Here’s an interesting and personal prompt: “Would love your thoughts on living intentionally vs living in the stream of continuous reactions to the outside inputs”
It’s kind of related to the project management question. And it’s something that I grapple with every day – and not nearly as well as I’d like to. And… I feel like I could write the conclusion in advance: the optimal configuration is probably something close to what I’m doing now – intentionally getting intentional feedback from other people on what I’m working on. This is a topic that I want to write about, and I’m not sure if I’d have thought of this particular way of framing it, by myself. So this is an interesting thing that’s happened somewhere between me and other people – in that sort of liminal middle ground, the venn diagram commons space between me and others. This is where I think all the good and interesting stuff happens. (Or, to be more precise, I think it’s part of a cycle between introspection and peer-relation… but I digress).
When I look back on my life, I have to confess that I’ve almost always “lived in the stream” a lot more than I’ve “lived intentionally”. I remember writing a blogpost on my livejournal about how I felt like I was living passively, being a secondhand driver in the car of my own life.
And yet… the fact that I was even writing about all of that, I think, hints at the fact that there was a part of me that WANTED to be in control. Right? Otherwise why even bother documenting it? What was the documenting for? Was it just for my friends? I think it was for me. I think I have this almost 20-year long tradition of leaving messages for my future self to interpret and make sense of. I still think that even talking about nihilism or solipsism is an optimistic act – because you believe that it’s something worth doing. (Maybe there’s some obscure edge case where you’re behaving in a certain way despite thinking it’s pointless, but, eh.)
So… what’s all that about? What is living intentionally? I can talk quite a bit about my theory about how and why I used to be the way I was – I think that I used to be terrified of making bad decisions that would screw up my entire life, so I avoiding making decisions at all as far as I could help it. I have a thread that’s related to this – it’s all mixed up with things like a fear of responsibility, of being at fault when something goes wrong – and it’s a rather irrational, outdated fear from childhood that I’m currently working to dismantle. It’s a sort of defense mechanism. As long as I still have this defense mechanism, there’s a certain imbalance in the way I do things. I can try and “correct this balance” artificially, but the smart thing to do is to fix it at the source.
It’s interesting to me that I thought about this in terms of balance – because yes I do think there is a balance to be had between living “intentionally” vs “living in the stream’. Or, to be more precise, the two aren’t entirely separate. It’s possible to be in the stream intentionally and unintentionally, and it’s possible to be out of the stream intentionally and unintentionally. Being unintentionally out of the stream is very unlikely, though, because the world is always dragging you in. Friends, family, advertisers, social media, notifications, capitalism, whatever you call it. The world wants your attention, and if you aren’t deliberate about how you’re directing your attention, then it will be directed for you.
I have another thread about focus that I feel is related – I talked about how a book is a sort of prosthetic aid, where the author (and her support team) are focusing for you. Why do I bring that up? Oh, to think about what it means and what it looks like to be intentional in the stream. I think that’s a lot of what I do, or what I want to do – which is be intentional while surfing waves of outside inputs. And it reminds me of something my ex-boss said once that resonated with me – that, once you’re very clear about what you want, and what you’re trying to do, it becomes much easier to filter the all information that comes your way. It’s easier to write things off as likely-irrelevant. I remember when I FIRST heard this perspective, I thought “but how do you ever really know though… what if you miss something…” – but I’ve grown to realize that there is a cost to inaction, too. You can’t generalize for all circumstances (ie there are definitely some scenarios where it’s good to agonize and deliberate over a single decision for a long period of time), but generally, loosely, it’s good to have forward momentum. A lot of things are reversible, fixable and so on.
(At a meta level, I also have grown to think that it’s rare for people to be able to make dramatic changes re: how they approach risk, how they feel about being careful, and so on – so rather than force yourself to be something you’re not, it’s better to look for a context where people with your personality traits are likelier to flourish. Eg if you’re someone who’s scatterbrained like me, probably not a good idea to work in an environment that demands error-free output. Better to work in a context where you can make mistakes and correct them. And so on.)
There are a bunch of little things that make a pretty significant difference re: not getting needlessly swept up by external outputs. When I get on Twitter, I try to make it a point to tweet whatever’s on my mind before I look at my timeline or notifications. This is part of my bigger/broader scheme to catalogue my own thoughts, to explore my own inner newsfeed. Maybe yours might be different. But the point is… you can create some space for yourself before you start you day. I think that’s easiest. Some people do it at the end of the day (I suppose this is also what I’m doing right now, at 3am in the morning…). Find it, make time for it, schedule it… I used to have problems with this because I didn’t feel like I had the right to make time for myself when I had overdue obligations and responsibilities. But the thing is… I think at a subconscious level, if you don’t make time for yourself, your subconscious mind will wrest it from you – in a shitty way, via semi-unintentional procrastination, and sometimes even falling sick, etc.
When I’m feeling intentional, I try to do reviews. I’m a writer, and I’m pretty much committed to it for life, so that simplifies things for me. For me living intentionally is a lot about writing, and doing things and meeting people that facilitate more writing. And also some stuff about being a better husband and friend. Um, I’m getting sleepy, lol. To revisit the question… a phrase I’ve used before is “putting out buoys for my future self to navigate by”. I don’t think I can be super intentional 24-7; i’m not sure if anybody can. I think my intentions are a sort of “field”, like an electromagnetic field or whatever – and I “tune in” to them. And sometimes I’m very in tune, sometimes not so much. The more in tune I am, the better I act in accordance with my own values and in my own long term self interest. But sometimes it can be fun also to just ignore the field entirely and just do whatever, you know? Take off the headset and just dick around. And sometimes there are things you learn from that experience that you take back with you.
All in all, the recurring big picture caveat is… I can’t easily generalize for everybody across everything. I can only talk about my own experience. Different people may have different hangups, be imbalanced in different ways for different reasons. The question is, what is the life you want? I think being 100% intentional all the time would actually be kind of exhausting and overwhelming and boring – and I also don’t think I even have the capacity for it, so maybe that’s sour grapes talking. You know what I mean? You gotta figure yourself out on your own, ultimately.