screen. Rousseau had warned of it even earlier, drawing his famous line between amour de soi, the simple love of self that wants only to live well, and amour-propre, the restless vanity that must constantly compare, outrank, and impress. The first leads to contentment. The second is a hunger that no purchase in history has ever filled.

When you think about where your money goes, you start to realize how many things, large and small, you do simply to project an image. Think about it: the purchase of many things in your life may have had nothing to do with making you happy.

Why not dress the way you want, live where you want, be with people you like to be with, and share in a relationship that is healthy and happy? Security isn’t based on keeping the status quo and impressing those around you. True security lies in filling your waking moments with the activities that please you. When you make your choices from an inner peace, a calming effect comes over you. You are not allowing fear to lead you back into predictable, self-defeating patterns. Finally, it’s your life, so try to honor it. Security comes from making appropriate changes and having the confidence to stick with them.

In the end, the question of security turns out to be the oldest question of the good life, asked by every wisdom tradition that ever took root in human soil. Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, two and a half thousand years ago, that “he who knows he has enough is rich,” and that the sage is content with what he has, and so the whole world belongs to him. My neighbors in Parkersburg — in their thousand-square-foot homes, with their victory gardens and their unlocked doors — were rich in exactly that way, though not one of them would ever have reached for the word. They had simply made their peace with enough.

We have forgotten how. We have surrounded ourselves with everything and secured nothing, because we went looking for security in the one place it has never once been found — outside ourselves. It was always an inside job. It always will be.

The cherry tree is still there. The first cherries are coming out. And the only thing standing between you and the climb is the courage to stop performing a life and finally begin to live one.