It is hard to find a satisfying goal in life if you are living in a global, techno-industrial military complex, which we are. That is why so many find distractions like TV or try and achieve at work or sport. Failing that, there is always drugs and alcohol.
Excellent observations! I wish parents and school had given me these frames as foundations, instead of floating around ‘doing what makes you feel good’.
Leila Hormozi talks about seeing things as Seasons of Life, helping her deal with really busy times and intense work schedules - in a ‘Season Of No’, everything is kept away while the Deep Work happens.
Automating routines, reducing mundane choices has helped me - the less time I spend thinking about things like what to eat, what to wear, the more focus I have.
I heard Bjork interviewed years ago and she said :
“It’s spiritual labour. As the body fails you have to build your own Cathedral so you have a place to hang out when you’re 85.
It’s a lot of work and you can’t can’t just copy others and jump on their bandwagons.”
Thanks Leaf. I'm solidly in the philosophical pessimism camp - the question is how to respond to it. Responses vary: while both were pessimists, Schopenhauer recommended a life of ascetic withdrawal and Nietzsche recommended the polar opposite, a will-to-power laughing-at-the-universe defiance (even though both's real world actions went against their own philosophies, as Nietzsche had terrible health and Schopenhauer was the life of the party). I'm somewhere in between these two polarities; this world is a kind of Hell, but I'm doing what I can to make a way through it regardless...
Until there’s some way to rid ourselves of the scourge of class rulership, life will continue to be hell. It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, but we will persevere as long as we must, and not one second longer
Thanks for this. For me in retirement the goal seems to be shedding control in my family and finding balance in how much time I spend in the imaginary internet world.
Being an Anon it's impossible to truly know the person but, in my minds eye I picture you as an older person mid 40's to early 50's working as researcher or professor with a reseved and calculated demeanor, one who looks at all aspects before making a decision.
So it suprised me to hear you say that you had to battle against blindly following your intuition. It would be interesting to hear what the circumstances and the outcomes were.
Like you previously had I have an issue of strictly following my gut and once committed never changing course which has led to extreme highs and extreme lows, which in turn left me struggling to find life balance.
Thanks Wheel, I would be interested in hearing your story sometime. Your description of my personality is pretty accurate. When I was much younger I didn't have proper guidance- no role model mentors who I could trust and respect, plus a marked lack of self confidence rooted in part in my lack of understanding in how the world works (something I had to figure out through a lot of painful recursive trial and error). I spent a lot of time on a career path that I almost gave up on at a critical juncture because I figured I had no passion for it (which was true! and remains true!) but it's allowed me to make money while pursuing my interests on the side. This is why intuition must be balanced against intellect, emotions, and one's senses, imo...
Get out of the United States and go somewhere else is my advice. Get off the sinking ship. You'll be happier for it. A friend of mine just moved to Bali.
The ongoing battle for the homeland is a great source of responsibility and fulfillment. Abdication seems like a good way to throw life out of balance.
The homeland isn't our home anymore. The cancer is in too deep be it immigration or with the political class or the education system. And Trump is compromised just look at his running mate and Harris even worse! Better to get out before the flood. As long term it won't get any better. Sorry if I thought there was still hope I'd say stay.
There's always hope. In any case there's nowhere to go that I could meaningfully call home in a spiritual sense. I'm sure materially there are plenty of places that could be more comfortable, but that doesn't mean much to me in comparison. Regarding hope I'd like to share this short article with you: https://h2fman.substack.com/p/the-rationality-of-optimism
Excellent post. I agree that for everyone, the sizes of the individual pie pieces will vary. Maybe to some extent we enlarge one or more pieces to fill a gap left by the inability (or unwillingness) to have one aspect included. For example, one might have great difficulty in the romance department, or struggle to achieve meaningful friendships. Does that "lack" of one aspect of fulfilment eventually tell in our lives, down the line? No idea on that. I have very few friends these days, but I do have literally a couple of people who I can have relatively deep conversations with, and whose advice I would value. For the moment at least that seems enough. I am fairly "content" as opposed to "happy", the distinction between which as you say, is important.
Great essay. Question I have is about balancing focus on these areas. For example, I'm currently struggling to form enduring romantic attachments (as is most of my generation). Do I start treating this more like a day job and go on 4-5 dates a week like you recommend? Or do I pull back and focus on other areas of life that might more readily yield fruit?
Hi Joshua, thank you. Yes, younger generations today are having a lot more trouble forming romantic attachments than older ones had. It's not easy to offer personalized advice without knowing the details of your situation; I think you should take a gut check, as filling up the pie is different for everyone and requires prioritizing different things at different life stages. Historically many men chose to focus on establishing a career before focusing on romance, but that's a generalization... Perhaps one person needs to focus on work while young in order to gain confidence and life skills, and turn to dating later; perhaps another feels the lack of a romantic relationship acutely and it's something one want to focus on sooner rather than later. Each person's situation is different, even if the end goal is a balanced pie of life...
Yea I have not been feeling the dating app grind recently. There’s all this pressure to move forward romantically with someone who is a complete stranger to me. I have plenty of interests, but could work on making them more social! Thanks for the advice!
One great tip I heard recently is to find your ‘Thrive’ locations - where you feel like your best and most confident self. Set yourself up for success. For years I went to bars and clubs - where I feel really uncomfortable.
Run club is one of these for me- I’m probably the 3rd or 4th fastest runner in city which is nice. My other big hobby is reading: not sure what do with that one in terms of social connection. I’ve also taken up swing dancing recently, but have some skill building to do before I feel really comfortable
“What I would really hate for myself is ending up an old man, living in poverty, in poor health, no family or children with the older generations having long since passed away and haunting my dreams as ghosts, friends dead or gone, with a world that has moved on and forgotten me, feeling unfulfilled, not having fulfilled my potential and wondering about what could have been. What a nightmare that would be.
“Focusing on each aspect of the pie of life to try to achieve a balanced whole is the way to avoid this fate.”
…
Me too! 😂
To your essay on friendship, I replied with my belief that some people are more skillful at marriage than at friendship, and vice versa. I’ve invested nearly all my social capital in my wife these past 30 years; 5 children, but I wish we had 10. I mean it, 10, or as many as I could feed.
I do have some regrets about how little social capital I invested in friendship, but I was preoccupied with physical survival: food security & housing security 😂 - the basics in life - but I do regret still how fear kept me from investing social capital in friendships those first nine years of marriage before, finally, we took a huge financial risk in reproduction.
Because now I do enjoy food security & housing security, fxxxing finally! 😂, but I have not had a very close friend in over ten years. And at this age, 51, and isolated as I am in a fringe-rural setting in the greater Tokyo metro region, (I’m a farmer 😂), I fear that from here on out my wife & children & future grandchildren will be my only opportunities for deep connection.
But this problem is a ‘luxury problem’ compared to my personal struggle for financial survival on the GenX job market 😂 (till I gave up & moved my family back to my wife’s native Japan). And it’s a ‘luxury problem’ compared to what most Americans are dealing with right now.
There are two points I’d like to make here.
1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs adds the necessary vertical component to the horizontal component of ‘life balance.’
2. I see a whole lot of Boomers & GenX’ers heading for lonely ends in the Medicaid Concentration Camps for Abandoned Seniors. Will their friends take their cats in???
After pressing send, I’ll try to post a meme for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I don’t know if memes are permitted on Substack.
Thanks Gerald. What an interesting story you have, moving to Japan as a farmer with five children - kudos to you, that is super cool. Children are a blessing and the more the merrier, I think anyway - "be fruitful and multiply". Children were historically the "social safety net" that people relied on to take care of them in old age, replaced now by (as you say) the Medicaid Concentration Camps for Abandoned Seniors...
Making friends is likely harder as a non-native in Japan, which (I've heard) is quite insular. I'm aware of Malow's hierarchy of needs (your meme didn't go through, you can post a link to it if it's hosted elsewhere) and I agree with you that it would make a good compliment for the pie of life...
It is hard to find a satisfying goal in life if you are living in a global, techno-industrial military complex, which we are. That is why so many find distractions like TV or try and achieve at work or sport. Failing that, there is always drugs and alcohol.
Some of the effects of shortening days on human mood demonstrated here -- to good end, however.
Excellent observations! I wish parents and school had given me these frames as foundations, instead of floating around ‘doing what makes you feel good’.
Leila Hormozi talks about seeing things as Seasons of Life, helping her deal with really busy times and intense work schedules - in a ‘Season Of No’, everything is kept away while the Deep Work happens.
Automating routines, reducing mundane choices has helped me - the less time I spend thinking about things like what to eat, what to wear, the more focus I have.
I heard Bjork interviewed years ago and she said :
“It’s spiritual labour. As the body fails you have to build your own Cathedral so you have a place to hang out when you’re 85.
It’s a lot of work and you can’t can’t just copy others and jump on their bandwagons.”
With this great ikigai like philosophy post - are you moving on your substack gradient from pessimistic to optimistic?
Thanks Leaf. I'm solidly in the philosophical pessimism camp - the question is how to respond to it. Responses vary: while both were pessimists, Schopenhauer recommended a life of ascetic withdrawal and Nietzsche recommended the polar opposite, a will-to-power laughing-at-the-universe defiance (even though both's real world actions went against their own philosophies, as Nietzsche had terrible health and Schopenhauer was the life of the party). I'm somewhere in between these two polarities; this world is a kind of Hell, but I'm doing what I can to make a way through it regardless...
https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/philosophical-pessimism-a-denial
Until there’s some way to rid ourselves of the scourge of class rulership, life will continue to be hell. It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, but we will persevere as long as we must, and not one second longer
I remember well being touched by your essay on friendship, and thank you for today's balance-of-life pie post.
Thanks for this. For me in retirement the goal seems to be shedding control in my family and finding balance in how much time I spend in the imaginary internet world.
Being an Anon it's impossible to truly know the person but, in my minds eye I picture you as an older person mid 40's to early 50's working as researcher or professor with a reseved and calculated demeanor, one who looks at all aspects before making a decision.
So it suprised me to hear you say that you had to battle against blindly following your intuition. It would be interesting to hear what the circumstances and the outcomes were.
Like you previously had I have an issue of strictly following my gut and once committed never changing course which has led to extreme highs and extreme lows, which in turn left me struggling to find life balance.
Perhaps some day in another post.
Thanks Wheel, I would be interested in hearing your story sometime. Your description of my personality is pretty accurate. When I was much younger I didn't have proper guidance- no role model mentors who I could trust and respect, plus a marked lack of self confidence rooted in part in my lack of understanding in how the world works (something I had to figure out through a lot of painful recursive trial and error). I spent a lot of time on a career path that I almost gave up on at a critical juncture because I figured I had no passion for it (which was true! and remains true!) but it's allowed me to make money while pursuing my interests on the side. This is why intuition must be balanced against intellect, emotions, and one's senses, imo...
Get out of the United States and go somewhere else is my advice. Get off the sinking ship. You'll be happier for it. A friend of mine just moved to Bali.
The ongoing battle for the homeland is a great source of responsibility and fulfillment. Abdication seems like a good way to throw life out of balance.
The homeland isn't our home anymore. The cancer is in too deep be it immigration or with the political class or the education system. And Trump is compromised just look at his running mate and Harris even worse! Better to get out before the flood. As long term it won't get any better. Sorry if I thought there was still hope I'd say stay.
There's always hope. In any case there's nowhere to go that I could meaningfully call home in a spiritual sense. I'm sure materially there are plenty of places that could be more comfortable, but that doesn't mean much to me in comparison. Regarding hope I'd like to share this short article with you: https://h2fman.substack.com/p/the-rationality-of-optimism
Thank you
Excellent post. I agree that for everyone, the sizes of the individual pie pieces will vary. Maybe to some extent we enlarge one or more pieces to fill a gap left by the inability (or unwillingness) to have one aspect included. For example, one might have great difficulty in the romance department, or struggle to achieve meaningful friendships. Does that "lack" of one aspect of fulfilment eventually tell in our lives, down the line? No idea on that. I have very few friends these days, but I do have literally a couple of people who I can have relatively deep conversations with, and whose advice I would value. For the moment at least that seems enough. I am fairly "content" as opposed to "happy", the distinction between which as you say, is important.
Great essay. Question I have is about balancing focus on these areas. For example, I'm currently struggling to form enduring romantic attachments (as is most of my generation). Do I start treating this more like a day job and go on 4-5 dates a week like you recommend? Or do I pull back and focus on other areas of life that might more readily yield fruit?
Hi Joshua, thank you. Yes, younger generations today are having a lot more trouble forming romantic attachments than older ones had. It's not easy to offer personalized advice without knowing the details of your situation; I think you should take a gut check, as filling up the pie is different for everyone and requires prioritizing different things at different life stages. Historically many men chose to focus on establishing a career before focusing on romance, but that's a generalization... Perhaps one person needs to focus on work while young in order to gain confidence and life skills, and turn to dating later; perhaps another feels the lack of a romantic relationship acutely and it's something one want to focus on sooner rather than later. Each person's situation is different, even if the end goal is a balanced pie of life...
Dating as a numbers game left me feeling jaded and cynical as well as out of pocket paying for strangers food and drink.
When I focused on what I found interesting and took up hobbies, that was when I met someone.
In the end, you only need to meet one person to marry.
Good luck!
Yea I have not been feeling the dating app grind recently. There’s all this pressure to move forward romantically with someone who is a complete stranger to me. I have plenty of interests, but could work on making them more social! Thanks for the advice!
One great tip I heard recently is to find your ‘Thrive’ locations - where you feel like your best and most confident self. Set yourself up for success. For years I went to bars and clubs - where I feel really uncomfortable.
Run club is one of these for me- I’m probably the 3rd or 4th fastest runner in city which is nice. My other big hobby is reading: not sure what do with that one in terms of social connection. I’ve also taken up swing dancing recently, but have some skill building to do before I feel really comfortable
“What I would really hate for myself is ending up an old man, living in poverty, in poor health, no family or children with the older generations having long since passed away and haunting my dreams as ghosts, friends dead or gone, with a world that has moved on and forgotten me, feeling unfulfilled, not having fulfilled my potential and wondering about what could have been. What a nightmare that would be.
“Focusing on each aspect of the pie of life to try to achieve a balanced whole is the way to avoid this fate.”
…
Me too! 😂
To your essay on friendship, I replied with my belief that some people are more skillful at marriage than at friendship, and vice versa. I’ve invested nearly all my social capital in my wife these past 30 years; 5 children, but I wish we had 10. I mean it, 10, or as many as I could feed.
I do have some regrets about how little social capital I invested in friendship, but I was preoccupied with physical survival: food security & housing security 😂 - the basics in life - but I do regret still how fear kept me from investing social capital in friendships those first nine years of marriage before, finally, we took a huge financial risk in reproduction.
Because now I do enjoy food security & housing security, fxxxing finally! 😂, but I have not had a very close friend in over ten years. And at this age, 51, and isolated as I am in a fringe-rural setting in the greater Tokyo metro region, (I’m a farmer 😂), I fear that from here on out my wife & children & future grandchildren will be my only opportunities for deep connection.
But this problem is a ‘luxury problem’ compared to my personal struggle for financial survival on the GenX job market 😂 (till I gave up & moved my family back to my wife’s native Japan). And it’s a ‘luxury problem’ compared to what most Americans are dealing with right now.
There are two points I’d like to make here.
1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs adds the necessary vertical component to the horizontal component of ‘life balance.’
2. I see a whole lot of Boomers & GenX’ers heading for lonely ends in the Medicaid Concentration Camps for Abandoned Seniors. Will their friends take their cats in???
After pressing send, I’ll try to post a meme for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I don’t know if memes are permitted on Substack.
Thanks,
Gerald
Thanks Gerald. What an interesting story you have, moving to Japan as a farmer with five children - kudos to you, that is super cool. Children are a blessing and the more the merrier, I think anyway - "be fruitful and multiply". Children were historically the "social safety net" that people relied on to take care of them in old age, replaced now by (as you say) the Medicaid Concentration Camps for Abandoned Seniors...
Making friends is likely harder as a non-native in Japan, which (I've heard) is quite insular. I'm aware of Malow's hierarchy of needs (your meme didn't go through, you can post a link to it if it's hosted elsewhere) and I agree with you that it would make a good compliment for the pie of life...
A good read and words to live by. Balance is everything 😀