You Get Only What You Settle For

Most people never think about designing their lifestyle. So, society designs it for them based on the incentives of those with the most power: corporations and governments.

Where does that leave the mass majority of us? Living for the evenings and weekends. Exhausted and uninspired. Spending our money on cheap dopamine and forgoing what actually makes us feel alive.

And we live this life because we settle for it. You get only what you settle for.

The World Is Designed To Keep Your Time Scarce.

The “full-time job” is designed to keep your time limited. When working like this, the days all blend together like an Instagram timeline - scrolling so fast you never actually see anything.

The mornings are rushed - either spent commuting or getting up at the last minute to log in to your company’s instant messaging platform so people see you’re “online” (I know you’ve done it…)

The next eight hours are rushed - never enough time to push forward the projects you’re actually interested in. Your “to-do list” is dictated by your boss, or your boss’s boss, or your boss’s boss’s boss. And you spend most of your time searching the internet because you, like everyone else, work just 3 hours out of an 8-hour day.

Finally, six p.m. hits and it feels like you’ve woken up from a bad dream. You start your evening… which is rushed. Gotta figure out dinner, something quick (and never as healthy as it could be), followed by a cocktail or two to make you feel alive, an hour or two of TV to follow, before hitting your pillow to wake up and do it all over again.

Notice what’s not in here?

Reading. Writing. Exercising. Meditating. Walking outside. Hanging out with friends and family. All the things we pine to do but never find the time to do it.

This is why most people are unhappy. Because they’ve settled for this non-existence. As Kapil Gupta writes in his book, Atmamun:

“As history has shown time and again, a human being can adapt to any circumstance and any condition. And while this may afford him a mode of survival, it rarely affords him a mode of Life.”

You get only what you settle for.

The 8-Hour Workday Was Built to Keep You Spending Money.

This lifestyle isn’t an accident. The 8-hour work day didn’t just appear. It’s been crafted by those in power to keep us spending money on things we don’t need.

As writer and entrepreneur, David Cain, says in a great post called Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed:

“The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours…but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.”

When you don’t have time, you spend money on instant gratification. You spend money on food, entertainment, thrills - anything that makes you feel “alive” in the one or two hours of spare time you have per day during the week.

And then during the weekend, you can really let loose. You’re not going to spend your weekend working on that creative project that keeps poking you in the back of your mind. You only get two days to pack in as much dopamine as you possibly can before the “Sunday scaries” kick in.

You might be thinking, “there has to be another way.” And there is. But how do you find it?

Surround Yourself With People Doing What They’re Meant To Do.

I didn’t realize there was another way my life could go until I met my wife.

She’s an actor, and it only took only a few short months for me to see just how much free time she had. She worked just a fraction of what I did per week, AND did so on her own terms. There was no boss. There was no signaling. There was no bull shit. She had leverage - which divorced her time from her earnings.

And the kicker? She loved it. I have never met anyone else before or since that is so in love with her craft. She just loves acting. It lights her up. It gives her life meaning. And there is nothing else she is willing to do (because if there was, she would have quit already - acting is that hard).

It was the same with many of her friends. They were actors and writers, all living on their own terms and loving their work. In fact, it wasn’t just work - it was their craft.

After a few years of seeing her lifestyle in stark contrast to mine, I had a choice: Do I settle for working for someone else in a job I don’t design for the rest of my life? Or do I try and figure out what lights me up - like acting lights my wife up - and give that a shot?

…Not much of a choice, is it? I quit my job a year ago and haven’t looked back.

But here’s the key: I didn’t realize there was another way to live until I saw someone else doing what they’re meant to be doing.

You have to find these people and expose yourself to the way they live. Only then do you realize the sheer number of paths your life could take.

If you’re not sure where to find these people, here’s a hint: most of them work for themselves. And if you don’t have a partner or friend who’s taken this path, look to the internet. Twitter has exposed me to people and ideas that have literally changed how I live my life.

You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know you’ve settled for a lifestyle designed by someone else until you see someone living on their own terms. For me, that’s made all the difference.

Keep going and looking. There is something out there meant just for you.

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SOURCES

David Cain: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

Gupta, Kapil. Atmamun: The Path To Achieving The Bliss Of The Himalayan Swamis. And The Freedom Of A Living God. Kindle Edition.