It’s not really a suggestion.
It’s not an idea nor a nice to have, nor a luxury. This is not an optional quality. Humans are designed to be humans, we’re not not built to be robots.
To work without joy is to disappointm everyone who’s ever come before you… They all worked to make the world in which you’re currently living a better one. They all strove to make you have the best life you can have. To still hate it would to be to throw their efforts in the trash.
There’s a level of discipline, yes. But to build an entire life around the ‘Hustle’ and to ‘Have things get done’? That is a miserable and disappointing existence.
That is being in to this world and then being taken out of it only living for other people. It doesn’t matter how far we go in this world. It doesn’t matter the money we make, the impact we have, the progress we implement… if we didn’t enjoy it ourselves.
To live a life externalizing our own joys to the validation of other people is a sorry and miserable existence.
Nobody knows what they’re doing. Those at the top struggle just as much. Societally, we applaud those who have made the dollar or gotten the status. But the sole metric we’re using to evaluate quality of life is monetary success? Is it really just to climb the ladder and then get a round of applause? Is that really what all of this chalks up to?
We focus on status… but what about an individuals’ sense of well-being? Why are we not using peoples’ own joy of life as their metric for quality? Why has quality come to be synonymous with wealth and status instead of joy and quality.
If you got to be the Greatest of All Time at whatever your job was… you did insanely well… you rose through the ranks… you checked the boxes and became the absolute best in the world…. would you take it if you knew if meant you had to work 120 hour weeks and didn’t enjoy the journey?
Does the end justify the means? I suspect that it does not.
There will always be areas of humanity to explore. There will always be new exotic species of animals, new parts of the ocean to discover, bigger rockets, faster computer processors, more complex algorithms, more accurate LLMs… but what’s the point if we don’t enjoy any of it?
There are an infinite number of rabbit holes to go down. Our curiosity can be piqued at the smallest things. Cooking. Singing. Reading Science Fiction and Romance Thrillers. Basketball. Lacrosse. World of Warcraft. League of Legends. Call of Duty. Harry Potter. Japanese cooking. Making pottery. Watching FRIENDS. Watching The Office. Watching The Avengers. Stock market analysis. Water color paintings. Spanish. Spanish salsa. Puerto Rican Salsa. Cuban Salsa. Bachata.
The list is infinite. There are an overwhelming number of ways that we can choose to spend our time. It goes on and on.
The Collective Consciousness is ever expanding. But what if it expands at a rate faster than we can keep up with it? What if our interests and curiosity is so overwhelmingly expansive that we can’t keep up with our own sanity.
We devolve into a state of overwhelm. The processing power of our mind can’t keep up with our To-Dos and our Interests and all of our friends lives.
We just won’t get there. It’s called a To-Do List for a reason. It hasn’t been done yet. We haven’t gotten there yet.
But we also never will.
There’s no end status of life where all of a sudden we are at peace. There’s no future point in time where we’ve “got it all figured out”. No, no. And to delay our our sense of contentment and peace to that distant point in the future is to straight up lie to ourselves.
We never get to reach that sense of calm. It doesn’t just happen. If we want that sense of calm and peace we have to create it now. If we want joy from our lives, we’ve got to weave it into our lives each and every day.
We’ve got to pursue them in the present moment because our life just keeps lifeing and we don’t just wake up one day in a present state of bliss. There’s no future we’re trying to get to.
Oliver Burkeman puts it so incredibly well in his book 4000 Weeks. There are a plethora of thought-provoking ideas in that book. “Life is just the sum of a bunch of present moments”
We’re not getting anywhere. Tomorrow doesn’t exist because by the time it happens, it’ll have been today again. We just keep on waking up into ‘Todays’. Over and over. Day in day out.
Today. Today. Today.
We just keep on getting more and more todays. There’s no future state of bliss. If we want that state of bliss it has to be created today. It has to be created right now.
‘Happiness is something that you create’
Why do we do this to ourselves?
And so it is batshit crazy to me that we hinge all of our happiness on some future point in time like it’s a dollar amount that we can save up for and cash in on “Happiness”.
But we can’t. That’s not how it works. Happiness has to operate more akin to an Annuity. We have to pay ourselves every day.
Happiness is not something that can be stockpiled and cashed in all at once. We’ve got to pay ourselves first.
Delayed gratification may work for a dollar amount or long term goals but it doesn’t work for happiness.
There are many members of the Hustle Culture. Have we stopped to wonder what we are hustling for? Where are we trying to go? What are we trying to achieve?
Long term goals are incredible useful. They need to be pondered and studied and written down. They give us orientation and a direction for our lives. But if we chosen a long term goal in which we barely enjoy waking up and grinding for it, what are we doing with ourselves?
Have we really just sacrificed our own enjoyment for the virtual pat on the back from people we don’t care about?
Death is the ultimate equalizer. It binds each of us together. Nobody gets to escape it. No matter how godlike one may seem, each of us ends up buried underneath of a heap of Earth.
Eventually, the universe will dissipate into just a bunch of cold nothingness. Everything we’ve ever experienced, loved, hated, or cared about will be gone in a couple hundred, maybe thousand years. But it will all be gone. Carl Sagan taught us that.
End end state of happiness doesn’t exist. And so we’ve got to do what we can with the present to enjoy our progress and enjoy our own journey. If that means only 5 minutes each day of the things we love, so be it.
But everyday partaking in the things that bring us joy is not an option.
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