Peter Thiel had a question that went something like, “what important truth do very few people agree with you on?” I tweeted an answer to it a while ago, that truth itself is intersubjective. That seemed like a clever answer, and it seemed true to me, and I quite like that.
That said, lately I’ve been feeling a little strange, and I think it’s because there’s some disharmony between what I think I know, and the world around me. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tweet about it but it hasn’t yet come to me – and I think a big part of that is because the thought itself is so… weird? That it requires a lot of contextualizing. And somehow, contextualizing that in a series of tweets feels like it’s just too much effort. But now that I’m here, in a WordPress interface, I feel like it’s easier to try and work up to it. Since I have more space.
The thought I have is… life is easy, actually. Which, as a thought, and as a tweet, seems really loaded. What are you trying to get at when you say that? What do you mean by that? My life is so challenging and difficult, and you’re saying life is easy? What the fuck. What are you trying to signal here? What are you trying to prove? Are you trying to show off? Are you trying to look wise and cool and wordly or something?
I will admit that there’s a part of me that’s like that. Status is nice to have, and to accumulate. But I honestly believe that that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to make sense of things, I’m trying to be honest and true. And I think there’s something to the “life is easy, actually” idea – maybe that’s the wrong phrasing, I don’t know – but there’s something in there, and I want to get to it.
I remember when life was hard. I remember being a kid, being sent to school, living with the burdens of the expectations of my parents, my teachers, ~society~, feeling like I was being judged. Maybe a big part of that was illusory, but the illusion feels very real when you’re a kid. I hated that stuff.
I remember when I was a working adult, and I had a commute every day, and I was just miserable all the time even though I had such a great job with great colleagues and I was (and still am) married to my best friend. Life just seemed relentless, full of obligations and expectations that I would never be able to fulfill. I was never going to be enough, I was always going to be a disappointment, never going to belong anywhere.
So where is this coming from, now? Life is easy? What?
I don’t know. I don’t know where it’s coming from. I’m trying to find out. It keeps coming back to me even though it seems a little absurd and I don’t quite know how to make sense of it.
I wrote a ‘story’ thread a while ago when I was trying to work up to this idea. And I guess it reveals more detail. Life isn’t intrinsically easy, but it can become easy. Getting to that point requires a lot of work. And I have been putting in that work.
I remember I have an older thread where I talked about how I was putting in lots of work and I didn’t feel like I was getting any reward from it. I was so miserable then. If I walked up to that kid and said “you know what, life is easy actually,” what would he say? A part of me thinks he’d say “fuck off mate”. Another part of me thinks he might say, “I want to believe. Please teach me, please show me how.” So maybe that’s what this is really about. How do I convey to my younger self what I know now? What is it that I know now that I didn’t know then? Why do I feel so good now when I felt so bad then? What changed?
I find myself thinking again about the ‘crisis of expectations‘. There are many reasons why life might’ve been harder for me in the past, many of which have to do with being relatively unskilled. But I think the big reason is that I had inherited all sorts of expectations and assumptions that weren’t serving me. There were outcomes that I badly wanted, and my fixation on those outcomes kept me from enjoying life as it was, as it is. One of the cruelest ironies of the world is that wanting something too badly can make it harder for you to get it.
I have learned a lot in the past 3 years since I tweeted that I felt empty. I wish I could have a clean, simple, itemized list to share with everyone. But I don’t have simple, clean answers. It’s no single particular thing, it’s my entire configuration, my entire way of being. I live much more lightly now. I am more comfortable with failure. I don’t cling to things so hard. I’m okay with things. And being okay with things, being okay with not getting stuff, being okay with not getting rewarded… ironically, being cheerfully playful in that space has led to me getting rewarded! In both material and non-material ways.
Some part of me wants to shout all of this from the rooftops, because I want to be of use to others who might be struggling the way I was. But I don’t know if I am actually qualified to help. I’m not an expert, I’m just a dumbass with some experience. I’d really like to talk about this with people, but a part of me has been hesitant because I don’t want to come across as smug, or holier-than-thou, or any of that. I know that I’ve helped a bunch of kids who’ve hit me up in my DMs – usually I’ve found that the problem is that they’re inflexible about something and don’t realize what. People are, like I was, stressed out and wound tight. And I know damn well that there’s such a thing as being too stressed to relax.
I guess that’s the question at the heart of all of this. How do you solve the problem of being too stressed to relax? How do you just… let go of stress? I know it can be done, I know I’ve done it, but I don’t actually quite know how exactly I’ve done it. I know that listening to therapeutic people like Alan Watts (on youtube) helped a lot. I know that journalling helped a lot. I know I had to experience failure and pain to learn that the fear of failure is often worse than failure itself.
I’m reminded now that I also had a major cathartic moment when I realized that I had an under-examined fear of responsibility that was rooted in my childhood experiences of being blamed and faulted for bad things happening. I only really came around to this last year, and that was after years of circling around and around these ideas.
So… life gets really easy once you figure out how you’re fucked up, take ownership of fixing it, and do the fixing. But all of that is really hard to do. I’m just here to say that it can be done, it’s worth doing, and I believe that you can do it too. It takes a long time. But it’s worth doing.