I get what’s being said here. I do.
In the United States in particular, we have a “hustle” culture. Keep your nose to the grindstone, 80 hours a week, 3 jobs. Get after it. Then you’ll win at life.
That’s not healthy. That’s not how you win at life. You win at life by finding balance.
That’s why I object just a little bit to this tweet. There’s no balance.
What is life if not the pursuit of a purpose? Rocks can simply be. Humans and dogs and snails and grass and bacteria all DO something. They have purpose. They work.
A blade of grass sucks up water and nutrients from the dirt, breathes in CO2, absorbs electromagnetic rays, and transforms them into more of itself.
A dog finds, chases, and kills other animals and transforms them into more of itself.
Humans are the same. We’ve just figured out that we can do a little extra work to make sure there’s always water, while grass just dies if it runs out. We do a little extra work to make sure there are always other animals within reach, while dogs just die if they can’t find any prey.
Human work isn’t a distraction or an illusion. We’re just so much better at it than any other form of life that we’ve lost track of the connection between what we’re doing and the not-dying that it causes.
It feels right to say we need to just stop capitalism and get back to what life is supposed to be about. But there’s a baby in that bathwater, as ridiculous as that phrase is. And it is the only thing keeping billions of people alive today.
We could all go back to being hunter-gatherers, and for the millions of people who don’t starve to death, life would be better in many ways. But I don’t think we need to make that trade.
We have tools like meditation. Meditation is all about being present in the moment, finding stillness amidst all the hustle and bustle. It’s an amazing practice.
But it’s important to remember that being present and finding stillness is not the end goal, it’s a tool to help you overcome distractions and focus on finding the purpose and the work that you were meant to achieve.
