It’s easier, really.
It’s simpler.
If I could just chalk it all up to ‘too much’. If my blanket excuse was ‘sorry I’m busy’. It takes the pressure off. The decision is no longer ours.
Distracted.
We’ve got 1000 things going on, all at the same time. How can we not be?
‘I’ve got to make lunch for tomorrow. My laundry just finished washing so I’ll have to hang it out. I’ve got to ask my Doctor about that weird skin thing I’ve got. Haven’t texted my buddy back in awhile, and shit I think we are supposed to call today. Jesus I haven’t even eaten breakfast lunch. What the hell, man!’
There’s an infinite number of things we could be doing with our days and our lives. And as Oliver Burkeman puts it ‘every single one of them is perfectly valid. There’s an infinite number of ways we could spend our time and deem ourselves ‘productive”
Every hour awake has an infinite number of potential options. It’s as if there’s too much. The To-Do List just gets longer. It’s almost overwhelming… sometimes it is.
One thing done, but 2 more pop up. It’s the world’s most realistic Hydra. It’s never all completed. I want to relax. I can’t relax. It’s just one thing after another.
We like to believe ‘just after this work project’ or ‘after this semester’ or ‘just a little more money’ and then we’ll reach the end. Then we’ll reach our sanctity of peace. We think we’re in a tornado of turmoil we’ll finish justttt around the corner. The oasis of calm awaits and we ‘can finally take a breath’.
But unfortunately, that place doesn’t exist. At least, according to everyone who’s ever achieved a goal. As you’ll note from your most recent accomplishment “The goal post just keeps moving”. We’re never fully content after we reach a goal. It might bring some fulfillment and temporary peace, but it’s not too long before we get restless and want something more. Have you ever taken an extended vacation? And noticed by the end of it, you’re sort of… ready to work again?
There is no finality of peace… I guess that is, until you die….
Once we finish this, we’ll start that. Once we finish that, we’ll start those other things. On the cycle goes. On and on. There’s no ‘End Point’, not for happiness nor for peace.
Human minds crave control. We want everything to be neatly packaged up and make sense. We want to know what’s exactly in front of us. Unfortunately, it seems like we never get that certainty.
To be unsure is to be human
What’s the alternative anyways? To know 100% of the details about our lives? Would we prefer to know and understand where it’ll go and exactly how everything will pan out? We’d rather know our birth, our death and everything in between?
It seems like a weird paradox. We crave to know what comes next. We need to know what we’re in for. But if we were to know everything, chances are, we probably wouldn’t really want to. I have a hunch we’d get a bit bored – Just living with full knowledge of the next move?
We’d be soldiers quite literally marching towards our death.
If we had complete control over every minute of our day we’d lose the spontaneity. We’d miss out on some of the excitement and the fun of not knowing. I think that’s the meaning of Potential. We wouldn’t get to experience the uncertainty of emotions because we would already know what comes next.
In fact, that sounds like a prison – A place where every single move is preplanned and mapped out. That is no more lively than running a computer program.
That sounds like the existence of a robot.
Perhaps each of our very actions are precharted, many religious perspectives have this belief. Some believe it all happens for a reason. If that is true, we’ll still never know what it is or why it exists – To my understanding, that’s why Faith exists in teh first place.
Sometimes I wish I believed this myself – It would take away much of the uncertainty. I think life would make a whole lot more sense. But for some reason, it doesn’t compute. I think we can make any decision we like and take our lives to the highs or the lows we wish to, in any direction. I believe we truly are the “Masters of our fate and the Captains of our soul”
Always uncertain
One thing for sure is that we can’t predict the next step. For a reason or not, the Onus is on us to step confidently into the misdirection of our own lives..
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”
Henry David Thoreau
We can’t control the outcome, but we can control each and every step we take along the way. The outcome of our existence isn’t predictable, not to us anyways. The uncertainty is scary, terrifying at times.
But we never get full control anyways. Nobody alive has ever reached a blissful state of calm but doing more. So if that place doesn’t exist, why bother worrying about it?
It’s easier said than done. But in a weird way, the uncertainty of death is exciting.
Today, we could slip and break an arm. We could get hit by a bus. We could have a hereditary heart attack or a brain aneurism or swim in a lake and ingest a brain eating amoeba (new fear unlocked).
There’s always stuff that we can’t control. But to live and let it control us is the yield to the infinity of Fear.
“I’d rather live in a world of what ifs than oh wells”
Tim Ferris
I think the trick is to embrace that and focus on what we can control.
All those infinite variables? The unpredictable boss, the job that might not pan out, the pandemic that might hit?
Those are all things in our lives that we have excruciatingly little control over. We could spend all our time obsessing about all the things, but we’d just be spinning our wheels.
Infinity stones
We’re complex creatures with complex problems with layered lives. We all have so many things going on at once. It’d be great if we could pursue all of our passions and learn all the languages and travel to all the countries and take all the vacations.
But we’re finite. There are lots of productivity tips suggesting how we can get more done.
But is that really the trouble? Not enough? We already know that it’ll never be enough. We’ll keep going and going and finding new ways to fill our time.
So why try?
The alternative
If we accept that we’ll never read all the books or watch all the shows we want to, we can finally yield to the infinite and start working on precisely the thing that matters most. We’ll have accepted that life is finite. There’s no point in going down all the rabbit holes because we know we’ll never go down them all anyways – So why start?
Instead doesn’t it make sense to work on only the most important stuff at this very moment?
With finitude comes limits. There are only 24 hours in each day. Everyone is allotted the same amount We could rush and rush and rush, but ever notice how that busy person never quite ‘gets there’? They just keep on pushing harder.
There’s no End. Life isn’t a pool of water that we can scoop out handful after handful until finally one day it’s empty. We’re not robots checking off a couple of things off our To-Do List one by one. Oliver Burkeman also noted that “life is more like a river than a bucket” – An infinite flow of new ideas and passions.
And we get to scoop one thing out, look at it for awhile, ponder it, and sip slowly before going back for another. We’ve only got 2 hands. We could sit and thrash about trying to swallow all the water, but that would be useless.
We try to get around this prioritization by escaping in to the digital realm of infinite – we get to avoid our problems and scroll and scroll and see Josh Daiek skiing culoirs in one and chicken electric dance music in another. One after another, it’s like we get to trick our brain to consume it all. Perhaps that’s why it is so addicting.
But as soon as we put it down we’re faced, once again, with the finitude of a singular lifetime. ‘That’s scary. Ew gross. That means I’ve got to choose’.
But that’s also the beauty of it.
We have to choose.
The very nature of only being able to do one thing means that we are foregoing all other options. We are deciding ‘this sole item deserves my attention’.
We want to be able to do 100 different things, but that’s impossible. Our brains can focus on a singular thing at once. Multitasking studies show that productivity drops in all areas.
As long as we go on believing we can get it all done or that we can do several things at once, we are living a lie.
4000 Weeks was a fantastic book, and now I realize there is only one thing we can do at this very moment. The trouble is choosing that thing from a ocean of infinite.
Every moment we choose something should be a conscious decision that this is the most important thing right now – precisely because it is put ahead of allllll the other possible things we could be doing.
They recommend a short 3 item ‘Closed To Do List’ and an infinite ‘Open To Do List’ of which we can pull from. The next item cannot be moved on to until one from the Closed List is complete.
Parting thoughts
Usually when we prioritize, the decision is subconscious in the hopes that we can do everything. “I’ll do this real quick and then the next”. But that defeats the point that we’ll never get it all done to begin with.
It’s easier to be distracted. But it doesn’t get us anywhere. It’s harder to make the decision, accept the responsibility that all other responsibilities – All people we’re supposed to text, all car maintenance, all meals needing to be cooked – will be put on pause, and we can get to them afterwards.
I thought I could both workout and meet my friend on time this very morning. And god damn it I was late. You can’t be in two places and the same time, to trick ourselves is to deny ourselves Finity.
Steve Jobs was in denial that his kid was his. The mother, Crissan Brennan never made the choice to have the kid or not. They pointed out, she never really ‘chose’, she just sort of “had a kid”.
When we don’t actively decide, time chooses for us.
Time just keeps on going. Whether we like it or not, it just keeps on going.
If we want any semblance of control over our lives, we’d better realize we’re going to die some day, damn it. And that means picking the most important thing from a million. And that means tough decisions.
Geez, I hate making tough decisions.
Leave a Reply