Having It All
After Work, Part 7
Can we “have it all”? (What’s our goal, really?)
At the beginning of the series, I wrote about my goal for this season of life being “variety,” but what comes after that? When you’ve filled your empty cups and repaired your table legs (maybe doing some good adventuring, feeling positive about your family situation, having a reasonably well-rounded life, doing some meaningful work), does our permanent goal simply become “gentle cup tending for hopefully a few more decades”? That feels a bit wrong or mildly depressing, or even morbid…
But is it, though? Why does saying that out loud make me shudder with discomfort?!
I can see two reasons: one is that perhaps it is a depressing goal and we should improve it (either with a more inspiring goal, or at least changing the way we describe it), or two, that the undying need to pursue bigger goals is a problematic leftover of the Business-Brain, and a broader reorientation of our expectations about how life is “supposed to feel” is called for. Let’s look at each.
1. Endless Cup Tending as a Poor Goal
I was chatting with a dear friend about how I was never able to find balance in my career era, and that I’d never met someone in a big job who seemed to “have it all.” It seemed that beyond a certain point of seniority, everyone makes some kind of devil’s bargain: trading away key aspects of what I viewed as a good life (time with family & friends, physical/mental health, adequate time for non-business pursuits, simple joys) for the sake of their careers. I’ve asked friends, peers, coaches, and therapists about this, and nobody could point me toward a good role model. My conclusion, essentially, was that there was just not a good way to have the kind of life I wanted while doing these sorts of jobs. (This was a principal reason for my decision to eject.)
Oddly, I had never asked this particular friend, and he shocked me when he said, “I think I have it all.”
!! (??)
He said the key to “having it all” is to be what you love. He’s a great dad, an anchor to his extended family, a compassionate leader of large organizations, a thoughtful mentor, and he’s (calmly) involved in many meaningful causes and several hobbies that he finds sufficient time to enjoy. He doesn’t think about these elements as in conflict, but rather a nice balance of things in his complete life.
He doesn’t have escape fantasies because he is content, he acts in alignment with who he is, and he believes that what he does is well-rounded and whole. When he stops “working” for a while, he goes stir crazy because he isn’t fulfilling his purpose and isn’t using the skills he’s refined over the years. This may sound like an unexamined excuse for workaholism, but I would never consider him someone who is job-obsessed or who has given up on having a rich life. He has a rich life, and he has few unmet needs. Of course he has ups and downs, but that’s unavoidable. Overall, his cups are pretty full and well-tended.
Was my life all that much different than his? Had he figured out some mechanics that eluded me? Maybe despite all of my efforts and experiments, I had still missed something. Maybe there was a way to put it all together, that there were things I didn’t try that I should have, and that the answer is as simple as the over-quoted “Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Maybe I just didn’t quite have the right job, or the right location, or the right family situation1, or took my job too seriously, or didn’t prioritize my hobbies enough.
But it just doesn’t feel that simple. I didn’t really see a way to follow his advice of being what I loved. It’s possible to deeply love ice cream, but if you eat it for every meal, it’ll ruin you. The things I loved seemed to either be in conflict or came with significant downsides. We might think this is merely a matter of “work/life balance,” but my friend actually rejects this as a concept: it implies that work and life are different things, and he doesn’t consider them as separate in a well-integrated existence. All your parts are, in a way, equally important. (I recall one of my big tech luminaries saying something like this as well — that he didn’t think about work/life balance because his work and his life were happily intertwined.)
If we are to believe this, the goal shouldn’t, then, be “gentle cup tending until you die,” but more about continuing the search for great, yet undiscovered teas to pour into those cups (am I getting too crazy with the metaphor here?): Clarifying our values and interests, making sure they’re super soul-aligned, and configuring things in ways such that the cups are resonably easy-to-fill, that a pitcher is always at the ready, and that the flavors aren’t in conflict.
Perhaps that would look like tending differently to my adventuring cup (allowing for the multi-month blocks to do it), and geographically allowing for my family cup to be filled by deep investment and presence, and making the space (and recovery) for my craft’s requirement of high brainpower use and sustained time investment. That would mean that gently filling my cups (a little at a time) wouldn’t work; when I pour from the pitcher, a lot rushes out (and when I drink from a cup, it empties quickly!) So maybe it is about better use of the calendar for accommodating the big blocks (and trusting that the wheel will turn when the next block is ready to emerge), and better selection of activities when the calendar doesn’t cooperate. (Do I really need months of undisturbed time to see the world or connect with my family or to feel a sense of home?)
I want to believe all of this, and it feels aligned with the earlier parts of this series: Sometimes you get to a point where things are so obscured, or that multiple concurrent famines are so severe, or that the table is broken so badly, that you need to reset and reconstruct it all from a calmer place. Maybe there is a different model available, and I just couldn’t craft it from where I was before. Even if I don’t succeed, poetic perspectives highlight the beauty of seeking, too: Mary Oliver’s Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End? begins with the lines “There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.” It’s not portrayed as a futile, sad search, but an uplifting one. Why not yearn?
But it’s also hard to believe. I experimented for so long with so many different models that never worked, so it’s tough to accept that I might’ve missed something. It also feels scary to think about reopening that door of trying to figure it out all over again.
So, maybe I need to set this one aside. It’s possible that my has-it-all friend has a healthier perspective than I do2, perhaps from different life experiences/upbringing, or a genetic disposition toward a more easygoing personality, or perhaps because he cultivated a different approach to life.
Let’s explore our second model.
2. “Goals” are the Problem
When you spend much of your adulthood using that optimizing Business-Brain, it’s easy to develop a habit of never feeling satisfied. In a dynamic workplace, there’s always another problem to solve, a promotion to chase, a skill to develop, or a refinement to implement. I’ve had many periods (both in my working life and personal life) where it felt like an endless preparation: when I finally get that promotion, or restructure that organization, or find that kind of apartment, or save up that much money, THEN [something something]. But as I wrote about in The Terror of Meaninglessness, living your life like the South Park World of Warcraft episode (where they spend the entire time preparing their characters but never actually enjoy the game) — what my friend (M.Y.) calls “being caught in a Dungeons and Dragons stat-maxing trap” — can leave us in an endless, unsatisfied (unsatisfying) pursuit. Earlier, I wrote about how our escape fantasies can obscure the good parts of what we have, but I think the Business-Brain Rut can do something similar: Even if we have a beautiful life, being so habituated to improvement-seeking can make us believe something must be wrong even if it isn’t. We might be so conditioned to seek betterment that we’ve forgotten how to live any other way.
Wanting what you have equals being happy. And that wanting something other than what you have equals stress.
— Psychologist Fred Luskin
Sometimes this doesn’t manifest as unsatisfied, but as unprepared. Ruthless pursuit of betterment can trick us into feeling that we never have the right tool for the job, mistakenly leading us to believe that we endlessly need to upgrade our skills, our relationships, our possessions, etc.
I noticed this while I was moto traveling; it’s silly how many different bikes, configurations of luggage, seats, windscreens, and riding suits (sooooo many riding suits) I bought trying to optimize my kit. Because there were so many options out there, it seemed like there just *had* to be something better, right? But I never found anything that was all that much better, and in the end, I mostly just used what I already had. There were occasional minor upgrades, sure, but most of those came with opposing downsides (the little Honda was easier to handle off-road, but then the on-road portions were miserable).
While I enjoyed some of the process of figuring it out, there’s a danger that the quest to refine replaces the joy of the actual activity. It was revelatory (and liberating) to just accept that I might already have the right tool for the job. And even if there potentially is something better, why spend an eternity looking for something you might not ever find when “good enough” is right in front of you? The search isn’t the activity. The activity is the activity!!
Take a moment and think about this:
How would it feel to be certain that the tools you have are indeed the best ones?
(How would it feel to know that you were already at your peak?)
I’ve asked versions of this question to people over the years, and for some, it doesn’t affect them at all (or they view it as a dumb question). But for others — those afflicted by a Business-Brain Rut — the idea can feel so liberating.
This is not to question the value of self-improvement, nor to suggest we should stay in misaligned or toxic situations, nor to stop the work of figuring out what’s true to you. That stuff is all good. But when you veer beyond that, trying to fix things that really aren’t broken, you might need to wean yourself off the habit of thinking that seeking is a worthy end unto itself. (Mary Oliver certainly wasn’t referring to this type of neurotic seeking in the poem above!) Our problem isn’t always that the tool is the wrong one; the problem just might be our endless wondering about it. When that happens, we’ve got to stop. Stop trying to solve it or “figure it out.” Stop trying to max our characters. Just play the damn game. (Just go ride.)
If this model is indeed what’s going on — that we are trapped on a hedonic goal-expanding treadmill — then it’s not about better goals or more exciting teas or sturdier cups or optimizing the specifics of our lives or looking for the magic “trick” that will make it all work, all in hopes of feeling like we “won” and that it’s safe to relax. We might have already “won,” as much as one ever can, and we still are unable to relax. Our work, then, is to exit the optimization rut and learn how to shut off our seeking-machine. (This is, of course, not easy when that rut runs deep. I wrote about this last year in The Problem of Grief).
The “solution,” then, to this nonexistent problem, also doesn’t exist. There isn’t anything to do. We just have to … go live.3
Shit.
Like most hard, binary questions of life, if you’re asking “Well, which one is it?” the answer is usually “both.”
When the Little Prince left his planet, was he off on a necessary, bold exploration to understand the boundaries of his life and the universe, or was he leaving his precious rose behind in pursuit of something better that is not actually possible to find? Both.
Do I need to have new life goals and refine my ways of going about things, or do I need to learn to be more satisfied with what I have? Both.
Which of our two models is it? Both!
While I pretend to accept this, my clever mind trick for avoiding the consequences is to ask, “If it’s both, then in what proportion? Because 50/50 is going to prompt very different actions than 99/1!” But guess what: until we discover that this is all a simulation and gain access to the code, we’re never going to figure that out, so the question is a trap. The only way to move forward is to just live your life, spread your effort around, and let the game play. Eventually, one of those binary options might go away, or maybe it won’t, or maybe a third pops up. It doesn’t really matter anyway. What else are you going to do, pick grass?4
I’ve probably taken us as far down the deep hole of my thoughts as anybody should ever go (as an ex once said, “Being in your head sounds exhausting!”), so let’s take a breather.
Next week, an interlude.
He once warned me, “It will be interesting to see how long you last as an executive without kids. As a financially advantaged single person without any tethers of responsibility, it’ll be real easy to view it as ‘not worth it anymore.’”
My high school English teacher did always call me a “malcontent,” after all…
And I guess keep doing all of those annoying things that we’ve been told 1000 times: Practice mindfulness. Express gratitude. Find moments of awe. Enjoy the daily joys. All of that!
That same English teacher who told me I was a malcontent used to use this story for being stuck, which oddly I didn’t see reproduced in a search: A little bird is on the ground, picking at the grass. A hawk is flying in from above to eat him, and a snake is slithering over from the side, also to eat him. Rather than taking action in some way, he can’t figure out what to do, so he just keeps on doing what he was doing: picking grass. Don’t pick grass!