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Lost, discouraged and without perspectives — unfortunately, this is how too many people feel on this earth. There is this big hole inside our soul that we cannot fill. No matter how much stuff we buy. No matter how many experiences we accumulate. No matter how objectively good our life is. It’s still there. And it’s affecting more and more people every year.

Some thousand years ago, life was simple. You went hunting for your daily food, cooked it on a fire and then pretty much relaxed for the rest of the day (just watch a lion in the wild to get an idea). But then, we discovered farming and settled down. While more people survived due to a smoother food production function (outliers were rarer), it exposed us to a different kind of stress. Suddenly, we had much more time thinking about our lives. And things quickly became complicated with that.

1. The Divided Soul

Humans are — as far as we know — the only species on this planet that live three lives simultaneously. And judging by the recent spike of psychological issues during the past few decades, which only got worse due to the Covid crisis, we are hopelessly overstrained by it.

The very root of all our psychological problems lies in the fact that we are constantly living in three different timelines: the past, the present and the future. Depression, for example, does have its roots in living in the past. We mentally re-live situations that have already happened. We are sad because a certain something has happened to us. We worry about how we have handled a specific situation. Or somewhere, deep in our heart, we wish to go back in time to a seemingly more peaceful, meaningful and fulfilling time we have already lived through. Anxieties on the other hand, arise when we live in the future. We worry about stuff that has not yet happened and maybe never will. Still, it affects us in the here and now.

Animals, on the other hand, live predominantly in the present. Although some animal behaviour has been witnessed where animals were seemingly crushed by a tragic life event (e.g. the loss of a master in the case of a pet) or shown signs of planned behaviour (e.g. hiding food to have something to eat in more scarce times), I think it’s fair to say that only humans consciously reflect on past life events and (more or less) rationally plan for upcoming events.

2. Modern Times

This basic truth, however, has been the case for many thousands of years. And still it seems as if psychological issues are on a dramatic rise just now. Why is that the case? Why haven’t our ancestors who lived through — objectively — much worse times than we not been affected by such mental illnesses to the same degree as we do? The answer is twofold.

The easy part of the answer is that psychological issues have always existed but predominantly been swept under the carpet. While this for sure is true to a certain degree, this is not the whole truth. The whole truth is much more complicated. We are increasingly dealing with higher order needs on Maslow’s pyramid of needs. If you are hungry, you usually don’t dwell on events from the past. You are just hungry. If you, however, have all your basic needs met and concentrate on self-fulfillment needs you have plenty of time worrying about stuff from the past and future.

Also, and this is more true now than ever we have lost the answers to three very basic questions in life:

1. How does the world around us work?
2. What are humans and why are we here?
3. How shall we live a good life?

In the past, religions were the “go-to-place” for these kinds of questions. Just follow the sacred lines of the scripture and you’ll be rewarded in some way after your (earthly) death. However, the tales of the different religions became less and less convincing in the past few years and more and more people are turning away from them. They simply diverged too much from our today’s scientific understanding of how the world works. We increasingly turn to other “tales” to answer these kinds of questions. Some turn to alternative philosophical theories such as nihilism (nothing matters), hedonism (let’s maximize pleasure) or stoicism (just accept the moment). Some turn to science. And some turn to racism, extremism or one of the many wacky conspiracy theories around us.

The problem with every of these modern “belief systems” is the same. They never answer all the questions. They’re never all the way true or wrong. And there are simply too many of them. We feel lost.

3. The Gameplan

So, how do we address these issues? How do we create a happier world with happier people in it? The answer is simple. And yet incredibly complex if we dive into the details. But even a journey of a million steps starts with someone just taking the first. It will take some time. But we’ll get there.

This gameplan consists of three main steps. I’ll describe them as briefly as possible in the next few chapters.

3.1. The Book of Life

First, we need to give people some new guidance. We need to collectively answer the three main questions of life raised in the chapter before. Every single one of these questions contains thousands of sub-questions that are closely connected to it. As the title suggests, we need a new “Book of Life”. We need something that gives us structure. Something that helps us understand the world around us. And something that tells us what we are and by what values we should live our life.

A few decades ago, a miraculous gift was made to all of us in the form of the internet. It allows humans to access all available information in one click. We can collaborate in ways never seen before. And still, we predominantly use it to watch the latest cat videos. Don’t misunderstand me, I love cat videos — but I think we could also use the technology for creating a future we all want to live in. At least partly. Don’t abandon the cat videos completely.

All humans are different. And so are the answers to the questions raised before. So, instead of writing “one single truth” and then conquering the world, missionizing and forcing people to accept our newly developed belief system, why don’t we embrace our diversity. Why aren’t we collecting the most popular answers to the fundamental questions in life and then present them to society in a structured way? We could even vote on shared cultural, societal and ethical values and then develop a new, digital, political system from there.

The term “book” might be misleading. This project will start purely online and all the information will be available for free, without any restrictions and to everyone in the world. We’ll collect answers to the basic questions in life predominantly in this Reddit forum. Other channels will follow. It’s possible that the outcome will be a book. But it doesn’t have to be. It can also be a wiki.

Although none of the chapters have been written yet, I already have some basic structure in mind. Note, however, that this structure will most likely be subject to (frequent) changes during the process.

Part 1: How does the world around us work?

The goal of this first part is to create order and some basic understanding of our environment. We look back to the beginning of time and devote ourselves within the framework of astronomy to the question how an infinite universe could arise from nothing. What mechanisms underlie the birth of stars, planets and moons? How did our home solar system evolve? And what future will it have?

From there, we bridge to the field of biology. How is it possible that life could develop on this initially desolate and barren lump of stone that we now call “earth”? And how did we get from originally primitive life forms to humans? How does the machine “human” work and what are its different “components”?

As soon as we zoom in closer and closer to the basic building blocks of this marvelous machine and leave the cellular level behind and devote ourselves to the molecular or atomic level, we enter the realm of chemistry. How can all the things observable in the universe be created from just about 100 different individual building blocks (i.e. atoms)? Which elementary laws do these “constructions” follow and which consequences result from it?

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In the final section, we zoom in even closer and ask fundamental questions in the realm of physics. How did atoms come into being in the first place? What are they made of? And what are those components of an atom made of? Together, we will travel all the way into the exciting world of quantum physics and ask ourselves groundbreaking and profound questions about our environment. Nothing is as it seems. We and everything around us are nothing more than oscillations in an all-encompassing quantum field; but more about that later on (we are going to need some bottles of wine for that).

Part 2: What are humans?

In the second part of the book, we turn our attention to humans themselves. Starting from the biological basics from the first part of the book, we analyze the evolutionary pedestal on which we have lifted ourselves up. What makes humans special? How do they differ from other living beings? And what drives us?

To be able to answer these profound questions of life, we first devote ourselves to the phenomenon of “consciousness”. As far as we know, humans are the only species on our planet that exhibit something like a higher consciousness, which encourages reflective thinking, planned action, and living simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

In this context we dedicate ourselves to the organ “brain” and try to fathom its functioning together within the framework of neuroscience. The electronic impulses in the brain, which form the basis for all our actions, our emotions, our thoughts and our memories, are still not completely decoded. But they don’t have to be in order to get a rough understanding of how the machine “human” works.

Analogous to a complicated computer algorithm, we can examine which input variables produce which output. We do not necessarily answer the question of “how”, but in the first step we find out a lot about the “what”. We’ll probably have to make do with that for now, since it will likely be several decades before the human brain is fully decoded (if ever).

Together, we are figuring out which actions entail which reactions of the brain. We analyze how these findings can be used to improve all of our lives in a sustainable way. How do we become happier? How do we become more satisfied? And how can we become better people than we were yesterday?

Finally, we dedicate ourselves to different basic states of our brain. How does the electronic signature of the brain differ depending on whether someone is asleep or awake; well rested or stressed. And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage by acquiring techniques with which we can train, rest or heal our brain, body and soul? We will explore a wide field of possibilities in this area, which scientific studies consider promising. In particular but not conclusively: yoga, meditation or lucid dreaming.

Part 3: How to live a good life?

The third and last part of this book deals with the question of how the individual human being should lead a “good” life. In essence, this question comes down to the interaction of the individual with their environment and is highly subjective.

Everyone will have their own definition of what a “good life” is and that’s completely acceptable. It is not just something we should grudgingly accept, but rather something we should welcome with open arms, as it increases diversity among people and makes life many times more exciting than if everyone were identical.

A person interacts with different stakeholders in the course of his or her life. For each area of life, there are other basic values and guidelines that must be observed and one’s life must be aligned accordingly:

1. Nature: Humans interact with nature. Nature in this context refers to all physical matter that has not been formed into a lump of “human”. So both animals and plants as well as planets, stars and galaxies. In this chapter, we will look at basic principles of sustainability and answer the question of how we should live in harmony with nature and our environment.
2. One-Self: It may sound odd that the individual himself is a stakeholder. But we also have a relationship with ourselves. Mostly even the most compromising and unloving one at all. This has to change. In this chapter, we address the question of what relationship one should have with oneself and how this should be classified in the context of psychology.
3. Family, Friends & Society: As soon as we turn our heads to other people, we can distinguish three different groups. A family represents the practically unbreakable connection of at least two people within the framework of a degree of kinship. Friends come and go and we choose them consciously (or subconsciously). Society consists of all the rest of our fellow human beings with whom we have no close relationship. Three questions are fundamental in living together with other people:
4. Ethics: What moral and ethical obligations do we have to our fellow human beings? This area deals with the questions of how we want to treat our fellow human beings, what basic values we want to establish together and how one should behave in a group.
5. Psychology: How and why does human A interact with human B in a specific way? How do our interpersonal relationships influence our thoughts, words, and actions? How can these be interpreted, explained or changed? And what psychological framework allows us to live together as happily as possible?
6. Politics: How should we organize our lives together so that the resulting life enables the pursuit of happiness for the greatest number possible? Which are the basic rights that cannot be discussed and which rights can human beings “acquire” on their own? What does a suitable, digital, mega-political system of the future look like?

3.2 Changing the rules of the system

Today’s system is broken. We all feel it. We might have trouble putting our finger on the exact nature of what is broken in this huge machinery. But something is off. We can all witness the symptoms of this defunct system that we have built and called modern society. Most (if not all) of these fundamental flaws are deeply rooted in our human nature. We are not perfect. And again — that is fine.

The first step in fixing any mistake is to acknowledge it. Only then, we can investigate the exact nature of the flaw, and think about potential solutions. Finally, humans usually come up with an innovative solution on how to address these issues. We are creative animals. We “simply” need to design a political, economical and societal system for our future, so these flaws are mitigated, not amplified.

Let’s start with politics for example. In today’s democratic systems, the wide spectrum of society gets increasingly discouraged with the actions of the political elite. And I am not even talking about the increase of autocratic, dictatorial or centralized political systems in our world. Even “model” democracies are starting to dismantle themselves like the Roman Empire some centuries ago. We are on the verge of a new era.

The old institutions are struggling more and more to organize and manage today’s fast paced society. They are getting inefficient. They increasingly occupy themselves with meaningless paper shuffling. They are diverging from the actual public opinion. And they are leading to a more unequal society. In short: today’s system divides us instead of unifying us. Why is that?

Every time a technological innovation is around the corner, the political system changes too. Often late, but it does so eventually. The feudalistic system in Europe — for example — was ill equipped to handle the new dynamics of the industrial revolution because it shifted the power distribution within the society. Today’s systems are ill equipped to handle the new dynamics of the information revolution. The power is shifting from the government to the capitalist strongholds in the form of huge quasi monopolistic conglomerates and the people who control them.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s simply how the system was designed. And maybe… we have to change that. Honestly, I don’t have a specific solution yet. The challenge is just way too large-scale for any individual to simply come up with a “one size fits all solution”. But I have some ideas. What, for example, if we didn’t vote persons but ideas into democratic elected governments? What if we didn’t even vote for politicians but organized ourselves with the tools available to us thanks to digitization. What if we set up a system in a truly decentralized way that does not even allow for any individual to exploit its flaws?

I truly believe that if we stick our heads together, give it all our blood and sweat as well as finally starting to listen to each other again, we can fix it. It won’t be a piece of cake. It will take years or even decades. But we can do it. Together.

3.3 Living the Good Life

Then, finally in a future yet to come. We have arrived. We have truly changed the world. We have defined what constitutes a “good life” for each and every one of us. We have agreed on shared values of human decency and basic principles we want to live by. We have arrived. We have — let’s face it — one life. Let’s at least enjoy it while it lasts. Let’s rather spread happiness, not fear. Let’s rather be united, not divided. And let’s love, not hate.

4. Feedback

Much appreciated and always welcomed. :-)

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