jennypenny wrote: ↑Sat Jun 02, 2018 4:30 pm
Living deliberately is a purpose, no?
I liked Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. I also liked his last conversation with Joe Rogan and his appearance on EconTalk. One thing I like about Peterson is he recommends only looking 3-5 years out. Good advice for those of us who are planning-obsessed and try to run every aspect of our lives through a firecalc-type simulation.
Living deliberately could be a purpose, and at one time not long ago I saw it that way. To me though, as I've thought about it more, living deliberately (mindfully is the term I usually use) is akin to the idea of tending the process. By that I mean, looking at it a bit shallowly, say for those of us who have FI as a goal, we focus on the incremental decisions and actions: save and invest a little money every month, as much as possible approach spending decisions consciously and conscientiously, emphasize long-term decisions over short, etc. IOW, I see it not only as a purpose, but as a tool.
I've not read
12 Rules for Life yet but I think subconsciously/implicitly the idea of restricting how far forward I try to foresee is inherent to my prior post. Some of that is coming to grips with mortality: odds are my horizon is 30 years, give or take a handful, so there are fewer future iterations in the calculations to map out. Part of it is probably the habituation I've undergone in my profession. It's a bit of a caricature, but give an engineer a tool and he doesn't want to sit and navel-gaze with it, he wants to go make something with it. Much of my journey over the past several years has been one of reining in that tendency. It's fine in the office but when it seeps into life in the wide scale it fosters too much of a sense of some lack in the present (the thing that is yet unbuilt) with attendant negative emotions. So it is important to me to be better anchored in the present, both for the reasons I've discovered/mentioned over the few years of this journal, and because I believe it is the perspective from which gratitude can be tapped--appreciating what you have (present) rather than focusing on what you've lost (past) or what you're yet to acquire (future). Typically people see gratitude as a polite social response/reaction to things, sometimes as a virtue. I increasingly see it as a tool/weapon.
But as I've changed over the last few years (whether I've grown or regressed is debatable) I see more room to have a direction beyond simply being mindful. That's not to say I want to have a plan and schedule for the rest of my life. It's more like having some sort of loose trajectory which, approached mindfully, will give my subconscious opportunity to seize things and elevate them. When good ones show up, if I pay attention to them, I can reset the trajectory and go from there. 3-5 years intuitively seems like the right sort of timescale for such things. If Peterson is full of baloney in his suggestion I'm really out nothing provided I maintain a mindful and grateful approach.
Peterson and I are about the same age and probably have roughly similar backgrounds, which is why I readily relate to some of the things he says, I believe. One that's stuck with me in the week I've listened to his ideas is that our actions will tilt the world around us a little towards the good, or a little towards the bad. It's far from a new or original idea on his part, but hearing it in the context in which he emphasizes it caused it to stand out to me. I suppose it takes an amount of faith to buy into that idea, maybe even naivete, but lacking proof to the contrary I'd rather my sum total show up on the positive side of the ledger in the end. And it is tough to admit, but part of it is a reinvigoration of my youthful rebelliousness. Being squarely in the center of the cross hairs of a surging, caustic, even potentially violent, political movement makes tilting the game board to the good a little more urgent and a little more biased towards self-interest.
Sorry for the wordy deluge, but I guess since it's my journal topic it's not too much of a stretch to anticipate an amount of tolerance.