How to Not Squander Your Life and Live it
Some helpful things to think about
“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.” Victor Frankl
One thing that has been front and center on my mind lately is that we in the West seem to be undergoing a Meaning Crisis. And despite the material safety and comforts of modern times, many can’t help but feel an existential inertia, which leads one to feel they’ve lost the agency to create a life that feels good in their heart.
(For an in depth investigation of the Meaning Crisis you can seek out the extensive body of work that John Vervaeke takes up in his Meaning Crisis video series. It’s one of the most profound things I’ve ever watched).
It seems evident that something is off with how we are living in modern times.
As the novelist, Chuck Palahniuk, said in Fight Club, “We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against our culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”
Things just don’t feel right; at an intuitive level. Sometimes I get the feeling that life is just passing by; like it’s just slipping through my fingers.
Do you ever feel that way?
Like you are existing but not really living? Diddling around but not really engaging with life in a way that nourishes your heart. Like the life you’re living doesn’t match your interior. Like how often do most get the chance to really do something these days and test their mettle? How many are consciously working on improving their character and putting themselves in situations that help them actualize their potential?
Maybe this is the growing pessimist in me, but I presume many are struggling with these kinds of existential issues.
Including myself.
Especially these days when we’re all confronted with easy distractions and with these added new constraints on everyday freedoms.
If you feel similarly, below are some guiding points that could help you recover some of your agency and live to a greater extent.
Balance consumption and production
Life today, more than any other time in human history, is full of pleasurable distractions. We’re drowning in content; enough for countless lifetimes. And because of the internet and our devices, at our fingertips at all times. I’m not one for most social media but my addiction is YouTube and I’ve been aware for some time that I’m habitually spending too much time consuming content.
The challenge for me is that it’s educational (like the Meaning Crisis series) and so it’s easy to rationalize. But at the end of the day it’s still passive consumption.
And passive consumption has taken over. Wherever you look people are looking at their phones and consuming something. It’s disturbing how we’ve become these mindless robots who spend most of our time watching others live, through social media, t.v., and movies, instead of living in such a way that we are the heroes of our own movie.
As Chuck Palahniuk writes in Lullaby, “The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.”
To some extent, it appears we can’t help it. Like it’s just part and parcel of modern living.
In the documentary, The Social Dilemma, we learn that these applications were designed to prey on the lower parts of our instinctual brain (race to the bottom of the brain stem, as technology ethicist Tristan Harris calls it). Tristan recounted in a recent podcast with Joe Rogan a quote from E.O Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
This is why we need to be extra vigilant and disciplined about how much attention we give to our devices and instead balance our passive consumption with time for productive activity. Articles like this, for example. Take back control of your emotions and be at the cause, not the effect. Emotions are like our mind, “an excellent servant, but terrible master.”
Focus on the important stuff
I recall the regrets of the dying, as recounted by palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Most of human life in western societies revolve around having and we forget that we are human beings. This was written about by the German social psychologist, Erich Fromm, in his book, To Have or To Be? Just as we need to balance consumption and production, we also have to balance these two existential modes if we are to be a balanced individual. Realizing that his life was defined solely through the having mode is what led Siddartha (who later realized himself as the Buddha) to leave the palace on a long journey to find out what was missing in his privileged life.
Writer, Johann Hari, talks about some of these things and more in his book, Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope. He argues that people in the developed world are living in disconnection from various kinds of soul nourishing prerequisites that make us human, for example from meaningful work, people, and nature, to name a few, and so we have developed all kinds of physical and psychological symptoms, “diseases of civilization,” to indicate this divorce.
A parallel story to illustrate: I just dog sat an Alaskan Husky for the night and I found it striking that she was on Prozac (an anti-depressant) for “separation anxiety.” As someone who has watched enough of Cesar Milan’s shows I know there is nothing wrong with the dog. Separation anxiety doesn’t exist in the dog world. That only comes into being when a dog comes into contact with a human and a certain environment that throws it out of it’s natural rhythms. A strong breed like that isn’t cut out for cramped city living where they stay in a tiny apartment for eight hours while their human goes to work at the office. They need a job and intense physical exercise. Otherwise their souls become sick.
As does ours when we are living in such a way that we are denying ourselves the important stuff that falls under the being mode of existence. Don’t forget to be proactive with cultivating your garden with the important things that water your soul — movement, dance, and good relationships.
Focus on doing what's hard, not easy
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some worthwhile goal.” -Victor Frankl
As Jake said in James Cameron’s Avatar, “All I ever wanted in my sorry-ass life was a single thing worth fighting for.”
It’s too easy to get sucked into living a safe, comfortable, routine, and pleasure driven life that leaves you feeling dead on the inside. Lots of activity but no real meaning or growth. Like mentioned earlier, the ocean of endless content at our fingertips can turn us into passive consuming machines.
This has honestly been something that I’ve only begun to confront myself still dealing with the effect that C-19 has had on my life these past couple years. Before that point, I was living and testing myself to a greater extent. I had a budding spiritual life at my ayahuasca church which was challenging me spiritually and leading me down a path of love, growth, and communitas; introducing me to lovely people from all walks of life. And then on the physical side I was heavily engaged at my Muay Thai gym, where I trained intensely enough to go through a couple fights. It was the undoubtedly the hardest physical experience I’ve ever encountered in my life.
I was fighting for something. It wasn’t an easy path but as Jocko Willink says, “discipline equals freedom.”
With C-19, things drastically changed, as I’m sure it did for most, and to a great extent I settled into a more comfortable and safe existence. I guess I am still grappling with the ripple effects and trying to figure out how to return to some semblance of what I had or move onto a new chapter. I very much feel an existential inertia, like I am waiting to live again someday. Perhaps similar to the husky laying around her city apartment.
Optimize your ‘mechanism’ for awareness and understanding
I recently watched a wonderful film that was recommended to me by a good friend, My Dinner with Andre. Not a conventional film by any means.
It’s simply two old friends catching up over dinner at some restaurant in New York City and engaging in a meandering conversation about various topics and how to live a good life. (The first half is a little tough to get through but stick around, it really hits its stride in the second half)
Wally (played by Wallace Shawn, man on the left) is a pretty normal guy who is content with the simple tasks of life and finds contentment and meaning in just running errands, reading a satisfying book, and crossing things off his to do list. His friend Andre (played by Andre Gregory), a retired theatre director, is a seeker, and someone more inclined to seek grandiose adventure where he was engaged in a fantastical journey that would result in some profound insight.
Though, ironically, despite having led this incredibly interesting life, Andre admittedly felt in some sense like his life was being squandered. Wallace, on the other hand, felt content with a cup of coffee and reading a good autobiography. “Reality is everywhere,” Wallace said, whether you’re climbing Everest in the Himalayas or going about your everyday life doing routine tasks.
It’s the mechanism that’s the key — one’s orientation and attitude toward life, how you’re thinking, what you believe to be true — that creates your own hell or heaven as reality. The experiences and external events don’t matter as much as what you bring to it. If your thinking is poor you’ll make a mess of whatever life situation you find yourself in.
Perhaps that’s why travel in truth might not be the antidote to life’s problems as it seems to be. “Wherever you go, there you are,” as the saying goes. Or as Krishnamurti said “You may wander all over the earth but you have to come back to yourself.”
Turn inward and think about your balance of striving and doing versus non-doing and just being. How much are you in appreciation and understanding for that which you already have or have done versus craving that which you do not have or have not done?
If you’re constantly off in some other headspace thinking about what should or could be, perhaps a little more focus on non-doing and just being with all that you have and have done. It’s a balance. And one that is important so that you’re not feeling distant and chronically dissatisfied with the life in front of you but rather experiencing joy and full engagement in the here and now.
“It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live.” Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
As David Foster Wallace writes, “To get good at being in touch with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
This is water.
This is water.”
Deep immersion with the world around you. Present awareness to the here and now. You become an agent that makes things better.
If you want to live a different kind of life by all means take action and make it happen but if you’re not prepared to do that forget it and live the life in front of you and be present, engaged, and someone who looks on how to make everything you engage with better. That is how you enter the flow state as a human being. The more you can enter flow, the more liklihood you will consider your life meaningful.
Closing
Today more than at any other time in human history we need to become our own masters. We cannot just coast on autopilot because there are forces at play that are actively hacking our biochemistry and want to dominate our attention and most precious thing in this life: TIME. Yuval Harari talks about how there has never been a more crucial time to know ourselves because there is now a race with AI for that understanding, who in some ways already know us better than we know ourselves. It’s a frightening thought and one that is continually progressing at an exponential pace.
Stand guard to the door of your mind and be disciplined with what you focus on and let in. As we get older, life seems to go by quicker and there’s nothing sadder than getting to the end and being haunted at where it all went. You don’t want to be one of this palliative patients that Bronnie Ware encountered who lived with regret during their dying days.
So to recap to avoid squandering your life and live more:
Balance consumption and production
Focus on the important stuff- family, friends, personal growth, learning, nature, community and belonging, expressing and being yourself, moving your body, and realizing your latent potentialities
Focus on what’s hard, not easy
Optimize your ‘mechanism’ for awareness and understanding
We dont’ want to die with the music still in us. It reminds me of my late beloved grandmother, Ruth. One of the sweetest and kind souls I’ve ever known. Sadly the last half of her life was spent just existing. When she was in her early fifties she decided to just stop living and remain in her home for the most part. Year after year passed until she passed on at age eighty-eight. She would spend most of her days watching tv, chatting here and there on the phone, cooking, or sometimes just sitting in silence thinking of fond memories of the past. One of her dreams, perhaps the only one, was to see the homeland, Italy. She had a chance when she was younger when her friends all went but she didn’t go because she and my grandpa didn’t have the money. When she had the money she wasn’t in the physical shape to make the trip. It haunted her to the end of her days and was her biggest regret. Listen to your soul and take the risk.
Thank you for reading and I wish you all the best on your journey.
