Not Letting Life Just... Happen
5 Ways to Take Control
How I went from living for other people to planning a life I enjoy.
As children we have no say in what our weeks or days look like (even though new parenting styles seem to be changing that). Life happens to us. Then, as we get older, we want control. We develop preferences and we fight to get them. We try to control life.
The way I see it, there’s two big buckets that define all the ways we try to control our lives.
Avoid a life you DON'T WANT
Chase a life you WANT
Throughout life we go through periods where chasing a life we want is easier and then other times, avoiding a life we don’t want is easier. But overall, I think avoidance more consistently leads to enjoyable lives and I’ll explain why below.
Avoiding a Life You Don’t Want
I don’t want to be geographically tied down.
I don’t want to be hurting for days whenever I play sports.
I don’t want to be stuck in a big city where I can’t quickly immerse myself in nature.
…
Make a big list of these - what I know I do not want in life.
Charlie Munger, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said, “it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward”. Put simply - it’s easier to avoid being dumb than to be smart.
Our brains are hardwired to look for problems. We needed to avoid danger constantly when we spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers. We can use that to our advantage by using inversion.
It’s much easier to think of things we don’t want than things we do want. Try it. Think right now of a life you would hate to live. That probably took you less than 5 seconds to start putting together an image in your head.
Now if you are serious about wanting to avoid that, write it down. Be very clear with yourself - what type of life do I need to avoid. This can help immensely in choosing the direction of your life. It doesn’t tell you the coordinates of your destination but it points you the right way.
If you say, “I don’t want to work weekends” and “I don’t want to have to drive hours to get into nature”. Then, first you should look at the career path you’re on and make sure you’re not going into a field where you’re expected to work weekends. Next, you look at the city you live in or plan to live in. How dense is the city? How far are the mountains?
It’s much easier to find problems than solutions. Find your problems. Then find ways to avoid them. To me, this seems the simplest way to move in the right direction with limited information/experience. This is the frame I used to convince myself to start writing.
*Charlie Munger (pictured above) is a multibillionaire with immense knowledge. A lot to learn from his speeches and his work.
Chasing a Life You Want
With experience, you learn what you want but narrowly. I think of this like when I started playing basketball. I knew which spots on the court I did not want to get the ball and I avoided those. Now, after a decade of playing on different teams, I know which spots I want to get the ball. I naturally learned specific desire in specific circumstances.
Life experience is more helpful for narrowing down desires in specific areas of life. You can learn naturally what kind of house you want, what fitness regimen you want, what vacations you want… but asking what life you want is a different question.
When you try to solve for the life you want you get to questions that past experiences alone can’t help. What TYPE of life do I want? I see four types of life people can chase:
A life chasing acceptance
A life chasing pleasure
A life chasing freedom
A life chasing nothing - accepting (the hardest, rarest one)
1 - Chasing Acceptance
We all want to be accepted, that’s human nature. We have different people who we want to accept us. We want our friends to like us, our family, our boss, our coworkers, or even strangers on the internet. There is nothing innately wrong with the desire to be accepted. The problems come when we compromise our values to chase acceptance.
The most common example I see is people who value loyalty and integrity, then go around gossiping about their friend's lives. They have conflicting desires: to be accepted by the group and to be a person of integrity. Everybody has this internal struggle and often, the desire for acceptance wins.
If you find yourself craving another person’s acceptance, it’s important that you identify whose acceptance you’re chasing. Once you know whose acceptance you want, think of what you would need to do to get it. Create a list of the values, skills, activities, accomplishments you would need to be accepted by X person. The person you described fits into one of these three avatars:
A person you would enjoy being and be proud to be
A person you would enjoy being but not be proud to be
A person who cannot exist - the bar is too high or has contradicting values
*Note - A person you do not enjoy being is a person you cannot be proud of.
If the answer is 1, then I see no problem chasing acceptance from that particular person. That’s not a popular opinion but the way I see it, life isn’t easy. Controlling your thoughts and desires is grueling work. If your desire for acceptance leads you to be a person you enjoy being and can be proud of, then don’t waste your time overcoming that desire.
But that situation is rare. If you want to make your mother proud and the way to do that is by raising a family, holding a steady job and going to charity events with her, that’s a life you can be proud of. But if what’s really calling to you is a life in a van traveling, then you would not enjoy the life you need to live to make your mother proud. Falling into category 1 becomes rare when you look at both aspects.
If the answer is 2 or 3, then ask yourself why you want that person or group of people to accept you. If their values aren’t aligned with yours, why do you want their acceptance? You probably will need to ask your “why” at least three times before you get to the root cause. Once you find that root cause, there’s more work. Ask if allowing that to direct your life serves you well.
A person you do not enjoy being is a person you cannot be proud of.
2 - Chasing Pleasure
A life just doing the things that make you happy.
I don’t know as much about this one so I won’t speak at length.
If I enjoy something but I can’t assign meaning to it beyond that, I get bored.
I aim for nights my bed hits the pillow and I feel proud of myself.
I imagine the key to a life of pleasure is to find the intersection of what you enjoy and what makes you proud of yourself.
I think that is the intersection where you find “meaningful work”.
Much easier said than done.
This is the goal.
This is untouchable.
3 - Chasing Nothing - A Life of Acceptance
This is the life of the philosopher. I try to live this in some degree but it’s no easy task. This is the life of a monk, who accepts the world for the way it is.
Marcus Aurelius and other stoics have spoken about this same idea - you are in complete control of how you see the world. And if you want a real life example of a man controlling his reaction to a terrible event, watch this video of a man forgiving and hugging the man who killed his son.
As Naval Ravikant puts it, we are born, we have a set of sensory experiences and then we die. We assign meaning to those sensory experiences - they have no intrinsic meaning. And to rip from another Ravikant - Kamal Ravikant - in his book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, he has a line that goes:
“I once asked a monk how he found peace.
I say “yes,” he’d said. “To all that happens I say yes”
Then to knock home one last example, Jocko Willinck, a former Navy SEAL, had a line he said whenever his team gave him bad news. “Good”. No matter how bad the news was, all he said was “good.” it didn’t serve him to wish it were another way. He accepted the situation right away. “Good”.
This is the adult version of letting life happen to you. We can never be quite as carefree as young children because we don’t have full time caretakers - and even then that’s probably not the constraint.
A life of acceptance is not just for monks because acceptance is a spectrum, not a binary. The question isn’t whether you accept life or don’t accept life, it’s how much do you accept life. It’s a worthy ambition to learn to accept the day-to-day life around you. If you become distraught by a one-off tragedy, that does not make your ambition less admirable. This is the hardest practice because you must override brain patterns you’ve developed since you were a child. If you decide to take this journey, remember to be kind to yourself.
The question isn’t whether you accept life or don’t accept life, it’s how much do you accept life
4 - Chasing Freedom
The idea of freedom is too vague. In the Red-White-and-Blue sense, freedom means nobody tells me what I can and can’t do or say. In the internal-sense, freedom means you are not a slave to your mind’s biases, reactions and impulses.
Internal freedom sounds more abstract, so to ground it, think of addiction. A person addicted to drugs may live in Seattle and appear to be allowed to do as he pleases, but he can’t. While he has external freedom to do drugs as he pleases, he’s a slave to his desire for more drugs.He is not free.
We all have that same issue, but it isn’t usually so obvious or debilitating. Having low self-esteem means you are not free. If you don’t have control of your monkey brain, then you are a slave to it in moments where people criticize you. You may lash out and get defensive without even realizing it.
Our brains evolved to have biases, reactions and impulses so we could survive. We can’t solve every problem like it’s the first time we’re seeing it. If we’re hiking and we suddenly see a bear not far from us, we react before we can think. We’ve already frozen before we realize it’s just a statue.
Now, we still use these cognitive biases to solve problems, but it’s not usually life or death. It's efficiency, which could be argued to be life or death over a long time horizon. We judge books by their covers. We’re walking down the street at night, and there’s skinheads covered in tattoos approaching, so we cross the street. The man we met yesterday didn’t make eye contact, so we forget him instantly, as he is unimportant. We speak with lots of industry jargon so people think that we’re smart. Our brains are such efficient problem solving machines, we don’t even realize how many problems we solve each day.
Our brains are hardwired for fast problem solving, so instead of wasting energy trying to avoid our monkey brain biases, let’s:
Be aware of our biases
Replace biases
Be Aware of Our Biases
Your new favorite word is “why”. You need to ask yourself why you think things as they happen.
“That guy over there’s probably an asshole” - WHY?
You will gain awareness of your biases. “Why did I pick the right line and not the left? Why did that guy rub me the wrong way?” Keep track in your head of these interactions and look for patterns.
While doing this exercise myself, I noticed I feel rage when I deal with bureaucracy. As I tried to organize events at school, navigate job recruiting at massive firms and get my driver’s license from the Canadian government, I felt the same fury inside. The awareness allows me to create systems to weaken my bias and also avoid situations in which it arises. This leads us to replacing biases.
Replacing Biases
Once you become aware of your biases, you can alter them to become beneficial to you. If you know you get defensive as soon as people begin to give you feedback, engineer a new rule. “When somebody gives me feedback or advice and I start to get frustrated, I say “thank you for the feedback/advice, I really appreciate it.” Having a rule is a great way to reprogram your brain. Over time it will become more natural to follow your new rule you created than to follow the old rule your environment created.
Returning to my anger with bureaucracy, here’s how I replaced my bias. Now when I deal with bureaucracy, I focus on smiling and being as friendly as possible. I made it a game to try to make each person I speak to smile. Now, my brain is biased towards looking for opportunities to make people smile. This simple change has made it much easier for me to be in soul crushing places like the DMV. I also get a lot more helpful answers since I started this.
Pro tip - at the DMV, always smile, thank workers for dealing with all the crazy people, and offer them a stick of gum right away. Watch their attitude change completely.
Under the bucket of chasing a life we want, we discussed:
Chasing freedom
Chasing acceptance
Chasing pleasure
Accepting Life
Now, let’s move to the smaller bucket that I personally use much more often when making decisions.
Do You Need To Pick Only One?
I don’t think so. But some are harder to match. And I think it’s easier to pick only one.
The less desires you have the more likely you are to achieve them.
If you want to be free, and be accepted, that will be infinitely harder to achieve than either one of those by themselves. I won’t say it’s impossible but I think they oppose each other. Once you’re free, you don’t seek acceptance. And so long as you seek acceptance from others, you won’t be free.
Now that a 23 year old has babbled on and on about how to live life, I’ll say the most important thing. These are only ideas - the only thing I know for certain is that life is a hard problem. And there’s no easy solution that works for everyone. Find the solution that makes you content and do that.
Or don’t. Live your own life. By your own rules.
Noah Sochaczevski