What if there is no right way to live

How can you tell that all you’ve ever achieved isn’t just random?

This monkey must be good at surfing because he’s doing it so well. I wonder advice it has about surfing?

Even my secular friends who don’t believe in any kind of god or spiritual component to the cosmos believe there is structure to the live we live. On a level one step below the workings of an indifferent universe, there’s human society, and we created it ourselves. That society wasn’t constructed with universal consensus on how it should work, but nonetheless it was constructed by us for us. So maybe this little pocket of human civilization we live in is not as random and arbitrary as the rest of the universe.

On Medium, the website I’m writing this now, you can see countless posts with titles like, “Nine steps towards more productivity,” “Why your habits are holding you back,” “How to attain genuine happiness,” and similar things. They aren’t like instructions for building model airplanes or recipes for cake where following steps exactly will get you to specific end results. It’s more like coaching for sports or tips for video games, where they give you a basis of understanding that is supposed to improve the odds of getting good results from your efforts.

Why is the path to success more like sports and less like cake? Whether you define success as some big endeavor that leaves your mark in history, or just finding an…