You Can’t Hack Life
Life hacking, tidying up, minimalism, guaranteed to make you more efficient, happier, more fulfilled, sexier, healthier, more productive, and did I mention sexier? These are the latest iterations of the self-help trend. Do this and you'll find the secret to life. No, do this instead and find the secret to life faster and easier. No, wait, do this and find the secret to life even faster and easier.
What all of these things have in common is the notion that there is a fast, easy fix to this complex, messy, complicated thing we call life. We are so afraid of living authetically and of trusting our own inner knowingness that we constantly search for something, anything, to free us from the trap of our minds.
But, here's the thing, those things we use to free ourselves often become traps (Ram Dass addresses this brilliantly in Journey of Awakening).
Marie Kondo advocates tidying up and getting rid of anything that doesn't "spark joy. I know people who have tidied up their lives according to Marie Kondo principles who then become obsessed with not owning and set themselves up as superior to those who own more. In the meantime, nothing sparks joy because the value of everything has to be calculated to make sure it sparks joy.
Life hacking is the notion, taken from high-tech, that we can create life shortcuts to make our lives more efficient to free us up to do more stuff. The thing with this is that many people spend so much time figuring out ways to hack their lives, they never actually do anything. Additionally, it perpetuates the myth that there is an easy fix to what ails us mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically.
Minimalism shares similarities with tidying up in that it espouses owning only what is absolutely necessary for living. There are people who argue you should never own more than one hundred things. Again, people obsess over what those things should be and fill their time with cataloging what they have and what they've given up.
Here's the real secret to life; there is no secret. Life is meant to be lived fully, messily, with complications, with ups and downs, with good days and bad, with wellness and illness. All of it is part of the human experience. We run into trouble, because we believe if we find the secret we'll stop having the human experiences we don't like. Then when we continue having those experiences, rather than realizing this is part of being human, we search for the next fix; we tidy up, walk on hot coals, break boards, throw out all but a hundred things, make sure we never have more than ten emails in our in-box, get rid of "toxic" people, walk on more hot coals, go to workshops, read books (which we then have to get rid of so we don't own more than the allowed amount). Then we find that we're still irredeemably human. Messy, complicated, complex.
The secret to life is there is no secret. Just live. Be the big, beautiful, messy person you are.
