Meaning: What should I do with my life?

[Explor­ing Life] Aris­to­tle posed the ques­tion, How should a human being lead his life? It is a uni­ver­sal ques­tion that touches every human life on the planet. For some, the ques­tion vis­its us only once in a while; for other, it relent­lessly pur­sues our atten­tion and demands inti­macy. In What should I do with my life? (Fast Com­pany, 2007) Po Bron­son states that it is impor­tant to return to first prin­ci­ples, rather than focus­ing on hold­ing on to pat­terns of liv­ing that no longer serve our pur­pose. The shift from main­tain­ing and pro­tect­ing our habit­ual and addic­tive pat­terns of liv­ing to a crit­i­cal and fear­less exam­i­na­tion of the very assump­tions we live by is a inex­orable call to learn­ing. But what are these first prin­ci­ples and why do they really mat­ter?

There’s a way out. Instead of focus­ing on what’s next, let’s get back to what’s first… There are far too many peo­ple who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are… the kind of sat­is­fac­tion that comes with know­ing your place in the world. That choice isn’t about a career search so much as an iden­tity quest.

Iden­tity Malaise: The ques­tion What should I do with my life? forces us to stare directly into the heart of the abyss, that place where the known quickly fades away into the unknown. Some peo­ple are drawn toward this ques­tion with great inten­sity, while other peo­ple may occupy them­selves with other mat­ters so as to avoid it. Mys­tery and its com­pan­ion the unknown are two of the most impor­tant learn­ing envi­ron­ments in our expe­ri­ence. It is in our strug­gle to embrace mys­tery and reveal the shad­ows of the unknown that learn­ing can be most alluring.

Bronson’s sub­ti­tle to What Should I Do With My Life? is “The real mean­ing of suc­cess — and how to find it.” It is a great risk to lay claim to “the real mean­ing” of any­thing since mean­ing can only exist within a mind. Peo­ple cre­ate mean­ing; meaning-making is unavoid­ably sub­jec­tive and its vari­a­tions diverse. The “real mean­ing” of suc­cess lies in the quest for iden­tity, or know­ing who we are, why we are here, and what we should be doing.

The gen­eral struc­ture of iden­tity malaise often con­tains the fol­low­ing elements:

• An Inter­nal Malaise: Dis­tress, uncer­tainty, con­fu­sion. Mis­guided use of time and energy. An under­ly­ing sense of unease that what we are now doing is not what we should or can be doing. A fail­ure to derive a sense of ful­fill­ment, pur­pose, or mean­ing from our cur­rent activities.
• Source of the Prob­lem: Usu­ally found in the realm of assump­tions and pre­sup­po­si­tions. A real­iza­tion that our gen­eral direc­tion in life is mis­di­rected and that which we achieve seek to achieve is ulti­mately frail and vacuous.
• Pro­posed Solu­tion or Process to Relieve the Prob­lem: A new per­spec­tive, set of assump­tions or pre­sup­po­si­tions, aimed at that which is pur­pose­ful and meaningful.
• Process Required to Change: Often related to elim­i­nat­ing cer­tain habits of liv­ing and replac­ing these habits with new and more mean­ing­ful ones.
• Qual­i­ties of Change: Often linked to the acqui­si­tion of pos­i­tive emo­tional qual­i­ties such as courage, resilience, and per­sis­tence. Often linked to spir­i­tual quest in orga­niz­ing life to pur­sue spir­i­tual beliefs. Learn­ing becomes ori­ented toward the acqui­si­tion of new qual­i­ties and capac­i­ties of per­cep­tion and emo­tional fortitude.

A Call to Iden­tity: Bronson’s work in cap­tur­ing the essence of how peo­ple seek their own iden­tity is quite inter­est­ing. Rather than cre­at­ing mod­els and the­o­ries of iden­tity, he works at the level of per­sonal expe­ri­ence. Bron­son also focuses on “ordi­nary” peo­ple, in the sense that they are not famous or well known celebri­ties but aver­age peo­ple try­ing to live the best life they can.

These peo­ple don’t have any resources or char­ac­ter traits that give them an edge in pur­su­ing their dream. Some have suc­ceeded; many have not… What I learned from them was far more pow­er­ful than what I had expected or assumed.

We often make frag­ile and some­times mis­guided assump­tions about our expe­ri­ences in life. Bron­son found that work is not an impor­tant enough con­cept to invest a per­sonal iden­tity in. That is, peo­ple real­ize that equat­ing their iden­tity with their career is folly. And it is. He refers to the idea of a call­ing, or a whis­per — a faint urge — from within that demands per­sonal dis­cov­ery and explo­ration in order to reveal its form.

Learn­ing Through Adver­sity: Under the pres­sure of adver­sity our learn­ing abil­ity inten­si­fies expo­nen­tially. When we expe­ri­ence unfor­tu­nate or dis­tress­ful cir­cum­stances in life we either assume respon­si­bil­ity for our lives — or not. Adver­sity and it com­pan­ions cat­a­stro­phe, dis­as­ter, trou­ble and mis­ery, are mas­ter teach­ers. One impor­tant pur­pose of learn­ing is to trans­form afflic­tion into per­sonal growth and ben­e­fit. In other words, the power of learn­ing embraces the poten­tial that lies within the adver­si­ties we inevitable face in life.

The tougher the times, the more clar­ity you gain about the dif­fer­ence between what really mat­ters and what you only pre­tend to care about. The funny thing is that most peo­ple have good instincts about where they belong but make poor choices and waste pro­duc­tive years on the wrong work… — the human soul resists tax­on­omy — except when it came to four mis­con­cep­tions (about money, smarts, place, and atti­tude) that have cal­ci­fied into hob­bling fears. These are stum­bling blocks that we need to uproot before we can find our way to where we really belong.

Even though the state­ment is a glar­ingly obvi­ous real­ity, the notion that money and its mate­r­ial off­spring do not lead to hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment is one that is often droned, but rarely embraced. Bron­son clev­erly cap­tures the essence of this in the fol­low­ing paragraph:

The rul­ing assump­tion is that money is the short­est route to free­dom. Absurdly, that strat­egy is cast as the “prac­ti­cal approach.” But in truth, the oppo­site is true. The short­est route to the good life involves build­ing the con­fi­dence that you can live hap­pily within your means (what­ever the means pro­vided by the choices that are truly accept­able to you turn out to be). It’s scary to imag­ine liv­ing on less. But embrac­ing your dreams is sur­pris­ingly lib­er­at­ing. Instilled with a sense of pur­pose, your spend­ing habits nat­u­rally reor­ga­nize, because you dis­cover that you need less.

The Endur­ing Lifeblock: What are the things that obstruct our expe­ri­ence of life? Lying under­neath the quest for iden­tity and the chal­lenges posed by adver­sity are the real sources of con­fine­ment in our lives — our assump­tions about how to live. Edu­ca­tion den­i­grates learn­ing by fail­ing to reveal and chal­lenge its own assump­tions openly. As a result, we are psy­cho­log­i­cally con­di­tioned to be that the things we are pre­sented with through­out years of edu­ca­tion actu­ally mat­ter. One of the most insid­i­ous effects of edu­ca­tion is to con­fine thought and imag­i­na­tion by cloak­ing assump­tions and con­ceal­ing the pre­sup­po­si­tions it is built on. This kind of blind­ness about the assump­tions that shape our lives is a kind of require­ment for suc­cess­ful par­tic­i­pa­tion in society.

We are all writ­ing the story of our own life. It’s not a story of con­quest. It’s a story of dis­cov­ery. Through trial and error, we learn what gifts we have to offer the world and are pushed to greater recog­ni­tion about what we really need. The Big Bold Leap turns out to be only the first step.

What ever hap­pened to learn­ing by trial and error? The nature of our tri­als and errors have become banal, repet­i­tive, regres­sive and com­mon­place. Per­haps the free­dom and open­ness of trail and error within play is lit­er­ally what makes play­ing a more pow­er­ful learn­ing process than study­ing or being taught. Per­haps we have become so pre­oc­cu­pied in deal­ing with the exter­nals in life, we have for­got­ten how to focus our explo­rations, inves­ti­ga­tions and sense of dis­cov­ery inward. It is as if we attempt to pur­sue life by con­stantly grasp­ing for attach­ments all the while ignor­ing the life that is within each of us.