Raptitude.com

Note: This is a long post (3000 words) but it can easily save you years of your life, so take a lemonade break halfway through if you have to.

When I was a TV-watching child in the 1980s I’d see a lot of commercials for something called “Freedom 55.” It was a financial planning service, offered by a life insurance company, but at the time I didn’t know what any of those things were. I knew what retirement was though. I also knew that companies in commercials always try to make themselves sound as good as possible. So the message I took from those commercials was that age 55 was an ideal age to retire, a few years earlier than the norm.

That stuck in my mind as a pretty universal benchmark, throughout my gradeschool life and working life, and it was steadily reinforced by how the working adults around me talked about retirement. It was something for old people.

I pictured the typical career-fueled life as settling out into three distinct phases: pre-work, work, and post-work.

Pre-work lasts about 16-23 years, while you live off of your parents, student loans, or both.

Work, the longest phase, lasts about 40 years. During this time you earn an increasing amount, and so as you soldier on through these four decades, you can afford an increasingly rewarding lifestyle.

Once you are in this phase you also begin to save some of your income for the next phase. The gold standard benchmark here, culture taught me, was 10%. Save 10% of your income for retirement, beginning as early on in the work phase as is feasible for you, and you’re cruising. Almost everyone recognized this benchmark too, yet almost everyone described it as being hard to do. I found it hard.  Read More

Lying is regular a part of being polite.

Long-time readers know that I don’t accept guest posts here, other than two or three by-invite exceptions. But I get requests all the time and I try to turn people down graciously.

Even though a lot of them are probably mass-mailing their submissions, I reason that in each case there may be a sensitive and hopeful person reading my response, and I don’t want to hurt them by being cold. So when I reject their offer, I add a lie. I tell them I am afraid.

“I’m afraid I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude.”

“I do not accept guest posts on Raptitude,” sounds too unsympathetic I guess, so some ridiculous habit has me claiming that this fact actually scares me, so the submitter knows I find my own policy as unforgiving and insensitive as they do.

Our language customs are full of these kinds of insulators. The truth, in very many cases, is just too brutal or embarassing to state as a fact, so we add in little fictions.

“Hello, Mr Smith, I was just wondering if I could borrow your pickup truck Saturday afternoon.”

In my culture, it’s normal to be afraid to even ask, “May I borrow your truck?” So you phone Mr Smith not to ask anything of him, but just to declare to him something you’ve been wondering about. Presumably, you believe he is the type of person who may find it interesting to know what topics you’ve been pondering recently, so you phoned to let him know. Perhaps he will then have the idea to offer you the truck, so that you no longer need to continue to wonder if it is possible that you could borrow it Saturday afternoon.

In a restaurant, I notice that when I decide that I want the veggie wrap, what I do not say to the waiter is, “I want the veggie wrap.” I don’t want to be crass. Instead I tell him that I would like the veggie wrap, as if we’re talking not about our immediate desires but hypothetical ones in some peripheral universe. Essentially I’m saying, “If we were in a situation where we were actually stating what we want here, I would tell you I want the veggie wrap — just so you know, for what it’s worth. Do with that information what you will.”

I have a memory of running punishment laps around the basketball court, while our coach stood on the bleachers yelling, “Sorry is the most misused word in the English language! Don’t tell me you’re sorry! You aren’t sorry, not yet!”  Read More

The antibiotics didn’t work, so next I’m going to try doing the dishes.

The illness I referred to in my last post two weeks ago — the one that I said has been impeding my consciousness, shrinking my world down to its most selfish and short-sighted concerns — is still going strong even after taking the whole course of pills prescribed by the doctor. It’s been almost a month altogether.

If it doesn’t get better in a few days I will consult modern medicine again, but in the mean time I’m going to start treating the symptoms in my own way. The coughing and fatigue are annoying, but by far the worst effect of this bout of sickness is that I’ve become a lot more reactive and stressed than normal, which I described in the last article as being stuck in the “lower latitudes” of the overall human spectrum of consciousness.

This lowered consciousness causes all kinds of secondary side-effects. I’m less patient about cleaning up properly, which leads to house-clutter, which in turn creates more mental clutter. I haven’t been especially pleasant to be around, which leads to a correspondingly ill social life, and a growing feeling of missing out. The mental fog makes writing a lot more difficult, and being more reactive means I’m quicker to throw out ideas before I give them a chance to develop. Together, these side-effects create an exaggerated sense that my life and all its little duties are beyond my current capacity to meet.

I normally derive a lot of my sense of stability and peace from the habit of mindfulness — the way in which I walk across parking lots and make tea — and since I’ve been sick it has not been very appealing. I tend to want all the normal moments to be over, or to not happen at all.

A month is a long time to be in such an impaired state and I’m alarmed at how far I’ve fallen in that respect. It’s normally very easy for me to just let my attention settle on an ordinary moment, and find that it reflects some peace or beauty back to me. But right now it only takes a few seconds before something annoys me: the pain in my chest, or the weird clamminess I have, or how it is almost mid-April and still freezing.

If my compromised physical state has created a compromised mental state, then I suppose that treating my current mental state is only going to improve my physical state. It certainly can’t hurt. I need a single, regular place to apply deliberate mindfulness every day.

Signs have been pointing to my sink. My mother’s dishwasher broke months ago, and she never bothered to fix it, because doing them by hand was almost as easy and nothing about it can break down. Read More

Being sick is one of the circumstances in which the higher functions of my mind start to go dormant. I often feel like I can’t write about anything other than being sick, or some peripherally related topic.

My whole human experience sinks to the low end of something — some kind of spectrum. As it does, I get duller and less compassionate. My mind turns inward, becomes self-absorbed. My self-consciousness grows and my consciousness of others shrinks. Mental chatter increases and takes more of my attention.

Even when I’m in the throes of its dysfunctional lower end, I am quite aware that I’m always somewhere on this spectrum, and that I have been on farther-flung parts of it (in both directions) in the past, and I’m sure I will be in the future.

I don’t know what to call this spectrum, but I do know I want to be closer to the other end of it as much as possible, which I know from experience is more likely to happen under certain circumstantial conditions: not being sick, being on top of my responsibilities, eating mostly whole foods, and taking my time whenever I drink tea or walk across parking lots or do anything else, to name a few.

There’s a problem with the words “higher”and “lower” though. They imply that one direction is definitively superior to the other, the way gold medals are superior to bronze medals. I want to avoid that, for reasons explained below, even though I obviously think one end is vastly preferable. So maybe “north and south” are slightly less-misleading words to label the two directions on this spectrum. They have nothing to do with geography, at all. I just need some poles in order to talk about it.

I know I’m being vague here. There’s a reason for that. Traditionally when people talk about subjective inner states they wade into semi-spiritual territory, where explanations start to sound hokey and assertions become unprovable, because there can be no second observer of what’s happening inside you. In an attempt to describe your current condition you might hear yourself saying something like, “Wow my energy is in disarray today,” to which your hippie friends may nod knowingly and your science-head friends may roll their eyes.  Read More

I just answered a huge batch of emails, and there’s a question that keeps getting asked:

“How did you learn all this [stuff you write about on the blog?] Did it come to you in one big epiphany, or a bunch of little ones? Was there a *big* one?”

I’ve been totally fascinated by the topic of human quality of life for twelve years now, and I’ve been writing about it for four. Throughout that stretch of time, I’ve had lots of little breakthroughs and each one left something to build on.

The biggest one of all happened last fall. The feeling of being me changed drastically, over only a couple of days. Life lost its normal mildly-threatening background hum. Today, in almost any given moment I actually feel prepared for the rest of my life. That used to be a rare feeling.

It happened to me when I was experimenting with the much-maligned Law of Attraction, which I am still agnostic towards, but I hit on something that was very out-of-character for me at the time.

I decided to expect everything to go well, for no reason at all.

And generally things did. Everything generally went very well for no discernible reason. Almost everything I did ended up being easier than I thought and more rewarding than I thought, once I decided not to bother thinking about things going badly.

That sums up the best advice I could give anyone: think a lot about what you want, and think only sparingly about what you don’t want.

My whole life I felt like I had some sort of duty to think about what I don’t want, as if it must be helpful in some way, or that somehow it’s healthiest to keep a “balanced” outlook by tempering positive expectations with negative ones.

For about four months I’ve refused to entertain thoughts about what I don’t want, as a rule. I wanted to see what would happen if I just ditched them all as soon as I noticed them.

Instead of everything falling apart, everything started coming together. I found myself doing things I’d been afraid to do for years. It started to feel good to wake up — throughout my whole adult life my first waking thought was almost always a worrisome one.

Normal moments became easy and beautiful. Tough moments tend to make me lucid and patient now. Almost all my remaining social anxiety disappeared. My aversions shrank, my attractions grew. The outside world at large became damn attractive to me, when it used to feel vaguely menacing most of the time.

After thirty years of taking negative thoughts seriously, I felt a little like the doomsayers must have after the recent Mayan non-apocalypse — my model of reality was wrong, and I’d be embarrassed to have wasted so much energy on it if I wasn’t so thrilled to finally get it right.

I can’t believe how prominent imaginary bad outcomes were in my life. Most of my life was spent picturing every kind of disaster, from embarassment to maiming, virtually of it habitual, draining and useless.  Read More