№ 800. Viktor Frankl & Freedom

Viktor Frankl

№ 774. Destinational Living

Author Annie Dillard wrote that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. So, how was it that I spent a large portion of my 20s​­ terrified of the big, long life I had before me? After Stanford University, I’d moved to New York to work at Google but I was depressed, anxious.

When I realised that many brilliant and accomplished people were also secretly miserable, just trying to make it through the day, I looked for terminology to describe this, but there was none. So I came up with my own: the underfulfilled overachiever, or UFOA. This describes a constant striver who is living a great‑­on‑­paper life, yet feels disconnected from their work, life and self. UFOAs see success as the organising principle of our lives. We call it by a catchy name: hustle culture. We brag about our intense busyness. Side hustles are a badge of honour. Going “above and beyond” in our jobs is routine. Our primary purpose, unabashedly, is achievement.

Most of us were shaped around expectations from the beginning. We praise kids for being “good students”, by which we don’t mean curious and engaged. We mean high grades and awards. Our education system is built on this principle. This means prioritising productivity – achievement’s codependent ­partner – above almost all else. The central question becomes: “How can I be the most productive today?”

The way we’ve been taught to “do” life is all wrong. “Destinational living”, by which we pursue recognisable outcomes based on the lie that these will guarantee security and happiness, is an “end justifies the means” philosophy. Destinational living says: “Decide what you want your life to look like, come up with a 10-​­year plan, and then work backward to determine the most advantageous place to start.” In the abstract, this is a lovely idea. There’s a reason why it’s the dominant cultural paradigm. It’s comforting to believe that the world is so predictable that we can plot it all out in­ advance. If only it were true.

But if this is supposed to guarantee our happiness, why do almost 50% of millennials report symptoms of depression and/or anxiety disorders and ­84% report burnout? And why are these numbers rising? Those are not metrics of success by anyone’s definition. Clearly, our system is broken. The problem is the expectation that with achievement comes fulfilment. It’s not about the most enjoyable way to get to work or being and feeling well during your day; it’s about what each choice can earn you.

Destinational Living means outsourcing our decision-making. What is impressive, what is ­valuable, is defined not by what matters to us personally but, rather, by what matters to others. In effect, we’re “life plagiarising”. It’s asking, “what did that person do to achieve such success?” and then turning around and saying, “OK, got it. Copy, paste”.

What most UFOAs eventually learn the hard way is that being, or appearing, successful (becoming a CEO, parent, spouse, homeowner) is a different experience from being fulfilled. Fulfilment is a deep sense of belonging to yourself.

№ 750. Bill Watterson's Speech

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED

Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

№ 749. Meaning v. Happiness

Meaning

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

№ 667. The Map You Make Yourself

Medium

 

 

The Map You Make Yourself

By Jan Richardson

 

You have looked
at so many doors with longing,
wondering if your life lay on the other
side.

For today, choose the door that opens
to the inside.

Travel the most ancient way of all:
the path that leads you
to the center of your life.

№ 591. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Pinterest

 

Indeed, he was a proponent of talking openly about dying and grief, something that came with difficulty for many people, he said. “Death has come out of the closet,” he told The New York Times in 1994.

“For so many years people thought that if they didn’t talk about it, death would go away,” he continued. “It was the immorality of mortality. But for the first time, people are willing to acknowledge that living is the leading cause of death, and they want to talk about it.” He counseled mourners with his often-used adage “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

 

Hedgeye

 

After Rabbi Grollman retired from Beth El to focus on writing and counseling, he returned there occasionally to recite the Yizkor, a memorial prayer for the dead, and regularly addressed the congregation into his 90s.

“Obsessing about death can lead to paralysis, while ignoring it can squander opportunity,” he told The Times in 1994. “The important thing about death is the importance of life. Do what you have to do now. Live today meaningfully.”

 

№ 556. Myth, Meaning & Mahler

 

If the past 11 months have seemed illogical and unstoppable, consider these questions. What if the hummingbird darting from flower to flower is actually a nobleman eternally searching for his beloved maiden? Or the sun and the moon are an angry married couple destined to chase each other across the sky? These age-old myths unsettle everyday logic to reveal larger truths. Unpredictability is but a literary device that helps explain an increasingly bizarre world.

Mythology is not only the relic of ancient civilizations, but also the engine of contemporary cultures. Its stories provide comfort by bringing people together to make sense of strangeness through shared foresight.

Mythology (from the Greek mythos for story-of-the-people, and logos for word or speech, so the spoken story of a people) is the study and interpretation of often sacred tales or fables of a culture known as myths or the collection of such stories which deal with various aspects of the human condition: good and evil; the meaning of suffering; human origins; the origin of place-names, animals, cultural values, and traditions; the meaning of life and death; the afterlife; and the gods or a god. Myths express the beliefs and values about these subjects held by a certain culture.

Mythology has played an integral part in every civilization throughout the world. Pre-historic cave paintings, etchings in stone, tombs, and monuments all suggest that, long before human beings set down their myths in words, they had already developed a belief structure corresponding to the definition of `myth' provided by Leach and Fried. 

According to psychiatrist Carl Jung, myth is a necessary aspect of the human psyche which needs to find meaning and order in a world which often presents itself as chaotic and meaningless:"

"The psyche, as a reflection of the world and man, is a thing of such infinite complexity that it can be observed and studied from a great many sides. It faces us with the same problem that the world does: because a systematic study of the world is beyond our powers, we have to content ourselves with mere rules of thumb and with aspects that particularly interest us. Everyone makes for himself his own segment of world and constructs his own private system, often with air-tight compartments, so that after a time it seems to him that he has grasped the meaning and structure of the whole. But the finite will never be able to grasp the infinite."

№ 302. Notes from the Universe

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky, “all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”

Know Thyself