Speech for Jakob’s confirmation

By Lars Schwed Nygård

June, 2016

Jakob, my dude.

First of all: Congratulations on your confirmation.

I just needed to make sure to get that out of the way, because this speech is gonna take us to some weird places, and I don’t know that we’re ever coming back.

So, before we go any further, I’d like you all to charge your glasses. To Jakob!

Now, speech.

Dear Jakob, my dude.

Like many people I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with social media lately, and here the other day, while I was doing that, I scrolled through my Instagram profile. All the way back to 2011, and the first picture I ever posted on there. That picture is a picture of you, at two years old, sitting in your father’s lap.

Now, I am of course not going to embarrass you by telling everyone how tiny and cute you are in that picture—spoiler alert: he’s very tiny, and very cute—nor am I going to embarrass you by making the obvious joke. You know, “You were so very tiny, and so very cute, and look at you now, 12 years later: still tiny.” No, I would never do that to you.

I am, however, going to embarrass myself by making an obvious and rather unoriginal observation, but one that I found it impossible not to make, looking at that square, little collection of Instagram pixels that for 12 years has been pretending to be you and your dad.

And that observation is that even though your dad and you share 50 percent of your genes and are overall biologically very similar—like all humans have been for the last 300,000 years of our unimaginably slow process of biological evolution—even though he and you have all that in common, you are, unlike him, growing up in a world shaped and continuously re-shaped by an unimaginably quick process of technological development.

Not exactly news, maybe, but what does it mean?

A lot of things, but two in particular, and they’re both hiding there in the name of the platform where I posted the picture of you and your dad:

Instagram.

Insta: Instant, instantaneous, quick, easy.

Gram: As in telegram, something written or recorded, something transmitted to others.

Quick, easy recording and transmission. Even back then, even the first time, it was ridiculously easy. Easy, quick, all done in a couple of seconds. All that was required of me, was to touch a flat glass screen on a flat plastic slab a couple of times, and the picture was snapped, transmitted to whomever, and then forgotten about. But hey, at least it was easy.

And yes, things are getting easier all the time. Mark Zuckerberg is making the metaverse, and it’s going to be so easy you can’t believe it.

With the metaverse, according to Zuckerberg, you will be able to play augmented reality chess, which means that you can just snap your fingers and a virtual chess board will appear anywhere, and you no longer have to suffer through the inhuman torture of actually owning a physical chess set, and lifting it out of its drawer, and—horror of horrors—taking the time to physically set up the pieces.

I bought my favorite chess set in a tiny, little shop I found in Prague, in 2001. I was there with my then-girlfriend, and I still remember it was raining for the whole time that we were there, but that somehow just made the city more beautiful.

The chess board and the pieces are all hand-made, intricately carved and lacquered to smooth, imperfect perfection. It smells vaguely of spicy wood, and each piece is fitted with a sole of quiet felt that lets you slide it from one square to the next without making a sound, or—when you want to add a touch of subtle theatrics to your game— set it down with a soft, yet decisive toc.

I love my chess set. I don’t love Mark Zuckerberg.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that little two-year-old Jakob probably wasn’t hyperaware of the existence of Mark Zuckerberg at all, but if you had been, I think it’s a safe bet that you wouldn’t have been his number one fan.

Because the most striking thing about that old Instagram picture, to me, is the expression on your face: You’re staring into the camera with this super-serious, ultra-skeptical look, like you’re prepared to disbelieve pretty much anything and distrust pretty much anyone.

But there is something else in that stare as well, a quality that I recognise both in your dad and in myself. It’s the perfect complement to your skepticism, and that is your curiosity. You’re staring at the camera like you’re trying to tease out of it the meaning of life, but the camera is an iPhone and take it from me: the iPhone does not know the meaning of life.

But, thankfully, I do.

So now, 12 years later, let’s try and satisfy two year old Jakob’s curiosity. Let’s discover the meaning of life.

I actually found mine a few years ago. I use it to guide me through every single choice I make in my life, and it’s the reason that I, when your mom asked me to say a few words here today, hesitated for a grand total of zero seconds before saying yes.

Because the meaning of my life is to create stories that help people evolve.

Just saying the words out loud makes my spine tingle, and it makes me feel so deeply grateful to be standing here in front of you today, telling you a story that I hope will help you to live the rest of your life in as deep and rich and meaningful a way as you possibly can.

Your father, Nils, is my best friend. And looking at the expression on his face, today, and in that old Instagram picture, and every single time he talks about you or Niko or your amazing mother Lian, it’s pretty obvious what the meaning of his life is.

I’m not a parent myself, but if my sources are to be believed, it’s not the easiest job in the world.

“It takes a village to raise a child,” an old African saying goes, but our current society has traded away the village for the nuclear family.

For tens of thousands of years, mothers and fathers lived surrounded by other adults who played crucial roles in their children’s upbringing, but that all changed with the Industrial Revolution.

Villages and tribes and extended families have been split apart into nuclear families, shifting the responsibility for our children solely and squarely onto the shoulders of one or two parents who are also expected to hold down full-time jobs and do every other gosh-darned thing.

To all of us, of course, the nuclear family is as natural as sunlight on the trees, because we’ve all lived all our lives like this.

But for our bodies, our genes, our slow, evolutionary inheritance, this state of affairs is shockingly new—and hard as hell. It’s important to remember that.

Luckily, though, you and Niko and Nils and Lian do have a village. It’s all of us.

And I have a village too. It’s Lian and Nils and Niko and you.

You guys are the closest thing I’ve got to a family of my own here on this paradise of a peninsula that I, in so many ways thanks to you, have made my home.

I moved from Oslo out here to Nesodden for the same reason I do every other gosh-darned thing in my life: To create stories that help people evolve.

But since coming here, I’ve picked up something else as well: In some ways, my life, now, is just a little bit harder than it was before. Nothing big, just the added responsibility of maintaining a house instead of an apartment, the slightly trickier logistics of life outside the city.

I was prepared for all that, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would make me feel. The calmness, the groundedness, the fullness of being that fills you up when your everyday offers just a little more resistance, a little more friction, a little more unpredictability.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut tells this story about the time he told his wife that he was going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh,' she says, 'well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?

And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people.

And, see some great looking babies.

And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up.

And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is.

And, and I don't know.

The moral of the story is, we're here on Earth to fart around.”

There’s meaning in that, too, and it’s a type of meaning that I hope you’ll still be able to find when you reach my age.

Which is 23.

Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with social media recently, and the sharpest analysis that I have come across of our world today, is this:

We have bodies, brains, and nervous systems from the Stone Age, societal institutions from the 19th century, and godlike technology that is developing at exponential speed.

I believe that this fundamental discrepancy is at the heart of most of the challenges that we face today, and that you will face in the world that my generation leaves behind for yours.

I believe that our great task, now, is to restore a balance between those three things: our technology, our society, and our own biological and psychological needs.

It’s going to be hard, but there’s meaning in that, too.

So. So far we have found two meanings of life: to solve the fundamental problem of human society, and to fart around. Is that it?

No, my dear Jakob. I don’t believe it is.

So allow me, now, to initiate you into what I believe is the one, ultimate meaning of life, of all life: The one meaning that contains within it both farting around, and solving the fundamental problem of human society, and creating stories that help people evolve, and the meaning that your father radiates whenever he talks about you.

I believe that the ultimate meaning, the purpose of each and every living thing is simply this:

To give each other life.

To give each other life. Like your parents gave you life, like the salad I ate just now gave me life, like the trees in the forest give us life when they make our air and when they become our houses and our firewood.

Like our doctors give us life, like our musicians give us life. Like we give life when we support a charity or lend each other a neighbourly hand.

Sure, there’s often happiness in receiving, but in giving there is always meaning. My meaning—to create stories that help people evolve—is my way of giving life. And I am desperately curious to see what yours will turn out to be. All I know for sure is that it is going to be hard.

Because that, I think, is what meaning itself is: Our Stone Age bodies evolved to struggle for survival, our own and each other’s, and if we didn’t struggle, we didn’t survive.

We’ve all forgotten that, now, but our bodies have not.

Our Stone Age bodies still expect us to struggle and to help each other, to do things that are hard for us, and when we do, they reward us with that glowing feeling, that deep, contented fullness of being, that when we feel it we immediately recognise as the meaning of life.

Like President John F. Kennedy said:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Kennedy was murdered not long after, but his place in history is now almost less that of an American president than that of a mythical king. And his people did go to the Moon and do the other things, at least in part because he had inspired them, a nation, to make the impossible possible.

We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Which in itself can be hard to remember in a world that keeps insisting to us that what we always really need is to spend our money on more convenience, more ease.

So I will leave you now with two things: a piece of advice and an offer, each of which it will be up to you to decide whether or not to accept.

The advice:

Once every year, to infuse your life with a great, big booster shot of meaning, do something extremely challenging for you, and don’t tell anyone that you did it.

This is a practice called Misogi, which is based on an old Japanese Shinto ritual where people would push their endurance to the limit by standing under an icy waterfall.

But a Misogi can be any physical activity that is so challenging for you that you estimate no more than a fifty percent chance of succeeding at it.

Stand under a waterfall, run twice as far as you’ve ever run before, carry a heavy rock around all of Nesodden’s coastline—whatever you can come up with, as long as it’s safe, extremely hard for you, and preferably a little bit weird.

If you do that, and if you succeed, you’re going to feel so proud you’re about to burst. You’ll be desperate to share it with someone, to tell everyone what you’ve done and what you’re capable of, but don’t.

Keep it to yourself.

Tell your parents only what they need to know to be reassured that you won’t hurt yourself, but other than that: Not a word. Not to them, not to Niko, not to me—nobody. Your Misogi is yours alone.

And if you’re strong enough to keep that secret, that sense of accomplishment and pride and meaning is going to feed back into itself, and it will start to feel like an army of warriors lined up behind your chest, ready to protect you, to fight for you, and to fight for the deepest meaning of your life, whatever that will turn out to be.

Which brings us to the offer.

Today, Jakob, you have been through an initiation. I would like to offer you one more. The very same initiation that I myself went through to discover the meaning of my life.

If you accept this offer, I will come to your door one day soon, and we will walk off into the woods just south of here.

There I will guide you through the initiation, and at the end of it you will have given yourself the confirmation present that you truly deserve: a compass by which to guide your life’s choices, and a yardstick by which to match your achievements and ambitions and relationships against who you truly are.

You will have given yourself the meaning of your life.

I won’t tell you here and now what the initiation will entail, other than to say that it will be safe, and difficult, and that I promise not to Instagram it.

And once you’ve been through the initiation once, you can guide yourself through it again whenever you like, and that way you can make sure that your meaning grows and changes as you yourself do the same.

You’re growing into a man, now, Jakob, but you still carry with you the curiosity and the skepticism that marked your face when you were a boy of two.

Which one of them will win out in you today? Your skepticism or your curiosity?

The offer has been made, Jakob Mørk. Whether or not to accept it is up to you.