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          What to Do

          March 2025

          What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's
          not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question
          kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only
          came across it myself in the process of investigating
          something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least
          try to answer it.

          So what should one do? One should help people, and take care
          of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything
          else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good
          new things.

          I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can
          prove that one should help people or take care of the world.
          We're talking about first principles here. But I can explain
          why this principle makes sense. The most impressive thing
          humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing
          that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more
          precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make
          good new things.

          I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics
          was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this
          principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem
          general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for
          example, except insofar as they embody new ideas. And while
          they may embody new ideas, that's not all they embody, unless
          you stretch the word "idea" so uselessly thin that it includes
          everything that goes through your nervous system.

          Even for ideas that one has consciously, though, I prefer the
          phrasing "make good new things." There are other ways to
          describe the best kind of thinking. To make discoveries, for
          example, or to understand something more deeply than others
          have. But how well do you understand something if you can't
          make a model of it, or write about it? Indeed, trying to
          express what you understand is not just a way to prove that
          you understand it, but a way to understand it better.

          Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us
          toward creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that
          are naturally seen as making things rather than, say, making
          critical observations about things other people have made.
          Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's
          easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable
          than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new
          things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's
          precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable.

          Is newness essential? I think so. Obviously it's essential in
          science. If you copied a paper of someone else's and published
          it as your own, it would seem not merely unimpressive but
          dishonest. And it's similar in the arts. A copy of a good
          painting can be a pleasing thing, but it's not impressive in
          the way the original was. Which in turn implies it's not
          impressive to make the same thing over and over, however well;
          you're just copying yourself.

          Note though that we're talking about a different kind of
          should with this principle. Taking care of people and the
          world are shoulds in the sense that they're one's duty, but
          making good new things is a should in the sense that this is
          how to live to one's full potential. Historically most rules
          about how to live have been a mix of both kinds of should,
          though usually with more of the former than the latter. [1]

          For most of history the question "What should one do?" got
          much the same answer everywhere, whether you asked Cicero or
          Confucius. You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and
          just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest. There
          was a long stretch where in some parts of the world the answer
          became "Serve God," but in practice it was still considered
          good to be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold
          tradition, and serve the public interest. And indeed this
          recipe would have seemed right to most Victorians. But there's
          nothing in it about taking care of the world or making new
          things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this
          question should be a timeless one. The answer shouldn't change
          much.

          I'm not too worried that the traditional answers don't mention
          taking care of the world. Obviously people only started to
          care about that once it became clear we could ruin it. But how
          can making good new things be important if the traditional
          answers don't mention it?

          The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different
          question. They were answers to the question of how to be,
          rather than what to do. The audience didn't have a lot of
          choice about what to do. The audience up till recent centuries
          was the landowning class, which was also the political class.
          They weren't choosing between doing physics and writing
          novels. Their work was foreordained: manage their estates,
          participate in politics, fight when necessary. It was ok to do
          certain other kinds of work in one's spare time, but ideally
          one didn't have any. Cicero's De Officiis is one of the great
          classical answers to the question of how to live, and in it he
          explicitly says that he wouldn't even be writing it if he
          hadn't been excluded from public life by recent political
          upheavals. [2]

          There were of course people doing what we would now call
          "original work," and they were often admired for it, but they
          weren't seen as models. Archimedes knew that he was the first
          to prove that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest
          enclosing cylinder and was very pleased about it. But you
          don't find ancient writers urging their readers to emulate
          him. They regarded him more as a prodigy than a model.

          Now many more of us can follow Archimedes's example and devote
          most of our attention to one kind of work. He turned out to be
          a model after all, along with a collection of other people
          that his contemporaries would have found it strange to treat
          as a distinct group, because the vein of people making new
          things ran at right angles to the social hierarchy.

          What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question
          to the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to
          define any kind of threshold, because new kinds of work are
          often despised at first. Raymond Chandler was writing literal
          pulp fiction, and he's now recognized as one of the best
          writers of the twentieth century. Indeed this pattern is so
          common that you can use it as a recipe: if you're excited
          about some kind of work that's not considered prestigious and
          you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it,
          then this is not merely a kind of work that's ok to do, but
          one to seek out.

          The other reason I wouldn't want to define any thresholds is
          that we don't need them. The kind of people who make good new
          things don't need rules to keep them honest.

          So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take
          care of people and the world, and make good new things.
          Different people will do these to varying degrees. There will
          presumably be lots who focus entirely on taking care of
          people. There will be a few who focus mostly on making new
          things. But even if you're one of those, you should at least
          make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people
          or the world. And if you go a step further and try to make
          things that help them, you may find you're ahead on the trade.
          You'll be more constrained in what you can make, but you'll
          make it with more energy.

          On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often
          be helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to.
          Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any
          practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical
          effect of his work has been enormous. And this seems the rule
          rather than the exception. So if you think you can make
          something amazing, you should probably just go ahead and do
          it.











          Notes

          [1] We could treat all three as the same kind of should by
          saying that it's one's duty to live well -- for example by
          saying, as some Christians have, that it's one's duty to make
          the most of one's God-given gifts. But this seems one of those
          casuistries people invented to evade the stern requirements of
          religion: you could spend time studying math instead of
          praying or performing acts of charity because otherwise you
          were rejecting a gift God had given you. A useful casuistry no
          doubt, but we don't need it.

          We could also combine the first two principles, since people
          are part of the world. Why should our species get special
          treatment? I won't try to justify this choice, but I'm
          skeptical that anyone who claims to think differently actually
          lives according to their principles.

          [2] Confucius was also excluded from public life after ending
          up on the losing end of a power struggle, and presumably he
          too would not be so famous now if it hadn't been for this long
          stretch of enforced leisure.



          Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert
          Morris for reading drafts of this.



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