The Argument Against Living Your Life Fully

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

We've embraced the notion of living a full life. Well, at least in public. I'm working 24-7, we brag to anyone who will listen. And of course, this is a lie and that is just one of the things wrong with the whole notion of living life fully.

Rather than 24-7, it might make more sense to live life from peak to peak. This suggests a life punctuated by bouts of love making rather than hours and hours of hand holding, or a mad sprint in a race of seconds rather than a stroll that goes on and on and on for hours. Peaks are not only wonderful - they demand recovery time that looks suspiciously slack jawed and glazed eyed.

And the more we scale these peaks, the more readily we can repeat the trick of finding those peak moments that distort time, cause us to lose self consciousness, and let only the task at hand command our attention, finding our perfect balance between challenge and skill. It is through these peak experiences that we are actualized. And it is from these peak experiences that we need to recover.

For one thing, post-peak order is the opposite of post-traumatic disorder. Peak experiences when we are in flow are hard to attain and impossible to maintain, but once we've had them, we feel more alive, more sure about our life's direction and purpose. Peak experiences lend clarity to life that would be lacking in an "every day is the same" kind of life.

The creative cycle includes peak moments and time that seems, on the surface, wildly unproductive. Aha! moments are preceded by incubation (which is preceded by immersion in a topic and problem set). The Aha! is a peak moment when things click to take shape, but incubation looks about as productive as a chicken sitting on eggs. And yet without this incubation time, its rare that anything pops out of the "ain't there" ether into the plane of existence, that miracle of creativity.

Lest the reader think that I'm just making all this up, offering this odd notion that one's life is best spent in a state other than flat-line exertion, allow me to quote from Warren Buffet, who, last I heard, is worth about $35 billion, a net worth that usually suffices as an attention-getting device in this world.

Think of yourself as you go through life as standing at the plate and people throwing you pitches. It is a very special baseball game. There is no one calling the balls and strikes and you can stand there forever. You have got all these people in the bleachers saying, "Hey, swing you bum!" on every second pitch. You just have to learn to ignore them and when a pitch comes along and it is straight but it is a little high inside, you let it pass. Another one comes along and it is a little low outside. Every once in a while a pitch comes along that looks like the sweetest, juiciest, fattest pitch you are ever going to see. And when it does, you swing from your heels on it. You come out of your shoes on it. That is how you go through life. And you are only going to get about ten swings like that, maybe five swings. That is what you wait for. Too many people go through life batting at every other pitch. So just wait for your opportunities and when they come you swing from your heels.

Don't live your life fully. Don't swing at every pitch so that you're exhausted when that juicy pitch finally comes across the plate. Instead, go from peak to peak and shamelessly savor the valleys in between.

The Voice in Your Head

From Overheard in New York
Female #1: You know when you think something and then a voice in your head is like, 'Yeah, yeah, say that out loud! That would be a good thing to say!' and then you do it and you're like, 'Well, that was a mistake...'?
Female #2: Yeah.
Female #1: Yeah, I think I just did that.

The biggest mistake we continually make is simply this: we confuse the narrator with the event. Specifically, we confuse the voice in our head with reality. "He is such a dweeb," the voice says, and we file that commentary away as a fact. "I can't do that," we tell ourselves, and, again, file that away as a fact.

Facts are hard to get to. It took mankind about 10,000 years before it arrived at the empirical method, at science. Not all people are scientists and very few of us seem capable of seeing the facts about ourselves. The first step towards that may be as simple (and as hard) as merely acknowledging that your internal narration is not the same thing as reality.

Painful Experiences

Certain qualities seem to be universally admired. Selflessness. Patience. A positive spirit.

Yet it seems that many of the virtues that most of us want come from experiences that most of us shirk. The painful loss of a business or even a child. Or even the hunger pains and muscle ache required to develop a chiseled physique.

It is worth remembering when you are going through a difficult experience that you may well gain a characteristic or two that you've always so admired in others. This very hope may be the hope that you need to get through this experience.

Heroes & Individuals

"I asked myself 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So ... I took it upon myself to get to know 'my' myth and I regarded this as the task of tasks ... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me."
- C.J. Jung

Charles Tart makes the point that a hypnotist, in a matter of minutes, can program you to do things. How much more powerfully can society program you during the course of your life?

The purported purpose of life until now has been to be a good Christian, a good citizen, a good employee. That is, purpose has been given to the individual by social institutions.

The genuine individual distances himself from these institutions to do the hard work of defining herself with a degree of autonomy from them. The hero comes back from this shape-shifting exercise and transforms these institutions. It's hard work - and nobody's got to do it.

Failure

• Age 22: Lost job
• Age 23: Defeated for state legislature
• Age 24: Failed in business
• Age 27: Nervous breakdown
• Age 34: Ran for congress and defeated
• Age 39: Defeated again
• Age 46: Ran for senate and defeated
• Age 47: Defeated for nomination for vice president
• Age 50: Defeated again for senate
• Age 51: Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the U.S.

The difference between beiong a success or failure may be determined by something as simple as when you stop.

What is the difference between a day when joy grabs you by the lapels and head butts you into giddy gladness and days when you're inclined to turn off the phone and go fetal? It might be your choice of recreational drug. Or, it might be the difference between living in possibility and living in expectation.

It's a complex world and expectations are simple. So many things can happen that the odds of our very expectations being realized are remote, like winning a lottery. When the world fails to meet our expectations it hasn't failed. The world is still there - busily buzzing at the intersection of past and future, what has been and what is possible, just as it has been for your entire life. The world is innocent. We are the ones who occasionally lose sight of the fact that we're one in six billion and unlikely to do much to steer this unwieldy planet. We'd have better luck driving an office building and yet we persist to sit at the window and honk our horns, shake our fist, and feel frustrated when the building next to us won't get out of the way and let us through. Our expectations are often as silly as spouting Confucius to an infant or tickling the belly of a businessman.

What are the odds that our expectations of life will ever be as amazing as life? What these finite minds project onto an infinite universe will always be some fraction of what is possible.

With that in mind, here is a low-calorie, faux-fortune cookie:
Let the world be what it is and simply see what it has in store for you. Open yourself up to possibility today, laying aside the stale expectations that would otherwise drive you like a flock of bored habits.

Two Secrets of Happiness

It occurred to me today that a large measure of my happiness can be attributed to two things. One, I'm easily amused. Two, I'm easily fascinated.