Category: Happiness

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Accountability Happiness Knowing yourself Productivity Self-management

Here’s What Smart People Know That the Latest Fads, Diets and Lifestyles Don’t

You can eat fat by the pails of lard now, but no carbs. Or try an all-meat diet. Or just eat raw veggies. I have never understood diets. Or “lifestyles” as diets are now called. These days you’re not on a diet, you change your lifestyle. No longer are you buying into a temporary act, but a permanent change.

Ever notice how every diet has a detailed system for you to follow? Complexity is added so that a product is new and novel to the customer. The result is the answer. That thing you’ve been missing. You just didn’t know the right rules to follow.

I have a better lifestyle for you. It can be boiled down to one word, and that word is not FAT, MEAT, or RAW. This is a special word, a magic system that not only serves as a recipe for what you eat, but a playbook for how to live your life. This single word? The only rule you’ll ever need? This passphrase that unlocks decades of research you’ve never read? It’s moderation. Oh, so boring right? You probably think you’ve tried moderation before. That you gave it a fair shot and moderation did nothing for you. But you’d be wrong.

Moderation comes from the Latin “moderare” which means “to control.” It avoids excess and extremes, and encourages a life in the middle. Synonyms for moderate include self-restraint, self-control, self-command, and self-discipline. Which explains why we avoid moderation like the plague; we possess none of those things.

Moderation Over Time
Source: Google.

Back to food, the number of choices on what to eat alone are mind-boggling. The grocery store is a veritable jungle of sights and tastes and nutritional value competing for a place in our bodies and minds.

With so much choice, it’s no wonder we turn to diets – er, lifestyles – to reduce the number of decisions we have to make. Doesn’t it make it easier? Aren’t we special? So we believe. But the limits of one only encourage the excess of another. And the yo-yo-ing between these two extremes can be nauseating.

Under the facade of science, we tweak these lifestyles to ever-more detailed minutiae. Now add acai! Now subtract lactose! Armed with such complex rules the next time you open the fridge, you feel control. You’ve got this nut figured out. (Wait, can you eat nuts?)

But make as many food substitutions as you’d like, external rules will never be a replacement for your own self-discipline. Here’s the thing. You already know everything you need to be successful. Take a breath. You know the choices to make. We fill our time with personal development books and new tomes on eating and the latest green smoothie recipe because we don’t trust ourselves, maybe don’t even like ourselves. (And hey, that’s a good instinct to have; companies are now spending millions and billions of dollars perfecting the addictive crunch of a chip until the whole bag is gone, the auto-play of the next episode until you’ve watched the entire season, the notification alert until all of your time is spent.)

We do need rules, tricks and defenses to put up against the new, the shiny, the distractions, the temptations – even if those are couched in kale and productivity. Extremes are extremes, no matter which end of the spectrum they lie. So break out your arsenal. Just be careful you aren’t trading one extreme for another. Don’t fear one extreme so much that you live under the supposed protection of another. When in doubt, eat a donut.

Moderation is a simple concept. There is nothing that cannot be moderated. Your actions, your desires and thoughts can all live by one simple rule, one magic system. But we don’t do it. I think that’s because moderation is not fun in the moment. But smart people know moderation need not exist in every moment, only over time. The moments stacked one on top of another become a fortress against the latest fads, diets and lifestyles. All good things come over time.

So the next time someone asks you, instead of saying you’re “fasting” or “juicing,” just say you’re “moderating.” People might chuckle, roll their eyes in exasperation, or secretly be glad they know the latest research that you are clearly unaware. But keep trucking on, eating your your cheese and your beans and your brussel sprouts and your chocolate almonds, and f*cking enjoy your life.

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Career Happiness Relationships Women

The Loosening of Ambition

I have a horrible memory, but I remember Ryan asking me to move to DC. Sitting next to each other knee to knee, looking away, biting my inner cheek while he explained why his company needed to relocate. I waited, re-forming his words in my brain while he talked, and then, he wants me to come with him, doesn’t think he can do it without me.

I remember Thank You. Relief. Finally. (And hooray big city!) Thank you for taking me away, letting me play big, taking me with you. 

The move, four years ago now, was supposed to be temporary. But it was also supposed to be permanent; you keep up a facade for the sake of transition. Uprooting it all is easier when you think you can come back. I moved to get out of the Midwest where I had lived my entire life, to do the next big thing, and to serve my ambition. Basically, I moved for me. But I also moved for love and for Ryan, more so than I knew at the time.

My job in Madison let me work remotely, which seemed like a good idea then. Who doesn’t want to work from home, especially in a place like DC? I imagined myself traipsing around the city, diving into museums, opening my laptop and leaning back, legs elongated and crossed at the ankles, surveying the people, twirling a pen between my fingers. But I didn’t do those things. And working from home sucked.

I spent most days in a dark apartment we found after viewing twelve places in twelve hours; it was the best out of a dozen, and we signed the lease to have an address for our U-Haul. After we moved in, we realized the windows faced a brick wall. The irony should have alerted me then. In Madison, I thought I was a big fish in a small pond (as much as a young twenty-something could be a big fish). In DC, I wasn’t a small fish in a big pond, it was more like I didn’t exist.

I didn’t get out and meet anyone as I was still tricking myself into thinking we might move back. There was no urgency for me to build a network as I still had my job. And I continued to hold onto the supposed heaven of working from home. Meanwhile, Ryan, whose company situation was precarious before the move (part of the “why” of relocation), was flourishing. You’re not supposed to be jealous of your partner but I was jealous. All of a sudden, everyone knew who he was and all about his company. But no one had heard of the startup I worked for. As time went on, I became increasingly isolated.

Life started to revolve around Ryan in ways I didn’t expect. He passed on speaking engagements he couldn’t or didn’t want to do. Told me about consulting opps from his network. A new job opening from someone he knew. What little career I strung together, I did under his wing. I never imagined myself as the girl who follows her boyfriend across the country, but that’s what I did. I never imagined myself defeated, not knowing what to do next, finding it difficult to get out of the house, intimidated and riddled with anxiety, but that’s what I was.

Sometimes our relationship felt like two bricks tied to my ankles, drowning me in a sea of opportunities. I kept this quiet of course; it wasn’t true, but the weight of my own responsibility was weighted even more with depression. I had the ability to create my future, my present, but chose not to day after day. I oscillated between stuffing down feelings of worthlessness to day-dreaming about starting over on my own alone.

One time I had a job opportunity in New York, something I was really excited about, and got to the final round of interviews. They said I didn’t get the job because the plan to work remotely and travel in between didn’t work. I offered to move to New York temporarily, say for three months, even six, but it didn’t work. And I couldn’t lie and say I would move there for real; we live in DC. And we live here for Ryan’s company.

After, when I told Ryan that I offered to move to New York, he was taken aback. You wouldn’t have really moved, would you? he asked. In my mind: YES. Then I shrugged. Maybe. In my mind: Maybe not.

My choice was largely unconscious over time, but I did prioritize the role of supportive girlfriend, fiancé, and now wife over ambition. And this is what women do. We have careers, we have ambitions, and then love, society, and a lack of vigilance gets in the way.

The ability to have it all, let alone do it all, rests on the supposition that we know what it “all” is, and succeeding in the idea presupposes that we have a choice in the matter, which we often don’t. A modern patriarchy leaves women subtle cues and not-so-subtle mixed messages that layer on top of each other to form a confused haze. We’re left fighting for personal clarity, for the knowledge of what one wants over expectations and transitions, for independence in the midst of love, for careers in the midst of relationships.

I am lucky to have a partner who, when I realized the tiny box I was in and of my own making, allowing myself to be pulled along by the gentle machinations of society, didn’t insist on professions of contentedness or ask, “Why aren’t you/can’t you be happy?” but rather opened up the world and said, this is for you. There is time.

But it’s hard to support your partner and take your own path. Especially when the path isn’t obvious or bumps up against invisible rules or biological clocks (shout-out to love, marriage and the baby carriage!). Unconditional love and support means the ability to fly and be rooted, to gamble and be protected. You get both freedom and security. And while ambition can be amplified in a relationship, a careful watch for its loosening and slipping, then settling, must be kept. Keep a lookout for your mind, worth just as much as his. Vow allegiance to love and independence. Guard your decisions with intention. The world needs the depths and dreams of a woman.

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Happiness Knowing yourself Love What You Do Productivity Self-management Time management

Don’t Trust Your To-Do List
(It’s Crap)

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[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DontTrustYourToDoList.mp3|titles=Don’t Trust Your To-Do List. It’s Crap]

One of my productivity secrets is obsessive singular focus. Give me a task, and I’ll put my head down and get ‘er done. Ryan likes to joke that the last time we moved, he left for work from one apartment, came home to a different one, and the location was the only thing different. I’m that good.

Once there is a goal in front of me, I throw everything at said goal to achieve it. That time we planned our wedding? Most big rocks were complete in 24 hours. Site redesign? Give me a weekend. Total career change? I need a month, max.

One after another, I devote my energies to each goal like a monogamous relationship. And for awhile, it works. Until it doesn’t. This magical productivity train (choo! choo!) stops when obsessive singular focus requires you to ignore everything else that’s important. And because you lose sight, you get overwhelmed. The productivity train slows, then stops.

Last Friday, the train didn’t slow or stop, it derailed. I had been working on merging our financial accounts for about a week. What shouldn’t have been too arduous a process was made more difficult by multiple attempts (like, a thousand calls) to verify my identity with our new bank. I finally got the accounts open Friday afternoon and Ryan said he would change his bills to our new joint accounts on Sunday.

Ahem.

SUNDAY? TWO DAYS AWAY?

Not only had I spent many logistical hours getting our accounts in place, but I had spent many more hours creating new budgets for our joint finances, and most importantly, I was READY. TO. BE. DONE. To cross this task, its sub-tasks, the whole freakin’ thing, off my list.

When Ryan went to pick us up dinner, I called my mom. “Can you believe it? He wants to do it on Sunday!”

“Well, it doesn’t all have to be done right now, does it?” she said.

My mom, ever-the-mediator. I took a breath.

No, it didn’t have to be done then and there. Not at all. In fact, there would be no dire consequences if Ryan changed the accounts on Sunday instead of Friday.

I took another breath. And really, if I had permission to not do things right away, just because it was on my list, maybe I could enjoy our Friday night, and Saturday, and Saturday night.

One more breath. Yes, of course, Sunday was fine.

We live in an achievement-oriented culture, where we add things to our to-do list, even when they’re already done, just to cross it off. The art of getting things done is more important than what we’re doing. Compile the weekly report. Done. Grocery shopping. Done. Write. Done. Exercise. Done. Meditate. Four out of five ain’t bad. But just because we measure by the numbers doesn’t mean we’re complete.

Climbing can be exhausting and I’ve tried to opt out. Not out of hard work, mind you. We glibly talk about first-world problems, but when your food and shelter needs are met, and you get down to the horrifying work of being a decent human being, sitting with your mind day-in and day-out, there are no easy problems. When you’ve stripped the titles and money and accolades, it can be more than difficult to just “be you.”

Not convinced? Witness the existential crises the most privileged among us face: the have-it-all graduates of the Ivy League. In a bracing essay for The New Republic, former Yale Professor and author William Deresiewicz argues “our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

So we fill our time. With weekly reports. Daily lists. Merging financial accounts. We make things that don’t need to be priorities super important. So we feel important. So that we have meaning. So that we feel we’re on this Earth for some sort of reason.

Me too. I’m super competitive, despite never getting above fifth place on track or speech team in high school (FLUKES, I tell you). I’m good at what I do. I was groomed for the new American Dream where your email open rate counts for more than the type of car in your driveway. I love seeing numbers going up-and-to-the-right whether it’s revenue or minutes per run. Tracking. Self-quantification. Besting my personal best.

And me too. I’m hard on myself. Way too hard. It’s okay not to do it all. It’s okay not to have it all. I have to remind myself.

Obsessive singular focus is a magic potion. But it can be poison. It depends on the task at hand. But here’s a tip: Don’t trust your to-do list. It’s crap.

—

If you want to work on what matters, new spots are now open for the next round of Accountability Friend, wherein you invest in whatever your heart desires, and I become your accountability friend for two weeks. Click here to take control of your time, and take responsiblity for your life.

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Happiness Knowing yourself Relationships Self-management

How to Get Married After a Long-Term Relationship

RyanAndRebeccaEngaged_29Ryan and I were together almost six years before we got married a few weeks ago. People (like me) enjoy asking long-time couples once they’re married, “Do you feel any different?” And the answer is usually, “Not really.”

But I do. For me, marriage is an unknown. I didn’t grow up with an example of marriage or what it meant. My father died when I was in second grade, but even if he had lived, my parents were not married. They loved each other, spent their free time with each other, slept with each other (and then there was me – surprise!), but did not marry each other, for reasons too intricate for now. So I didn’t learn about marriage growing up. I learned Independence. Strength. How to Put Together Furniture Without a Man.

And while I was never sure I would ever get married, Ryan has always been sure he would. If my upbringing was imperfect, his was idyllic. While his parents were both previously married, once they came together, they stayed together. They had Ryan and his brother, and while of course they had ups and downs, they mostly built an All-American life. Which isn’t to say my childhood wasn’t privileged and joyful, just that we did not represent the standard nuclear family.

So do I feel different? I started to when we began to plan the wedding. Besides the streamers and food, we planned not just the order of the ceremony, but our marriage. I knew Ryan was “the one” right away, but five or six years together didn’t help the fear of lifelong commitment weeks before the wedding. I pushed against the idea in my head and then out loud. Very loud.

It came out all sorts of ways, but was mostly this: “Are you sure about this? Are you sure you want to commit to me? Lil’ ole me?” and also this: “Wait, I’m not ready yet! This isn’t where I wanted to be in my life. My identity! My career!”

I dug my heels in, trying to make the time before the big “I do” go slower, to talk about kids, and finances, and how we would fight, and who would get up with the baby, and where we would live. Our imaginary teenagers got into all sorts of trouble and I got upset when it became clear Ryan would be easier on our kids than I would be (dear future kiddos: you will be grounded).

It all took some time to sink in. When you’re as hard on yourself as I am, acceptance is a delicate flower. I came to realize that not being fully formed, well, that was okay. You can enter into marriage without smoothing down all the bumps. God knows, I tried.

Finally, we took a slow one or two hour walk through our favorite running path, down to the Lincoln Memorial (Ryan’s favorite), then along the reflecting pond, past the White House, and back up, past our neighborhood restaurants and shops. I didn’t get everything figured out like I wanted to. Only that I had chosen and had been chosen.

I finished my vows, the promises I made to Ryan, that we would figure the rest out along the way. I promised to go on that journey with him, not knowing what will happen, how we will feel, or what will come next.

When we arrived back home after the wedding, everything looked the same, but also, everything had moved two inches to the right. The space in between opened an entirely new depth in our relationship. I can see glimpses of what our life will be like, but I try to live in the present. My head on his chest, his hand on mine.

This is different. It’s all very different. Every day, my heart opens wider and I don’t know how it can hold so much love.

How did you or will you prepare for your marriage? Do you feel different? How will marriage change your relationship? 

(Psst – Next week, I’ll reveal the more practical side of marriage, including exactly how much our wedding cost and of course, the wedding photos. Update: click here to read.)

Categories
Accountability Career Happiness Knowing yourself

How to Do What You Want
In Life

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[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/dowhatyouwant.mp3|titles=How to Do What You Want In Life]

The hardest thing in doing what you want is coming to terms with it. I’ve spent more than ten years doing that, maybe more, maybe since I was a little person? When I was young, my mother gave me a book to record my dreams. I never wrote down the visions that came to me at night, only what I fantasized about during the day. The themes don’t change over time. I’ve known for a long time what I wanted to do.

In many ways, I’ve been doing what I want, and in those positions and side jobs and experiments and activities, I’ve been circling closer and closer, around and around, like a bird goes about it’s prey. But quitting my job was recognition that, all of a sudden, the circle was getting larger, not smaller. I wasn’t closing in on everything I’ve ever wanted, but moving farther away from it. I needed a course correction, and I took it.

Since then, for two months or so, I’ve gone on a life break, a reset if you will. I exercise a lot. I read endlessly on the Internet. I sit on our stoop and people watch. I started drinking light wheat beers. I completed my best run, and then a week later, I did it three days in a row. We went on a vacation to Newport. I had my 30th birthday party, and another celebration for good measure.

I am more at peace, knowing somewhere I already made the decision the moment I quit, and now I am just preparing myself. There’s depression, and then there’s the overwhelming excitement of possibility, where your heart races and there’s nothing you can do to slow down. I’m not sure which I prefer. I try to temper my expectations. Other days, I strike down big goals from my heart. I tackle them in permanent ink.

If you could do anything, what would you do? The responsibility is big. Or so we believe. Most of us can do anything we choose, but we don’t because of perceived limitations. For the past two months or so, I have been stripping those limitations from my view. I have been trying to erase paradigms, or understand them, or feel comfortable wrestling with them because they’ll never go away, not completely.

Like, for example, when people asked what my next step was, and I said “I don’t know.” That’s not a good thing to say unless you want to make people confused and uncomfortable. Or later, when I knew, and I said, “I’m a writer,” the reactions are very different from when I mentioned “I’m in marketing,” or “I work for a startup.” I still do those things. But first and foremost, I’m a writer now.

Mostly I am coming to terms with a different financial reality. Because I want to make money, and I am pursuing what I want in the absence of money. This makes me confused and uncomfortable. But media is an industry in enormous flux, both risky and thrilling, where beloved institutions crumble and new ones are built in just hours. More than anything I want to be in the fray. Writing is a constant sifting and winnowing for the truth. That which allow us to make sense of our lives. And there’s a lot of sense to be made.

I want to build a space for dialogue to engage and challenge our ideas and institutions. I’ll investigate how to find meaning and make money in our work and lives, even as inequality rises to staggering heights and highly educated young people remain jobless or underemployed with debilitating debt, even as we live in a lesser depression, even as partisan politics reaches all-time highs and corporatism sinks to lower lows, even as we struggle with sexism and insidious ignorance, even as we feel the problems piling up around us are too big to solve.

Now is the time where I stop circling and make the dive.

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Earn More Find a side job Get a Raise Happiness Side Jobs

Don’t Quit Your Job Until You Make Some Money

To come to terms with opting out of your career, is primarily to come to terms with money. The first step toward leaning out is to get a raise. Maybe a side job. Also, max out your 401(k) and your Roth IRA. Fill up your emergency fund – and feel free to call it a “screw you” fund if it helps you contribute more. Because opting out? It’s best suited for those with money.

Our money paradigms  – often negative – say that those with a lot of it are undeserving, and came by it via luck (“the rich get richer”). And in times of enormous uncertainty, like now, we seem to be more comfortable leaving things up to chance. Things will work themselves out; everything happens for a reason. This sort of fatalistic thinking puts us in the depressing position of being in less and less control of our own lives. But we used to be a lot more self-reliant. We used to actively manage our lives.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it,” said Thomas Jefferson. Luck used to be “perceived as something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled. It was not this weird external force that couldn’t be understood,” argues PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “Today’s default view is more Malcolm Gladwell than Thomas Jefferson; success, we are told, seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes. You can’t control your destiny. Things have to combine just right. It’s all kind of an accident.”

Le sigh. A big reason I chose to “lean out,” was specifically to ensure that my life wouldn’t be left up to chance. And I spent a good two years preparing, long before my “Enough!” moment. The financial viability of taking a break, and exploring your options comes with a price tag. Mine includes a six-month emergency fund. Plus, I have side income and no debt. Even though I quit my job, I didn’t quit my side projects, which I actually enjoy. So my six-month fund will last much longer, more like a year. I also have a fiancé, and together, we split expenses. Practically, if I lived alone, I would probably spend less, but psychologically, his support makes taking risks easier.

Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses. And fifty percent have less than a three-month cushion, while twenty-seven percent had no savings at all. Several people in the last category have told me they want to leave their jobs since my last post. Why? If you hate your job now, if you are stressed and exhausted, it will only worsen when you are sitting watching daytime television and have nothing in your bank account.

Take care of yourself. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to make millions when you opt-out. You need to hustle enough to cover your expenses. And if you can’t hustle now, while in a job, by getting a side job, or asking for a raise, you will not be able to support yourself without the protection of an employer.

The first step is money. The first step is not to figure out what you want to do with your life. It’s not to discover your one true passion. It’s not to come up with a great idea.  Passions are fleeting. Most ideas aren’t very good. Learn how to make money. Start now. Build the habits. Money allows you to do great things. Money allows you to quit the job you hate, or keep the job you love. I’m not talking obscene wealth. I’m talking enough to provide for your later years, enough to make your current years nice, and enough to lean out if you so choose.

Luck, Thiel says, “defeats one’s ability to shape the future.” Don’t leave your life up to chance. Lots of things don’t happen for a reason, but many do, and for a very specific one – that is, because you made an intentional and deliberate choice. You showed up. You did the work. Don’t opt-out to live a romanticized artist’s or entrepreneur’s life with no money. Money does in fact buy happiness. Make some.

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Generation Y Happiness Knowing yourself Love What You Do Notebook Self-management

It’s (Not) Okay to Fail

Generation Y does not need permission to fail. We got medals and ribbons for that very reason as kids. Gen Y normalized failure. Failure is not scary. It means you get to stay in the status quo, which most of us are very comfortable in. You get to keep being who you are, and that isn’t all bad.

It’s success – that’s scary. Indeed, we’re not changing stuff up because we’re afraid to fail, but afraid to succeed. We need to let people know, “It’s okay to succeed.”

Part of the reason we are so obsessed with normalizing failure is that we want to feel good about ourselves. And that’s hard right now, no doubt. It’s hard to find a job, to get out of debt, to pursue meaningful work. It’s hard to make time for family, get away from our computers, and engage face-to-face. It’s hard not to compare our bottoms to everyone’s top on Facebook.

So, we embrace failure. In its call for speakers, the Dare Conference says, “If you’re willing to be vulnerable, admit your failures, and share what you learned from them, we want to hear from you.” Apparently people aren’t doing that enough on the Internet?

So, we court failure. This guy goes around trying to get rejected on a daily basis. He intentionally tries to fail as if that’s an accomplishment.

So, we sleep with failure. We dream of failure. We live with failure — as a point of pride.

I don’t want to fail. Failure is boring. Failure usually means you didn’t try something; you didn’t follow through; you didn’t finish. Most people don’t really fail. They succeed at being lazy, and call it failure. But at least they tried. Er, right?

Lazy is not failure, it’s just lazy. Practice moderation, instead of binging on inspiration. Practice patience, instead of quick wins.  Start something, but then finish it.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the modern web browser, Netscape and leading venture capitalist, said pivots used to be called fuck-ups and begged for the startup community to put a little more stigma back into failure.

“We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure,” Andreessen said. “You don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma. The entrepreneurs I admire — I admire the ones who pivot but I really admire the ones who have persisted.”

Persist. It’s okay to succeed.

Categories
Career Finding a job Happiness

3 Ways to Discover Your Dream Job

Finding your career purpose is tough. If you come up empty after journaling, quizzes and vision boards, it may be time to take real action. Over at US News and World Report today, I talk about the three steps you can take to gain immediate clarity around discovering your dream job. Read it here.

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Guest Posts Happiness

Why aren’t you happy, darn it?

Ah, happiness. It’s so elusive, right? My guess is that you spend the great majority of your time online reading and browsing aimlessly, seeking that secret to happiness, that thing that will make you motivated and feel happy for the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week if you’re lucky.

In fact, it seems that everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Seriously, how many times can you read about how to be creative or how to execute your idea? You probably would be great at doing what you love, but you are too afraid to do so because we’re stuck in society’s delusion – that is, what we really want to do we’re afraid won’t be acceptable in society or are told to stay in whatever place society has created for us (particularly true for women).

There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing what they want and living their highest values except most people try to live in other people’s values instead of their own, or they expect other people to live inside their values instead of recognizing they have their own as well.

Le sigh. I’d like to suggest two solutions:

1) Recognize that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. Struggle isn’t something to overcome then, but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Accept it and find a balance.

2) Dive deeper. Happiness is not the be all and end all. There’s a whole lot more going on in the world like energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy, technology, fashion, the food industry, political history. So, maybe stop reading so much about the processes of ideas, and start reading about actual ideas.

My guess is that by avoiding your pursuit of happiness for awhile, you’ll find more of it than you thought possible.

This was originally posted on Elysa Rice’s GenPink.

Categories
Happiness

The Delusions of Happiness

Happiness is relative, but I’ve been really happy lately.  Secrets to happiness? Yes, I’ve got those. Try exercising, meditation, setting goals, spending time with friends and family, trying new things. Those should all sound familiar; people tell you those things all the time and they may or may not work for you. The real secret? I’ll get to that in a moment… (and it isn’t something foolish like follow-through).

Meditation, though. That’s something people are hot about lately. “It’s like a key that opens the door to the treasury within,” filmmaker David Lynch tells a New York Times columnist. “Here’s an experience — poooft! — total brain coherence. It’s what’s missing from life today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy, peace. Things like tension, anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear — poooft! — all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people that experience and — poooft. Man, it’s beautiful.”

This coming from the man who created Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive. The point of meditation isn’t bliss (as any earnest attempt to understand the practice will reveal), but let’s look at the delusions supported in Lynch’s statement – primarily, that meditation will bring you peace. While the practice certainly can do that for you momentarily, we are decidedly fooling ourselves if we think that we can rid ourselves of negative emotions all together.

A great many people try and fail in that pursuit of happiness. Blogger Jenny Blake wrote a book on the topic and shortly after its launch admitted that “The book is meant to be aspirational — even for me.” It’s aspirational, but is presented as realistic. No one could possibly do or be everything in Blake’s book, and yet, that is the ambition. Why is impossible the ideal?

Society gets off on when you compare yourself to others, when you try to live by other’s beliefs, or when you try to get others to live by yours, and so and so forth. Unconditional happiness is just as destructive as uncontrollable anger. But the happiness ideal states you should learn from failures (instead of feel upset) and find lessons in whatever goes wrong. Theoretically, these happy nuggets serve to make sense of your pain but in reality, all they do is suppress it which is exhausting.

“Those who keep a check on their frustrations are at least three times more likely to admit they have disappointing personal lives and have hit a glass ceiling in their career. But those who let their anger out in a constructive manner were more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with loved ones,” reports a study by the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

“People think of anger as a terribly dangerous emotion and are encouraged to practise ‘positive thinking’, but we find that approach is self-defeating and ultimately a damaging denial of dreadful reality,” says Professor George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Let’s go back to meditation. One type of meditation is yoga, which is a study in the union of opposites (think Dog/Cat). In that vein, I’d like to suggest that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. And that the union of these two emotions, and indeed many others, is the end goal, not the glorification of one over the other.

Struggle isn’t something to overcome then (and feel good about after), but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Personal growth advocates assume you want to avoid those bad days whereas I don’t think that’s possible or necessary. In the moment you are failing, you are also succeeding.

Life is great and it sucks, always simultaneously. Most people can’t live in that environment so they live in delusions. Religion, personal development, companies – all are too eager to create those delusions for you. But life is a duality and I’m all for happiness, just not at the sacrifice of negativity, depression, anger, tension, anxiety, stress, hate, rage, or sorrow.

Categories
Guest Posts Happiness Inspiration Knowing yourself

You Don’t Need To Settle

This is a guest post from my dear friend and change-maker Sam Davidson. Sam Davidson is a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer who believes that the world needs more passionate people. To help people find and live their passion, he has written 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. He is the co-founder of Cool People Care and Proof Branding, and lives in Nashville with his wife and daughter.

50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need from Point House Films on Vimeo.

Finding and living your passion is a process. It’s not something you do once over the course of an afternoon at a coffee shop and are done with. It’s a journey you live deeply, repeating as necessary until you die. It’s a commitment, a lifelong pursuit, and a work of epic proportions. Once you decide that you must find your passion, you cannot settle until you do.

This is something I learned from Rebecca Thorman. She doesn’t settle. And neither can you when discovering what it is you love, who it is you’re becoming, and what it is you’re passionate about.

I’ve met Rebecca once. Nothing about her was second rate. The coffee shop where we met, the sushi place we grabbed dinner, the martini bar we went to after that – it was all top notch. Look at her blog design. Read about her boyfriend. Check out what she does for a living. Look at pictures of where she lives (or used to). What about this woman screams compromise?

Nothing.

Take heed: you can’t settle when you’re looking for your passion. You also can’t settle  – once you find it – as to where that passion takes you.

For some people, a passion becomes a profession. For others, it becomes a wonderful hobby to explore after work or on the weekends. Some become passionate about a cause and others about people. Be warned: when you decide that you can’t be anything but passionate, you are beginning the journey of a lifetime.

But, what a wonderful journey it is! I firmly believe that the world needs more passionate people. This is why I wrote 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. Using the excuse to eliminate excess from our lives, I also detail how getting rid of what doesn’t matter can help you discover what does. The same is true in reverse: once we find what’s truly important, everything that isn’t can fade into the background.

Have you seen pictures of what Rebecca cooks? Doesn’t it want to make you do the same? Your passion will be similar. Once you find it, others will see the contagious fire within and want to find theirs. And when they do – when a friend or colleague tells you that they want to be as passionate about something as you are, make sure to warn them. Let them know that if they truly want to find that which makes them feel alive, they can’t compromise. They can’t settle. They’ve got to follow the journey until it’s logical and exciting conclusion. Your passion demands nothing less.

Serious applicants only.

Other things (actually in the book) that you don’t need:
#3: Untaken risks
#12: Pictures that don’t mean anything
#47: A job you hate

Contest:
Share your passionate story in the comments. What is it that you’re passionate about? How did you find it? How long did it take? Where has it taken you now? One lucky commenter will receive a signed copy of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need.

Categories
Happiness Relationships Self-management

A New Residence for Home

Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together.  We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.

You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?

Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no.  Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.

I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.

Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.

He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.

He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”

He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”

“It’s a habit,” I reply.

He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.

When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.

Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.

This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.

Good Hearts.