Virtue must be trained. We are the sum total of our habits, and virtues must be habituated. To establish a habit, we need to train and practice, and reinforce actions. The starting point for Christians should be to habituate thinking about Christ. Connecting everything back to Christ and taking every step in virtue of Christ. The habit is the Christian mindset and thinking about everything from the Christ-like eternal perspective. This is no easy task and we can try so hard to have a brief glimpse of it. I don’t know how to make this easier. People devote their entire lives to this. Monastics escape the world to meditate. There is so much we can do, but we have to try.

The first practical step is to lean into discomfort. Professional athletes are devoted to growth and they focus on areas of most discomfort, that is, their weaknesses. Usually, weaknesses are the most uncomfortable to approach and work on. But our love of comfort often keeps us blind to our weaknesses. It is hard to know how to lean into discomfort because it is uncharted territory and it feels like jumping off a building. Everything tells us to stay comfortable and blissfully ignorant. We must be disciplined and approach actively the areas we avoid.

While there is an active portion of seeking discomfort, we must resist and stay resilient through attack. The temptation to cross the line or fall into sin is always present, sometimes stronger in one moment than others. Today, sexual sin is all around us, and resistance must be deliberate and focused. We have to draw the line and stick to it. Another example of line drawing is the white lie. We must speak the truth and be honorable even if it is inconvenient. All of this leads to an often neglected sin: gluttony. We are so self-indulgent and seek novelty gratification through technology without any restraint. It corrupts us in the same way excess food does–that is, it affects our minds and the way we control ourselves. We become too flippant in crossing the lines we draw and we have a hard time staying within them because of our lack of practice.

Kierkegaard wrote, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, ‘Create silence’.” Our lives are too busy. It is important to have the right perspective and train this perspective to always have it on in our day-to-day work. In the grander picture, our work is insignificant busywork. However, through Christ, everything is imbued with meaning. The insignificant busywork becomes a part of a grand plan that Christ has for us. We might only understand a small slice of it, but we can have faith enough to have hope and work hard. 

We must embrace the discomfort. The non-ideal constraints help us realize that nothing is in our hands. Our plans dissolve as the present moves into the future. In this, we have faith in Christ. In faith, we can take risks, embrace failure, and be fine with whatever worldly rejection we face.

We must train ourselves to be reminded of the importance of training. To lose sight of the importance of the eternal perspective can cascade dangerously. Minimally, we have to force ourselves to taste the eternal and understand its importance in order to tame everything else in the world. The world of distractions can be a wild animal that consumes us if were are not careful.

Fortune favors the bold. Does it? Superstition aside, it’s important to take risks to expose ourselves to novel opportunities. Taking risks allows access to the minimal chance of something amazing happening; there is an important difference between zero and non-zero chances, no matter how low. The converse of this optimism is that it exposes us to a non-zero chance of something catastrophic. That fear can be paralyzing and instinctively we might avoid it. But we may overexaggerate how bad it can get. Moreover, we can inflate trivially bad outcomes, like rejection or failure without real consequences. These sorts of things are internally bad and can bruise our self-image or egos. These bruises are sometimes good.

We should practice being resilient to failure or rejection. The “go-for-no” approach looks at defeating trivial failures and embracing them in order to gain the possibility of great success. It attempts to deflate the trivially bad outcomes and indeed leans into it, like exposure therapy. The phobia of failure and its bundle of social failures and anxieties are pathological yet so common in society. It’s important to rise above in order to exercise our radical freedom. It’s an act of faith.

Selfishness, according to Aristotle and Plato, is ordered into self-love through training our prudence and moderating our affect. This is done through virtuous habits. Selfishness, or self-interest, is a basic drive or passion that can be controlled through practical reason and willpower.

Humor can help with virtues. It can be a service and risk to leap and tell a joke. It can be a form of self-forgetfulness and humility. It can be a social enterprise and a tool of connection and communication. Moreover, it’s an intellectual exercise of performance and art. There’s little comedy in the Bible. But humor and comedy are clearly a part of God’s creation: there’s humor among friends, funny little animals, and a deep irony in life. This is no mistake and not a result of sin. We shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that the solemn nature of Christianity means there is no comedy in the Christian life. Comedy is interestingly authentic. Pretense is the opposite of true comedy. Comedy also is a truthful commentary of a shared experience. It’s relatable because it resonates with a particular view or experience in this life.