The more I write and think about human life—consciousness, happiness, motivation, fulfillment, love, fear, suffering, and well-being—the more fascinated I become by the complexity of simply being human.
Scientists search for a theory of everything: one elegant explanation capable of describing how the fundamental forces of the universe fit together.
I seem to be conducting a similar search, but my laboratory is my own life.
I am developing my theory of everything about being human.
What makes me work? What fulfills me? What causes me to suffer? What awakens ambition, love, creativity, or fear? What helps me flourish, and what causes me to get in my own way?
And perhaps most importantly, how can I live this brief human experience as fully and meaningfully as possible before this particular raindrop returns to the ocean?
At first, I hoped there might be one simple answer.
Perhaps happiness is love.
Perhaps fulfillment is purpose.
Perhaps well-being comes from presence.
Perhaps life is about learning, growing, creating, serving, surviving, awakening—or some combination of all of them.
But the closer I look, the less human life resembles one straight line.
It looks more like a kaleidoscope.
We are physical beings who need food, shelter, movement, rest, safety, and touch. We are emotional beings who experience affection, loneliness, hope, grief, excitement, jealousy, peace, and fear. We are psychological beings carrying memories, beliefs, identities, expectations, defenses, and stories. We are social beings who need some combination of belonging, recognition, cooperation, independence, and intimacy.
And perhaps we are spiritual beings—temporary expressions of something larger, searching for meaning and occasionally wondering what we are beneath our names, personalities, and roles.
All of these dimensions are operating at the same time.
A physical illness can darken the emotions. An emotional wound can become physical tension. A fearful belief can damage a relationship. A loving relationship can restore confidence. A change in circumstances can alter our identity. A quiet spiritual insight can reorganize an entire life.
Nothing operates completely by itself.
Perhaps that is the first principle of my theory.
The Sims
Being human sometimes reminds me of the computer game The Sims.
The player manages a simulated person whose needs constantly compete for attention. The character needs food, sleep, hygiene, relationships, recreation, money, and a functional home. Ignore one meter long enough and eventually it begins interfering with everything else.
Human life is infinitely more complicated, but the resemblance amuses me.
Every morning I wake up inside this biological character called Scott.
The character has an energy level, a body that requires maintenance, emotional needs, relationships, responsibilities, unfinished business, desires, fears, memories, habits, and a limited amount of time.
Somewhere inside all of that is an awareness trying to figure out what deserves attention today.
Unlike a computer character, however, I wasn’t born with a visible control panel.
I have had to discover the controls while playing the game.
I arrived with DNA, survival instincts, temperament, sensitivities, abilities, and limitations. Then family, religion, school, culture, relationships, successes, failures, wounds, and experiences added layer after layer of programming.
From within that mixture, something I call me began making choices.
I reason.
I imagine.
I experiment.
I imitate.
I fail.
I adapt.
I love.
I protect myself.
I pursue what feels rewarding and withdraw from what causes pain.
Gradually, through trial and error, I construct a working model of reality and call it my life.
It is not a simple thing to be human.
There Is No Universal Setting
One of the problems with creating a theory about being human is that there doesn’t seem to be a universal setting.
What fulfills one person may make another miserable.
One person thrives in the energy of a crowded city. Another comes alive alone in a forest. One seeks stability; another needs adventure. One is motivated by achievement, another by relationships, another by service, beauty, understanding, spirituality, or freedom.
Even within one person, the formula changes.
What fulfilled me at twenty might feel empty at sixty-eight. What once frightened me may now interest me. What once appeared essential can eventually seem trivial.
The life I wanted while raising children is not necessarily the life I want while sitting quietly at a cabin listening to rain settle into the forest.
So perhaps fulfillment isn’t a permanent destination we finally reach.
Perhaps it is the continuing art of recognizing what this particular life needs at this particular moment.
Sometimes the body needs rest while the ego demands productivity.
Sometimes the ego wants certainty while the soul invites curiosity.
Sometimes I need companionship.
Sometimes I need solitude.
Sometimes fulfillment comes from accomplishing something difficult.
At other times, it comes from remembering that there is nothing I have to accomplish at all.
The challenge is not merely satisfying every desire. Some desires are useful; others can become destructive. Something can feel good without being good for me. Fear can protect me or imprison me. Ambition can create something wonderful or consume the person pursuing it.
The meters on my imaginary control panel don’t operate independently.
They affect one another.
Wisdom may be less about discovering the correct setting and more about learning to read the whole system.
The Game Keeps Expanding
We begin life with relatively simple needs.
An infant wants warmth, nourishment, safety, comfort, and connection. Someone else must regulate almost everything.
Then the game expands.
We acquire language, identity, friendships, ambitions, sexuality, responsibility, careers, families, moral questions, successes, disappointments, losses, and dreams.
Eventually, something even stranger becomes possible.
We become capable of examining not only our experiences but also the mind experiencing them.
I can become angry and then notice that I am angry.
I can feel afraid and wonder whether the danger is real or whether my mind is creating a story.
I can experience jealousy and ask what it is protecting.
I can hear my ego demanding certainty and recognize that certainty may not actually be available.
The character can begin observing the character.
And somewhere in that strange ability to observe myself, another dimension of being human appears.
Team Ego and Team Soul
My ego would love for this theory of everything to become a reliable operating manual.
Understand the rules.
Avoid unnecessary pain.
Solve the problems.
Protect the people I love.
Accomplish something worthwhile.
Leave evidence that Scott was here.
There is nothing wrong with that.
The ego helps me navigate practical reality. It builds businesses, solves problems, protects boundaries, plans for tomorrow, fixes websites, writes essays, and tries to keep the character alive and functioning.
But what I call my soul seems to approach the game differently.
I don’t claim to know exactly what the soul is. It may be something spiritual, something produced by consciousness, or simply my name for that quieter observing awareness I sometimes experience when I step outside the immediate demands of my thoughts.
Whatever it is, its perspective feels different.
The ego asks:
What can I accomplish before the game ends?
The soul asks:
How fully can I experience the game while I am here?
The ego wants to manage the character.
The soul reminds me that perhaps the character is not the whole player.
I don’t think one needs to defeat the other.
In fact, increasingly I suspect that they work best as partners.
The ego can pursue achievement without turning achievement into identity.
It can protect without automatically attacking.
It can love without possessing.
It can create without needing applause.
It can solve problems without imagining that every problem threatens its existence.
The soul does not defeat the ego.
It gives the ego a larger context.
So What Is My Theory?
After all this thinking, I should probably be willing to state the theory.
At least today’s version.
My working theory is that a fulfilling human life emerges as I become increasingly conscious of the interacting systems within me—physical, emotional, psychological, social, and perhaps spiritual—and learn to respond to them with greater intelligence, love, awareness, and choice.
That includes learning what the character genuinely needs.
It includes questioning the programming I inherited.
It includes distinguishing fear from danger, pleasure from well-being, attachment from love, ambition from compulsion, and responsibility from the desire to control.
It means allowing the ego to do its job without allowing it to run the entire show.
And it means becoming increasingly aware of the effects my choices have not only on me but on the other people and systems I touch.
If I wanted to reduce the theory even further, perhaps I could:
Increase intelligence.
Increase love.
Increase awareness.
Reduce unnecessary fear.
Reduce unnecessary disorder.
Not perfectly.
Not permanently.
Just directionally.
And even that is not a final theory.
It is my current operating system.
A Living Theory
Any useful theory about being human must remain alive because the human using it remains alive.
I am changing.
My circumstances are changing.
My body is changing.
My relationships are changing.
The world around me is changing.
What I understand today may look incomplete tomorrow.
So my theory must be flexible enough to evolve, broad enough to tolerate contradiction, and humble enough to admit that reality will always contain more than I understand.
Perhaps life is not a puzzle designed to be permanently solved.
Perhaps it is a game designed to be consciously played.
I can observe the character.
I can learn its needs.
I can question its programming.
I can notice when fear has taken control.
I can recognize when ego has confused winning with living.
I can expand the choices available to me.
And occasionally I can step back from the whole thing and marvel at this astonishing production:
The body.
The emotions.
The relationships.
The ambitions.
The fears.
The mistakes.
The discoveries.
The losses.
The love.
And most mysterious of all, the awareness capable of witnessing any of it.
I may never discover a theory that explains everything about being human.
I don’t think I need to.
It may be enough to become increasingly conscious of how this particular human works and to play the character with greater skill, curiosity, humor, compassion, intelligence, love, and freedom.
Then, when this temporary raindrop finally reaches the ocean, perhaps its greatest legacy will not be that it mastered the game.
Perhaps it will be that it entered the experience completely.
That it learned what it could.
That it created something while it was here.
That it loved and allowed itself to be loved.
That it helped a few other players along the way.
And that, despite the losses, frustrations, uncertainty, and occasional absurdity of the whole extraordinary experience, it genuinely enjoyed playing.
I love the game of life.