Photo courtesy of bixentro.
Most people choose unhappiness over uncertainty. – Timothy Ferriss
The usual route of life, according to society:
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Be born.
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Go to 18 years of school.
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Go to college for 4-5 years.
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Get married.
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Get an entry-level job working for some company in your field of study. If you can’t, go back to graduate school for 2 years and then get a job.
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Have some kids.
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Work 8 hours per day, generally from 9am to 5pm, from Monday until Friday of every week.
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Take a week or two of vacation every year.
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Fight to convince your boss to give you more money.
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Complain about your job to your friends.
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Retire at 65.
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Die.
It’s safe, it’s predictable, and it’s what American society wants us – nay, expects us – to do with our lives. If you do anything different from this, people will surround you with concerned looks and comments about “throwing your future away”. I frequently mentioned during my last three years of college that I wanted to drop out and didn’t see the point to it, but anyone from family to friends would start saying that I would “never be able to get a job” and I would “regret it for the rest of my life”.
The bulk of American society buys into “deferred happiness”: the idea that you need to work hard now to be happy later. When you are in school, it means working hard so that you can get a well-paying job later. When you get that job, it means working hard so that you can retire with money and be happy later. But what if you want to be happy NOW?
I want to set the record straight before I go any further: I wholeheartedly believe in the value of hard work. Everyone needs to go through it, and it is crucial in the development of your work ethic and attitude throughout your life. Everyone needs to make sacrifices. I just worry that we’re sacrificing our entire lives sometimes.
Nobody knows this better than Tim Ferriss. Two years ago, Tim released a book called The 4-Hour Work Week. In it, he recommends finding a way to “outsource your life” – in other words, get other people to take care of menial tasks for you. There are people all over the internet who have jumped on top of him for saying that he’s “lazy” and that he promotes the idea of people sitting around drinking fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. The problem is, they just looked at his methodology, and not the philosophy behind it. They miss the entire chapter on giving back: finding a cause that you believe in and are interested in and devoting time to that. He feels, and I agree, that being happy and being a productive member of society are not mutually exclusive.
So, he set himself up a way to experience the world, be happy, and help other people out along the way. That sounds like a pretty happy life to me. If you want to read more from Tim Ferriss, check out his blog here.
So how does that fit in to what we are talking about? Tim took risks. He didn’t sit in a cubicle wishing life was different. He made it different for himself, and he’s been able to design a lifestyle that makes him happy.
This does not mean I want you all to go and quit your jobs today, especially if you have a family relying on you. In that case, it’s important to take a gradual approach to this sort of thing, and make little changes along the way that can add up – like start a little side job in something that interests you and see what kind of opportunities there are. Who knows? With a little luck and some work, you might be able to put something together that could even replace your full-time job down the line. It happens.
Or, my favorite, don’t be afraid to cut some things out of your life, too. People pay for luxuries that they are certain they can’t live without, but they wind up causing them more stress than they are worth sometimes. How many years went by where we all had to program VCRs to tape stuff, or had to wait until a commercial break to go use the bathroom? Now you talk about how you can’t live without your DVR but you sigh and moan when the bill comes at the end of the month. What sense does that make? Are you really happy there? Learn to live without, and you might open the door to happiness you never knew existed. It’s possible to take risks responsibly – you just need to find the opportunities in your life.
In my case, I finished up college, but I was a full-time freelance writer two months before I even got my diploma. I waited and worked on the side until I found enough of a market to take the plunge. But it’s a year later, and it’s still going fairly strong. My diploma hangs in my guest room, and it just looks useless to me. Outside of a firm faith in God, I have no clue how the rest of my year is going to go. I am completely uncertain.
But you know what? I’ve never been happier.
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