How to Change Your Life

Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy. Today’s topic is something that is always on my mind. It’s also a constant work in progress. If you have any thoughts or ideas around this. I’d love to know 🙏.

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created by author (without AI)

Theories of change are tricky. The basic assumption behind them is to fix one thing in order to achieve a specific outcome. Especially in the field of healing, be it physical, mental, philosophical, or planetary, I found that it is exactly this way of thinking about healing itself that is a fundamental part of the problem.

The approach to healing follows this same formula “do x and y will follow”. Eat veggies and your gut will heal. Take zinc and your skin will clear up. Shake your body and your trauma will release. Do philosophy and your existential anxiety will lift. Switch to degrowth and the planet will heal.

Many have now recognized that all forms of healing are typically messy and multidimensional. The result of that is that those theories of change involve a whole bouquet of different influences and errors pointing at each other. It typically looks something like this:

But still, most of the time, this doesn’t cover it. I have found that even the most complex healing modalities can leave you just where you started. I’ll talk about more effective and effortless ways to “healing” that another time. Today, I wanted to start with this warning label about theories of change before I share one myself.

Like I mentioned before, I embrace critical complexity. And only because theories of change are usually not a representation of the truth, they can nonetheless be helpful to increase our understanding. A utilitarian approach, if you will.

The search for a reliable method of change is a deeply human one, driving the self-help industry and underpinning our most personal ambitions. Why we are so eager to change in the first place is for another discussion. I have yet to meet a human though who doesn’t want to.

I also believe there are as many theories of change (around our behavior and becoming) as there are people, because this is a deeply personal process. And while some patterns might repeat themselves and we can learn from each other, the task of finding our own theory, one that works for us and not one that is dictated by any authority, is not only a task of a lifetime, but I think it’s one of THE tasks. Meaningful. Fulfilling. And also, it’s what practical philosophy is all about.

“There is no other reason for men to philosophize but to be happy.” Augustine

So, here (humbly) we go.

A Theory of Change

Within planetary health, and sustainability science respectively, the public focus is typically on political or technological interventions to change the system and on behavioral interventions to change the individual. Eventually, people like Donella Meadows argued that the most effective way to transform any system, from a person to a planet, is to change the mindset, paradigm or philosophy out of which the system arises. For Meadows, shifting the deep-seated beliefs that govern a system provides the most powerful leverage for creating lasting change.

The Iceberg Model

This assumption is of course not limited to planetary healing, but in many therapies, especially cognitive behavior therapy, this is one of the fundamental premises.

In fact, the "mind-first" approach has a long and venerable history. Many therapies, especially in cognitive behavior therapy and much of traditional self-improvement, operate on the assumption that our inner world—our thoughts, beliefs, and values—is the command center from which all action originates. It is often credited especially to the Stoics who stressed how our thoughts shape our reality and our ability to change our thoughts.

Nowadays, we are developing all sorts of modalities, tools and tricks in order to change our thoughts. In sustainability science, we often try to find ways to change people’s values. To make them care.

The result of that has been extensive research on the so called value-action-gap, which we don’t just see in terms of sustainability, but also in many other walks of our life. We value health and continue to eat ice cream for breakfast. We value our friends and yet never get around calling them. We value creativity and yet don’t ever create anything.

Pick your gap. Mine are plenty.

The same goes for the so called knowledge-action-gap, also a well researched phenomenon in sustainability science. We know we should’t use so much plastic, yet continue. We know we should be active in our neighborhoods, yet aren’t. We know the planet is heating, yet we fail to act.

When we noticed that knowledge didn’t seem to change people, we thought it’s values. And, as just described, that also didn’t work.

Because values —nor knowledge for that matter— don’t seem to make us change, a growing body of research points in the opposite direction. This "action-first" model suggests that our values are not the cause of our actions, but often the result. We don't wait until we feel like going to the gym, we go to the gym, and in doing so, we become the kind of person who values fitness.

“This relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical challenges one of the key dogmas of modern Western philosophy, the so - called ‘is / ought gap’. Often attributed to David Hume, this is the idea that nothing about how the world is can tell us about how it ought to be or how we ought to act. Facts are facts, values are values, and you cannot logically transform one into another.” Julian Baggini

Adding a third layer of complexity, systems theorists looking at human dynamics argue that the most crucial element for change is neither the individual's mind nor our actions, but our relationships. They suggest that we are products of our connections and entanglements, and to change ourselves, we must change the web of relationships we are embedded in. An analogy I like is the formation of a crystal. A single atom doesn't decide to become a diamond. Instead, it finds its place by forming the most energetically favored bond possible with its immediate neighbors, which is influenced by the conditions it is at. From millions of these simple, local connections, a complex, coherent, and unique structure self-organizes that no one planned.

So we are left with a triangulation of advice: change your mind, change your actions, or change your relationships.

So which is it?

A Uniform Project

I love clothes. But usually, I’d only love them once or twice before I loved something else - something I didn’t have yet. At one point in my life, I started caring deeply about social and environmental impact of all the needless clothes I owned. The garment industry is one of the biggest polluters on this planet. I didn’t want to be part of that anymore. While you can’t escape “the system” there are things that you can escape with rather little effort.

It wasn't all about my environmental impact, it was also about a certain aesthetic of my soul, a simplicity I saw in others and craved for myself. I wanted to want less.

The wanting, however, was not the same as the being. My mind had the aspiration, but my identity was still that of a consumer. As I see life as one great experiment, I devised a pretty rigid behavioral mandate, which I had no chance of ignoring: I would wear one dress for a year. It was a simple black dress, well-made and unremarkable, a uniform for the person I hoped to become.

An illustration of me in the dress back in the days. Reality check: my hair was never wavy like this.

For the first few weeks, the experiment felt like a constant, low-grade performance. I was acutely aware of it at work meetings, at dinners with friends, at parties. I felt like I was pretending. I was acting my way into being a person who doesn’t mind wearing the same dress everyday day, but my mind was standing at a distance, skeptical, tallying the social cost. It was a lonely, disorienting performance.

And I really did mind.

Then, slowly, it shifted. The daily decision of what to wear vanished, and with it, a cognitive load. The fear of being noticed was replaced by a confidence. The dress felt more like a skin. It became not just any dress, it developed a character of its own, something the Japanese might call wabi sabi.

Wabi Sabi

The dress and I seemed to form the perfect relationship.

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. … There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” Virginia Woolf

When the year was over, my aspiration of becoming a person with less, seemed a lot more real, and a lot more effortless. I wish I could say that this was the happy ending and that any desire for more clothes was gone. It wasn’t.

Shortly after - because the experiment went so well - I’ve decided to now wear the same dress for the rest of my life. This time, I’d co-designed it with a costume designer in Berlin, the fabric was donated by a sustainable clothing brand, everything seemed to be in place. And I would love to be able to say that this time, there was no pretense. That it was no longer an experiment. It was simply how I lived. That I had, through the simple act of doing, actually become the person I once pretended to be. But as you know, life is messy.

This time, when I told people what I was doing, they seemed to react with alienation. Instead of enjoying the slight challenge of doing all sorts of events in the same dress (from wedding, to interview, to kink party), it now felt like my uniform could be read as a failure to honor shared rituals of celebration. My mind was now rather fixated on the downsides and the idea of never wearing something else felt draining. This dress also had a character and agency of its own and somehow it didn’t want to be worn everyday. Eventually, this experiment failed and I went back to the old wardrobe that I still kept in storage in a basement.

While the one-year-experiment felt more like I was playing with the boundaries of a system that is made for consumption, the for-life-idea felt more like I was really trying to step out of it entirely. But that meant also stepping out of many of the relationships. Not just with people, but with the relations to a society as I find myself in it.

The Practice of Becoming

That feeling of being a fraud, of performing a life I wasn't yet living, was, as the philosopher Agnes Callard argues in her work on aspiration, the entire point. Callard suggests that we can rationally work towards acquiring new values, even if we don't fully grasp them yet. The person I was couldn't possibly understand the value of less in the way the person I hoped to be would. That understanding could only be acquired through the process, through practice itself. It’s the nature of aspiration: we are drawn to a value, and through the, at times, awkward and unsatisfying process of engaging with it, we begin to genuinely cultivate it.

And the seeds of our aspirations are often sown not by some pure internal desire, but by our relationships and the culture we inhabit. As the French philosopher René Girard pointed out, we are creatures of mimetic desire: we learn what to want by observing the desires of others. The minimalist life I craved was desirable because I saw it desired by people I admired. My relationships, my media consumption, my surroundings, planted the seed.

Our desires are rarely our own.

“According to meme theory, the spread of memes through imitation leads to the development and sustainability of culture. According to Girard’s mimetic theory, culture is formed primarily through the imitation of desires, not things. And desires are not discrete, static, and fixed; they are open - ended, dynamic , and volatile.”

Luke Burgis

Eventually then, saying that only one of these three theories of change is true or most likely is incomplete. Actions change values, but only if a seed has been sown. Once that’s done, just thinking more about the value won’t actually change it. Just thinking more about consuming less would not have made me value it. Action must follow. A practice. This is where behavioralists are right. It is through the repeated practice of acting that we live our way into a new value. Action without a seed of aspiration, however, is directionless. It can even strengthen what I would call "bullshit values"—those we’ve often absorbed unconsciously from our upbringing or culture that serve neither our own well-being nor that of the world around us. Or even those that only serve ourselves. And finally, our relationships not only to a great extend sow those seeds, but they also determine how well we are able to practice. That’s where research is right that says that we should change our surroundings and outer conditions.

Somehow, this reconciles the opposing ideas of how we change. The process isn't linear it's feedback-loop-ing. There is no hen without the egg and no egg without the hen.

It also relates to what I have previously written about values and an inner compass. While we like to believe that deep inside each of us is a fixed, stable set of values—a true north—that we can find if we just look hard enough, from a relational perspective, this compass isn't something we find, it's something we create-with the world. Our values aren't a static possession but a dynamic process, not a fixed noun, but a constant verb of value-ing. The search for an unshakeable, pre-existing inner compass of values is frustrating because we are looking for a solid object in a place of constant flow and multiplicity.

“I think that Socrates is just what he seems to be, namely someone who believes that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophy—the pursuit of such knowledge—is the only sure road to becoming a better person.” Agnes Callard

If we wish to consciously direct our own becoming, then, we must engage in a practice. This practice has two fundamental components:

1. Curating Desires: We must choose, with care, who and what we relate to. The seeds of our future selves are being sown in every moment. Do we surround ourselves with people who are in constant competition, or people who practice kindness? Do we consume media that offers quick fixes, or stories that explore complex truths? By consciously curating our inputs, we take an active role in shaping the aspirations that will take root in our minds.

2. Practicing Values and Beliefs: An aspiration must be embodied through action. If I aspire to care for the environment, I can’t just think about it, I must practice it - be it through conscious consumption, care for a family member, or perhaps by joining an urban gardening project in my neighborhood. This is the practice of “as if”, about practice till you become.

“Philosophers are reclusive souls, more inclined to turn inwards into a studious interrogation of the canonical texts of thinkers like themselves – mostly, though not exclusively, dead white men – than to engage directly with the messy realities of ordinary life.” Tim Ingold

This ongoing, conscious engagement is, in essence, what I understand as the practice of philosophy. It is consciously choosing-with the values you aspire to and then designing a life that allows you to live them - in relation to the whole. This requires what the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and practical philosopher

Peter Limberg

call an "ecology of practices"—a set of behaviors and routines that work together harmoniously. Trying to cultivate a value of mindfulness while at the same time working in a cutthroat environment that rewards frantic, non-stop competition is not a well designed ecology.

This is why I hope for spaces for deliberate practice and —something we do IPeP— to offer communities of practice like "PhilosophyGyms" as places where people can come together not just to inquire into ideas, but to actively practice a way of being and to support each other in the process of becoming.

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