3 levels of living: taste, culture, faith

When we are deciding how to orient ourselves in the world, what to do, and what to commit to, we have three ways of doing do.

TASTE

Firstly, we can react by personal taste. We do this when we choose what foods we like, and what activities make us feel safe, happy or comfortable. This is mostly an easy way to live, as we are seeking the path of least resistance to our desires. It is consistent with our feelings, and often leads to temporary happiness or feeling good, because we are feeding ourselves what we want in the moment.

This way of living relates strongly to our food-searching or hunting evolved nature, where our ancestors, for millions of years, have lived by ‘feel’, by doing what feels right in the moment. Of course, in a modern world, we are surrounded by all sorts of products and stimulants that were scarce in the old days, so there is a great danger of overdoing it in a lopsided way, and getting addicted to over-available chemicals.

CULTURE

Secondly, when we have had enough of wildly veering around to feed our tastes, we might want something more consistent. We might realise that all this pleasure and happiness seeking is all very well, but never leads to anything solid, just an eternal cycle of seeking temporary comfort and avoiding pain. It doesn’t feel very solid or long term.

Our culture offers us a pattern of social ethics to follow, which we may end up craving, when we have finished pleasing ourselves. We might seek out and get attached to whatever instruction manuals we can find, whether it be a religious book, or a psychological methodology. We just want something to give us an ethical framework.

The thing about living with a culture, is that there are no guarantees that the culture has it right. We grow up into families and societies that have developed codes of practice and belief that seem to make sense, and to be self-consistent. But this does not mean that they are right.

The benefits of following a culture’s ethical framework, is that it does release us from the endless cycle of pleasure-seeking. After youth, we seek to settle down and follow more of a social pattern of mutual concern. We may get married, and lock in to a pre-prepared system of rituals which give us a sense of belonging and commitment. Often, in the liminal space between personal taste and culture, we spend some of the time binging on food, drugs, whatever works – and then try to recover by seeking refuge in ethical behaviours that get us ‘on track’, such as following strict self-improvement regimes or codes of conduct.

FAITH

Eventually, having done the cycle between happiness-seeking and cultural conformity a few times, we may start to realise that there is still something missing. Over and above temporary personal happiness, or acquiring societal stability, reputation and status, we feel something else is missing. We wonder what our own personal contribution is, what we are ‘here to do’.

This is a question of faith, in that no one else is going to tell us whether we are right or wrong. In a sense, this is an existential commitment. We have to decide for ourselves which hills are worth living and dying on, and which hills are not for us. We may wish to rise above the small world of personal taste, and the slightly larger world of our local ethical culture, to breathe the thinner and more difficult air of our own chosen life commitments.

This is one of the hardest things we can do, and we need to leave a lot of space for reflection, personal battles, and refinement. But it is worth it if we want to achieve a real sense of what it might mean to ‘be ourselves’, to live authentically, by which I mean to live more confidently with our own long term commitments.

If we are doing what we do just to escape pain or achieve short term pleasure, it may not be sustainable. If we are doing it to please our social group, it may end up feeling hollow or frustrating. But if we can find commitments which really, wholistically, mean a lot to us, then they have a change of being sustainable in the long run.

To listen to a longer exploration of this three-part idea, you can listen to this Solved podcast on making life commitments. Using the work of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, writer Mark Manson explores what it might mean to move through three stages of development:

https://solvedpodcast.com/commitment

Note: To map them better onto some psychological concepts, I have labelled the three stages slightly differently. Following Kierkegaard, Mark Manson talks about an aesthetic stage, an ethical stage, and then a stage where we make leaps of personal faith into greater commitments. I rename them taste, culture and faith because I want to ground them more in our psychology: starting with more immediate personal sensation, moving through socially adopted ethics, and then into personal commitments based on courage and faith.

I really like the way the Solved podcast appreciates the fear and the risk of narrowing our options to a few chosen commitments – although there is a net gain, it means saying goodbye to some old comforts and habits along the way.