Giving things up
More of everything makes everything worse
For many of us our lives are overly rich, where we live in a target-rich environment for food, entertainment, and material things. These things can reach a critical mass in our lives, layering fat on our bodies, adding more bookshelves to dust, impeding our ability to adapt and learn, causing more time spent making decisions, and distracting us from our best creative work. We are loathe to let go of them because they comfort us and our brains have evolved to seek that. FUCK COMFORT: more stuff and less structure does not equate to better.
At the age of 49 I gave up drinking alcohol after 30+ years of it having some kind of hold on me. At the time it felt like I was giving up the ability to have fun, my safety blanket at crowded parties, and on my ability to numb away the negative thoughts. For a couple years it really did feel like something was missing, but what crept in was the space to deal with some of my mental struggles and an increased self-confidence in larger groups. The lack of hangovers helped my morning workouts as well.
Excess stuff reduces our luck surface and our ability to learn. We’re not going to find that new hiking trail or engage with a new person because we’re sitting in a comfy chair in front of the TV. Our worldview is so fixed, i.e. full of stuff, that new learnings are rejected because changing it would be too hard. We don’t even attempt deliberate practice because it is uncomfortable by nature. An inability to learn and adapt is the enemy of neuroplasticity and problematic for people growing older in a rapidly-changing world.
Giving up comforts can take many shapes without us becoming fully abstinent and monkish: a digital Shabbat where we turn off our devices for 24 hours, reducing sugars and processed carbohydrates and alcohol in our diet, disabling social media during the workday, Marie Kondo-izing our closet or house, cooking instead of going out to a restaurant, clearing out a box of meaningless stuff from storage, going outside without a podcast or audiobook in our ears. It takes an act of rebellion against ourselves to give up some of those creature comforts but it creates space for adaptation and growth. Rather than view it as a loss or hardship we can take it as an opportunity to embrace change and be curious about what will replace the thing that’s gone. We can think of it as if we are pruning a rose to have it grow back fuller, with more flowers.
Boredom. Being bored is not a void or a lack: it’s a mental state that is crucial to feeding our creativity. When we remove all of the manufactured external stimuli - phone, TV, music, books - we are really just allowing ourselves to return to the state we’re evolved to be in. The thing is we never stay bored. Think about it: as bored children we created complete games with complex rules, miniature societies of our own, and rich, virtual worlds.
Hunger. Fasting has long been seen as beneficial to health. When we eat no food our body steps in with healing mechanisms (autophagy) and it switches into a mode where it burns body fat (which we all have an abundance of). We are empty of digested food, the same person in a different metabolic state. With normal water intake the average person can live over a month this way if not more. We can realize many benefits without long term fasting by simply not snacking between meals and lengthening our overnight fast. When we get food out of the way and embrace some hunger our body gets a chance to heal.
Decluttering and Clearing out Old Stuff. Every single piece of material around us represents a distraction and a weight on our conscious. It’s a place for dust to settle, more nooks and crannies to keep clean. Papers to be shredded, long dead kids toys, bits of obsolete technology, crap piled on top of older crap. As our lives go on it builds up in layers. Minette and I have moved our family 3 times in the last 20 years and each move involved many trips from the attic to the dump. It takes effort to regularly get rid of unneeded physical things, but each time we do it we feel lighter, less burdened. We haven’t so much gotten rid of something as given ourselves more space to flourish.
Creative Constraints. What if we removed many of the niceties we build up around our creative process? Maybe we eschew the beautiful pastel set and just draw with a pencil. Maybe we drop the fancy editor and just write with pen and paper. Maybe we place code size and runtime limits on our software idea. Maybe we record a song with a simple mic, voice, and ukulele. Artists have been doing this sort of thing for a long time. By giving up on the ease and fun of unconstrained creation our minds are freed from decision-making and it often leads to something more beautiful and useful.
Schedules and Plans. It feels great to go through the day without a plan or a schedule, but, like a lack of creative constraints, it lets us be lazy. We get to drift from task to task, avoiding the more difficult ones, never really forced to focus on some of the more important things. Fully planning our days can feel stifling like we’re giving up our freedom but that structure allows us to do better work and enjoy our playtime even more.
Weltanschauung. The control our worldview has on our lives is bigger than most of us want to admit. We spend our lives trying to make sense of the world we are born into. As we age and increase the amount of life experiences that can turn into a baggage-filled perception of the world. The problem here is that once our worldview has solidified we tend to downplay new things as fads or the silliness of young people. This is like saying “the attic is full of my stuff, I only like what’s up there, all this new stuff doesn’t fit, and I’m leaving it that way until I die”. We don’t want to deal with the reality that our worldview quickly becomes invalid: things we thought were true are no longer so, our big new ideas are now quaint little old-timey ones. Instead of clinging to those old notions until we die it is necessary to clean them out and make space for new ones. We must learn and adapt.
The act of giving things up is a practice and a mindset. It’s the ability to look at our current state and see what parts are important and what parts are just comfort. We don’t have to reject all comforts all the time. Obviously we need nourishment to survive long term, but maybe we can get by without those fries. We enjoy listening to our favorite music, but maybe we can go for one walk or run each week without it. We love that old outfit, but we haven’t worn it in 5 years and someone else might like it. We think we know enough to form an opinion about the latest debate, but have we actually listened to what’s being said? Do we really need a fancy new chisel to do this work when we could just sharpen the one we have?
Strong99 is about not just living longer but thriving longer in life. When we free up space in our minds, bodies, and homes we allow ourselves to flourish and thrive. If you are looking for more space in your life look to the excess comforts you have. What can you reduce or remove to allow something better to sneak in?