Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

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KELLY: One of the scenarios for the future of the US is that, basically, the Amish take over all the farmland. Because right now the Amish are continuing to expand. Their attrition rate is still very — attrition meaning the number of kids that they have that don’t stay with the church — it’s still only a few percent. That seemed kind of like a waste, or a failure or something, that you would generate stuff that you would throw away, knowing that you're going to throw it away. I mean, that's the difference. And so now I understand that I'm just going to write a whole bunch of stuff that I'm just never going to use, and that's sort of the point of it. KELLY: Yes. The last thing, and I have to say this very cautiously — but I have been deciding that I think the Civil War was a mistake. That we should have — we, the Union, should have left the South to secede, if the majority of people who were voting had voted for it, and that the right of the Union to enforce that Union, I think, was a mistake. But I have to say Star Wars itself, the idea of the worn and old future: that shifted my idea and expanded my possibilities, my idea of what’s possible, as well. I think maybe the idea of a future that was worn and used and not just streamlined — I think that that did shift my idea of reality. In this insightful entry, Kelly, a founding editor of Wired, collects pearls of wisdom for all stages of life . . . the entries are genuinely thought-provoking, and Kelly’s earnestness is leavened with refreshing humor. The result is an unapologetically upbeat offering.”— Publishers Weekly

COWEN: Do you think it would have ended for not being profitable enough, or just slave owners would have given up all that wealth? This is the Amish. This is the Amish take on how you do it. “Let me see how other people are doing it and how it affects their lives before I decide to do it.” And If there was generally positive results in their own lives and around them as society, then I might adopt it. COWEN: Now, my favorite creation of yours probably is this three-volume set: It’s called Vanishing Asia. If I understand correctly, it was a 50-year project based around roughly 200,000 photos; it’s three volumes. It’s one of the greatest picture books ever produced, possibly the greatest. That in turn makes it one of the greatest books ever produced. I think you say, “Well, accounting — things that I know about — are things that are probably not where I should be headed. Even though I may start there, that’s not where I really want to go.” I make another piece of advice, which is, “It doesn’t really matter where you really begin, because that’s not where you’re going to end up.”I think the educational system could incorporate the idea of advice into its curriculum as a way of helping young people develop these principles in their own lives that they could be reminded of. KELLY: It was all I could do to try and get them to ride a bicycle to work. I actually accompanied my son a couple of times — it was a pretty long haul; I have to say that. KELLY: I had a hippieish attitude, and when I was dropping out, I was very influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. I believed what it said, that you should invent your own life and that all these things were possible. I had a very arm’s-length — I owned nothing. I was very suspicious of computers, which my dad worked with. Kind of the “small is beautiful” take. Thoreau was my hero in high school: building your own house, living in a little simple life. That, I believed, was my destination.

Then, thirdly, I think thinking in terms of generations rather than just the immediate next quarter or next year — I think that also would enable us to manage the planet in a better way, because lots of the planetary things that we’re interested in and paying attention to have a longer-range dynamic than just the immediate year or two: the “short now,” we call it. COWEN: Let’s start with some questions about your new book. Which is the piece of advice you were afraid to give and did not give? Before you are old attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving. KELLY: Yes. Well, there may be limits because the big cash crop for most Amish is actually dairy, and there’s a limit on the amount of dairy that we’re going to consume. But they’re really good at the small holdings, animal raising, combined with raising the food for the animals. So I would say, maybe as long as there’s actually consumption of meat and animal products, the Amish — The events that befall us are typically beyond our control, hence they are not the primary drivers of our life story. Instead, our true story is crafted through our responses to these uncontrollable circumstancesKeep showing up. 99% of success is just showing up. In fact, most success is just persistence. Art by Christoph Niemann for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. COWEN: Don’t you like the feeling that you’ve figured out where everything is when you use a paper map? You don’t get that from GPS? Seeing how high all this AI could work is really hard to see. How is there a world in which we have ubiquitous AI, ubiquitous genetic engineering, constant surveillance — how is that a world that we want to live in? I’m trying to imagine what that is with a set of scenarios that would say, “Here’s a possible future of this high tech that could work,” and I call it the Hundred-Year Desirable Future or Protopia. That kind of advice I’m very reluctant to give, and almost never answer, because I don’t feel I know that person well enough. I can give them a platitude (like my book is filled with), saying, “Here’s my piece of advice for a young person who is setting out — ”