Drinkin’ the Kool-Aid

Winter’s getting to me. That last dump of snow we had Saturday evening, even though it’s mostly taken care of now and certainly will be by week’s end (I hope) really got under my skin. It’s for this reason that I know I’m not all that stable at the moment where it comes to emotions. If I’m getting genuinely pissed off at the weather, well that’s a problem.

So, I guess it’s not all that great to be listening to any of my own insights at this time, although sometimes, it feels like maybe I should. Not necessarily the stuff about the weather, or the little annoyances that I’ve gotten pretty good at overlooking. The thing that’s been playing on me lately is the whole “live the life you love” thing.

In case it’s not clear, I’ve become, for better or worse, an avid reader of certain blogs that espouse the sort of life I think that I want. As an entry point, it comes down to minimalism/decluttering, personal finance, and meditation. The reasoning being that if I want peace, I kinda need to start with me, as that is pretty well the only sovereign ground I have. And, if I look critically at it, I’ve met with some success. I meditate every day, and I have better finance habits than most of the people I know. I’m still struggling both on a personal and spousal level with minimalism and decluttering. These things I see as doable, so I’m pretty much still striving, and hopeful that I improve every day a little bit.

The really irksome thing is that a lot of these blogs preach all about living the life you want regardless of responsibilities. The foremost of these is Zen Habits (and ironically, the grand daddy of them all that got me started), which I’ve stopped reading because for reasons I can’t put my finger on, Leo makes me feel worse rather than better, or inspired. Maybe that’s not entirely accurate that they say you can live the good life regardless of responsibilities, as many people do state that you can do it–you just need to re-jig your expectations and your day-to-day spending and then go on diatribes about how to shift one’s focus of what is truly important. Many of them, most recently Joshua of the Minimalists, practice what they preach by quitting their traditional jobs in order to ‘follow their passion’.

I think the reason I find this irksome is that nothing would please me more than to ‘follow my passion’ but there’s all sorts of reasons why it can’t be done, and I find this incredibly depressing. Much as these online gurus state time and again that yes, it can be done “Just look at me!” and then cite everything from fear to lack of direction as reasons why people still think that they can’t follow their dreams, I think that it’s just a cold hard fact that not everyone can. In fact, I wager the vast majority can’t. There’s a ton of reasons why people can’t do this from financial to disability to psychological. Some people sure can, but my god, they are few and far between.

I’m thinking this whole self-improvement racket is a little like a cleaned up version of Cosmopolitan. It’s become pretty clear that the women in these magazines are not real. No one in a regular human body looks like that, and if they do, they’re unhealthy and have external funding. And yet there’s a lot of women who stare longingly at these idols, quietly loathing themselves and dreaming of a life they won’t ever have. That’s what I’ve started to feel like reading a lot of these blogs. Yup, there’s people out there who write for a living, get enough cash to support themselves, maybe even to support their families if they decide to pare down all possessions and give up keeping up with the Joneses.

But dammit, look at the math. There’s what, maybe 100 noted online self-help/improvement guru blogs that anyone cares about. And then there’s hundreds of thousands of people who go there, just looking for a life they’d love to grab but will never grab, no matter what the gurus say, or more importantly, what the people can realistically do.

Being one of these hundreds of thousands can be profoundly depressing. And honestly, my sights aren’t set all that high. And honestly, I do much of the work that they recommend. Do I see results? Sometimes. Are they good? Sure. Are they things that I “Digest slowly that just might change my life”? Christ, no. I once thought so, but holding on to that hope is as stupid as buying a lottery ticket every week. The only thing it does is up the web traffic of the gurus.

Probably the best bit of wisdom I have heard in a while came out of the following TED talk, in which Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs. The best bit is the middle toward the end from when he says the guy who cleans up the road kill whistles while he works. If you want to skip the first bit (which is worth a listen, but not necessary), go to 10:45:

Maybe the real Zen Habit here, as much as the mere thought of it depresses the hell out of me–no doubt thanks in part to all the life-coach cheerleaders out there telling me I can do what’s not possible–is to learn a certain amount of resignation to temper one’s dreams with. No, we cannot, no matter what the gurus say, all quit our jobs and follow our dreams, no matter how much we pare down and change our focus. That’s just the way it is. Suck it up, sunshine. Better to try to find peace somewhere in what you are required to do to make money and be useful to yourself and family. If the gurus spent more time on that, it might be worth reading again. As it stands, they’re just making everyone who already feels shitty about their lot feel shittier when they realize there’s no changing it.

“Take your time,

think a lot,

why think of everything you’ve got,

for you will still be here tomorrow,

but your dreams may not.”

-Cat Stevens.