About six months after I got my first guitar, I had reached a stage where I knew a lot of chords and I could play recognizable bits of songs, but I couldn’t play even the simplest song (Wild Thing?) without flubbing chord changes all the way through. It felt like I hadn’t actually begun to learn at all.

I found some comfort in online guitar forums for beginners. Hundreds of others shared my frustration, believing that they were every bit as bad as they were the first day they picked up the instrument.

One day, a slightly more experienced player thaught us a trick that makes it 100% clear how far you’ve come since you started. You rotate the guitar so that your fret hand becomes your picking hand and vice-versa. Then you attempt to play anything you know.

This puts you exactly where you were when you started — your fingers have to find entirely new positions and make entirely new motions, and you recognize how much skill and nuance you’ve gained since that first day, which is the last time the guitar felt that unfamiliar and awkward to you.

When I have discouraging moments other areas of life, I use a similar trick to remind myself how much more capable a person I’ve become.

I think about where I was exactly a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago today — what was going on in my life and what my biggest dilemmas were. I then imagine being given a chance to deal with those issues knowing what I know now, today, as 2013 David. A lot of the time today’s Me would make short work of those problems, even if today’s Me isn’t on top of all of today’s problems.

This exercise reveals real growth, and that kind of personal growth tends to come in little breakthroughs. These little breakthroughs have two ingredients: 1) you learn something you didn’t know, and 2) as a result, you try doing something differently than you used to do it. 

Sometimes these attempts lead to lasting change, and sometimes they don’t, but they all come from some kind of behavioral experiment, either intentional or accidental. If you insist on doing things the way you’ve always done them, life will get easier and more fulfilling only very slowly, if it does at all.

So it’s reasonable to expect that people who try new approaches more often tend to grow more often, and tend to find a way to live their values earlier in life.

These breakthroughs also tend to be dramatic. You can’t believe you didn’t do it this way before. You wish you’d made this change years ago. You find it amazing others still live the way you used to.

My biggest breakthrough this year has been the way I approach money and income, and life is a lot lighter and brighter now. The Me of 2013 would make a cakewalk out of most of the financial dilemmas of my past. Almost certainly, the Me of 2014 would make short work of some of today’s dilemmas, because of some new habit I will end up trying in the coming year.

Everyone has had the experience of making a change in their behavior that gave them an immediate and lasting advantage over the rest of their lives. We’ve all know what it’s like to make a simple change that is so clearly better than the old way that we wonder how it took us so long.

I want to know what obvious-in-hindsight changes you’ve made in your life in the past year or two. What did you try that made you wish you’d done it years ago? Say so in the comments. It doesn’t have to be big — it could just be a better way of grocery shopping. All that matters is that it’s so much better than your old way that you wish you’d always done it.

Even if you don’t normally comment here, I urge you to share this time. Think of how much time and frustration we could all save each other by exchanging our breakthroughs here. Let’s trade our best in-hindsight wisdom. Share yours, then go try something that worked for someone else.

I’ll add mine later in the comments.

***

Photo by silentmind

I was 31 when I figured out breakfast, and after that life’s overall difficulty level declined a bit.

Every month I buy a bag of bulk steel-cut oats, a bag of trail mix and a six-pound bag of Royal Gala apples. Every morning I make a heaping half-cup of the oats and cut an apple into slices. About six months ago I added a cup of Ceylon tea to that.

That’s breakfast every day now. I used to keep my options open, figuring that going with what I “feel like” in the moment is going to naturally lead to a more appropriate, fulfilling breakfast experience.

After years of being confronted with a decision shortly after waking, I decided to be done with deciding what was for breakfast. My usual is now the only thing on the menu, and since I stopped deciding what’s for breakfast, mornings have had a significantly different feel. They are clearer and more spacious.

I thought my newfound clarity was a byproduct of having more whole grains in my diet, or the self-satisfaction of finding a breakfast that costs 11 cents. I now believe it has nothing to do with oatmeal at all, but rather with the fact that I have much more than 11 cents to spend on breakfast, and in today’s global food system that gives me way too many options.

As affluent Westerners we’re fortunate to have so many choices, but according to psychologist Barry Schwartz, having too many possibilities — which we do in almost every area: breakfast, clothing, careers, lifestyles and creative pursuits to name some major ones — makes it consistently harder to be happy with the options we choose. In his TED talk he identifies the ways too many choices erode personal welfare instead of serving it.

When we’re faced with a number of options, we’re always going to assume that one of them is better than all the rest. This means the more options there are, the more likely we are to choose one that isn’t the best one. We also presume it would take more homework to choose the right one. In other words, as options increase every decision becomes bigger, and so the more likely we are to delay our decisionmaking.

Facing any decision is to some degree stressful, whether it’s picking a menu item, or picking an investment vehicle for your retirement. Delaying decisions because you don’t want to make the wrong decision only compounds this stress. This trepidation is a fear of future regret, and the resulting paralysis can lead to procrastination, which in turn leads to self-esteem issues, which only compounds indecisiveness further.

Even once you make a decision, the more options you turned down the more likely you have lingering doubts that you missed the boat — or at least, some boat. Even if you make the best choice, you never really know that, and you’re likely to wonder what you’re missing.

If you went to a restaurant that only serves one thing, if it’s decent food at all, you’re much more likely to enjoy it because you know that among your options, there was no greener grass to be had.

With an increasing number of options in almost every aspect of life, we presume that our results in each of those areas should be getting better and better, because with each new possibility it becomes more likely that one of them suits us perfectly. Our expectations for perfection and total satisfaction are too high.

As freedom of choice grows, the perfect career, the perfect partner, the perfect schedule or the perfect salad dressing seem more likely to happen. Perhaps they are, but psychologically we’re less likely to be pleased with whatever we do choose, because our satisfaction with what we have shrinks as the number of things we don’t have — or could have — grows.

Schwartz on going shopping in a modern store:

“I had very low expectations when they only came in one flavor, and when they came in a hundred flavors… dammit one of them better be perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing. [...] Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be, and what that’s going to produce is less satisfaction with the results, even when they’re good results.”

The other day at work, I became momentarily obsessed with the idea of finding how true North related to the road I was surveying. I pulled out my Android and downloaded what was rated as the best of the thirty or so compass apps. Within a half-minute I had it up and running, but the digital needle was pointing back to the city, which I knew was roughly south-east. I clicked through the settings and couldn’t get the damn thing to work right.

After a few minutes of frustration, I realized how ridiculous a moment it was, given the entire history of human struggle: a young man, out in a field somewhere, had become visibly annoyed that he couldn’t procure a reliable compass in 30 seconds.

As stupid as that story is looking back on it, my annoyance was definitely real and was definitely affecting the quality of my life in that moment. It’s an example of the truly ridiculous expectations that arise in a world with truly ridiculous levels of convenience and personal power. I wish it was unusually ridiculous.

Our options are probably going to continue to increase for a long time. You have, in most areas of life, a tremendous number of possibilities, and generally, the more there are the less happy you’ll be with that area of life whenever you consider what you don’t have. If the career, partner, creative outlet or meal you currently have were the only one that had been available to you, you’d probably feel extremely lucky that you had it.

Although I didn’t always know why, I know that the more I simplify my life, in terms of its moment-to-moment options, the happier I am. Owning fewer things made me immediately calmer and more grateful. Having an inflexible regular day for starting my weekly article drastically reduced my anxiety around writing. Cutting my monetary spending (almost) down to the essentials gave me an immediate sense of control and abundance I never had before. I also suddenly have more money than ever — the side-effects of voluntary simplification tend to be wonderful and freeing, at least when you’ve been living the Western consumer status quo your whole life.

The reason behind these breakthroughs, I see now, is the same. Each one reduced the number of decision points in my life. Every time I reduce the number of decisions I have to make just to move my life along, everything gets less difficult and I feel better about my direction. It becomes easier to be grateful and to get myself to do what is most important to me.

The minimalist movement isn’t frivolous or snobby, they’re on to something significant. Voluntarily having less, and less to choose from, delivers real dividends on happiness, particularly when it comes to its ability to reduce daily decisionmaking and the stress points that go with it.

I can’t believe I never noticed this pattern, but I will be taking full advantage now. An Elaine St. James book recently enlightened me to the idea of simplifying meals, making it obvious why my oatmeal, of all things, made my life better. Having well-planned “usuals” at home — two or three healthy options at most — reduces the daily burden of mealtime decisionmaking, the weekly burden of grocery-store decisionmaking, and reduces the amount of time we spend preparing meals, which is something that happens three times every day. This represents a lot of mental sticking points removed from life.

The options at mealtime are a microcosm of the lifestyle options available to the ordinary, free Western citizen. We have never been freer to live how we want to live, which is wonderful and empowering but simultaneously taxing and intimidating. I want to take advantage of the freedoms provided by the incredible time we live in without getting paralyzed by too many options and endless unmade decisions.

The best approach seems to be to give ample deliberation to the decisions that concern major aspects of life, such as career, family, relationships, high-level goals and creative pursuits, and don’t let small ones hang you up. The big ones determine what you actually do with your life — and it is their doing that contributes most to happiness, so it’s worth pruning out as many of the distracting minor decisions as possible so that you don’t cease the important doing because you’re caught up in unimportant thinking.

Technology and commerce produce so many minor decision points for the typical person that you have to be careful not to let yourself become convinced that any meaningful amount of happiness hinges on them. Nothing produces a steadier supply of these needless, distracting desires than television.

Happiness comes from the major things, and although our 21st-century freedoms give us a lot of minor preoccupations, they do give us more personal power to get those major things right.

I find the more I can see my possessions and options as luxuries, the more grateful I am to end up with any of them. When we think of all non-necessities as luxuries, it feels ridiculous to stress over the outcome of minor decisions. From now on, all salad dressings are luxuries. All cell phone features are luxuries. If it’s not a basic need, it’s icing. You can still make decisions about icing, but icing should not stress you out, and any icing-related details you can eliminate from you regular decisionmaking responsibilities, the better.

Now I’m suddenly considering going to the store to buy some cake frosting. This is why I don’t have a TV.

***

As requested, I’ve added a page with recommendations for life-changing books and tools for aspiring bloggers. Check it out here.

Photo by piotr

Every time I write something on the topic of personal productivity, a few people suggest that maybe doing more isn’t appropriate at all.

As a friend of mine suggested on the Facebook page, Western society has an obsession with productivity. We grow up being taught that we want to “do well” but we’re not often taught explicitly what that means. Success is a vague word, and in the absence of a meaningful definition it seems to refer to little more than having an above average income and a lot of phone calls to return.

We know that there’s something very near-sighted about taking busyness and career success for compass-North in our personal quests for happiness, so it’s understandable that the discerning person might be suspicious of anyone that appears unusually preoccupied with their personal productivity.

Last summer, I was more socially active than I’d ever been. Over the winter my focus shifted totally, and as the recreation season returns I find I’m spending most of my spare time at my desk. I’ve been turning down a lot of social invitations, giving vague reasons most of the time, but those who know me best know I am working. Some of them may be wondering, in my conspicuous absence, if I’ve lost touch with the values I espouse — staying present, connecting with other human beings, and enjoying the in-between moments.

A certain amount of personal productivity is absolutely necessary, at least enough to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and maintain some semblance of stability and autonomy. But I’ve been achieving those minimum productivity standards my whole life, so the question “Why do you need to do more than you’re already doing?” is a fair one.

Well, I don’t need to do more. Other than the physical essentials of life, I don’t strictly need anything. But it makes no sense at all to cease all activity except the minimum necessary to survive. After I earn enough to pay my food and rent, “unnecessary” productivity becomes any activity other than sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom and meditating. We each decide how much time to apply to any given “electives” in our lives: how many movies to watch, how many barbecues to attend, how many blogs to read, how often to make coffee, and of course, how much we work. Right now I want to accomplish more work than I have been, and I think I have good reasons. 

Productivity is not the problem

There is a lot of undue criticism of productivity itself. We see the mounting consequences of thoughtless, irresponsible productivity in the forms of pollution, invasive advertising, mass-produced food, atrocious overseas working conditions, and the death of our own manufacturing sector, to name a few obvious problems.

These are serious issues, but they’re not caused by productivity, they’re caused by thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, a confusion of what it is we really value. For example, a recurring theme on this blog is that money is attractive only because it is traded for what we value, which actually only amounts to certain pleasant feelings. The result is that many people believe it is money that they value, driving the thoughtless kind of productivity that regularly annihilates animal species, erodes personal freedoms and poisons the tap water.

Productivity is often thoughtless, yes. I understand the suspicion that arises whenever we talk about how to be more productive, because we don’t often talk about whether that’s even a good thing. The way our culture reveres growth and profit, it’s easy to assume that whatever we’ve been doing, we ought to get more of it done if we can. As author Richard Carlson quipped in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, “People are no longer human beings. We should be called human doings.”

Western society certainly does carry an enormous deficit in the attention it pays to being, as opposed to doing. Meditation and mindfulness, at least when done intentionally, are still fringe activities associated with hippies and new-agers. We don’t think of “being” as a verb.

Doing nothing is taboo in our culture’s productivity-focused ethos, even though conscious periods of non-doing are proven to improve health, reduce stress, and make it easier to be happy. In my experience, the habit of periodic non-doing actually lends itself to becoming more productive, and makes it easier to notice when your productivity is aimed in the wrong direction.

Presence is a basic need

At least for now, time spent simply being, rather than doing, is not part of a normal person’s day. Yet we all have a persistent appetite for mindful states, even if we don’t realize it. The thousands of different activities we indulge in our off-days might have little in common except that they quickly put us into a present-moment state. All of them — lounging at the beach, watching movies cycling, needlepoint, off-roading, taking drugs, backpacking overseas , music-making, writing, having sex, and having a picnic — relieve us temporarily of the mind’s insidious habit of drifting into the future, which only exists as imagination.

The experience of mindfulness, whether cultivated intentionally or derived as a side-effect of what we normally do for fun, is as visceral a need as any. Our Western societies could benefit from being more aware of that need. If we were, we’d make sure that we have those mindful experiences by engaging in activities that produce something useful for ourselves or others — such as writing, exercising, practicing a skill or building something — instead of baking on the couch in front of the television, having been drawn there by intrinsic needs we don’t understand or try to understand.

Personal productivity doesn’t need to be at odds with mindfulness. Being doesn’t need to be separate from doing. In fact, if the work you’re engaged in is highly resonant with your values, a mindful state arises naturally, because there’s nothing to escape from, nowhere you’d rather be.

The feeling of being productive is different when what you’re producing isn’t truly important to you. For most of us, our jobs are a perfect example. When you’re just trying to pay the bills, work achievement feels more like a fleeting relief, a hit of something temporary, rather than a clearing of the mind.

At my job, I’m always pleased to get a batch of work done. It is gratifying, but it only the sense of feeling like I’ve pushed away something I don’t want for a little while. When I’m making progress on my own personal projects, it feels like I’m moving through the world.

My personal quest for productivity has been more of a struggle to make sure that the most important things do happen, rather than making sure that I make as much happen as possible. There is a difference. Over the last few months, particularly the last few weeks, I’ve been more focused on my personal projects than ever, because they’re beginning to generate their own momentum in a way job-related work never has for me.

The goal of all this is to be able pay my living expenses doing what I love, which is writing. The moment I reach that benchmark, I can cut loose my fifty-hour-a-week commitment to an employer, along with all of its related burdens such as buying work clothes, waking up and going to bed at inflexible times and having to ask permission to get on a plane.

I am partway there. This is worthwhile productivity, if anything is worthwhile. It is certainly more worthwhile than reporting to a full-time corporate job for forty years, just to pay for what I do on my evenings and weekends.

Smelling roses

Last weekend was Canada’s May long weekend. It rained every day. I spent most of my three days off working on my own projects. It was one of my most productive weekends ever. I wrote every day. I culled all my files. I cleaned my stove. For the first time I can remember, I have no resistance to getting down to work. For a seasoned procrastinator, this has been a transcendent experience.

The most surprising part of this burst of productivity is that it came with a more mindful, relaxed state. I felt like time was slower and life was more spacious. I got a lot more work done, but I also did a lot more leisure reading, went for more walks and did a lot more mindful sitting — much more rose-smelling, and more of an inclination to take a moment to do it.

This state is lingering. Every action is more conscious, I’m more patient at my job, I enjoy waiting in line and walking across parking lots more than I ever have. As it turns out, productivity — at least when I’m working on the right things — makes it easy to stay in the moment, to be where I am.

When it’s applied to what’s most important to you, an increase in productivity is not tantamount to sacrificing the quality of the present to improve the quality of the future. It’s not an a deferral of today’s happiness for tomorrow’s.

We don’t need to “strike a balance” between being and doing, between work and repose. These are not separate categories of living, as they’re often made out to be. Doing the work that serves your real values improves the present reality of your life. It makes life better right now, and later, and probably forever, as all worthy goals should.

***

Photo by Cornelia Kopp

For the entire year that I have lived in this suite, a cardboard-velvet box piled over with envelopes and mail sat on the floor between my filing cabinet and my entertainment unit. Today it is gone because yesterday I took twenty minutes to file it all.

It feels very different in here now. Cleaner karma. Better Feng Shui. It almost feels like I removed something from my head.

That box was, ostensibly, an active part of my “workflow system.” Any file that ended up out of its home was to be dropped in there, the whole lot to be re-filed at the end of every day.

All of the other components of my system have been in a similar state of stasis for a similarly long time. It was months ago that my master to-do list grew so stagnant and irrelevant that I stopped even looking at it, which reveals an interesting fact about our to-do items: they often don’t really need to be done at all.

There are items on it that have been “urgent” for months. I have certainly experienced inconveniences and lost opportunities because of my ridiculous level of procrastination, but clearly none of the eighty forgotten items on my list were life or death, or I’d be dead. Life has been generally pleasant.

So the bulk of my supposed must-do items (and probably yours too) were completely optional, benign opportunities to get ahead, rather than the creeping imperatives they seemed to be.

Still, their undoneness imposes a persistent mental burden, on the clarity of your mind and your self-esteem. Unmet commitments represent personal shortcomings.

I am a career procrastinator. So are many of you, I gather. None of the articles I’ve written has inspired more heartfelt “Oh my god that’s me!” responses than one I wrote about procrastination. In the article I argued that procrastination is not laziness, but a symptom of certain kinds of private fear.

Fear is much less a part of my day-to-day consciousness now than it was when I wrote that. I feel like I’m game to take on my concerns as they emerge in life, including the fuzzier, scarier projects that made my to-do items into more of a permanent collection than a rolling list.

The two approaches

Everyone experiences a steady stream of to-do items in their lives. People generally subscribe to one of two philosophies in dealing with them: acting on them arbitrarily as they become salient, or by using a system to organize them. In other words, they either keep their list of concerns in their head or they put them on paper. 

Some people manage to live relaxed, productive lives allowing their workload to float freely in their minds. They do what needs doing whenever it feels like it needs doing.

For the rest of us, this feels too crazy. It’s hard to walk around with the persistent feeling that you’re not doing something that needs doing. When there are eighty things that feel like they need doing, it’s hard to regard them as a finite list of concerns that can each be dealt with. So naturally, we want to write them down, and see that there are only thirty-seven concerns right now, and you can do one or two or ten today. A list alone constitutes a workflow system.

A system only works when it feels like everything is accounted for somewhere outside your head. Even if your system is a cubicle wall plastered with yellow post-its, if you have faith that it’s all there, and nothing is floating unarticulated in your head that may fall through the cracks, then you can work through them and feel in control.

Most people find that a simple list isn’t detailed enough. It doesn’t articulate priorities, it makes it look like everything is on today’s plate. A lot of people have tiers of lists. A list of phone calls to make. A list of purchases to make. A list of things to do before you die.

Probably the most popular comprehensive workflow system is David Allan’s Getting Things Done. I have long fantasized about mastering the GTD system and the “mind like water” state that is supposed to arise once you’ve properly implemented it. This achievement even had a place on my own bucket list for a while.

The general idea is that you catch all incoming requests on your time in a series of inboxes: mail goes into an in-tray on your desk, email goes into its own inbox, notes when you’re out and about go into your smartphone. Any event that causes a feeling of “I should do something about that” — an order from your boss, an unsettling knock in your car’s engine, or a recurring dream about getting your prostate checked — is written down and sent to its appropriate inbox.

Every few days, you go through these inboxes and decide what you’re going to do about them. There are four options: do something about it right now, decide you’re going to do it later, delegate it to someone else, or decide not to bother doing anything at all.

If you can capture on paper anything that tugs on your conscience, and get it to its appropriate inbox, then you can know that no concern will escape your decisionmaking process. Properly implemented, the GTD system creates a workflow that lets you relax in the moment, knowing that every single concern will end up in front of you at your desk when you are alert and prepared to make a decision on it.

Your habits ensure it all gets into the funnel at some stage. The system hinges on eradicating escapees. If you have a concerning thought and you don’t write it down, some part of you will know that there is a free-floating problem out there that you haven’t addressed, and which could blow up at any time. Your personal world feels dangerous again, out of your sphere of control, and stress returns.

Weekly, you review the whole machine for leaks.

Presumably, once the crucial routines are established, you reach a point of balance, where sharpened habits process the inflow of emerging commitments into completed goals and realized dreams.

I envy people who make this complex system work. When those of us who are attempting to work a system begin to lose control of that system, we end up inadvertently using the other approach — trying to keep all our commitments organized in our heads.

Procrastinators and other people without a track-record of steady productivity will have trouble with GTD, for a particular reason: the system is unsympathetic to your emotional state. If you have any problems with procrastination or motivation, the system will fall apart quickly for you. Slag off one weekly review or let your inbox pile up for a whole week even once, then resuming the system becomes daunting enough that you wait to do them until you have a clear three-hour stretch, and very quickly your workflow system is back to a react-as-it-comes basis.

It’s still totally worth learning GTD, if only so you can use it as a basis for your own system, one that is not so inflexible and doesn’t require so many simultaneous habit changes.

I’m taking a much simpler approach now. Keep all the same inboxes, go through them once a week and put them on a big, single-category list. No more subcategories and priority rankings to get lost in. Look at the list every evening and decide what to do the next day. If I need time-specific reminders I’ll set them up in Google Calendar on my phone. A cabinet for files. A regular day weekly to get up to date.

The problem is that I’ve got a six-month backlog to work through before I can bring this leaner system to bear on today’s concerns as they arise in real time. It’s something like starting your first job, in retail, on Black Friday, when the closer last night forgot to do everything.

How to deal with a stagnant backlog of work in a single evening

In finance, when you need a clean slate, you take the drastic action of bankruptcy. I recently learned of the concept of task bankruptcy. Given that you’ve already delayed a ridiculously long time on an ridiculous number of tasks, you just decide you aren’t going to ever do those things, and you start a list again from zero.

As with financial bankruptcy, there are commitments on your list you won’t be able to reasonably discharge. But these are uncommon. Identify them and decide where to go from here with them.

Everything else is gone. If learning to knit or selling all those boxes of CDs on ebay or assembling the family tree really were important, they will recapture your conscience at some point later in life. For now — and maybe forever — they are no longer important. No need to remember what was once there, what you used to feel compelled to (eventually) do.

You let it all drop, and start from where you are. Those emails will simply go unreturned, those short stories will be allowed to die unfinished, and the world will go on.

After declaring task bankruptcy, I went through all my old “debts” with a sense of detachment and freedom and found that most of them didn’t seem important any more. But until I ceremoniously terminated them, each one had a little hook in my conscience.

Some of them still made sense to do. So I put them consciously, voluntarily on my new list, but only once I had truly cleaned my docket, and only if I felt a fresh commitment to doing them. If it was just lingering guilt, I let them die.

It may not even occur to a lot of people that almost all longstanding to-do items can be abandoned without your becoming a disgraced deadbeat. Dumping them will probably put you immediately into a better position to complete the important things. There will be some repercussions from letting certain tasks die, but they’re probably minor compared to the cost of continuing to bleed.

Streamline the system and declare task bankruptcy. GTD is a robust system that’s designed to catch absolutely everything, and it may be just too much personal bureaucracy for a lot of people. If you’ve been struggling with it, try Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done — a minimalist rebuttal to GTD and its complexity.

If you’ve got an unmanageable backlog, you’re paying all kinds of interest until you’re solvent again. Might as well swallow your pride and begin the rest of your life now.

***

Photo by purpleslog

When I go grocery shopping I never get a cart. I restrict myself to one of my supermarket’s large baskets, which limits me to essential purchases, and ensures that whatever I do buy will fit into the two nylon bags I bring with me.

Most of the groceries I buy are particularly dense items: tofu bricks, fruit, bulk nuts, tubers and the odd condiment in a jar. I don’t buy boxed cereal, lettuce, chips, or anything else that would fill up the basket without offering much nourishment. I end up with two bags so heavy that plastic wouldn’t do. My car is a two-door, so the bags ride beside me in the passenger seat.

I rent a condo in the city’s most densely populated area and I depend on street parking, so sometimes I have to march the mega-bags a block or two to get to my door. When I do my shopping on the way home from work, I also have to carry a backpack, a suitcase-sized GPS, and a big laptop.

I load up as evenly as I can, close the door with my bum, and begin my half-kilometer farmer’s walk. Often it’s in extreme heat or cold. Eventually, straps begin to slip, my shoulders and fingers begin to burn a little, and it invariably becomes more uncomfortable the longer I have to walk. There are two doors and two steps along the way

I used to really hate this particular part of my life. In my old apartment I had a reserved parking spot so the walk was never more than fifty paces and one or two steps to climb, but it was such a worse experience than it is now. I used to dread it. It was like a final kick in the chest after working all day.

Now, it’s like water. For a while now I’ve known that the way to deal with physical discomfort is to open up to it, rather than close up to it. I used to grit my teeth and, in my mind, lean toward the moment when I can drop the bags onto my table and the discomfort is over. This does not defend against pain, but it’s what I always did and what most people seem to do.

I now see all instances of minor physical discomfort as a chance to get better at being relaxed. I relax into the discomfort, I let it hang out with me. When you first try it it’s an exhilarating experiment — to voluntarily open up to minor pain when that’s what the moment brings you, to refrain from listening to the impulse to cringe or harden. It feels like you’re walking freely in an area you thought you weren’t allowed to go.

It’s relatively easy to do with minor discomfort. Life gives you endless minor discomforts, all of them opportunities to retrain this impulse, and then when tougher things happen, the impulse is still there. Instead of cringing, you release and allow. You look right at it. Nothing else makes sense.

All needs are preferences

The present moment is the only concrete reality you will ever have to deal with. Sometimes it contains pain. We prefer that our realities don’t contain pain. But that can only ever be a preference, because ultimately we don’t have control over the present once it becomes the present. If you truly needed reality to be something other than reality, your head would explode that instant. But it doesn’t. You prefer it to be one way, but don’t need it to be. Ken Keyes Jr wrote extensively about this phenomenon — the possibility of recognizing that all your apparent needs are actually just preferences, and the peace that comes with reframing them as such.

When we convince ourselves that our preference is a need, pain turns to suffering. The mind goes into an emergency state. It shouts. It hates life. It needs the pain to stop, and often it can’t. It needs the impossible, which is for reality to be different right now than it is. Nothing good and positive can be perceived at this point except for relief from that pain, there is no possibility for relaxation or gratitude. This is a bad place to be, and you could potentially live most of your life in that state, even if it’s due to a relatively minor source of pain, such as the bodily strain of carrying heavy grocery bags.

Whatever happens, by the time pain or discomfort is happening, it is reality. The way to minimize suffering is to practice turning towards pain the same way you turn towards any other reality when it happens.

Turn towards all realities. Let them be real. Relax into all realities, as a rule. Practice this consciously with light discomforts so that you can make this your reflexive response to everything. The habit of relaxing into physical discomfort leads naturally to a habit of relaxing into mental discomfort. Once it becomes a pretty consistent habit, you start fielding more and more that way, including major physical pain, and psychological pains such as loss, uncertainty, bad moods and self-disappointment.

It amounts to insisting on patience through pain. Patience is not the same as tolerance, which is characterized by quiet resentment and tense faces, patience is the willing acceptance of an unsettled or dissonant point in time.

This practice has to start with minor discomforts: heavy grocery bags, chilly temperatures, hunger pangs. Human beings are way too reactive to get anywhere trying to respond this way to genuine trauma before they can learn not to suffer from minor things. But I believe we can reach a point where we respond to almost every emerging reality with real-time calmness, followed by a rational action in response, if one is necessary.

The end of good, bad and ugly

All of us already open up habitually to pleasant realities, and those who experiment with mindfulness know how to open up to neutral realities. When you learn to open up to unpleasant realities too, then you’re giving all realities the same treatment. Then something amazing is allowed to happen.

Your mind stops dividing incoming realities into good and bad, which has the wonderful side effect of dissolving the background fear most of us carry of bad things happening. It’s hard to explain until you’ve experienced it, but because you know you’re game for all realities, the hyper-vigilant state supplied by moment-to-moment fear isn’t a lot of use. This creates a sudden sense of physical freedom. Your body relaxes, and you’re always ready to return to that relaxed state as soon as you notice you’re reacting to something.

You’ll continue to have thoughts though, some of which can convince you again that you truly need reality to be the way you prefer. Your ability to relax into all realities comes and goes in phases, as your overall level of consciousness rises and falls LINK with the tide of circumstances in your life. I frequently have periods where I totally lose that reflex and I’m too reactive to figure it out again. That’s okay. We all have long arcs of lowered consciousness now and then, where you feel unable to be mindful about anything.

Even during the times when your mind is generally unfettered, you’ll still have wandering mental images about potential bad outcomes in the future. As a policy I recommend using these thoughts about bad scenarios as a reminder to picture what a good alternative scenario would be like, if only to remind you that you don’t yet know what the reality associated with that thought will actually be once it arrives, if it does at all. Treat sudden pessimistic thoughts like you would treat an internet troll (close the thread, leave the bait untouched, find something else to put your mind on.)

Don’t worry that you’ll lose track of desirable and undesirable, or right and wrong. Whether an event is desirable or not is still obvious, and you can still make moral assessments, if you want to, after you accept the newly emerged reality. But in the mean time you don’t get yanked around by attraction and aversion nearly so much. You still feel them, but they’re just signals rather than orders.

Relaxing into an emerging undesirable reality is as much a physical reflex as a mental one. At the first sign of cringing or clenching, you let the tension out of the face and solar plexus, the legs or wherever it gathers in you. This will become a familiar feeling and it takes less than a second once you’re used to it.

There are great practical side-effects of this habit. You no longer need to control everything, so you become less tense all around, as your body realizes there is much less out there in the world that is of absolute importance to have your way. Therefore you find fewer reasons to resent others for their behavior, because you don’t need it to be a certain way. You will still always try to get what you prefer, and you’ll be much better at it because your actions are conscious. You also begin to see your own shortcomings more clearly, because it’s harder to distract yourself with blame. You realize the state of your life is all on you. Nobody else will ever be responsible for it. Evasiveness in general seems to become less useful and less rewarding — as time goes on there is less and less out there that you don’t feel like you can simply walk through. There is a domino effect of personal growth.

The great news is that minor discomfort is everywhere. Start with grocery bags. Or a room that’s a little too warm. Whatever the moment is like, you don’t need to think of it as pain that you’re turning towards. That’s just a mental category that will lose its relevance once you’re generally responding to everything the same way. Use each chance you get.

Then when the real bombshells drop, whether you can stay composed or not, you at least have an idea of where you want to be mentally: calm, conscious, and exactly where you are.

***

Photo by Caden Crawford

Note: This is a long post (3000 words) but it can easily save you years of your life, so take a lemonade break halfway through if you have to.

When I was a TV-watching child in the 1980s I’d see a lot of commercials for something called “Freedom 55.” It was a financial planning service, offered by a life insurance company, but at the time I didn’t know what any of those things were. I knew what retirement was though. I also knew that companies in commercials always try to make themselves sound as good as possible. So the message I took from those commercials was that age 55 was an ideal age to retire, a few years earlier than the norm.

That stuck in my mind as a pretty universal benchmark, throughout my gradeschool life and working life, and it was steadily reinforced by how the working adults around me talked about retirement. It was something for old people.

I pictured the typical career-fueled life as settling out into three distinct phases: pre-work, work, and post-work.

Pre-work lasts about 16-23 years, while you live off of your parents, student loans, or both.

Work, the longest phase, lasts about 40 years. During this time you earn an increasing amount, and so as you soldier on through these four decades, you can afford an increasingly rewarding lifestyle.

Once you are in this phase you also begin to save some of your income for the next phase. The gold standard benchmark here, culture taught me, was 10%. Save 10% of your income for retirement, beginning as early on in the work phase as is feasible for you, and you’re cruising. Almost everyone recognized this benchmark too, yet almost everyone described it as being hard to do. I found it hard. 

[A word on cultures: Raptitude is read in over a hundred countries, but it is written by a sole Canadian who is highly exposed to the culture of the United States. So cultural norms referred to in this post will reflect the US and Canada more accurately than they do other countries.]

At least in my area of the planet, everyone seems to mostly have the same idea of what they can expect to save and when they can expect to retire. The average American or Canadian worker retires at about age 63, and this number is rising.

Some people really do love the work part of the work phase but it’s probably safe to say the great majority prefer its evenings and weekends. We like to be able to decide what to do with our lives. Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy. Life is precious — the only thing we care about really — and finite, so most of us would like to sell off as little of it as possible.

For most people, the post-work phase marks the first time they can do what they like with their days without the approval of a parent or an employer. The post-work phase is typically shorter than the work phase. If average life span is a little shy of 80, the typical post-work phase is less than twenty years, and by the time it begins, the worker’s body can’t do what it used to do.

A good way to be unusual

Through a happy accident, I’ve recently discovered a movement of people who are finishing the clock-punching phases of their lives far earlier than the status quo. I had no idea what was possible for people willing to deviate from the norm.

If the “very good” benchmark is 55, then 50 is truly fantastic, and 45 must be bordering on impossible. After all, to retire at 45, you must save enough money in a 20-25 year career to pay for your living expenses for the next 35 years — as long as you don’t live past 80.

Yet normal people with middle-class salaries are retiring at 45, or 40, or even 30.

Tim Stobbs is on pace to retire at 45. One of his readers, “Dave”, retired at 40.

Mr and Mrs Money Mustache retired at 30.

Jacob Lund Fisker reached financial independence at 30 — after a five-year career making a mid-five-figures salary.

When you retire that early, you’re shrinking the work phase in order to lengthen the post-work phase, which means you have less time to earn the retirement fund, and more years of living expenses to pay for. If you retire at thirty, you need enough money to live on for fifty or more years.

This is why early retirees advocate reaching financial independence — saving enough that you can live off the interest alone without touching the nest egg itself — before you shut off your career income. This means you can live to be 200 if you like, but you’ll need to save more than a twenty-year burn-off fund.

Realistically though, most people who retire that early are going to have some kind of additional income during the post-career phase anyway. If you’re done your career at 35, you’re still in your prime physically. You need to put your energy somewhere, and there’s no reason not to put it somewhere that makes money, like maintaining rental properties, building a small business, writing books or working part-time at something you love.

But that still leaves a lot that has to be put away in the mean time.

How do they save that much?

They observe the relationship between their happiness and their spending, and they stop wasting their income on things that don’t return much happiness.

They also make a point of becoming financially literate, which means they understand (for example) that a single $20-a-week habit can add a year or two to the work phase of your life.

When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly absurd.

Basically, the main difference between the ER (early retirement) crowd and regular working people is that they strive to be rational with their money, in terms of what it actually does for their quality of life.

Most people’s financial decisions are driven by what the people around them decide — which, in this culture, typically ranges from thoughtless to completely backwards — and conscious thought about the getting the best deal on happiness doesn’t enter the picture. Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car? It’s shockingly normal for people to choose the latter, because they have no idea that they’re making that choice at all.

The long-term effects of a single financial decision

The biggest re-calibration for me has been the shift in what it means to be able to “afford” something. In my culture, to be able to afford something seems to mean, “to be able to acquire physical possession of that thing in a socially acceptable way” — if you have to steal it or take out a payday loan in order to buy it, you can’t afford it. But to borrow money from a bank to buy a car, rather than saving the money first, is normal.

My first car was $15,000 and I only had enough money to put $1,000 down on it. As far as I was concerned, I could “afford it” because the payments didn’t put me in the red.

The car is getting old and has been paid off for years now, but my next vehicular decision will be much more rational. A contractor at work asked me why I drive a little Civic — it’s normal in my industry to buy a full-sized pickup truck once you can “afford” it, because we work on construction sites and it’s just altogether more manly and awesome to be able to drive over curbs onto muddy new developments than it is to park your hatchback on the nearest pavement and walk.

I can imagine a few other benefits. You also get to spin your tires angrily, you get to sit up high, you can haul snowmobiles and other expensive toys out to the lake, if expensive toys are your thing. But all of these minor thrills seem pretty frivolous for my life, plus you have to help people move all the time. Still, those advantages may be worth more to others.

But how much more? The extra monetary cost is astounding. When you’re saving to retire at some point, as all workers are, any unnecessary costs should be seen as being sucked from your retirement fund (along with years of corresponding investment gains) which is tantamount to adding to the length of time you have to spend working.

The difference between a new, loaded half-ton and the small car I would otherwise buy is about $35,000, in terms of purchase price. Plus financing. On top of that, conservatively, another $50 a week for gas (and that’s at today’s prices) for the life of the vehicle. Then more expensive insurance, tires, oil changes and repair costs.

If that money was socked away in investments instead, after only ten or twelve years it could easily make a hundred thousand-dollar difference, which at my level of living expenses would allow me to take four years off work.

That enormous increase in freedom represents the fruits of only one financial decision. Imagine if you applied this kind of clarity and rationality to every area of spending in your life, and invested the savings for long-term.

The most important number

The math might seem murky, but there’s really one main factor that determines how long you must work until you reach financial independence, and that’s the percentage of your take-home income that you invest for retirement.

Aside from that percentage, it doesn’t even matter what your income is, and here’s why: your saving percentage indicates both how much of your money you can save, and how much you can’t — which is how much you need for your annual living expenses. The proportion between the two determines how much paid-for time off you can buy with each year’s savings, regardless of income.

Example. If you take home $40,000, and you save 50% of that, it means you’ve learned to live happily on $20,000 a year. This means for each year you work, you put away the other 20k — enough to live for a year without working.

If you save 75% of your income, it means you’ve cut your living expenses to a lean $10,000 a year, and every year you have enough left over to live on for three years. You invest this 30k, and after a decade or so it’s grown into almost five years of living expenses. Plus, in each of those years you’re putting away three more years of living expenses. You won’t have to work for long.

Obviously by saving more, your retirement stash grows much faster, but each saved dollar goes so much further, because you need far fewer of them to pay for your living expenses. Add in compound interest, and you are creating some enormous personal leverage every single time you can cut costs in your life.

Think about it this way: if you decide to live without your daily Starbucks, not only do your savings grow that much faster, but you need to save less overall, because your retirement fund no longer needs to include a thirty-years’ supply of Starbucks.

On the other end of the savings scale the leverage is very low. If you save 10% of your 40k income then it means you insist on spending $36,000 a year on your lifestyle, which means it takes nine years of saving to pay for one year of living without a job. Your nest egg will grow far more slowly, but worse, it will need to be huge compared to your apparent ability to save.

This works the same with any income. A Wall-Streeter who nets 1 million annually and saves 10% will still have to build that money pile for 50 years in order to retire indefinitely, because he’s accustomed to spending most of a million dollars every year on boat parties and restaurants.

So, Wall-Streeter or Wal-Marter, if you save 10% of your income you will need to work for 50 years to have enough to live off the returns, all other factors being the same. If you save 55%, you’ll only need 15 years (these lengths of time are starting from a net worth of zero.) If you save 80%, it’s five and a half years. There are some factors that can stretch these numbers a bit left or right, but the general principle always holds.

Mr. Money Mustache did a great rundown on this elegant mathematical phenomenon. If the idea of financial independence interests you at all, read this post.

Having a higher income ought to make it easier for you to raise your savings percentage, but Parkinson’s Law often whittles it down again. As we get pay increases, we tend to reward ourselves with more expenses, instead of rewarding ourselves with more years of freedom and autonomy. Because I always expected to have more stuff next year than I do now, I had just as much trouble saving 10% when I was making 25k as I did when I was making 50k. This year I’m on pace to save 50% of my take-home, and as my income goes up I want that to go up too.

The two big rebuttals

Over and over, in discussions on the topic of early retirement you see two major objections:

1) I can’t possibly save anything in my circumstances!

I realize that there is a whole galaxy of different financial situations out there, including those of people who are unemployable due to disability or illness, or are otherwise totally dependent on others financially. Obviously talk about how to allocate your income isn’t relevant to you if you never expect to have an income.

But everyone else out there in the workforce, whether they’re high-income or low-income, debt-free or underwater, still makes decisions every day regarding where to allocate their money. The financial philosophy that leads well-positioned savers towards early retirement is the same road that leads people out of consumer debt, they’re just farther along it.

Early Retirement Extreme is a fantastic place to start if you’re in a low-leverage situation because it shows you what is possible even with a very low income. Most career people wouldn’t have to make anywhere near the spending cuts Jacob did to get his working obligations over with in five years. In his left sidebar is a 21-day crash course on how a person can adopt a lifestyle that saves $500 a month even on a minimum wage income.

Whether you must first put your monthly surpluses towards debt, or whether you can start investing it right away, you are still getting ahead of where you would have been.

2) But I would rather enjoy my life than deny myself everything I want!

From reading angry internet threads between ER people and their critics, it seems that most of the objections stem from one common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you need to spend as much as you currently do.

As these threads unfold, it becomes clearer that the root of the critic’s fear is always that they will end up less happy as a result of giving up certain luxuries. Every early retiree I’ve read about says sacrificing their expensive habits made them happier almost immediately (sometimes there is an adjustment period), and quickly pays dividends in other ways: switching to a bike commute saves thousands while making you fit and spry; selling the boat creates an instant windfall, and a load of invisible stress evaporates; limiting yourself to one drink (most of the time) means no taxis and no hangovers, and teaches you how overrated alcohol is as a fun-maker.

I am way happier already. In the three months since I’ve been smarter about my spending, I’ve saved three months’ worth of living expenses, which has an immediate stress-reducing effect. I could get laid off or fired and have plenty of time to figure out what to do, so there’s much less day-to-day stress about my job performance, which has actually led to an effortless improvement in job performance. I have a sense of control over my life that I’ve never felt before. These intangible dividends are immediate, and they don’t cost a cent because the money is still mine.

Critics of the ER movement seem to believe that saving a large proportion of your income means you live a life of sacrifice and deprivation. I had always regarded saving like that too — that saving means you are denying yourself happiness now so that you can have a little more of it later. This is the heart of the Western Consumer Fallacy: that happiness comes from spending, and therefore less happiness comes from less spending. So far there’s nothing I miss. I am worlds happier. Right now. I have no envy when I see people in fancy cars and clothes, rather the opposite, because those luxuries represent to me what they’ve given up, not what I’ve given up.

Sacrifice is a misleading word, because life is all trade-offs. A sacrifice implies that there is a gain somewhere, a reason to do it, but the word mainly connotes a loss. To say something is a sacrifice is to have tunnel vision on what is being given up, and misunderstand or forget what is being gained.

Do I feel deprived getting into my old Civic when I know I could be getting into a big awesome truck? Definitely not, even though I would admit that if it cost the same (both to me and to the planet) I would prefer the truck. But the personal cost is devastating: four years of work, which amounts to more than 1,000 days of doing what someone else tells me to do. The time I feel most deprived is when I wake up and remember that it’s Monday, and that my day will not be mine today.

***

If this topic interests you, browse the websites linked in this article, particularly earlyretirementextreme.com and mrmoneymustache.com. Canadians will find Free at 45 especially useful because they don’t have to translate terms like 401k and Roth IRA into Canadian. Brave New Life is also great. Read these blogs, explore their archives. Get a sense of the mentality and how to apply it into your own situation. Also check out Reddit’s Financial Independence forum. If the math is intimidating, check out /r/personalfinance, although you can expect a more mainstream outlook there on the subject of retirement age and savings rate.

Photo by Carsten Schertzer

Lying is regular a part of being polite.

Long-time readers know that I don’t accept guest posts here, other than two or three by-invite exceptions. But I get requests all the time and I try to turn people down graciously.

Even though a lot of them are probably mass-mailing their submissions, I reason that in each case there may be a sensitive and hopeful person reading my response, and I don’t want to hurt them by being cold. So when I reject their offer, I add a lie. I tell them I am afraid.

“I’m afraid I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude.”

“I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude,” sounds too unsympathetic I guess, so some ridiculous habit has me claiming that this fact actually scares me, so the submitter knows I find my own policy as unforgiving and insensitive as they do.

Our language customs are full of these kinds of insulators. The truth, in very many cases, is just too brutal or embarassing to state as a fact, so we add in little fictions.

“Hello, Mr Smith, I was just wondering if I could borrow your pickup truck Saturday afternoon.”

In my culture, it’s normal to be afraid to even ask, “May I borrow your truck?” So you phone Mr Smith not to ask anything of him, but just to declare to him something you’ve been wondering about. Presumably, you believe he is the type of person who may find it interesting to know what topics you’ve been pondering recently, so you phoned to let him know. Perhaps he will then have the idea to offer you the truck, so that you no longer need to continue to wonder if it is possible that you could borrow it Saturday afternoon.

In a restaurant, I notice that when I decide that I want the veggie wrap, what I do not say to the waiter is, “I want the veggie wrap.” I don’t want to be crass. Instead I tell him that I would like the veggie wrap, as if we’re talking not about our immediate desires but hypothetical ones in some peripheral universe. Essentially I’m saying, “If we were in a situation where we were actually stating what we want here, I would tell you I want the veggie wrap — just so you know, for what it’s worth. Do with that information what you will.”

I have a memory of running punishment laps around the basketball court, while our coach stood on the bleachers yelling, “Sorry is the most misused word in the English language! Don’t tell me you’re sorry! You aren’t sorry, not yet!” 

A teammate had left a ball out of the bin when we were supposed to put them all away. When the coach pointed it out, the player uttered a flippant, “Oh, sorry.” The coach’s eyes widened and he made us all do laps while lecturing us on the misuse of the word “Sorry” among today’s youth.

Honestly, I had never thought about it. I had always said it like a reflex. I forgot it was the same word used by authors to describe decrepit old farm buildings, pitiful Dickensian street children, and people whose lives are wracked with sorrow.

This misuse is bound to happen though — most kids are drilled to say “Sorry” for years before they ever learn that the word has meaning outside customary apologies. They learn what it actually means only later.

For the same reason, the perversion of the word “Please” is even more complete. We first learn it, as toddlers, as a sort of arbitrary password that allows us (usually) to have what we want. Normally, what we want is withheld from us the moment we express that we want it — as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with saying that you want something — until we say, “Please.” Some parents even call it “The magic word.”

Most of us learn a second meaning of the word please when we start reading books. One can please another, by doing something nice for them. Some never realize that it’s the same meaning, and that the “please” we say when we want something is short for “…if you please.” So essentially, it’s customary not to ask something of someone else unless you insist that you don’t want them to accommodate your request unless it genuinely brings them pleasure to do so. “Pass me the salt, but only if doing so would be a pleasing experience for you. There is no other reason I would ask.”

I recognize that to say “please” is only polite, and I know that we repeat the phrases that we know to be appropriate without really thinking about what the words in them actually mean.

Although I think there’s a lot of room for additional directness in the way we talk to others, I don’t condone radical honesty. There’s nothing worse than someone who doesn’t bother with manners, rationalizing that they’re just being “real” and they “don’t play games, man.” I prefer people play the game, even though it’s silly. It shows that you don’t want to be reckless with the reactions you cause in others.

Yet it fascinates me how rude it actually is to say exactly what you mean. We say aloud to our guests, “Well, I’d better start cleaning up…” rather than “I’d like everyone to leave now.” When did we get so embarrassed by our actual desires?

Maybe we are so hung up on the idea that we are civilized and egalitarian that we don’t want to acknowledge that we aren’t quite there yet. It seems like we’re pretending that our culture has reached such a level of grace that the desires of others are just as important to us as our own. If not, why do manners require that you say you only want the salt passed to you if the passer is pleased by passing it?

From that perspective it seems like a fairly deep-rooted sense of denial. We are not as selfless as we would like to be, and it’s rude not to pretend we are.

That’s just my guess. If you’ve grown up with this stuff it’s hard to come up with an objective take on where it comes from. What do you think?

Different societies have totally different customs too. I’d love to hear from readers in places where these kinds of language habits are significantly different than in Canada or the US. What about your local set of customs is ridiculous when you really think about it?

***

Photo by stevendepolo

The antibiotics didn’t work, so next I’m going to try doing the dishes.

The illness I referred to in my last post two weeks ago — the one that I said has been impeding my consciousness, shrinking my world down to its most selfish and short-sighted concerns — is still going strong even after taking the whole course of pills prescribed by the doctor. It’s been almost a month altogether.

If it doesn’t get better in a few days I will consult modern medicine again, but in the mean time I’m going to start treating the symptoms in my own way. The coughing and fatigue are annoying, but by far the worst effect of this bout of sickness is that I’ve become a lot more reactive and stressed than normal, which I described in the last article as being stuck in the “lower latitudes” of the overall human spectrum of consciousness.

This lowered consciousness causes all kinds of secondary side-effects. I’m less patient about cleaning up properly, which leads to house-clutter, which in turn creates more mental clutter. I haven’t been especially pleasant to be around, which leads to a correspondingly ill social life, and a growing feeling of missing out. The mental fog makes writing a lot more difficult, and being more reactive means I’m quicker to throw out ideas before I give them a chance to develop. Together, these side-effects create an exaggerated sense that my life and all its little duties are beyond my current capacity to meet.

I normally derive a lot of my sense of stability and peace from the habit of mindfulness — the way in which I walk across parking lots and make tea — and since I’ve been sick it has not been very appealing. I tend to want all the normal moments to be over, or to not happen at all.

A month is a long time to be in such an impaired state and I’m alarmed at how far I’ve fallen in that respect. It’s normally very easy for me to just let my attention settle on an ordinary moment, and find that it reflects some peace or beauty back to me. But right now it only takes a few seconds before something annoys me: the pain in my chest, or the weird clamminess I have, or how it is almost mid-April and still freezing.

If my compromised physical state has created a compromised mental state, then I suppose that treating my current mental state is only going to improve my physical state. It certainly can’t hurt. I need a single, regular place to apply deliberate mindfulness every day.

Signs have been pointing to my sink. My mother’s dishwasher broke months ago, and she never bothered to fix it, because doing them by hand was almost as easy and nothing about it can break down.

A friend of mine (let’s call her “Lily”) positively loves washing dishes by hand. She finds it so gratifying that she feels cheated when houseguests try to help by doing some themselves.

A few weeks ago, as I was turning on the dishwasher before we left my place, she said something like, “Dishwashers are what’s wrong with the world.” Something about that sounded right. I asked her to explain.

“Life is composed of primarily mundane moments,” she says. “If we don’t learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along.”

We used to have to spend a lot more time and attention maintaining our basic possessions. Dishes had to be washed by hand, stoves had to be stoked, clothes had to be mended, and meals had to be prepared from scratch.

Little was automated or outsourced. All of these routine labors demanded our time, and also our presence and attention. It was normal to have to zoom in and slow down for much of our waking day. We had no choice but to respect that certain daily tasks could not be done without a willing, real-time investment of attention.

My sickness led me to being reactive and mindless and so I’m going to reclaim a little bit of it back by un-automating one thing. I’m not going to use my dishwasher for a month. I’ll do all dishes by hand. Dishes have to be done, and so every day I’ll need to bring my immediate attention to bear on the soapy water and white plates.

This is experiment no. 15. It will last for a month, starting today, then I’ll decide whether to bother with the dishwasher again.

I want to see whether this commitment leads to my patience and mindfulness returning in other areas.

I’ll report occasionally on my findings on the experiment log. As always, you are welcome to join me, and you can let me know how it’s going in the comments section.

“It helps to cultivate patience,” says Lily, “and the enjoyment of a task which we usually discard as “not worth it”, too boring, too mundane, blase. It gives us the chance to take a little peek into the tiny but enormous world of simply noticing what is around you, and engaging fully with it. If you are someone who is naturally averse to washing dishes, you abhor it, you avoid it at all costs, you grudgingly go through it as quickly as possible… Well then, this is the perfect opportunity to engage fully with those feelings, and to gently scrub them away, until what you are left with is the realization that life is an amazing, and beautiful, and precious gift, no matter what kind of activity you are engaged in. You are surrounded by great textures, and images, and formations of light, and sounds, and smells, and everything, all the time.”

***

Photo by R/DV/RS

Being sick is one of the circumstances in which the higher functions of my mind start to go dormant. I often feel like I can’t write about anything other than being sick, or some peripherally related topic.

My whole human experience sinks to the low end of something — some kind of spectrum. As it does, I get duller and less compassionate. My mind turns inward, becomes self-absorbed. My self-consciousness grows and my consciousness of others shrinks. Mental chatter increases and takes more of my attention.

Even when I’m in the throes of its dysfunctional lower end, I am quite aware that I’m always somewhere on this spectrum, and that I have been on farther-flung parts of it (in both directions) in the past, and I’m sure I will be in the future.

I don’t know what to call this spectrum, but I do know I want to be closer to the other end of it as much as possible, which I know from experience is more likely to happen under certain circumstantial conditions: not being sick, being on top of my responsibilities, eating mostly whole foods, and taking my time whenever I drink tea or walk across parking lots or do anything else, to name a few.

There’s a problem with the words “higher”and “lower” though. They imply that one direction is definitively superior to the other, the way gold medals are superior to bronze medals. I want to avoid that, for reasons explained below, even though I obviously think one end is vastly preferable. So maybe “north and south” are slightly less-misleading words to label the two directions on this spectrum. They have nothing to do with geography, at all. I just need some poles in order to talk about it.

I know I’m being vague here. There’s a reason for that. Traditionally when people talk about subjective inner states they wade into semi-spiritual territory, where explanations start to sound hokey and assertions become unprovable, because there can be no second observer of what’s happening inside you. In an attempt to describe your current condition you might hear yourself saying something like, “Wow my energy is in disarray today,” to which your hippie friends may nod knowingly and your science-head friends may roll their eyes. 

The problem is that once you model something conceptually — that is, give it a vocabulary and relate it in terms of a concrete analogy — we all lose track of that something and end up talking only about the analogy. So inner states have always been problematic to talk about, especially between people of different religions or worldviews. It’s historically been done with vague concepts and cryptic stories.

This stifles the whole conversation on this particular topic, even though the inner states of human beings really is the most important and relevant topic in the world, because these states are exactly what quality of life is made of, and quality of life the only thing every single person on this planet cares about.

We can’t ever have a proper scientific look at our inner states, because science requires corroboration — multiple angles and observers — and nobody else can get a direct peek into what your first-person experience looks and feels like. Psychology is supposed to be the study of the mind, but it’s really mostly behavior that is studied, from which conclusions are drawn about the mind. As we all know, the human mind is an utterly different thing when looked at from the inside, and you only ever get to see one of them.

Therefore understanding the workings of your inner experience is always going to be a personal hobby, if you make a hobby of it at all, and a certain inability to explain what you find is always going to be a part of that.

So I’ll try. This spectrum — I never really explained what it was — doesn’t quite equate with mood, or with happiness even. It has more to do with how reactive you are, how self-absorbed your view, how much you are in your own way, in any given moment.

This is how movement along the spectrum manifests itself, in my experience.

As you move south:

• You become more self-conscious, more easily embarrassed, and more concerned with how you are perceived by others.

• Thoughts have an increasingly strong influence on mood. You can slip into a bad mood just by having a thought about something negative, even something that happened years ago.

• You feel more inclined to take thoughts at face value. For example, if you have a thought that a problem of yours is unsolvable, you’re more likely to believe it and stop seeking solutions.

• Increasingly, you regard everything that happens in terms of how it affects your own interests, which means external events become more distressing and you become more anxious about controlling them.

• You become less inclined to see others as equals. You tend to regard them as either better than you or worse than you.

• You become more likely to wish for solutions to your problems, and less likely to believe you are capable of solving them yourself. You feel like a small part of a big world.

• You become more reactive. If you are very far this way down the spectrum, you may even react violently.

• An increasing proportion of your attention is taken by your thoughts, which leaves less attention for sense perceptions.

• Cravings for gratification and comfort increase in frequency and intensity, and appear to be the only possibilities for fulfillment. You grow increasingly less likely to feel peace or joy in ordinary moments.

As you move north:

• Personal criticisms seem less relevant to you and you’re less likely to react to them emotionally.

• It becomes easier and more appealing to relinquish control over external events, particularly over what other people do.

• You naturally put a greater proportion of your attention on the physical world around you, which leaves less attention for following your internal dialogue. Inner dialogue becomes less persistent.

• Ordinary details of the physical world become more beautiful, and feel like they somehow make more sense, and you feel less inclined to tell others this. Private experiences of beauty make up a greater proportion of your day.

• You evaluate external events more in terms of their overall good in the world — how much joy they bring or suffering they relieve — than in terms of your own interests.

• You come closer to being able to accept undesirable events in real-time. You lose interest in talking about how the situation ought to be.

• Other human beings (and, farther north, animals) appear more individualized. They seem more delicate, interesting, and worthy of care and attention. Walking among them begins to feel more like walking in a china shop.

• Self-consciousness fades. You feel an increased willingness to let things be. Farther north, you cease experiencing yourself as an opaque object moving in the world and instead feel like a transparent subject through which the world moves. You may feel like you are watching the world without being there at all.

***

I don’t know if there’s a specific quality the spectrum reflects. It’s not important. The best barometer for your current position on the spectrum is probably how much peace and ease you feel during in-between moments. By in-between moments I mean moments in which you’re not getting what you want and not getting what you don’t want, which is most moments.

We move north and south along the spectrum throughout our lives. A swing can happen within a day, especially as a reaction to the arrival of exceptionally desirable or undesirable circumstances: major setbacks, major insights, major gains or major losses. You may be in one place one day and quite another a few days later.

It tends to shift in wide arcs though, like the tension in a storyline does. You may spend an arc of a year or two quite farther north than normal for you, if you’re doing something that serves your deepest values, or something that requires exceptional levels of attention or effort from you. You might have an arc in the other direction corresponding with a rough period, like a divorce or an illness.

But generally, if you have a persistent interest in personal growth, you’ll find yourself gradually moving northward over the years.

You move north by doing the things that seem to result, for you, in the “northward” qualities above. You only get a firsthand look at your own inner states, so it’s necessarily a solo practice. Spiritual golf.

For me, what has helped most has been practicing mindfulness informally, reading, simplifying my life in terms of possessions and commitments, confronting long-running fears, and writing.

You find your own best practices by trying things. If you never try anything new you never find them.

“Follow your bliss” is how Joseph Campbell put it. He always knew what he was talking about, but I have trouble with the word bliss because it’s been hijacked by Duncan Hines and other gratification-peddlers. Someone’s “bliss” may be heroin, after all. But if you get a good sense of where north is from the list above, then a personal practice of self-education can’t help but move you gradually northward.

I suppose it’s possible some people have done well at the south end, mastering the arts of controlling others, avoiding risk, finding constant gratification, and justifying their reactions. But I don’t know how happy they really are and it’s probably the harder road.

So head north. But keep in mind that the intention to move north is entirely different from pursuing the desire to reach the North Pole. At a glance, spiritual practices seem to focus on figures that have reached the Pole, so to speak — Jesus and Buddha come to mind — as well as the possibility of doing it yourself. But I think the North Pole was always meant to be a lot less important than simply heading north, and even just knowing which way it is. After all, most of the actionable passages in those doctrines describe the smaller habits that gradually move you farther north: being kind to your neighbor and washing your bowl.

***

Photo by David Cain

I live in a land of temperature extremes. In a typical year my city will see both 35 degrees Celsius and minus 35 (that’s 95 and -31 to Americans.) We have the greatest range of temperatures of any major city in the world. Average temperature is slightly lower than Moscow. Humidity and wind chill stretch these extremes further.

Our dramatic climate constitutes a large part of our modest civic pride. It’s particularly relevant to me though, because my day job has me working with my hands, outside, all times of year.

Construction crews know how to build things — roads, pipes, hydrants, and buildings — but they couldn’t possibly build them in the right place without a professional surveyor staking them out. That’s what I do. I read engineering drawings and mark exactly (to the inch) where all the new stuff belongs in the real world. Thousands of years ago, this was done using wooden stakes pounded into the ground at carefully measured-in points, and they have not yet found a better way.

Most construction happens in the summer. I find the points while a student assistant does most of the hammering. In winter, the construction season is on an outbreath and the industry slows way down. The students are gone, so two or three surveyors team up to create overqualified super-crews of stake-holders and hammerers. Many of my workdays, another surveyor does the technical stuff and so I become essentially a manual laborer.

Minus 35 is something everyone should experience at least once. The air shimmers with cold. When you inhale, the inside of your nostrils freeze. Your breath comes out in clouds. If there’s a breeze and some of your skin is exposed, say between your glove and the cuff of your coat, it feels like it’s being cut with a knife. But you wear layers, you keep moving, and you make sure to find a job for the extremities that tend to go numb first.

Worst of all for the surveyor, the ground is about as soft as a brick. Wooden stakes shatter when you try to hammer them in. So we must always first pound in an iron bar to make a hole.

Even with a pointed iron bar it’s almost impossible to make a hole if you’ve never done it before. If you don’t hit it dead-centre, often the bar bounces right out. It takes several great, two-handed swings with a ten-pound sledgehammer to make any progress, which means someone else has to crouch down and hold the bar for the hammer guy.

It becomes a cogent exercise in trust. A miss could be disastrous for the wrist-bones of the holder, but the hammer needs to be swung hard, and we have to do this thousands of times. Being the hammerer is actually scarier than being the holder — I would rather get hit with a sledgehammer than hit someone. After working a few weeks with a particular partner, a person gets less nervous and it feels a whole lot safer. The upside to swinging the sledge is that you stay warm. 

The whole process — working in bitter cold, and fighting such a hard physical battle for every stake — was always draining mentally, even when I was just thinking about having to do it the next day. I hated that I had to do it. It’s hard to even wake up, knowing how many of these little battles have to be endured just to get to the next day (on a slow day we’ll put in about fifty.)

How hard gets easy

Most of us have regular appointments with little things that always feel hard, usually a certain necessary part of your job or your personal commitments. Talking to a particular manager. Doing inventory. Performing a particular exercise in your workout. Cleaning the pots under the stove elements. Impending hard parts preoccupy us, which creates a draining effect on the easy parts.

It’s normal to prefer easy over hard. If there’s a way we can do something easy instead, without triggering any apparent consequences, we take it by default. We tend to think of easy as if it’s categorically a better deal. But it’s usually not, and here’s why.

Because I didn’t go traveling during the off-season, I did more winter sledgehammering this winter than ever, and at some point I found myself volunteering to do the hammering rather than avoiding it. Now when it’s time to do some winter staking I have no resistance to it. Waking up knowing I have to hammer fifty stakes in doesn’t faze me anymore.

That’s because of a wonderful law of reality: hard becomes easy. Almost everything that’s easy for you now was at one time hard.

What makes something hard is your emotional relationship to it, not what the thing actually is. Hard becomes easy, if you do it willingly while it’s still hard.

The biggest factor in getting something to go from hard to easy is normally exposure. The more you encounter something, the less intimidating it gets. Your emotional relationship changes. There’s less uncertainty, your skill in dealing with it improves, your resentment for it fades, your craving for ease or salvation disappears. It has become easy.

So if you have a bit of foresight, the easiest thing to do is to make the hard things easy. You make the hard things harder when you let yourself fall into a habit of avoiding them.

Normally we drag our feet all the way to the easy-point, so it stays hard as long as possible. A society that values convenience and technological solutions teaches us to overvalue the easy and to undervalue the hard. We try to escape the hard parts as often as possible, limiting our exposure and justifying our psychological resistance to it. We seldom come to something hard with the intention to get to the point where it’s easy. So what we’re really doing is ensuring that we experience as much “hard” as possible.

We’ve all seen this ease-seeking behavior in its extremes: people who only eat fast food, let the dishes pile above the faucet, or depend on the TV for most of their entertainment. Their lives are actually harder than those of people more inclined to address the “hard” things willingly, because they regard the easy option as a better deal.

We know this is ridiculous. We’ve all been watching hard things become easy our entire lives, but we still trust and even celebrate our resistance to them. We like to complain about the hard stuff we have to deal with, and often people validate us, and take the chance to share their own. It’s a big part of our culture. See any reality show for examples.

I’m beginning to retrain my impulses to regard the harder bits of life as more attractive, because the hard points reliably mark the places where you gain the most ground — which is to say the hard things offer more ease at the end of the day than the easy ones do.

This is upside-down from how I learned to approach the hard things and you’re probably no different. This winter’s survey work would have been a breeze all the way through if I’d understood how quickly everything can become easy once you bring willingness to the hard parts.

Approach the hard things like you might approach cleaning a great, filthy plate-glass window covered in smudges, dirt and cobwebs. You’re almost attracted to tackling the grimiest parts first, because that’s where the most ground is to be gained. You create more cleanliness more quickly by seeking out the dirtiest parts.

Reconditioning your reaction towards hard parts reduces the apparent hardness immediately, not just of any given task, but of life as a whole. The payoff is huge. You steadily transform the world around you into an easier, more welcoming one, by making a pretty simple change in perspective. You can finally welcome it all.

Think about it: life consists of alternating bits of hard and easy. So all the world can deliver you is ease, or a chance to create ease. That’s the world I prefer to wake up to.

***

Photo by hmboo