I saw a Canadian documentary film last evening called “An Examined Life” by Astra Taylor. It was a series of ten-minute ‘lecturettes’ by notable intellectuals on a variety of questions, all more or less about the meaning of life and how do we make a difference. Everything was filmed as the speakers walked the streets (mostly in New York), which provided interesting backgrounds and added great value to the production. Unfortunately, the backgrounds often distracted from the profundity of what was being said.

The idea for the film and its title is a spin on Plato’s challenge that “an unexamined life is not worth living”. I expected that I’d learn something about what it means to live ‘an examined life’ or something about how one goes about examining one’s life. The main message in this regard was that it is important philosophically and also practically to question one’s assumptions about everything. In many ways, this is consistent with my own philosophy. I’ve spent most of my life in more or less a permanent phenomenological inquiry about most aspects of life.

For example, much of my interest in aging is rooted in my questioning why so many of us live as if the later years of life must hold less possibility than our earlier years.

• Why do so few us actually look forward to growing older?
• Why do so many think about the last third or quarter of their lives as being a period of decline, loss, fear and isolation?
• Moreover, why do many younger people feel uncomfortable around older people and why is communication so often argumentative or strained?
  

Of course, there are exceptions. Generalizations are always risky if we’re looking for some perspective that can free us of the conventional limitations of our thinking and open new possibilities.

Nonetheless, if we do examine our lives we begin to see that we share certain assumptions or beliefs about who we are, the way ‘it is’, and what is and is not possible. For example, one rarely challenged assumption is the idea that a human being is an object: according to this idea, we are ‘thinking animals’ and psychology is the operating manual for how this ‘thing’ works. We see this assumption embedded in our language and metaphors all the time. We speak of human resources, our ‘role’, personality ‘types’, ‘born leaders’, and even the underlying belief that most of us have that people don’t change in fundamental ways.

Other core assumptions include the ideas that time is linear, circumstances are ‘objective’, we can control ourselves and other people, and understanding is a prerequisite for making good decisions. My point here is we are mostly unaware of these and many of the other assumptions that govern our experience, shape or determine our future and become the foundation for the quality of our lives.

If we aren’t aware of our assumptions and/or believe that our beliefs are ‘truth’, then we become trapped in our worldview and—at best—can be successful within a relatively narrow interpretation of reality. We live unexamined lives—meaning we are not choosing what to believe. Our beliefs use us to persist and become self-fulfilling, self-referential structures of interpretation that keep us trapped in the past and blind to possibilities and who we are.

© 2009 Jim Selman. All rights reserved.

Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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