The Psychology of Sailing: Navigating a Meaningful Life
This article initiates a series exploring the compelling similarities between sailing a boat across the ocean and living a meaningful, intentional life. This is a thought experiment, an attempt to organize and synthesize ideas I’ve been developing and “toying with” over recent years.
As I’ve immersed myself in books by authors in psychology and those focused on sailing, a synthesis has begun to form. I’ve gradually collected notes and quotations that are now merging into a more articulated project and I decided to share this research, even if it’s still in its infancy, hoping it will resonate with readers. Some may be drawn to observe established psychological phenomena from a new angle, while sailors, in particular, might appreciate seeing their unique experience framed in a broader, more communicable way.
I hope you’ll join me on this voyage and offer real-time feedback on how well this analogy holds water.
The Origins of the Idea
For the past three years, I’ve been a guest lecturer for American undergraduate students studying in Milan. Initially, my lectures were simply a personal recount of my transformative experience as a 28-year-old organizational psychologist who abandoned his career and country to live and work on a sailboat in Venezuela.
I soon realized, however, that the students enrolled in a psychology course were more interested in practical concepts than in the life story of an individual they might not have much in common with. Each semester, I gradually revised the lecture, integrating concepts like Transformative Experiences (L. Paul, 2014), awe as an emotion (D. Keltner et al., 2013), and the state of Flow (M. Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
In trying to be of service to my students, I was, in fact, helping make sense of my own story. These psychological frameworks are helping me clarify areas of my life where my own desires and expectations previously seemed obscure. I will use these same ideas in this article series, and expand into new territories. In fact the more I research this topic, the more I am opening to the idea that as human beings we are basically the navigators of the gaps between Self and Reality.
Sailing by the Seat of One’s Pants
Through my work in psychosocial risk assessment, hunting for psychological issues in the workplace, I frequently observed people unhappy with their circumstances or feeling they weren’t who they wished to be.
Some individuals, often viewed from the outside, appear blessed with an infallible internal compass, or consumed actors who hide how clueless they are about life. They seem to understand exactly what they desire and instinctively know where to look for joy. Others, even if they are not so sure about what they want, they set their decisions on an overarching life plan, setting out to complete tasks that will take them efficiently from Point A to Point B.
Yet, my experience—and that of many friends, colleagues, and clients—is that everything is much murkier. When it comes to personal preferences and traits, we often lack the clear answers needed to make sound judgments.
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Do I really love the person I’m dating?
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What is my main goal in life?
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Am I making progress in my career, or am I at a dead end?
This unawareness of our inner motives and sometimes of our own skills is a staple of art and literature. Characters like Don Quixote, Oedipus, and Macbeth live in a distorted, often delusional reality because they cannot truly access their inner truth. If this confusion is widespread throughout human history, it is possible that there are common, constructed blind spots that make life a treacherous area to navigate. This often leaves us no choice but to rely on instinct and feeling, not knowing what moves or what we want.
Ocean Navigation
Life’s journey truly parallels a voyage across the ocean: a constant negotiation with a potentially unfamiliar and often hostile environment. Though modern society aims to be safe and uneventful, there are times when “life happens,” forcing us to face difficult decisions and circumstances.
There are two main reasons I started to look into ocean navigation for examples and strategies to address the issue: It is a subject that I know quite well and the sailing voyage metaphor is familiar to many.
While humans can learn to swim, their bodies aren’t built for long-term survival at sea and they created vessels to endure extended journeys. Yet, even these tools, more resilient and better designed for the task, don’t truly belong to the ocean. In fact, boats require constant vigilance and maintenance, and as a result of errors and neglect many boats and lives have been lost at sea throughout history.
Navigators face the arduous task of routinely determining their vessel’s position in this profoundly confusing place: a constantly moving, featureless desert; a place with no shelter, undrinkable water and powerful currents, battered by strong winds and large waves. This operation requires them to continuously determine relationship with visible and invisible landmarks, plot a heading that steers clears of danger and project the vessel efficiently toward destination.
While GPS has simplified this job in the satellite era, it doesn’t diminish the fact that for ages, humanity successfully employed strategies, tools, and knowledge to solve this existential problem. This skill enabled us to reach every island on the planet long before modern navigation technology existed. If many perished in these endeavors, the majority made landfall safely and continue to employ this art.
Life Navigation: Understanding Your Vessel (The Self)
The movement through life parallels the movement on the ocean: Individuals are heading toward an unknown destination while crossing an environment that is, in many ways, dangerous. Yet, despite confusion and occasional accidents, we seem to manage quite well, even without a clear “GPS system.”
I would argue that individuals have developed a “self,” which, like a vessel, enables them to move through a psychosocial environment. In this series, I want to show how we usually navigate this “self-boat” and the limitations and fallacies we deal with.
Understanding your vessel is the first step in navigation. The constraints and capabilities of your boat—its keel, draft, average speed—create a fundamental knowledge base that ultimately determines the course you can and should steer. Similarly, an accurate self-image allows you to respond adaptively to different life situations.
On average, people tend to see themselves “through rose-colored glasses,” avoiding a close look at their flaws. This beneficial strategy helps us persist, but problems arise when these positive illusions become too detached from reality. But how can we gain accurate knowledge of our self-boat when we are plagued by so many blind spots?
Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?
I will begin by addressing the core issue directly: consciousness. For the sake of this experiment, I will arbitrarily give consciousness the role of the navigator: its job is to continuously gather information and make course corrections, using awareness and self-reflection to guide us.
Life Navigation is a method for aligning our conscious self with our true, often unconscious, movement.
In upcoming articles, we will explore:
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The Role of the Navigator: We’ll detail the duties of a navigator aboard a seagoing vessel and the process by which they accomplish their goals.
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Mental Maps: How we create the mental maps that allow us to orient ourselves and make judgments about our behavior in our shared environment.
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The Fix Cycle: We will learn about this crucial navigation strategy and determine an equivalent strategy for our own life decisions.
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Cognitive Biases: We’ll examine how biases and automatic processing save energy, and when this advantage becomes a danger.
As in any sailing journey, the route is subject to changes. It is usually at the end of the voyage, in the calm of a safe harbor, that one can best assess the course taken. The wisdom of “navigating life” is not found in plotting a perfect course, but in accepting deviations and re-evaluating the past from a place of peace and acquired knowledge.
Navigating as a Crew
As we will see in greater detail, navigating is a distributed cognitive process, as Edwin Hutchins demonstrated in Cognition in the Wild. I want to encourage you to be part of this journey by commenting this and the following articles with questions and feedback. Your input will help inform which heading this voyage should take.
We are a crew on this intellectual voyage! The experience and perspectives of each of you are important to a safe and enriching journey. Please feel free to email me any thoughts, personal experiences about navigating life challenges, or even criticism.
