Radically Moderate Life Advice for 2024
Balancing, Tradeoffs, and Complexity
I re-read my New Year’s post from last year again this morning and it reminded me of an important truth in this Radically Moderate journey I’ve been on: Radical Moderation goes all the way down.
What exactly does that mean?
For starters, while I think the world needs more radical moderation in politics and the social world, the principles that animate radical moderation are just as important in our personal lives as in our social and political lives.
While this isn’t primarily a personal development blog, I’ve come to the conclusion that radical moderation doesn’t have a hope at the social or political level if it’s not also being practiced at the individual level. That’s because our societies reflect the kinds of people we are, by and large. And the more we practice immoderation in our own lives the more we’ll accept it as par for the course in the social and political worlds.
As a reminder, Radical Moderation is characterized by a cluster of eight or so values, all of which affect the way we think about and interact with the world. These values or ideas are really important at the social and political level, but maybe even more so for individuals.
Here’s a quick primer on Radical Moderation for our personal lives:
Complexity: Human lives are complex. There are a lot of moving parts and our own goals and values and motivation aren’t always clear to ourselves, let alone to others. We also interact with other people for whom the same thing applies. This means total self-knowledge may be fundamentally impossible, as much as it still helps to work on it. But in any human life there are a lot of moving parts and an enormous amount of unpredictability.
Humility: Because human lives are complex, we need to give ourselves a break. Humility isn’t nihilism. It’s a willingness to try to become better people and better partners and better friends and better parents while recognizing that we can (and will be) wrong a lot. But we can (and should) learn from those mistakes.
Tradeoffs: This one is easy, because tradeoffs characterize human life. Every single day, we make choices that affect our present and our future, that limit our options in some ways while opening the door in others, and that affect the way we interact with others. I have a lot of interests, but I can’t pursue all of them at any given time, so I have to make choices. If I read a bit more Dick Francis than is probably necessary, that’s time away from other pursuits I might find valuable. But I may decide (and do actually decide) that the enjoyment of ending my day with a good mystery is worth the modest tradeoffs in productivity or talent management because I’m pretty good with the rest of my time. Your mileage may vary, but every choice comes with tradeoffs.
Social Individualism: As humans, all our decisions are made within a social context. This is a double-edged sword, but it’s ultimately unavoidable. Whether your relevant social group is your family or your colleagues/coworkers or friends, very few of us live in a vacuum, which means all our decisions are socially embedded. What you do with that knowledge will vary by your values and your specific context, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist is a recipe for difficult relationships and, yes, unhappiness.
Humans Matter: Because of #4, we should remember that our actions and decisions affect other people and that other people matter. Would it be a life-changing experience to quit my job and travel around Europe? Sure. Would it be a good idea with a family who relies on me and a job I care about? Probably not. Sometimes some options are closed off simply because they would affect other people too much. That’s not bondage. It’s the reality of being human. And it’s ok. It’s ultimately up to us as adult humans to decide what boundaries in our lives are acceptable and what relationships are worth sacrificing for.
Toleration: Because of everything that came before, including complexity, humility, social individualism, tradeoffs, and other human beings, we need to learn to tolerate imperfection in ourselves, in others, and in our lives as a whole. There’s already been a lot of ink spilled about the mirage of perfection created on social media and precisely because of that mirage we have to be even more careful to acknowledge and accept the imperfect beauty of our own lives. Toleration isn’t nihilism. It doesn’t mean we have to accept toxicity or people treating us badly. We have to think about our own values before we can really understand what to tolerate and what’s intolerable. But expecting the world to be perfect or to align perfectly with our goals and expectations will lead to dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and maybe even to disaster.
(Realistic) optimism: This one might be a bit controversial because I know some committed pessimists out there, but thinking that things can and likely will get better is a more radically moderate way to live your life than the reverse. Being a realistic optimist means that you believe you have a substantial amount of control over what happens to you in your own life or at the very least control over how you think about the challenges that do crop up. And it means believing that your actions - accumulated over time - will have a positive effect on your own life and the lives of the people around you. Realistic optimism does not mean that you assume everything will turn up roses without you having to do any work at all. It just means that you believe that hard work matters and that it’s worth doing.
I may go into more details on some or all of these later this month, but for now this is a good start. When thinking about your new year’s resolutions this year, think about how a radically moderate approach might help you balance parts of your life that are currently imbalanced or give yourself or someone you love a bit more grace in the new year.
As always, let me know what you think in the comments! And subscribe and share if you haven’t already.
Really enjoyed this piece!