In a world of convenience, and virtual living,
money and success are the only goals deemed to be important.
We are kept in an endless ratrace for more money,
and we sacrifice ever more time in the pursuit of success.
But there’s a sense of control that can be found
in possessing the ability to fix your own problems
Pick up the practical skills we’ve lost,
that let you survive in the world were the cost of living is crushing us.
Self sufficiency is a free source of wealth and power
Everyday we are teased on social with FOMO for the lives we could have led.
Our culture would have us believe we can have it all.
We are permanently dissatisfied with where we are and what we have.
This paradox of choice didn’t exist just a generation ago.
You picked a career for life,
rewarded if your worked hard.
People had fewer options.
Options are good.
But only when you can take action.
Too many options leads to
paralysis and dissatisfaction.
Which = anxiety.
The answer is to learn to be happy with the life you already have.
yes, you could pivot into a new life.
But it doesn’t mean you should.
If the grass always looks greener on the other side…
tend your own grass before you jump the fence.
After getting into an argument on linkedin recently,
I immediately regretted some stuff I said online.
I said I didn’t care much about world events because I don’t watch the news, which promptly earned me the label of “privileged”.
Maybe they were right, it was a poor choice of words and there’s a lot of suffering out there.
It’s not that I don’t care.
It’s that I only have so much attention to give,
and I’m not willing to give it up to a news cycle focussed on negative hyperbole.
So I then learned about a concept I wished I’d known sooner that would have saved me some trouble…
“Hitchens razer”, named for an author, states that:
Anything asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence
This has since saved me from many pointless arguments online.
I don’t need to engage with everything I see.
How many hours have I lost crafting arguments online?
Or wasting my best energy on imagined comebacks to arguments that have already faded into the past?
Or spent all day stressing about news I can do nothing about?
The thing is I should know better!
In fact,I’ve already written about this myself
In life by design ep40 I was talking about cultivating an information diet of selective ignorance,
Which massively improved my wellbeing AND gave me improved ability to focus.
After months of endless rain in winter, I prayed the rain would stop for even just one frikking second, so I could go out walks with Ramsey.
Yet after 2 weeks of drought in Summer,
There’s a sudden downpour of rain,
and I’m suddenly excited to go out a walk in the rain,
to listen to the pattering, feel the cold drops on my cheeks, to breathe in that petrichor scent.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
Keep an open mind on “good” or “bad”, try to think simply in terms of what is.
In winter, rain is bad.
In Summer a bit of rain is good.
Often what comes just before or after a thing can shift your perspective on it.
Whether something is “good” or “bad” is often just a matter of perspective.
They say “comparison is the thief of joy”.
The truth of this came knocking on my door last year:
It had been a tough few years, I’d worked my ass off for decades,
but business was going really well, making steady income and working with clients I enjoyed
But all it took was one short scroll on Instagram to kill my sense of carefully curated wellbeing.
Suddenly I saw all these younger designers who launched their business last month, and now they are earning more,
AND they are guest speaking at Adobe Max,
and they still had enough free time to pose on that jetski in Dubai.
Uuurgh I’m a complete failure
That’s how comparison steals joy:
One moment ago you were content, The next moment you WANT things:
…or maybe you’d settle for just a hint of stability and a decent night’s sleep.
But this is because we approach comparison with a negative mindset:
We compare where we want to be with where we are.
The distance between those two states leads to unfulfilled desire,
which is uncomfortable.
But what if we flipped that mechanism?
What if comparison could be a source of joy?
What if we recall our previous desires, which we have now fulfilled,
What if we compare what we wanted with what we now have?
That is the source of my happiness, and I try to remind myself when I’m being grumpy, or buried in admin, or coughing my guts out at 4am with a cold.
Happiness also requires a struggle,
it requires the shit bits that we don’t put on Instagram.
Happiness is so elusive because it’s a temporary state.
Once we have achieved something, we move onto the next goal.
So happiness can only ever be realised from moment to moment, not as a permanent state, but in retrospect, as something we feel NOW.
The state of happiness is just a story we tell ourselves, about a condition we were in that we wished to change (discomfort),
The challenges we overcame, (growth)
and the resolution that we have now realised (happiness).
Without the tension between desire state and current state there would be no happiness or unhappiness.
So whilst comparison is often the thief of joy,
Comparison can be the source of joy, if you approach it in the right direction:
With appreciation of what you have, Instead of desire for what you don’t.
It blows my mind that the hardware we used to invent the internet, build ai, travel to the moon and discover the genome
Hasn’t changed since 200,000 years ago,
When we were stabbing at lions with pointy sticks on the savannah.
🧠
Small wonder our modern world is making us unhappy.
We are goldfish in a sandpit.
We have not yet evolved to cope with this accelerating rate of change.
Our hardware is due an update…
Or maybe we just need to get back to things we were built for:
Buying a new phone used to be a big deal
Your whole life is on there
You’d have to set it all up again to my preferences, install all the apps, set up rhe home screen…
Often I would get a new phone and the barrier of setting it up would mean my new phone would sit there unboxed for months till I finally worked ip rhe courage to take it on.
Now its much easier.
I still love the lead up…
Bought new phone
The anticipation of the texts
Your package is on its way
The excitement of that package arriving
The pristine package design
The excitement of turning it on
I love it
But copying over all my data is so easy
In 10 mins it’s done and I arrive on my new home screen,
All my data perfectly captured and transferred across…
And that’s it
It’s done. Over.
Within 15 mins I’m back to the same level of satisfaction as I had with my old phone.
The pleasure of new things fades so quickly.
Experiences are what give lasting satisfaction
I used to get so excited about tech, gadgets and apps.
I followed all the feeds, and had alerts set up for news.
Now they hold no interest for me.
Often I prefer simple pencil and note pad.
I try to avoid new things as much as possible.
Is it a sign of maturity?
The disappointment of things?
Detaching my satisfaction from mere objects.
They call this the “hedonic treadmill“.
We live in a consumer society which pushes us to value things.
But the exceitment of new things doesn’t last long at all.
We jsut adjust to our new level of satisfaction in seconds.
The only way to be perpetually happy is to learn to enjoy the things we already have
But
Experiences > thingsand
People > experiences > things.
Want more customers?
Help more people
Stop selling and be helpful.
Even when they can’t afford you
Even when they’re on their way out
Even when they annoy you
Your website should help people
Your lead magnet should help people
Your followup emails should help people
Your sales calls should help people
Help them now, they’ll help you find more clients…
By marketing your business for you
By referring to their friends
By singing your praises
Two extreme paths impacted by AI I dreamt up from the hammock:
A
Prompt engineering is the new omni skill.
Those who can defly use, and have access to, AI, can quit the 9-5, launch a solo businesses pursuing creative or artistic endeavours at a rate never seen before.
The rest will become stagnant and are outcompeted.
Employers become obsolete as people pursue their own creative endeavours and make money for themselves cutting out middlemen in all walks of life,
coupled with the fact that AI giants have replaced vast numbers of small service businesses with specialist trained Ai chatbots.
Since services can be produced cheapy,
Value shifts from objects, status symbols, services to more intellectual properties, training, IP, thoughts, philosophies, connection.
These will be the things that people are selling in x5 years.
B
AI is used to produce a constant deluge of surface level garbage content which floods the Internet.
This compounded with fake news, over-promising, FOMO and aggresive marketing leads to nation-wide fatigue, and lack of trust of online content.
As online content loses meaning, people lose interest in social media platforms, who desperatley try to drum up engagement through divisive AI bots, and bot content, which only drives people away faster.
People now value and trust only face to face connections,
only believe in world events they can see in front of them,
buy local physical products,
triggering a rapid “quiet-quitting” of the Internet
Targets are just something to aim it
It’s target practice that counts
That’s how to aim high, fail most of the time,
And still hold onto your hope
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