From the Introduction of YOUR BETTER SELF, a book coming out in 2025 from Liveright Press

My grandfather grew up in Galveston, Texas in the early 1900’s.  His old Victorian home did not have indoor plumbing, so the family crapped and pissed in a little shack around back they charmingly called the “small house.” This, in turn, was emptied every day by George, the driver of the equally charming “honey wagon”—when it came to their shit, my ancestors clearly liked their cutesy euphemisms.  George was an older, black man who spent his days steering a horse-drawn cart around the neighborhood, emptying vile pails of human waste into its big copper tank.  Most remarkably, Grandpa said that George always had a smile on his face.

To this day, the image of George haunts me—not in a horror movie kind of way, but in that unsettling, “how on earth did he manage it?” sort of way. Galveston is brutally hot and humid—it has the kind of climate that makes you reconsider having skin. The daily stench must have been unbearable, and I don’t even want to think about the flies.  In this swampy oven, George didn’t just have to handle his own crap (metaphorically speaking), but everyone else’s as well. Yet he did this day in, day out, and, if Grandpa’s memory serves, always with that smile. So, how on Earth did he pull off this Herculean feat?

I can imagine two different stories. In one, George is an existential hero, a Camusian Sisyphus in overalls. He started driving the honey wagon because it was the only job he could get; Texas in the early 1900s wasn’t exactly a land of equal opportunity, especially if you were Black. Maybe George had a family to support, and this was the only work he could find. But rather than wallow in despair, he’s determined to smile through the misery, transcending his horrible circumstance through sheer force of will.  So George collects the shit every day, but with a sense of pride and dignity—and maybe even a dash of joy. That’s the inspiring spin.

But there’s another version of the story that I suspect is closer to the truth. In this version, George also drives the honey wagon because it’s the only job available, but he hates it—every sweltering, stinking, fly-infested minute of it. Yet he never switches jobs because he can’t imagine an alternative.  He’s gotten so accustomed to the smell, the nausea, and the misery that it seems unavoidable. His smile isn’t a reflection of some inner peace but an emotional camouflage, a way to hide his feelings and protect his dignity from the condescension of others.  Yet beneath the smile, George suffers in silence, trapped in a shitty situation from which he can see no escape.

Oddly enough, I find myself relating to both versions of George. I’ve spent most of my life dragging around my own honey wagon, a lot of emotional baggage that I’d be much better off without.  And, like Version One George, I try to meet these challenges with a brave face and a positive attitude.  But that’s not where the story ends. For even on my best days, there’s a nagging sense that things aren’t as good as they could be.  Sometimes it’s a real funk, a palpable sense of anxiety or sadness.  But more often its a softer discontent that always hovers around the edges of my ordinary life.

And this is where Version Two of George comes into the picture. For how much of my own suffering is self-inflicted? I suspect it’s a lot. And, like George, I’m usually blind to this fact. I’m normally so compressed in my thoughts, so busy just keeping up with the drama of life, that I rarely see what’s really going on. I’ve gotten so used to pulling the honey wagon, I don’t even notice it’s there. Either way, I struggle, lost in a fog within a fog.

This is also the case for most people I know as well.  For  who among us doesn’t feel that life isn’t quite as good as it could be? Sometimes it’s an obvious woe—contracting a disease, losing your keys, or hearing your Uncle Mitch’s noxious political opinions.  But more often than this, it’s a more hushed languishing, a chronic feeling of discontent. It’s that constant hum of tension and anxiety, like a distant radio playing static, the quiet disquiet of ordinary life.  

What’s worse, we’re usually blind to this.  Like George, we may have a vague sense that something’s off and that things aren’t as good as they should be.  Yet, that’s typically as far as our self-awareness takes us. Too often, we’ve gotten so used to a compromised way of being, we can’t imagine anything else. We’ve been pulling that honey wagon for so long, we’ve forgotten that life could be any different.

But why is this the case?  Why is it so damn hard to simply be happy in the moment?

According to history’s wisest thinkers, the problem lies with our knowledge. One of these sages was none other than my high school English teacher, Mrs. Malone. She was a imposing, no-nonsense woman, the kind of person who could silence a boisterous classroom by just clearing her throat. One day, she scrawled “Know Thyself” on the blackboard. She explained that these two words contained the distilled wisdom of the ancient Greeks, those marbleized founders of Western civilization who, when not inventing democracy or wrestling in the nude, spent their time doling out cryptic advice. If we wanted to lead a meaningful and flourishing life, Mrs. Malone assured us, then we would need to know our selves.

In the midst of my own rather bumpy adolescence, I took her words to heart. And so began a decades-long quest for this elusive self, a fervent search for the golden ticket to life’s chocolate factory. I devoured courses and books on Buddhism, existentialism, and positive psychology. I sought wisdom from priests, gurus, and even Turkish rug sellers (who, oddly enough, often have a surprising amount of insight into spiritual matters). I dipped my toes into self-help, twisted myself into various yoga poses, saw a parade of therapists, dabbled in psychedelics, and even subjected myself to long, silent meditation retreats where the highlight of the day was the sound of someone’s stomach growling. In short, I ticked off every box on the spiritual seeker’s bucket list.

Yet, for all this effort, I remained unsettled. If I wasn’t chasing some new peak experience, I often felt like my life lacked meaning. Even as I was achieving professional and personal success, I was less sure of myself than ever. I was doing all the “right” things—whatever that means—but the deeper fulfillment I was grasping for always remained beyond my reach.  Like trying to catch a shadow, my self-knowledge often seemed to come up short, and this heavy, stinky honey wagon was always in tow.  Eventually, it dawned on me that there were some big problems with my quest.

First off, it turns out that the Greeks didn’t have a word that meant “self" as we know it today.  If they really carved "Know Thyself” onto the ancient temple at Delphi, as legend has it, it probably meant something more like “Know Thy Place.”  In other words, “Know Thyself” was another way of saying, “Hey, you’re about to enter a sacred building. Put down your wine, put on your best tunic, and, for Zeus’s sake, stop fooling around!”  

Now here’s the irony: “Know Thy Place” was actually great advice for the time.  In fact, for most of human history, these were probably the best three words you could live by.  Our ancestors typically existed in small groups tightly bound by custom and tradition. Famine, violence, and death were always close by.  You knew your place, you played your part, and in return, the group protected you. It wasn’t about finding your inner truth—it was about keeping the wolves at bay, sometimes literally.

But that doesn’t really apply to us today. We no longer teeter on the brink of survival—even if our recent elections make it seem that way.  Released from our ancestors’ dogmas, we now enjoy the liberty, or perhaps the burden, to figure out what makes us happy, who we should marry, and what our purpose in life ought to be. In this sense, we’re freer than at any other point in human history. And so, “Know Thy Place” has evolved into the more introspective “Know Thyself” that we hear so often today—usually from wellness gurus or that friend who’s just discovered mindfulness.  

All of this, however, still leaves us with a second problem: how exactly are we supposed to know who we are? The answer isn’t as clear as one might hope. In fact, it’s actually pretty difficult to pin down a useful definition of this self we’re supposed to know. Take Western philosophy, for example. Here we have some of history’s greatest minds—people who have spent thousands of years contemplating the meaning of existence. Surely they’d have a solid description of what we are. But in all that time, they’ve agreed on, well, practically nothing. Worse still, many of their metaphysical musings are really unclear.

Consider the case of Soren Kierkegaard. He’s one of the big names in philosophy, a deeply spiritual and earthy thinker. Yet, when it came to defining the self, he famously declared it to be “a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.” Hmm. Okay, technically that might be correct, but it doesn’t really illuminate much about our actual experience of being, aside from confirming that it’s, well, subjective. And the same goes for most other philosophers, too.

So if philosophy isn’t useful, perhaps we can find better answers in psychology.  For if anyone can tell us about the self, you’d think it would be the scientists of the mind.  Unfortunately, psychology doesn’t deliver the goods either.  Sure, it offers us thousands of experiments, brain scans, and theories, but all these exist in pristine isolation, like puzzle pieces that refuse to connect. In other words, modern psychology tends to zoom in on one tiny fragment of the picture at a time, but it’s not always clear how these fragments come together into a cohesive whole. 

Well then perhaps we should look to the great wisdom of the East? Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism have been grappling with the subtleties of existence for thousands of years. Buried within their ancient sutras is a treasure trove of insights about the human condition. Surely, they must have cracked the code on what or who we really are. But alas, even these venerable traditions can’t agree on the nature of the self—in fact, the self is the very thing that divides them. For example, the Hindus posit that the self, or atman, is a fragmentary incarnation of a greater spiritual essence, Brahman. Meanwhile, the Buddhists say the self doesn’t even exist. Their philosophy of an-atman (or non-self) is, in fact, one of the key reasons Buddhism branched off into its own separate religion.

Here then is the dilemma of our modern lives.  Before us sits all of this knowledge—ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, mystical and scientific.  All of these approaches apprehend our being in different ways and many have useful suggestions for living better.  But all this variety is also confusing.  It’s not self-evident which wisdom path is the most useful for modern life or even how they compare to each other.  Searching for self knowledge today is like asking a group of fifty people for directions and getting fifty different suggestions in fifty different languages. And no single version seems to have all the answers.  

And this was where I found myself in my mid 30s, groping about to find a better way of living.  Then, in 2003, I took a job at the University of Chicago. One of the reasons I was drawn to this intellectual mecca was their laissez-faire approach to teaching—they essentially let us design whatever courses we want for some of the brightest students around. Seizing this golden opportunity, I cobbled together a class that reflected my own eclectic interests in Buddhism, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. My wife, Thea, suggested I name it “Shit I’m Interested In,” but I opted for the more respectable title of “The Intelligible Self.”

 

I wasn’t entirely sure how the class would go, but it turned out the students really got something out of it. So, I kept offering it year after year, and it eventually became one of the most popular courses on campus. I’ve had countless students tell me how much the class changed their lives (in a good way, mind you). And, truth be told, it changed me as well. Over the past twenty years of teaching this class, I’ve stumbled upon a much better way of existing in my own skin.

Meanwhile, as word of the class spread, I found myself having conversations with a lot of curious adults who asked for book recommendations. This was a bit awkward because I didn’t have just one—I had hundreds.  So here, I thought, was an opportunity to do something helpful.  Perhaps I could write a book that brought together this scattered wisdom on how to live better.  Maybe I could combine all the insights from the world’s greatest minds with the hands on lessons I’ve developed in both my life and my class.  And so,Your Better Self was born.  

In the pages that follow, we’re going to explore what the self is, why it so often malfunctions, and what we can do to make it work better.  We’re going to investigate what’s going on behind the scenes of our ordinary awareness.  We’ll venture into the mysteries of energy, language, consciousness, and free will.  We’ll look at morality, history, and psychedelic drugs.  We’ll learn about the science behind our minds and the power of myth and story.    

And while we’ll be exploring a lot of different ideas, there is one notion that we’ll see again and again and it’s important to mention it up front because it gets to the heart of our quest:  our normal sense of self is a very unreliable guide to our being.  In fact, it’s mostly a distortion.  

Consider a simple example.  Most of us believe that there is a singular, stable person that is each of us, a “me.”  I know I normally feel this way.  There always seems to be this me that is doing all this thinking, feeling, and complaining about life.  In other words, I tend to think of my self as a solid, solitary thing.  

But we are not things, we are processes.  

The self is a collection of processes that negotiate between our life force and reality—I’ll explain this rather mystical sounding phrase in the pages ahead.  Everything that comprises us, from our most tiny cellular metabolisms to our most elevated epiphanies, are expressions of these processes.  There is no point where we are fixed in space and time.  Our bodies and thoughts are in perpetual motion, ever changing from moment to moment.  We are beings in constant motion.

My inability to see my self as a process was also why all my youthful efforts to know myself always came up short—I was thinking of myself as a solid thing that could be fully understood.  In truth, there will never be a point where we can say, “Oh, I have myself figured out, now everything will be great.”  Life doesn’t work that way.  Transcendence is an ongoing activity, not a final resting place.  The self is not a thing to be mastered, it is a process to be continually explored. 

The real secret to a flourishing life is learning how to embrace this elusive fact.  It’s about recognizing where we keep ourselves trapped, figuring out which honey wagons we’re still dragging around, and finding the courage to let them go. This is what it really means to know your self.  In the pages that follow, we’re going to find out how to do this.  Luckily, many intrepid explorers have gone before us and offer some great advice on how to do this. Your Better Self is here to guide you through the more interesting ideas and some fascinating points of interest along the way.  So I invite you to come join me on what I hope will be an illuminating and entertaining tour of this wonderfully complex, fascinating experience that we call a self.

If you would like to read more, please find a sample chapter of the book HERE