This book isn’t just a must-read, it’s a must-re-read. I had been curious about it for some time, and moved it up my list when a friend bought a copy. LOVE! The only chapter that wasn’t a 10 for me was the first chapter, so if you pick it up and you’re not sure, flip through it at random. You’re bound to see at least some of what I did – there has never been a book I marked in so many places, not since my college Latin textbook anyway. Let me share some tantalizing tidbits: “be out of struggle” “You are responsible for what you say and do. You are not responsible for whether or not people freak out about it.” “...before you know it, you’ll be able to ditch your hero and start asking yourself, What would I do?” What would I do? Hahahahaha!!! What would I do? “I just wanna see what I can get away with.” “On the other side of your fear is your freedom.” There were more, lots more, many of which include the F word, and one of which I’m making into a wallpaper for my phone. There are some interesting things going on here. Jen Sincero relates an anecdote in which she has an epiphany in pigeon pose. So did I! I’ve been in dozens of yoga poses, but I can’t claim that any of the others brought me a specific moment of insight. (If you’re wondering, my pigeon pose moment was realizing that my visceral fat was an actual, physical obstacle in my life). There is another brief interlude in which she explains that quitting smoking is easier than smoking, because you no longer have to buy cigarettes, look for an ashtray, etc. I was never a smoker, but the same dynamic is true of my former vice, drinking soda. It is easier not to cater to the whims of an addiction every day, and it frees up a lot of money for other things. I dedicated my soda money to funding a student in Zambia, which made it much easier to continue not indulging. I can look at her picture and think about how wrong it would be to pick her pocket for my petty vice. Whatever works. That’s really what this book is about: telling yourself highly personal stories to get yourself to start or stop doing things. This book makes me want to talk to someone about it. It makes me want to buy copies for friends, although I never do that because I’ve learned that book-pushing is a negative habit for me. Instead, I can review it and hope that some of my excitement is infectious. Then, I can post this review and rush off to DO THE THING that You are a Badass has inspired me to do. When we use the term ‘crazy,’ I don’t think we’re talking about true mental illness. Plenty of mentally ill people are saner than the rest of us, because they’ve spent more time and worked harder on figuring themselves out. They’re better at recognizing when things are going a bit pear-shaped. Everyone has times of irrationality, emotional flooding, or idiosyncratic responses to situations. Some of us are better at recognizing it and owning up to it, that’s all. When we enter the dating world, it helps to work out ahead of time which types of crazy are okay with us and which types sound like too much work. I figured I would wind up with another divorced person, and I did. That’s a kind of crazy I know and understand. Someone who had never been married before, especially at my age, just wouldn’t get what it was like to have entered that level of commitment and then lived through its demise. I figured I might be too dark at this point to inflict my particular variety of baggage on someone untainted by divorce drama. Divorce can be a great teacher. Divorce forces us to be more specific about what we do and don’t expect in a relationship. We have to get more specific about financial income, bank accounts, retirement savings, housing, possessions, living environment, schedules, and communication boundaries, among other things. Divorce makes an amateur into a professional. It turned dating, for me, into more of an interview process, complete with application and background check. My (current) husband had his own particular expectation about re-entering the dating market. He had shared custody of his daughter, but he didn’t want to date anyone who had kids. He knew he didn’t want to have more children, either. He’d already raised two through the bodily fluids stage, and he was done. Whoever he dated would need to be sure that she had resolved the family question. That made me perfect for him, since I couldn’t have children anyway. It made him perfect for me, because it had been a deal-breaker or non-starter for other romantic interests in my life. Some people are willing to do whatever it takes and spend whatever it takes, no matter how many years it takes, to get some babies. That’s a kind of crazy that two people really need to share on a deep level. Neither of us did, and that was good to know. My first husband was bipolar. I didn’t really understand what that meant when I found out, and at that point, we were already married. As I said earlier, mental illness isn’t the same as ‘crazy.’ Still, that was a kind of crazy I wasn’t willing to deal with again. Maybe a different type of mental illness, like OCD? I suppose I might have considered it, if the guy was in therapy and taking care of himself, unlike my ex. Maybe if more time had passed? In the years after my divorce, though, I was definitely still not over it. I felt that I had been bamboozled, deliberately tricked, and I didn’t have the trust level. Maybe that’s why I wound up with an engineer, a very “laws of physics” kind of a person. We’re both workaholics. We’ve both gone to bed and fallen asleep while the other was up working on something, although that is sporadic. We often spend the entire weekend working on our separate projects. We will go to Starbucks and wind up spreading out two laptops, three phones, and perhaps a tablet. We have a shared calendar, shared spreadsheets, shared Trello scrum boards, and a shared Dropbox folder with a business plan in it. We have an official marital grievance procedure. We have weekly status meetings. This is definitely a kind of crazy that is not for everyone! Addiction is a special kind of crazy. While I’ve never had a substance abuse issue myself, and I won’t have it in my inner circle, I decided that I could handle someone in recovery if need be. That’s another kind of crazy that I understand. (I used to work at a drug rehab). I don’t mind. If I had to choose between someone with a squeaky clean, “normal” background or someone who had to fight for his sobriety, I’d take the fighter. I have dated a couple of those squeaky clean boys, and again, it felt like there was a dark part of life that I understood and they didn’t. Addiction is a rocky road without a rail, a steep path on an unmarked trail. Two people who have both come out the other side could have a lot to offer each other as friends and spiritual companions. Two people? There are those who think of monogamy itself as a type of crazy. Whether to be monogamous or polyamorous, exclusive or swinging, is probably the most important question to answer when people are contemplating whether to get involved with one another. Unfortunately, it usually enters the conversation as a game-changer. I think people should figure out where they stand temperamentally, and then make it clear at the outset which tribe is theirs. My husband and I are both firmly in the monogamy camp. Our motto is “Jealousy sucks BDD” (not ‘body dysmorphic disorder,’ but other than that, I’ll leave the acronym mysteriously unexplained). We’re exclusive. Asked and answered. Questioning whether to get involved with other people just sounds exhausting to us, like trying to decide between 47 flavors of jam. Blackberry! Done! Next question. It’s a kind of crazy that is compelling and exciting to lots of people, but it’s not for us. Crazy comes in a full spectrum of colors and flavors. Depending on personality, one person may see some as boring non-issues, some as fun or whimsical, some as depressing, and some as scary. A different person may categorize them differently. Some may feel like family-of-origin issues, and that may be either comfortingly familiar or terrifying. An example would be living out of a backpack and traveling the world with no official job or permanent address. Me, I’d go for it. It’s a kind of crazy I could handle. Others wouldn’t want to do it for a single day, or even watch a movie about it. We don’t usually have all the same types of crazy as our lovers. Sure, that can happen, the way that two people who obsessively follow the same band or both grew up in a religious cult might find one another. Maybe you both always wanted a monkey, and you’ll find bliss together. (Not a crazy that would work for me, although I have a parrot). My husband goes on long business trips a lot, a kind of crazy that is too hard for many women. I’m a vegan, something that my husband regards with total indifference, but would be impossible for most men to tolerate. It helps when your particular kind of crazy doesn’t faze the other party, and vice versa. He sleeps right through my parasomnia issues (“most of the time,” she said ominously). I find his desire to take off on group motorcycle trips cute, but otherwise unremarkable. So he and his four male friends are going to Las Vegas together. Good for them. Have fun, fellas! There are kinds of crazy that we may share, but may be better if we work on them privately and take a hiatus from dating for a while. Picking fights, shouting, throwing objects, punching walls, slamming doors. Suspicion and paranoia – are you cheating on me? ARE YOU? Acting out in its various forms, which could be anything meant as a coping strategy that tends to have negative consequences. Compulsive spending. Breaking up and getting back together over and over. Being manipulative, flirting with exes. Inability to disconnect from family drama. Insecurity and clinginess. Ambivalence, inability to commit. Hoarding or squalor (PM me, I’m here). Seeing your ex in everyone, refighting old battles that have nothing to do with this relationship or the individual right in front of you. Don’t get involved with someone unless you’re emotionally available. Remodeling a house. Starting a business together, or a band. Adopting a child. Training service animals. Going back to grad school, one or both of you. Losing weight. Finding your birth parent. Relocating to another city or country. Finding a new political or religious passion. All of these are types of crazy that may or may not be shared, may or may not feel like work to the other party. We have to expect each other to change over time, and the natural tendency will be toward entropy and distance unless we accept it, acknowledge it, and work on it. We have to keep leaning toward each other, keep making eye contact, in the same way we drive by steering and checking our mirrors. We have to accept each other, and ourselves, as uniquely flawed individuals, each crazy in our own way. Hopefully that’s a fun way, or at least an interesting way. Be your own test subject! Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not to everyone. It brings to mind Arthur Dent’s unintentional experiment with eating the least alarming leftovers out of his fridge and thereby preventing the spread of some space plague. By ‘designing a life experiment,’ I don’t mean to imply turning oneself into a petri dish so much as creating an interesting hypothesis (my dog is physically capable of learning to jump rope) and then testing it. (If I jump rope in front of him, will he eventually cut in?). Daily life is really too boring most of the time. About 80% of life is maintenance. Bathing, preparing and eating meals, commuting, working, doing housework, paying bills, cleaning the gutters, looking for things the dog buried in the yard… It never ends. That’s part of the reason to have pets, because they introduce an element of unpredictability into the mix. Setting up controlled life experiments is another way. There are two different approaches toward setting up a life experiment. The divergent way is to ask, “What happens when I go like this?” Commit to a new action and attend to what happens afterward. What happens when I give up soda? What happens when I initiate more phone calls? What happens when I quadruple my vegetable intake? What happens when I try to listen to everyone more attentively? The convergent way is to ask, “How many ways can I think of to tackle this problem?” If my issue is poor sleep quality, I could experiment with nutrition, hydration, mealtimes, exposure to different types of indoor and natural lighting, exercise, hypnosis, weight loss, sleep hygiene, snore strips, a visit to a sleep lab, ear plugs, melatonin, a white noise generator, prescription drugs, or kicking my pets out of the bedroom at night. The convergent approach is probably what most people are doing when they claim that they’ve “tried everything.” The drawback to “trying everything” is that we may be testing a bunch of irrelevant variables, and we may also be eliminating them from consideration without applying them for the necessary duration, frequency, or intensity. For instance, improving my vitamin A and C intake by eating better may not resolve my problem if the real issue was deficiency in D and magnesium. Nutrition was the correct approach, but we needed to get more specific. When we’re genuinely willing to “try everything,” it helps if we can pinpoint what we are doing with exacting, meticulous, painstaking detail. Many elements of one’s lifestyle can be tested in a lab or recorded with objective data. When someone says “my blood sugar is low” or “[X] gives me migraine,” that is a factual statement (“the moon is made of green cheese”) that can be tested and proved or disproved. We can test our micronutrients. We can record what we eat. We can keep time logs of the hours we slept. We can go to sleep labs and get monitored whatever it is that they monitor. We can have our body composition clinically measured. We can record the barometric pressure. We can examine our food logs against a record of our various health mysteries and look for patterns. (“Paprika gives me night terrors.”) When we’re not sure what’s wrong and the doctors aren’t, either, we can just record everything we can think of and eyeball it for a while. Tried everything? I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying I’d really love to take a look at your documentation. What I have usually done up to this point is to have a harebrained idea, such as “Next year I will take up running.” Then I dive in and wait to see what happens. There have always been more unintended, unexpected results than there were predictable results that conformed to my model. When I am pursuing a new interest like this, it tends to become all-consuming. Curiosity dominates my attention. I HAVE TO KNOW. I don’t always do well simply reading something, believing it, and implementing it. Sometimes, I try something because I want to debunk it, or because it confuses me and I can’t rest until I’ve figured it out. Most of the time, I just have an idea and it doesn’t seem like a bad idea until later. Questions have included: Is it possible to make Brussels sprouts taste good?, Can I walk on the treadmill barefoot?, Are walnuts good in minestrone?, and Can I tap-dance in roller skates? (Yes, bad idea, horrible idea, and yes but why?). What I now want to do is to try an extremely specific input for a very specific purpose and find a way to test whether it does or does not work. The goal I have in mind is to reduce my anxiety about public speaking. It’s already getting better through practice – my legs don’t shake anymore, although my heart still pounds and I have a lot of trouble making myself stay at the podium for an entire minute. I didn’t qualify the other day because I only made it 29 seconds out of 60. My mind goes blank and I lose my train of thought. My focus fades out into the middle distance, and it’s like the colored lights aren’t even there, much less the faces of my audience. I believe there is a significant physiological input that I can master, in the same way that I trained myself to be able to run more than 1/3 of a mile. I haven’t been able to run in a year and a half. It started with an ankle injury that responded only slowly to physical therapy. Just as I had healed enough to start running short distances again, I fell and tore open my knee. That took weeks to heal. While I was still wearing gauze pads for that, I bruised my nailbeds while hiking, and it’s taken six months for the nails to grow back properly. One darn thing after another. What I noticed was that my background mood dropped from a 9 out of 10 to more like a 7. Running initially helped me to beat my problem with night terrors, and I feel like it had a way of eliminating stress hormones. My suspicion is that reigniting a regular running practice will help to diminish my speaking anxiety, even though they seem to have nothing to do with one another. How do I design this experiment? What kind of metrics can I track to tell whether it’s working? Most of the variables involved in public speaking are subjective. How did I feel? How competent did I seem to others? Was my speech any good? There are a few numbers that are relevant, and the group does track them. How many times a month did I give a speech? How many seconds was my speech? How many times did I say “Um”? I know I say “um” more often when I’m nervous, although I don’t notice it at the time, and I also know that my speeches get shorter when I feel more nervous and less prepared. Lowering the first number and increasing the second will be positive signs that I am improving. As for running, I can easily and automatically track metrics with my sports watch and the RunKeeper app. How often did I run? How far? How long? What was my pace per mile? What were my split times? I can also subjectively track my daily mood, sleep quality, soreness, or anything else that seems relevant. There is the possibility (probability?) that my speaking abilities will improve over time anyway. I won’t be able to prove anything to anyone but myself, but I couldn’t with a sample size of one anyway. In the worst case scenario, I give myself something to do while waiting for time to pass. At best, I might notice that the “butterflies in the stomach” [factual statement again] fade as soon as I get in a good 5-miler. Learning to quantify my life taught me a lot. It taught me that my certainty about my behavior was almost always unwarranted. I went to bed later than I thought. I drank about ¾ of the water I thought I did. I ate about 50% more than I claimed. I exercised about 2/3 of the frequency I thought, at a lower intensity. (Walking instead of running, running instead of calisthenics, calisthenics instead of body weight resistance training, etc.). I can’t even say for certain whether I lied to myself deliberately or carelessly. All I know is that my picture of myself, based on doing what came naturally, did not match with the reality of an honest record of my actual behavior. My real habits did not match my perception of my habits. Part of why I like to plan life experiments is that it helps to focus my awareness. I want to live intentionally, and that is more or less the opposite of doing what comes naturally, at least at first. What I want is for a better life to start emerging naturally from new and improved behaviors. My natural tendency to interrupt people needs to be consciously replaced with a strong effort to listen more carefully. My natural tendency to have my feelings hurt by other people’s thoughtless remarks needs to be replaced by a conscious effort to reinterpret the situation. I annoy myself all the time, and my quest is to pause, reevaluate, and act in ways that I find more acceptable. Another reason that I like to plan life experiments is that I have overcome some serious difficulties, and it would have been much quicker and easier if I had been less stubborn. I often look back and feel that I could have saved myself years (or decades) of pain and frustration if only I had heeded certain signs. I beat fibromyalgia and thyroid disease. I beat poverty. I beat obesity. I beat the odds and found love again after my divorce. These problems were so difficult for me that almost anything else seems simple and easy in comparison. I have every reason to believe that action and habit change can bring me improved results, as long as I focus my attention and actions in the correct places. There are a million problems and situations that could respond to a life experiment. Weight, depression, energy level/vigor, headaches, punctuality, debt, shyness, loneliness, cooking skills… Can I prevent family quarrels? Can I streamline my morning routine? Can I earn a promotion at work? What happens when I try to put on 10 pounds of muscle? What happens when I clear six carloads of clutter out of my house? Any frustration, irritation, or annoyance probably has a solution. What I’ve found is that taking any positive action toward any issue tends to have unanticipated positive side effects. When we try to eliminate hassles from our lives, it tends to ripple outward, benefiting everyone around us. People are coming over. Quick! Hide the evidence! ‘Scoop and stuff’ is one of the classic techniques that my people use when they are working hard to make a good impression. It’s a gesture of hospitality. Hospitality infused with large quantities of shame, dread, and embarrassment, perhaps, but hospitality nonetheless. Welcome to my humble home, and please tell me if I’ve passed the audition. The way it works is that you cast a wild eye around the room, looking for anything out of place, and then grab it and hide it somewhere. Many people keep their bedroom doors closed for this reason. Others have an office or guest bedroom, or even an official junk room, for this purpose. These locations are always intended to be temporary, in a way that attics, basements, and garages are not. The stuff itself may linger for years upon years, but the aura of intentionality is subtly different. This is part of how specific areas get cluttered. There’s the “deal with it later” area that got out of control. It is superseded by the “deal with it later, but SOONER later” pile. After that comes the “no, really, deal with it later, but not as later as those others” pile. It calls to mind a rubber stamp a former supervisor had made that read EMERGENCY, because URGENT didn’t connote the desired level of urgency. (A true emergency generally involves the need to call 911). In my world, the stamps would read something like ‘anxiety,’ ‘dread,’ ‘frenzy,’ ‘panic,’ and ‘terror.’ It’s like all this misc is covered with venomous spiders or kale or something. That’s the everyday level of anxiety and urgency that drives ‘scoop and stuff.’ Stacks and piles get stuffed into bags or boxes. Several scooped and stuffed bags will get popped into a box. The boxes will get stacked. Piles will collect on top of the boxes. It’s like excavating for fossils. There are often clear date markers in the strata. The next level is when the scooping and stuffing happened during a relocation. People who had no idea what was in any of the various piles or stacks are working as hard as they can to box everything up. They’re “helping.” It’s true that it is helpful to have one’s important papers rescued rather than shredded or burned, which is what most people would like to do with others’ clutter. We have to keep that in mind when we shake the boxes and the Dementors start shifting around and moaning. These bags and boxes don’t scare me. On the contrary! I know from experience that many of the hidden bags are at least half full of:
‘Scoop and stuff’ happens most often in people’s cars. The bags get brought in because there may or may not be important mail in there. As often as not, there is, or at least it was important at some point. Usually it’s only 5-10% of the total volume, though. The next most common areas for ‘scoop and stuff’ are dining tables, kitchen counters, coffee tables, and desks. What we do is to spread out our papers in the hope that it will help give us mental clarity, or at least a definable chronology. The pattern is the same, but the specifics vary from person to person. “I put it somewhere important” – and now, of course, I can’t find it. The “urgent emergency” spot for that individual may be on top of the microwave, in a windowsill, tucked sideways in a bookcase, or on the floor. Other, less urgent items get stuck there because there are only so many hidey-holes in one home. Note that ‘scoop and stuff’ almost always consists of paper. This is because, for a small blip in the history of humanity, paper is cheap and widespread. I don’t think I even need to document the assertion that the people of antiquity did not have problems with paper clutter. Cholera and siege warfare, maybe. Junk mail, no. The main non-paper items that tend to get scooped are clothes, shoes, bags, and dishes. One jacket, one backpack, one pair of boots, and one pizza box can somehow spread themselves across an entire room, yet hiding them is relatively quick and easy. I used to hide dirty dishes in my empty vegetable crisper on occasion. I knew even at the time that it would have been faster to wash them. That frantic feeling does things to us. It makes us feel that time is running out. It keeps us from thinking straight. Clutter hides the emotions that were generated when it was laid down. As we start to excavate, the miasma of anxiety, grief, depression, or confusion wafts out. It’s like mold spores. Body fat does the same thing, storing our negative emotions just so that they can topple us twice. Once in the past when they were stored, the second time when Future Self finally has to deal with them. This is part of why having a partner or coach can help so much. To anyone but the owner, a stack or pile or bag or box is just stuff. Sorting it is simple and obvious. Junk mail in one pile, receipts in another, anything that looks important in another. Anything like a spare hairbrush just gets put away. Suddenly, 80% of the mess is gone. All that’s left are a few scary-looking sealed envelopes, or a stack of important papers such as applications. We bury the things that scare us so we can uneasily pretend to forget them for a while. Our friends and allies aren’t scared, unless they’ve had a papercut to the eyelid like I once did. ‘Scoop and stuff’ is a dead giveaway of a certain thought process. It’s nearly universal among my people. There seems to be something sinister about plastic grocery bags that causes them to collect large amounts of clutter, usually with a “prize inside” – the one seriously important item that makes it necessary to sort the whole bag rather than throw it away. The bags themselves constitute a considerable quantity of clutter. Every time I have done a home visit, there have always been plenty of plastic bags to use for the inevitable thrift store donations. What is this mysterious thought process? It’s simple. There is no structure or plan in place to deal with the daily influx of mail, paperwork, or shopping. (Many of the scooped and stuffed bags contain new things with the tags still on them). The only people who don’t have paper clutter are people who have a formal information management plan. This stuff doesn’t happen automatically. It’s not really hard to set up and maintain that flow of information, but it does require System Two thinking. That is the type of concentration we need to make decisions, do our taxes, book airline tickets, or read instruction manuals. When we’re tired, System Two thinking becomes difficult. We have to kick it in gear. When we’re tired at the end of the day, our brains get lazy. We grab whatever was in the car, whatever was in the mailbox, whatever else we brought home, and we. Set it down. For later. There is never a signal for “later.” If we don’t schedule it, the only time we are signaled that it’s time to handle these items is when something unusual happens. Guests come over, the landlord or a repair person comes over, or we have to move. Depending on how infrequent these occasions are, the piles of “later” can get pretty big. The bigger the piles, the more dread we feel when we think about touching or interacting with them in any way. When a spider appears in the house, most people freak out a little, especially if it shows up in the bedroom late at night and then vanishes. Personally, I carry spiders outside, and if I don’t act fast, my dog goes after them. It’s always interested me that we feel the same level of dread about sorting paper and other clutter, but we don’t feel the same sense of urgency about getting rid of it! Even when it’s obvious that spiders could hide in there. If I had a mass of paper clutter and ‘scoop and stuff’ bags, and I was determined to clear them without help, this is what I would do. I’d set aside a predictable time slot every day to handle all the incoming stuff: shopping bags, mail, those stupid coupon circulars… Then I’d give myself an extra 5 minutes to go through some of the older stuff. “Touch it once.” Pick it up and force myself to make a permanent decision about it before I move on to the next thing. The secret here is that the most important stuff will come back to haunt us again. It catches up to us in the same way that skipped dental cleanings catch up to us. Bill collectors won’t forget, catalogue companies won’t forget, and the IRS definitely never forgets. A replacement notification will come if we lose the first few. What we’re trying to do is to build a solid new habit of processing information as it comes in. Dealing with clutter without a system in place just means it will build up again, and it’ll start the very next day. One of the first things to do is to empty a bag. ‘Scoop and stuff’ items are usually together by sheer coincidence. They just happened to be near each other at the time of scooping. When ordinary stuff turns into misc, by dint of being combined with other ordinary stuff, it has supernatural powers of confusion and emotional darkening. The presence of one paperclip in a stack of paper can make it seem twice as hard to process as it should. What we want to do is to first engage System One thinking, whipping through and categorizing items as quickly as possible, getting rid of things like sticky cough drops as quickly as possible. At least 80% of clutter processing can usually be done relying only on System One thinking. We can come back and do the complicated, high-concentration System Two thinking later, when there’s space to sit and evaluate it. It’s not impossible. There might not even be as much as you think there is. There’s nothing wrong or shameful about scooping and stuffing – on the contrary, the habit of feeling shame during ordinary daily activities is what drives the ‘scoop and stuff’ activity. We try to buy ourselves a feeling of peace and tranquility by putting off and delaying certain things, like sorting mail. Then the shame of “never good enough” pops up again when we blame ourselves for that desire for leisure. The interesting thing is that processing stuff as it comes in each day takes less time than trying to hide things – and later search for them – on a regular basis. Having an information processing system means spending a few minutes every day to handle things, and then being able to relax without nagging thoughts or dread. Or bags of junk everywhere. Wealth and poverty are purely relative, subjective terms. They are also purely subjective experiences. I often think about the Emperor Charlemagne, for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is that what qualified as vast riches in 800 AD is not very impressive to me. The only thing Charlemagne had that I envy is convenient access to natural hot springs. He had plenty of money, but what could he buy with it? Horses, clothes, and food? Oho, but I have all sorts of riches that he didn’t. Nice penmanship, for one thing. I have (our world has) the internet, near-universal literacy, vaccines, sanitation, rapid transportation, images of the surface of Mars, forks, antibiotics, and all sorts of other fantastic things, not the least of which is the comfy pillow I use every night. Compared to anyone at the threshold of the Middle Ages, most of us are very wealthy indeed. We don’t feel it, though. Human progress is driven at least in part by social comparison. We are constantly comparing ourselves to the next guy up the ladder, the one who has it better than we do. We don’t spend much time feeling grateful that we have what someone else doesn’t have. (Vision, hearing, working limbs, sanity, living family members, literacy, happy memories, freedom from addiction, liberty). I can stand up and walk across the room without feeling dizzy or needing anyone to help me. Every single time that happens, I should rejoice. There are thousands of people who would, whose health means that they could never take such a miraculous event for granted. That’s not how it works, though. We’re built to want more. Always more. If we were all content with what we had, nobody would ever make anything, and we’d still all be living under thatched roofs, sharing the room with our livestock. To be called a ‘consumer’ in most cultures throughout world history would have been taken as a deadly insult. It’s saying that you eat more than you produce, that you are literally nothing more than ‘another mouth to feed.’ All you do is consume? Get out of here! This is one of the major differences between the present and the not-so-distant past. Most people have always been farmers and/or artisans. While they lived near (or below) subsistence level, meaning one season of bad crops could leave them starving, everyone shared in that. There’s little to envy when you and your neighbors are all in the same situation. What they had that we don’t is more cooperation. They worked together or they didn’t make it. Early people may have had more of a sense of purpose; they spent their days trying to store food, make and repair basic household items, and keep their children alive. At the end of the day, it would have been fairly obvious whether their work made an impact. One of the first things we buy with money is isolation. Privacy is the single thing the wealthiest celebrities want the most. We want to get further from our neighbors. We want thicker walls, bigger yards, wider airplane seats, private beaches. It’s sad to think that the richer people get, the harder it is for them to know whom they can trust. Obscurity can be seen as a great gift in that context. So can a small circle of real friends. This is an exercise that I do. I think about ways my life would be different if I had more money. Some of them are good, but many of them are bad. My taxes would be more complicated. I worry quite a bit about becoming jaded by greater comfort and no longer being able to deal with the hassles of poverty if I needed to. I worry that living in a higher-end neighborhood would attract home invaders. I worry about awakening the demons of materialism and social comparison, suddenly wanting expensive jewelry or… I guess I’m not sure what very wealthy people are supposed to want. The truth is that not much about my life would change if we had a higher income. I call my phone the “billionaire phone” because it’s the same make and model I would buy no matter how much money we had. We would eat the same way. We would spend the same amount of time with our pets. I might get a personal trainer, but otherwise, I’m already fit and strong. Okay, okay, I would definitely run out and upgrade my laptop. The biggest change, though, would be that we would spend more time with our friends and family. Probably we could use Skype and do that more anyway. If there is one thing that people tend to take for granted in our daily dissatisfaction meditations, it is the physical presence of loved ones. Mine is a Cinderella story, that is, if Cinderella used her housekeeping skills to put herself through college and then met a handsome aerospace engineer at whom she threw a shoe. One thing I have noticed since I stopped being poor is that I rarely spend time wishing I had something. I eat at restaurants less often, I “shop” less often, I have about 20% of the clothes I used to have, and I go out to the movies less often. I don’t eat as much candy. In fact, I quit eating junk food and drinking soda entirely. I used to have this serious sense of FoMO (Fear of Missing Out). I couldn’t bear to feel “deprived” of something. Now the only deprivation I worry about is sleep deprivation. Slamming the door on poverty was a watershed in my life. At 40, I’m significantly healthier and stronger than I was at 20. I have better posture, more muscle, and more color in my face. I sleep more and I eat a better diet. Some of that is due to knowledge, but some of it is just due to feeling the sense of abundance and opportunity. I can largely afford to do what I want, eat what I want, buy what I want, and go where I want. That means I don’t really spend any time worrying about what I can’t afford to do. It’s funny, though, that so many things I longed for 10-15 years ago don’t interest me anymore. Most of the things I do now were available to me then, if only I had realized it. As a poor person, I could still have learned how to defeat my sleep problems. Sleep is the single most valuable thing, if you ask me, and being well-rested is the difference between feeling like life is either a motel or a luxury resort. As a poor person, I could have meditated and done yoga. I could have taken up running; I would have eaten the same amount and just not been 35 pounds overweight. As a poor person, I didn’t know it, but I could have spent the same amount and eaten a much higher quality diet. I could have had a “capsule wardrobe” and spent the same amount on many fewer items of clothing. The difference between one $40 blouse and ten $4 Goodwill shirts is a matter of storage space. I still had access to the public library and the parks that I enjoy today. The most important thing I enjoy today that was available to me when I was poor was the ability to create interesting projects. I’m a writer. Anyone can keep a journal or write poetry anywhere, with the cheapest of materials. What makes us poor? Lack of physical security – feeling like you might be attacked on the streets of your neighborhood. That happened to me in 1998, and it was among the greatest terrors I’ve ever felt. Feeling like your neighbors or roommates might steal from you. That’s happened to me, too. Lack of access to health care. Yup, been there, avoided necessary medical appointments, even had a medical bill sent to collections (and it was under $40). Lack of agency in our work – feeling like we have no other options and that we have to endure unfair, unprofessional treatment. Don’t get me started. Lack of vision – not being able to see any alternatives. Today is just like yesterday and tomorrow will be the same. We have to bust that up. It’s true that a billion people in the world endure terrible poverty, corrupt governments, warfare, loose landmines, endemic diseases, human trafficking, and every other evil the human mind can devise. We start to feel wealthy when we use social comparison as a reminder of how good we have it. We start to feel strong when we realize that we have the power to fight for a better world for those who are suffering more than we are. Geek alert: Steve Kamb has written a great, fun book called Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story. While I’m not a gamer myself (unless you count Words With Friends), I was inspired by the model and it has my mind buzzing with ideas. This approach may be a better fit for many people than the New Year’s Resolution model that I’ve been using. Kamb was a hardcore, impassioned video game player. He decided to treat himself as a character and level himself up instead of some electronic avatar. He set out to learn to play some musical instruments, travel the world, put on muscle, build his own business, and of course write this book. One of his fantasy role models is Jason Bourne. Why watch the movie when you can be that guy? The great part of this concept is that you can choose what type of character you want to be and build quests that interest you personally. Level Up Your Life includes a dozen or so Rebel Hero Spotlights, profiles of members of his website who have designed their own adventures. They include geeks, introverts, and others who never felt a natural fit at the gym or in group classes. Their missions are all so distinct and individual that it’s easy to imagine how your own unique fascination could fit in there. At the time this posts, I’ll be in a foreign country, preparing to push myself and speak to someone in a new language. The first and last day of the trip happen to be in different countries than the main trip, so I will actually have opportunities to use basic phrases in three languages I have studied! This scares the [choose your own expletive] out of me. Speaking to people is one of the main points of learning a language, though, so it would be pretty silly to let cowardice deprive me of the chance to fulfill my quest. I’ve always been open and patient when talking to non-native speakers of my language, and I see it as pleasant and interesting. Even if my interlocutors don’t see it the same way when they listen to me butcher their language, chances are high that I’ll never meet them again. All I’m risking is a few seconds here and there of awkwardness. I’m awkward for at least a few seconds every day, right? It’s funny that traveling to a foreign country, living in a tent for over two weeks, and carrying everything on my back no longer intimidates me at all, but talking to a stranger still does. I wish I’d read Level Up Your Life sooner. Where was this book ten years ago?? I’ve been playing around with this idea of learning to be “spies,” complete with having a secret code and learning to escape from a locked trunk. I’ll have to wave this book at my husband and see if he’ll go for it. If that doesn’t catch his interest, I guess it’s back to being regular old superheroes. *sigh* Social comparison has been with us since the beginning. Probably even the proto-hominids felt it. Now that we’re in the age of always-on social networking, it’s unavoidable. Everything has a photo or a video attached. Everywhere we look, there are pictures of smiling faces that look so much happier than ours. Parties we didn’t attend because we didn’t get an invite. Dinners and desserts we didn’t get to eat. Cute babies and pets. New cars. New clothes. Vacations. As far as we can tell, everyone else in the world is having a fantastic time – without us. I’m a little mystified by envy because I like my life. Not to rub anyone’s nose in it or anything, but I’m pretty satisfied. I like my personal taste in music, books, and movies. I like wearing my favorite colors and eating my favorite foods. I enjoy myself while I do the things I like to do. Does that make sense? I put my effort into deciding what I do and don’t like, and then engaging in the stuff that works for me. I like flowers, so I walk around outside garden-spotting a lot. I like books, so I have a couple of library cards and I make time to read. I like to cook, so I make my own dinners every other evening. I like my husband, so I married him and I talk to him a lot. I don’t really spend much time thinking about what other people are doing, because I’m busy doing my life. Would I want to be married to someone else’s husband? I doubt it. If I woke up with someone else’s ring on, the first thing I would do would be to wonder what my guy was doing and if I was allowed to call him. Would I want to go on someone else’s vacation? Maybe! Give me a chance to look at all their photos and ask them to tell me all the stories about their trip. I might want to go there, too, but maybe at a different time of year. I might want to stay at a different hotel. I would probably want to eat at different restaurants, because I like what I like. What did those people do on their trip? I want a line-item veto before I copy their itinerary. I’m skipping the wine tour, the snorkeling, the nightclub, and the amusement park. Oh, how interesting. It turns out I’m going to the same place a different year – but in a different season, with different people, doing different activities. So, in other words, my dream vacation has nothing whatsoever to do with theirs. Would I want someone else’s cute little baby? This is a touchy subject for me, because I found out when I was 19 that I probably wouldn’t be able to carry a pregnancy. Now I’m 40 and, indeed, I’ve never been pregnant. Surely I should be eaten up by envy of all the beautiful mommies with their adorable families to snuggle. I’m not, though. I don’t think the “biological clock” is real, or if it is, it’s not universal. I have plenty of friends my age who chose never to have children. I wondered once what a child of mine would look like. Then I realized that my kid would probably look a lot like my nephews or my niece, because the half of the genes they got from my brother are very similar to the half they would have gotten from me. Giving birth is an experience I’ll never have, but so is being a man, being tall, or having a different skin color. I have the life I have, and it’s the life I like. I do envy other people’s parties and social gatherings sometimes. We relocate a lot, and almost everyone we know lives at least 400 miles away. It makes us appreciate even the most ordinary family get-togethers. These are the moments we’ll wish we could call back in the uncertain future. After we lose someone, we always wish we could hear their voice just one more time. We regret the birthdays and holidays we missed. There’s no way to get that time back. Enjoy it while you can, or you’ll wish you had. It really doesn’t get any better. This is all there is, and it’s enough. It has to be. That’s really what it’s all about: enjoying what we have. We can’t cherry-pick anyone else’s life. We can’t just snap our fingers and trade attractiveness or personality with someone else. It’s the entire life package we’d get. We’d better be sure we know all the details before we sign the contract, that’s all I’m saying. It could very well be like Let’s Make a Deal, when you trade for Door #2 and get a goat instead of the new car. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being a goat, and hello to my Caprine-American readers). If you like the looks of my life, you’ll have to take my cancer scare, my 15-year battle with chronic pain and fatigue, my divorce, and my history with night terrors. Wouldn’t you rather just take notes on how I put all that stuff behind me and made something else for myself? There’s nothing automatic about beating illness, losing weight, building strength, paying off debt, building wealth, changing ineffective communication habits, or building a long-term romance. Every one of those things takes focus, hard work, knowledge, feedback, and the ability to consistently apply what you learn to your behavior. I’ve come to terms with the parts of my life that I used to wish away. What I have that most people don’t is the grit, the determination, the perseverance, and the tenacity. I feel a bit sorry for people who have had an easy life, because there are no guarantees that things will stay that way. I am gradually learning the other skills, like relaxation and contentment. They’re much easier to pick up than my sheer cussedness and refusal to stay down where I was knocked down. The worst fate I can imagine is to have been a child star. Look at the poor things. Being any kind of celebrity is just as bad. The paparazzi, the bodyguards, the betrayals when anyone you ever met sells you out to the tabloids. Being rich and famous means never knowing whom you can trust. No. Thank. You. I have what every famous person truly wants, and that’s liberty, privacy, and anonymity. It’s not a zero-sum game. Anything worth having is there for the taking. Social skills can be learned. A positive attitude can be learned. New careers can be started. Love can be sparked and sustained. Friends can be met and kept. Foreign languages and art skills can be studied. There are only a few places in the world that require one of a limited number of permits, and there are plenty of beautiful places that don’t. The real trick is to take something average, or less-than, and make it into something beautiful. A rosebush instead of a patch of yellow grass, a potluck on an otherwise dull night, a song in the quiet. Forgiveness. Injustice corrected. One tiny corner of the world improved in one tiny way. Envy is a way of stating a belief in scarcity and unalterable fate. Envy is a signal. “THAT! Give me some of THAT!” “DO WANT!” I have a touch of envy for people with straight hair, but realistically, if I was willing to spend half an hour a day, I could pretend I do. I envy people who have a sister, although my brothers are awesome, and what it tells me is that I should open myself more to friendships with other women. If I had had a sister, there’s no guarantee that we’d be close as adults. My ability to get along with family members is a better deal than some random trick of fate. Envy can be a very powerful force that can launch us into a better life. If I envy your ambition, your hospitality, your abs, your wardrobe, or your lasagna recipe, I can go out and get some for myself. Maybe it will turn out that we appreciate the same things, and we can bond over that. I can’t begrudge you your workout or your career focus without admitting that there was effort involved, effort that I am capable of exerting. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass. Work on thine own ass. There is one way that social comparison can lead to happiness, and that’s when we compare downward. I have two friends who are extreme pessimists, and whenever either of them complains about something that I would appreciate, I smile and shake my head. The haters and the trolls can be useful in that way. Some people are impossible to satisfy. There are those who resent everything and find every event either annoying or disappointing. There are those who can create drama out of thin air. There are those who make a habit of criticizing their mates and airing grievances in public. They’re entitled to do what they want and reap the consequences, just like the rest of us. It can be nice, though, to stop and consider how other people’s patterns of negativity reinforce undesirable patterns in their lives. That can help us to see the unhelpful, ineffective patterns in our own lives. What proportion of our results is determined by our attitude and behavior? The only way to know for sure is to make some changes and test it out. Envy is a passion. There are better passions for the asking. The artist’s obsession. The athlete’s unrelenting drive. The nomad’s wanderlust. The entrepreneur’s vision. To be consumed by an idea that wants to be made real is a feeling like no other. Most of the outer traits that we envy in others were born of an inner fixation on a certain stream of energy. Other people have what we wish we had because their attention is attached more strongly than ours to family, health, friendship, career, or personal expression. When you drive, watch the road, not the car next to you. When you live, watch your own life. Aim for something in your future that your past self would envy. I slipped in the shower. Is this not one of the worst nightmares? Naked and incapacitated, waiting to be found by whoever gets home first. A coworker of mine fell off a ladder in her bathroom, broke her leg, and was trapped on the floor by the ladder itself. It took her hours to get past it and crawl to a phone. Having an accident at home is no joke. I was lucky today. I slipped, but I didn’t fall. Our tub has a (very dated) tile surround, and it’s built up a couple of inches higher than the bathtub. It’s nearly knee-high, and you have to step over it to climb out. I had one foot out, reaching for my towel, when my other foot slipped. I started falling backward, as though someone had shouted FUS RO DAH! I was frightened. I will take this moment to share that a relative of mine died by slipping in the shower when I was in middle school. She was kind, generous, beautiful, and unlucky. She wasn’t much older than I am now. I flailed. I grabbed the shower curtain with my left hand and somehow caught myself on the wall with my right. Not only did I not fall – I didn’t even tear the shower curtain. I got my sliding foot back under me. I remained upright, startled, a bit shaken, with this odd little scrape on my calf here from the tiles. What happened? My super powers activated, otherwise known as muscles. I have a strong core from all these years of running and backpacking. The muscles in my back and midriff held me upright and helped me catch my balance. I’m no longer obese, and my scrawny girl arms were strong enough to support my weight where I reached out. If this same accident had happened to me 15 or 20 years ago, the outcome might have been different. In fact, I slipped on the stairs and broke my tailbone when I was heavy, aged 24. Now I wonder if I could have avoided it. One of my resolutions this year is to quit beating myself up on walls and furniture. I have some attention deficit issues, and I tend to move quickly while distracted, resulting in a continuous stream of scrapes and bruises. A few weeks ago, I tripped and fell on our fire pit, which was fortunately no longer hot. I’m trying to build my situational awareness and tune in more to my surroundings, and it’s not something that comes naturally to me. The world inside my head is much more interesting. The physical world outside is like an obstacle course, only with less mud and open flame. The year I started running, I slipped in the mud on my favorite trail. I skated about a foot and a half, caught my balance, and went on running. I thought what a paradox it was, that I wouldn’t have caught my balance if I hadn’t built this new fitness level, yet I wouldn’t have fallen at all if I had stayed home on the couch. I can hear the clicking of Past Self rolling her eyes right now. Any form of exercise sounded so repugnant to me back then. I wouldn’t have seen any potential benefits to being fit that might be useful during my ordinary routine. The truth is that I’m probably at about the halfway point of my life. I turned 40 last summer. It’s a watershed. Either I can continue to push myself and see how strong I can get for how many years, or I can diminish and go into my couch. Not everyone has a burning desire to complete an ultramarathon or do a Spartan Race like I do. The thing is, though, that there’s no such thing as maintenance. At this point, I’m fighting entropy. I have to keep moving just to maintain my ability to do things like carry grocery bags or change lightbulbs. Now that lightbulbs last so much longer than they did in my childhood, changing a lightbulb may turn out to be a once-a-decade fitness challenge. I participated in Ride Your Bike to Work Day for a couple of years in my early 30s. One of those mornings, I stopped at a refreshment booth, and there was a lovely silver fox. She had to be at least 60. She had visible muscle in her thighs and calves, and her posture was much better than mine. I never spoke to her or learned her name, but her image burned into my memory. YES, I thought. THAT’S FOR ME. I had no way to know what she looked like at my age, but that didn’t matter. I figured that if I kept riding my bike (which I didn’t), then eventually I’d stand as straight as this lady. Years later, when I started participating in foot races, I saw many older men and women who were also fitter, stronger, and faster than me. It is humbling to be passed going up a hill by someone who is older than your own grandmother, and wearing a t-shirt to document it. What falling in the shower has to teach is that we can’t insulate ourselves. Staying home and making a nest on the couch will not protect us from bumps and bruises. In the decade between 2000 and 2009, 28 people died running marathons. In comparison, 20,000 a year die in accidents in the home. Just like I’m safer in an airplane than I am in an automobile, I feel safer during a mud run than I am in my own neighborhood, or my own house. In a race, trained emergency responders and hundreds of witnesses are standing by. At home, in my own bathroom, I have to hope I’m conscious and able to reach my phone. I was lucky this morning. The bad kind of luck. I happened to stand in just the wrong position with just the right amount of soap and water in the tub. The part about how I arrested my fall using muscle strength? That had nothing whatsoever to do with luck. That had to do with years of activity, focus, planning, determination, and strenuous activity. I’ve come away with a negligible mark on my skin and a renewed commitment to work on my balance, agility, and strength. Probably I should also work on mindfulness, such as reminding myself to buy a bath mat. Pauses, moments of silence, and clear areas are uncommon in our always-on culture. We’ve reached a place where everyone is constantly maxed out. We get through our days by cutting away at our hours of sleep, in debt, multi-tasking, consuming every possible calorie, filling every square inch of our homes with stuff, exploding into storage units, and overlapping our tight waistbands. We’re constantly bombarded with billboards, junk mail, TVs, text messages, notifications, and other people’s endlessly chiming devices. Our mental bandwidth has shrunk to nothing. We think we can text and drive, or if not, we have to be on the alert because the people driving in the next lane think they can. It stresses me out just thinking about it. Creating stillness is possible. It’s the reason people get hooked on meditation and yoga. It’s the reason people get hooked on their electronic devices, which are really ways to channel our focus and attention into a constrained area so we won’t physically attack the people crammed in next to us. Sometimes we need a way to push out the myriad distractions of the world and find a moment that isn’t overlapped by so many other moments. I’m writing this from a coffee shop. There are people having a conversation less than one foot from my shoulder, while three feet in front of me, a pair of friends trade gossip. Behind the counter, baristas are steaming things and rattling ice cubes. School just got out (evidently) and there are a dozen girls talking to someone with a bouquet of pink balloons. I don’t drink coffee, although you wouldn’t know this if you ever caught a whiff of my laptop bag. I come here as a way to test my powers of concentration. And eavesdrop on people. But mostly, I come here to make sure that I can think and write no matter how much racket is going on in the background. It’s a survival trait. It starts with reclaiming some mental bandwidth. If you’ve ever felt too busy to go to the restroom, you know what I mean. No matter how much is going on, there is always a moment to take one deep breath and slowly release it. One breath. One breath. Let the shoulders drop an inch and draw one deep breath. Then make the decision to reclaim five minutes a day to breathe slowly and stare into space. I believe there is a mechanical means of inducing creative inspiration. It requires staring into the “middle distance,” and that tends to require a view of the outdoors. I read that J. K. Rowling conceived of the idea for the Potter books while watching rain trickle down a window. I suspect there is something to the position of the eyes that aids this process. (There is another eye position that helps in falling asleep, and that is having the eyes slightly crossed and focusing on a spot in front of one’s nose, eyelids closed). The next step is to use the daily pause to reconnect with a sense of purpose and direction. Who is driving this bus, exactly? The brain likes to do System One thinking, just following a routine and going through the motions every day. We have to force ourselves to initiate System Two thinking, the kind of concentration that is required to fill out our taxes or use a map when we’re lost. A daily pause for strategic thinking and planning can help us realize when we’re off track or over-committed. It’s how we make choices about whether to rewrite our resumes, go back to school, hire a coach, train for a new sport, remodel, or all the other fascinating things that require initiative and focus. Meaningful decisions are impossible to make when mental bandwidth is overtaxed. Reconnecting with our bodies takes that same kind of pause. We have to check in. We have to realize when our necks and shoulders are tense. We have to realize when we need to get up, stretch, and walk around a bit. We have to feel it when we’re sleep-deprived and exhausted. Have you ever been so tired that you keep reading and rereading the same paragraph? Why do we treat ourselves this way? We have to quit skipping meals and sometimes set alarms to remind ourselves to stop for breakfast and lunch. If we managed our personal hygiene the way we manage our biological needs for sleep, meals, and stretching, people would hold their noses whenever they walked by us. If we managed our retirement accounts the way we manage our overall health, well, let’s just say we’d be getting a lot of angry, hurt calls from Future Self. Our schedules are part of the problem. We come home and try to “catch up” on queues and playlists and feeds. Our brains try to trick us into thinking we can somehow consume and analyze all the information that is constantly streaming past. (NB: we can’t). We allow ourselves not a moment to pause and delete. We are so burned out that we tend to devolve to “Netflix and chill” as a default over every other activity. Cook a nice meal or screen time? Call a friend or screen time? Go to the park or screen time? Clean out the storage unit or screen time? Look for a better job or screen time? Bucket list or screen time? Live the best life possible or screen time? Buffer zones can be purely physical. I keep my kitchen counters and dining table clear, and as a result, there is always room to cook and eat a meal. There is always room to set down groceries. I keep my bathroom counter clear, and so it’s easy to wipe down and I don’t tend to knock things into the sink. I keep my desk clear, and there is always room to work on projects, address packages, or make illustrations for my blog. I keep track of my weight, so my pants fit properly and I don’t have big red welts around my waist at the end of the day. I pack lightly, so there is always room in my suitcase for something extra like a sweater, a magazine, or a snack. We try to maintain a savings buffer of at least a month’s expenses in checking, which looks electronic but is really a digital representation of bags of pennies. Buffer zones mean saving a little extra space in every drawer, cabinet, closet, and shelf. The buffer that has been the toughest for me is the punctuality buffer. As a gift to my husband, I have spent the past several years working on my punctuality problem. It turns out that it has several root causes. One is my internal feeling that 90 seconds is really only 60 seconds. Another is my desire to “do just one more thing” before going out the door. Another is my dread of sitting for 10 minutes before an appointment with “nothing to do.” After I got a smartphone, I realized that I would never have a problem filling 10 minutes again. Most of the things I would be doing at home, I can do just as well in my dentist’s waiting room. I’ve learned to accept that I should be early and trust my electronic pacifier to help me in this effort. Life is easier with the addition of buffer zones. An attention buffer helps us to maintain focus only where we want to focus. A financial buffer helps prevent any number of scary, depressing money problems. Buffer zones of physical space help facilitate interesting projects, as well as making it easier to clean up. A well-planned pantry helps provide a time buffer, as we only have to go to the grocery store once a week. Following a rational system of activity and nutrition helps to only have to maintain one size in the closet, without having to tolerate pinching waistbands. Strategic planning helps to keep track of all these disparate areas. Buffer zones take away so much of life’s stress, urgency, anxiety, and burnout. What is left is space to live and breathe freely. There are three things that are inevitable: death, taxes, and the fact that young people will make a 15-20 year commitment to a pet the minute they get their own place for the first time. I did it. I bought a kitten as a high school graduation gift to myself. Six weeks later, I was on my own, not earning enough to pay for cat food and not able to afford a pet deposit. Jackson was a great cat. He lived past 18, and he was my parents’ responsibility for about 99% of those years. My decision was a classic young person’s mistake: taking on a major commitment without understanding all the ramifications, then dumping it on someone else. Debt is the same way. (We just dump the consequences on Future Self). Pets and debts are two of the biggest strings tying us down when we contemplate travel or relocating for career purposes. We’re planning a trip to Europe right now. Choosing flights and booking tickets are as nothing compared to the stress of finding a reliable pet sitter for our dog and our parrot. It costs $55 a day to board them at the vet in our old city. The local cheapie option is literally a kennel, where all the dogs sit in cages and cry. It’s one rung above “I’m reporting you.” Ms. Feather Pants is simply not welcome at most boarding operations. We think it’s because she’s gray. Blatant discrimination. First World Problems, I know. At least they’re cheaper than kids. Think about it, though: on some of our trips, we’ve paid more to board our animals than we’ve paid for our own hotel accommodations. Sometimes we bring them with us, and then there is a room surcharge. Spike is turning 8 this week, and Noelle will be 18. Hopefully, they have a lot of years left in them; the fluffy lizard might outlive us all. That means we have to continue to plan around them, not just for short trips, but for major moves, as well. If we want to relocate internationally, there are all kinds of complicated, ever-changing regulations regarding permit applications, vaccinations, health certificates, and microchips. It turns out there is such a thing as a “pet passport,” even for parrots. Many countries require a lengthy quarantine, which is a pretty big bummer for lonely little animals. I don’t even want to think about the bill. This is where debt comes in. We’ve reached an interesting cultural moment when many of us regard our pets emotionally in the same way we do family members. Certainly many of us would rather hang out with a creature that bathes with its tongue than with our biological relatives. We refer to our fur babies as fur babies, as kids, as grandchildren, as best friends. So, when they get sick or injured, we’ll pay whatever it takes to give them the best care possible. I’ve seen vet bills rack up thousands of dollars on people’s credit cards even when they are destitute and/or unemployed. We want to give “forever homes” to strays and feral cats, but we don’t care as much about feral men, aka “the homeless.” I know several people who have four cats, and some who have more. (Cat ownership has tripled since the 1970s). A common topic of conversation in my social media feed has to do with people who are forced to move and can’t find a place that will take all their pets. Invariably, their friends urge them to lie. This is part of what raises rents and pet deposits and causes ‘strictly no pets’ policies. Look at it from the perspective of a landlord who has to do an expensive remodel because the whole place is soaked in urine down to the subfloor. Having pets (yard chickens, goats, horses) can seriously restrict where you are allowed to live. Our dog barely meets the 25-lb weight limit imposed by most property managers, and if he could open the cupboard with the dog cookies, he’d surpass it. He’s also not on any lists of restricted breeds; whatever your opinion on those lists, they are indeed up to the landlord to enforce. We once spent an entire day looking at five houses rented by the same property management company, only to learn that Miss Sneaky Beaky counts as an exotic pet. Donkeys were not on the list but parrots were. Back to the listings we went. Rent/mortgage is the single biggest expense for most people. Paying hundreds of dollars in pet deposits over the years can really add up, in the same way that storage units and pay cable can. We see these as fixed, non-negotiable expenses, so we shrug them off. There are going to be many occasions when that $250 or $500 lump sum would have been really helpful. We don’t have it, thanks to our furry little ingrates, so we put unanticipated emergency expenses on the credit card. The credit card. The card-zuh. Plural. Most of us don’t know exactly what we owe to the last penny, because we don’t want to know. There is only one thing as scary as an accurate, up-to-date balance sheet, and that is stepping on a scale and finding out how much we weigh. We never stop to calculate how much we’ll pay in interest for every pizza, set of new tires, or vet bill that we charge. I did, and that’s part of why I paid off all my consumer debt 10 years ago. I still owe on my student loan (at 40), and that’s bad enough, but at least that is fixed at 3.2%. Many of us are travelers at heart. We want to see this big old world. We’d go right now, if it weren’t for two things: who’d watch our critters and how we’d pay for it all. It is absolutely possible to finance the travel dream by getting a menial job over there. I know several people who’ve done it; one came back with the experience to vault himself into a new career with a much higher salary. I would have done it myself, after college, when I found myself single, childless, and with no strings. I was going to teach ESL in Japan. I studied Japanese for three years, and I was sure I could pass whatever certifications were necessary to teach English. It turned out, though, that I’d have to pay for my own flight, my visa, and my rent and expenses for the first month. I owed money on two credit cards and I had zero savings. Incidentally, I also had a pet, the dearly departed Mr. Puffy. I put aside my maps and applications and spreadsheets – a whole sheaf of papers – and resolved to get a temp assignment until I had saved enough. The second day on that job, I met the man to whom I am now married. Still haven’t been to Japan. Do it while you’re young. Everyone says that. There was a brief period when I could have, if I’d known what I know now. I found out about a year too late that I could have worked in Europe as a nanny until age 26. If I had the information, if I hadn’t bought that kitten in the pet store window, if I had known how valuable just a couple thousand dollars would have been – I would have done it. I’d probably be well into a career at the UN by now. Now I’m trying to pretend that a two-week vacation is anything like living abroad. I already know I’ll be sound asleep every night before the best nightclubs even open, because I’m middle-aged and dancing all night doesn’t even sound like fun anymore. There are always going to be pets in my life. I probably should have been more intentional about which pets and when, though. When I decided to buy a kitten, it was pure, 100% spontaneous impulse. If I’d given it any thought, I could have waited a year or two, and just spent more time with my cat-mommy friends. It wouldn’t have been the same specific cat, but I’m sure it would have done just as good a job of barfing on my carpet. Our current canine love-ball will probably be our last personal dog. The plan is to pet-sit, volunteer at a shelter, or borrow running buddies when we need dog time. There are lots of ways to enjoy animal companionship. Then there’s the one sitting next to me with the silver feathers and the golden eyes and the ruby-red tail. She requires a multi-generational contingency plan because she could live past 70. That tends to put pet ownership in a different context – the context of retirement planning. If we’re going to give them “forever homes” then we need to think about our debt, our savings, and our ability to give ourselves forever homes. Wherever in the world those homes may be. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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