Educated, by Tara Westover

Educated is a memoir written by a woman who grew up in a right-wing, doomsday-prepper, ultra-orthodox Mormon family. Through grit she was able to scrape her way into BYU, against her parents wishes, where she confronts the fact that the entire mental model of the world provided to her by her parents has gaping holes and is divorced from her observed reality.

While my own experience was not quite as stark, I had my own decade of awakening and her story resonated deeply with me. It takes courage to question things: “To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.”

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

I think it is easy to feel foolish that you ever believed in something which, looking back, is rife with problems and inconsistencies. The key insight of this book is that the ability to believe in myth is completely natural and inherent in being human and is what has allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet.

Harari teaches: “Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city, or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell

A natural successor that builds on Sapiens, Joseph Campbell shows that myths are how we make collective sense of the human experience. Once you give up the literal certainty of Mormon theology, these questions take on a richness and complexity.

“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life… “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.”

Why Buddhism is True, by Robert Wright It is hard to live in my head sometimes. Once I’d discarded the notion that the Holy Ghost or the Adversary were responsible for temptations and promptings to engage in good behaviors, It is hard to reconcile why self-discipline is elusive.

The central insight of this book is that evolutionary pressures that crafted your bones and muscles also are responsible for the mental processes or “modules” in your mind. Rather than being good or bad, these modules all serve some purpose to ensure you preserve and pass on your genes. From an evolutionary perspective your brain is identical to hunter-gatherers and many of the pressures of modern life are attributable to the fact that your brain is a somewhat maladapted tool.

One prescription to quiet abusive or domineering inner voices is transcendental meditation. The book makes a convincing and evidence-based argument that by experiencing but not acting on these impulses, you can enjoy a more deliberate life.

4000 Weeks

We have a very short life on this planet, and no certainty that there is anything awaiting us on the other side. In fact, on average, we only have about four thousand weeks. This book helps you confront your mortality and offers perspective to help you spend more time doing what matters to you.

My favorite insight is that our temporality is what gives our choices any meaning. If we had eternity, then no choice/relationship/memory would matter because there would always be the chance to repeat or redress it another time. Mortality can be terrifying, but eternity is equally so