Your User's Manual by Anderson Silver - Summary & Quotes

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Three Takeaways

Note: The following are excerpts from Your User's Manual: A Guide for Purpose and an Anxiety Free Life in the 21st Century by Anderson Silver.

1. Life is Transience

To truly recognize the fragility of your time here is humbling. Now use that perspective to identify what is truly important, and what is unimportant. With this perspective, take a moment to think of a few unimportant, or trivial matters you used to stress over, that really does not merit any of your precious time being wasted on after realizing how very little of it you actually have. A small mental exercise you can do is to imagine you knew for sure you were going to die at the end of the month. How many things you currently worry about just became unimportant in this scenario? So why would changing this expiration date to 1 year, 10 years or 100 years change what is important?

Do not fear death. The anxiety that came with the sudden realization of the shortness of the remainder of your life is not from the prospect of death. The anxiety is from not knowing whether you are making the most of your time while you are here. Are you missing out? Are you wasting your precious time? These are uncertainties, and only uncertain things cause anxiety. Death is a sure thing. It is simply a matter of time, not if. To fear something that is assured to happen is ludicrous and a self-inflicted punishment. You will die. This will happen. You have no choice over this as death is a universal law for all life. What you can do however is use that knowledge of death and impermanence to better live your life today. Do not fear death, quite the opposite remember that you are dying every day, so as to motivate you to live a full life while you have it. The Stoics lived by this mantra and embodied it in two words: Memento Mori. Remember death. Remember impermanence. Reminding yourself of this inescapable and unavoidable truth regularly will help you immediately see what is important and truly merits your time, and what is trivial and does not deserve to tax your precious time.

Research shows that mammals have an average set number of heartbeats for their lifetimes. Giraffes average about 680 million heartbeats in their lifetime, rabbits about 970 million, monkeys about 1.5 billion, and us humans get about 2.2 billion. For humans, however, with the advent of modern medicine, we can push the general estimate to about 3 billion. Stop for a moment, close your eyes, and listen to your heart beating. Each beat brings you closer to the end. Tick tock. Never forget this and let this motivate you to live a better life today and for the rest of your days.

The day you die is not death. Every day is death. Every day is another day gone by that you will not get back. The day you die is simply the last death. But every day is death. The past is gone. You can learn from it, but there is no option to change any of it. The future holds a script for you, which you do not yet know and cannot know, control or change. So do not live in the memories of the past or the hopes of the future. You are dying right now, this is a fact. And so live as if you are dying right now. Use this freeing reality to unburden yourself from the trivial matters in life that you used to worry about. See things in a proper perspective (what truly is important and what is not) and live every day, as opposed to living in memories and hopes. Live right now.

2. Upgrading Our Code

Daniel Kahneman wrote a book entirely on the topic of knee-jerk response versus the rational ordinary response of a nobler kind. He referred to the inherent “autopilot” responses as System One, and the more thought out and logical responses as System Two. Freud referred to these as the Id and the Ego, whereby the Id controls your intuitive instinctive reaction, and the Ego dictates your more controlled and thought out responses. Many have studied and discussed the topic of the Lizard brain versus the Mammal brain, and these studies go far beyond simply responses to events. For the purposes of your reflections, however, simply understand that there is a discourse within you. There is the part of you that is rational and responds clearly, virtuously and compassionately. Then there is the side of you that is emotional and badly coded. Not badly coded in that you have emotions, as emotions are a part of being human and unavoidable. But badly coded in that you instinctively respond based on emotions and said response may be contrary to what your rational ordinary mind would have done.

This bad coding in you can be changed. Through practice you can correct your intuitive mind to act in a way that is in conformity with your rational ordinary mind. Through practice, by reminding yourself of everything you have read, and everything you will read here, through their application and repetition the bad coding can slowly be changed. But you have to start somewhere. Remind yourself you spent years learning, going to school and absorbing information in your day to day life in order to feed and train your rational mind. You must also spend some time feeding and training your intuitive mind. A good starting point is realizing events are not excuses to act in a base way. They are not an excuse to let out any harbouring negative feelings you have towards the world. Everything that happens is already in the past and therefore should not have any bearing on your responses or actions in the present. A good perspective is a foundation for all Stoic behaviour, which is that only moral good or virtue, is good; and only moral evil or vice is an evil.

This must mean that what happens external to your thoughts and mind should have no bearing whatsoever on your state of mind. Said otherwise, the choice of your state of mind, of which you clearly want tranquility as opposed to anxiety, is quite literally and entirely up to you in how you respond to the external events. Epictetus was known to tell his auditors that eliminating all "Alas!" and "How unhappy I am!" from one's life is critical. Repeat the good dogma. Write it down. Read it. Do this multiple times a day and for the rest of your life. The pursuit of tranquility is a lifelong journey, and each repetition of your dogmas, creed or mantra (whatever you want to call it) is a step towards the end of this path. Each time you face, what could have otherwise been an unwelcome event, with a newfound embrace of it simply being what the universe has in store, and that it is immaterial to your state of mind, and to just go with it, you take another step down this path. Step by step you must try and become a philosopher king.

3. "Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it." - Epictetus

Do not be a preacher. You are living your life for yourself, not to educate others. You are pursuing a life of tranquility, not a life of trying to educate the people. Trying to give advice or opinions to people who do not want to hear them, disagree with them, or worse applaud and cheer them for the sake of social decorum will bring angst and afflictions along with them. Worst of all, your precious finite time would be wasted. If, however, you are approached for opinions or teachings, then you must help your fellow being. If you have been requested to educate, then you have a listening ear. A listening ear will take your teachings to heart and become a better person, thus making the world a better place. Therefore, your duty is to educate when asked to do so by a listening ear. Otherwise, do not preach to non-listeners or crowds. Your precious time should not be wasted and should be spent pursuing a tranquil life.

The pursuit of philosophy and knowledge should never stop. At all times, if you are not answering one of the few demands of the universe, you should be pursuing philosophy and knowledge with an insatiable haste, spending as much of your time as you can learning, reflecting, philosophizing. Live by your necessities. Your new found, objective basic spiritual necessities. Declutter the mind regularly. Write down your thoughts and make difficult decisions on paper to ensure you are using the most rational ordinary mind. Remind yourself of Marcus Aurelius’ three rules for a tranquil and good life:

1. Discipline of judgment – Things are as you see them, so make sure you see them rationally and objectively. Things do not affect you. Your judgment of things affect you.

2. Discipline of action – All that you say and do is always after the fact. Choose your responses and reactions such that they are virtuous, compassionate, and that they fit with your necessities.

3. Discipline of the consent to Destiny – The Universe is going to do what it does and you quite literally have no choice in the matter. When “bad” things happen, they are not actually bad. They just are. There is no fair, unfair, good, or bad because this would imply the existence of another reality where things happened differently, and that you can go to that reality. There is just the one reality, this one, and you cannot change it, so just go the way things are.

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Learn more about Your User's Manual on Amazon.

Buy Your User's Manual: Print | Kindle | Audiobook

If you enjoyed this summary, please consider buying me a coffee to caffeinate my reading sessions.