Life’s curve balls and “path quakes”
Getting back on the horse, reinventing ourselves, or a little of both
World Trade Center (2001), CCO.
Most adults in modern, urban, industrialized societies handle a bunch of “life’s curve balls”. These are unpredictable events that negatively impact our lives. By definition, there is an infinite variety of possible curve balls: remember, they are unpredictable. Curve balls can fall into different categories: accidents (a tornado that flattens your house; a car accident that hurts you or worse, someone you love; a bad health scare, like a stroke, cancer, a severed spinal medulla, a new and mysterious chronic disorder); economic crises; war; external violence; a financial aggression (theft, whether legal or made legal, predatory policies impacting your region, an unfair lawsuit); the final development in a negative group dynamic (your family, your workplace, your village); and I’m sure you can think of a few other classes of random destructive things.
I am publishing this tiny essay because more than one friend is exactly in this uncomfortable place, and because I have been there more than once. I am also currently editing 40 thousand words of writing I did (and published as columns) on “motivation”, or what puts us in motion. I am having a hard time: today, I dispute many of the conclusions I reached a couple of years ago when I did that series. It’s not just editing: it’s rewriting, and I’m at the research and literature review of it. Anyway, here are just a couple of pointers from this more recent critical perspective. I hope it helps. If not, leave me your question: maybe I stumbled into something that answers it, or at least I will look for it. Anyway, I will get back to you.
Steer away from self-help books and “success manuals”
You are a reasonable person, you would never walk into that tacky, disgusting aisle with the self-help, self-improvement and “secrets to success” books, right?. After all, they are all scams, either for being entirely unsupported by facts, or by hugely exaggerating a particular piece of research and blowing it out of proportion and into a gold mine, like Malcolm Gladwell did with the “ten thousand hours to mastery” book (“Outliers”). It was completely at odds with the scientific research, yet the immense majority of those who even heard of it, heard or read the scam version from a self-help book. Garbage, right? You’d be surprised how catastrophic life disruptions push us towards any and all offered solutions. And some self-help books come disguised as “serious stuff”, often authored by someone with a Ph.D. Sadly, sometimes even by the scientist who authored the original research, a colleague with a broken moral compass who doesn’t think twice before profiting from misrepresented scientific data and models.
If you already did that, you are not alone. I’d go as far as to say the majority of us did that, or will do it under the worst circumstances. In secret, embarrassed, but we do it. We rationalize it in ridiculous ways.
They will not help you. They may in fact cause you great distress, and here is why:
You cannot “will" your way out of this particular rock bottom. You fell there by accident, or by a chain of actions that you could not have predicted. The idea that people successfully emerge from catastrophe as long as they have the willpower is not just false. It is evil. It is reproduced by conservative voices because it throws the victims of socio-economic attacks perpetrated by dominant segments of society into the delusion that the determinant factors are individual - their issues, their fault - and not social. You probably heard the maxim that “bad decisions” are the reason these homeless people are where they are, or those addicts are in bad shape, or those guys are in prison. That’s false and evil. Everyone makes good and bad decisions. The worst decisions are made by the so-called “decision-makers”. Yet, they just benefit from them. You, on the other hand, may have your life torn apart because of their bad decision - not yours.
Therefore, don’t put much hope in affirmations, vision boards, and especially goal setting.
Avoid goal setting on a large scale or a long time frame. You know what? Avoid goal setting for the moment. Goals are tricky things that work well in organizing your actions within very specific contexts. I’ve written more project flow charts and time lines than I can count, but that is because I had/have an academic career, I was a Principal Investigator - the guy who signs stuff and is held accountable for every penny spent on the research -, and publicly funded research projects have non-negotiable deadlines and very detailed goals. You are held accountable for every goal that you failed to accomplish. That’s not how life works.
2. Life is not (just) a project. Life is action in time. It’s happening right here and now.
Project management tools are useful, of course. I highly recommend good management tools for budgeting, for keeping track of health indicators such as what medication you are taking, regulate weight measurements, macronutrients - whatever is critical for you to recover from chaos and get healthy again. But that’s not management because you can’t treat “getting healthy” as a goal. It is not a goal: it is a demand. But under “I need (and want) to recover my health”, you can set goals. For example, your brand new chronic disorder has created locomotor impairments. After excruciating months of testing and delving into obscure case studies and cutting edge research, you and your physician achieved a tentative explanation and concluded that there is a specific regimen of rehabilitation procedures that may lead to significant improvement, as well as a very experimental circadian rhythm manipulation through dietary and drug strategies. Your goal is not to fix your pain - that is what you need and desperately want (and first of all, you need medication for that in the right dose, frequency, and regimen). Your goal is to, firstly, figure out the best frequency and form of execution of the exercises and how to implement the dietary/drug strategy, and, secondly, to follow both as closely as possible for “x” months. That kind of goal is good because it is achievable. Monitoring it provides feedback. With it, you can tweak your direction and fix it in real time. Anything else is just rhetoric, like “my goal is to be happy”.
Life happens, and the best thing you can do to reclaim a modicum of autonomy and self-sufficiency (that minimum that supports your sense of dignity) is to study it. Observe it. You really don’t have the option of observing it from the outside. If life were a project, it would be a participant observation project. You cannot not participate. And living has repetitive and non-repetitive parts. The very constant and repetitive parts are habits. Habits are essential. They become energy-saving chunks of action-time in our lives, since a lot of the action is automated.
Catastrophic transitions break and make habits. And here you do have some choice. You can deliberately eliminate and create habits.
I have no clue as to what habits you need to eliminate and which ones you need to create. Neither does your therapist, your physicians, your wife, your kids - nobody knows. You, however, may figure them out. All these folks I mentioned can help, make suggestions, but only you can decide and do what it takes. It’s your life, your decision, nobody has the right to offer their unsolicited opinion, let alone decide for you.
3. Observing leads to insights
When you actually quiet your mind enough to observe your life - your habits, your discomforts, your history - a few paths start to delineate themselves for you. Eventually, you will see a path that you definitely don’t want, or even really, really need to quit, burn the bridge, bomb the road, obliterate it. “Hey, why am I going this way? That’s not where I want to go”. When this happens, you often wonder, months later, why in hell you took so long to do it. That’s just how it is.
Other habits - old and new - are associated with paths that you really like. It’s much easier to invest in “installing” a habit that you associate with a positive highway (hey, the habit is the Key to the Highway!).
Installing habits is tricky. No, it’s not hard, in the sense that it doesn’t require complex analysis and interpretation, or extenuating effort. It’s the consistency “thang” that gets us. My advice is to be reasonable with consistency. If you are trying to install a habit that involves daily activity, you’ve been doing it for a month, but you missed over 60% of the days, with the practice days all being continuous, it’s not great. It’s not awful, either. However, killing yourself to accomplish 100% daily consistency is dangerous. I have never seen a quantitative study on this, but from my experience and observation of others, this level of demand leads to frustration, desistance, and depression. And we fall back into the undesirable goals: the only acceptable “project management goal” at this stage is to invest in supporting the habit you want to install.
Everything you do to optimize your wellbeing is a consequence of this observation practice. You must count with unpredictability, and you must count with the crushing weight of external events and social structures. The best you can do is observe and choose what keeps you in the paths you like, want, and need.