THE SITUATION:
Why do I do anything?
I recently asked myself this question and it began a philosophical spiral which resulted in this article. I don’t mean why do we do anything in an existential manner. In other words, I don’t mean “why” in the sense of people searching for meaning in things happening to and around them (I tackle this in “There is no why”, coined by Vonnegut). On the other side, I also don’t mean simple cause and effect as in “I work to make money and I make money so I can eat”; although that is true. Is it even possible to find balance? What does balance look like?
Perhaps context would be good in order to explain my thoughts.
I keep trying to push the boundaries of productivity and self-development. I have learned so many things about efficiency over the last few years and have also burned out on occasion while trying to optimize. My career has skyrocketed and I have taken on more personal development tasks than ever before. A few days ago while feeling particularly weary but also guilty that I hadn’t gotten to everything on my list of to dos. I had been neglecting one category that I considered important to me.
As a result I felt guilty. I kept bouncing around in my thinking; I thought I really wish I could devote more time to thing X. Also I thought, hey, stop beating yourself up, you’re achieving 95% of your list every week and that list is probably 2000% deeper then Joe Shmoe who cares much less. Then I thought, yeah but comparing yourself to others is not great (only compare you to a past version of yourself). After a while flitting through guilt and justification I began wondering if it were even possible to accomplish everything that I needed and wanted to do or if doing so were even important enough to continue or if I even could figure out what complete balance would look like.
Let me put it in perspective. I am the directing manager of a fairly large engineering firm and manufacturing facility and everyone’s problems are my problems in a professional sense. My day is spent using Pareto’s law, 80% of the workload is accomplished in 20% of the time; these are my high impact directly related to the business issues. The rest of the time is spent trying to collect issues and help individuals. The latter is just important to me on a personal level but spread out and more varied in results in terms of business impact.
My ambitions don’t stop at work though. In fact largely I consider work a means to an end so that I may develop myself farther in other areas. That doesn’t mean that I don’t find work challenging and stimulating. We build interesting products and solve interesting technical problems and that is a pretty sweet deal to me. But this does not define me.
TASKS OUTSIDE OF WORK:
Outside of work I get up at around 6 every day without fail. First thing in the morning I accomplish my meditation and Duolingo practice (I’m on an over 550 day streak for both currently). I also do a bit of stretching and then I journal in my trusty moleskin. I also take the time to verbally practice gratitude and compassion. Out loud I will say what it is that I am thankful for. Then I will pick a person whom I feel I have difficulty with or don’t think about often and out loud genuinely hope that they are doing well. This isn’t as easy as you think depending on how miffed you are by said person. These things help to center me for the day.
That’s just my morning. In a complete day to me I’m going to stretch at least one more time and get an exercise session of some kind. I’m also going to make sure that I take a bit of one of the online courses that I am enrolled in at some point in the day (I’m currently breezing through a Data Science course on Python and R). I also need to make sure to read every day.
Additionally I write a minimum of 500 words on whatever project I am working on every day without fail. If you want to be a writer, you need to write (and I do/am). Last but not least I try to play or work on music in some way shape or form every day.
Once more my daily list of to-dos outside of work, keeping up my home, taking care of my dog, relationships, and parenting (I have two small children) is: Stretching and exercise, journaling, reading, learning, writing 500 words minimum, working on music, meditating, using Duolingo, practicing gratitude and compassion.
It’s a lot! It’s a lot to me. It might not be for someone else. It might be way over the top to someone else. The point is that we all have our list of to-dos(or we don’t). It’s different for everyone. I was feeling burned out and asked myself why am I doing this? What am I trying to accomplish. Certainly there is point for some of those things other than the fact that I enjoy doing them or that I find some benefit as it relates to me. Or is there? Does there have to be a point? Again, everyone is different.
Believe it or not I’ve significantly trimmed down my list into much simpler categories then I used to have. It used to be untenable. I would reach a crashing point and then accept the failure to maintain as a reason to evolve my list. I’ve done this on 3 separate occasions.
As it stands what I believe I am trying to accomplish is balance. I think everyone else is too. So this article is less to do about how to achieve balance and more to do with what balance even looks like in the first place. I spent weeks refining and racking my brains over this and this is what I came up with. What I ended up with is what I believe to be a universal framework for what balance looks like for everyone, or rather the elements that comprise balance in a person’s life.
THE CHART:
I have entitled the chart: “Personal Well Being Balance”.
The chart is comprised of one large Venn diagram with two large sections. The sections are internal and external. I will explain all of the interactions between the sections in order to clarify my logic.
INTERNAL:
The internal represents only the things that you have direct internal contact with. These are the things that you are left with when you are alone and naked in a cave. I divided them into three main categories of mind, body and relationships.
These categories are self-evident with the exception of relationships. I’ve seen a lot of people do something similar where there is a three-fold mind, body, spirit connection. While I acknowledge the presence and importance of spirituality, belief structures and religion, these things are largely given to you through external factors. I would argue therefore that your spiritual health in the internal sense is still more of a factor of your mind and mental state generally.
I placed relationships in the internal category even though on the surface it seems counter-intuitive. Relationships are derived from interactions other living things, so in a sense, they are brought on from external sources. I believe however that I mean relationships from your perspective, what is left with you in the absence of other things and your choice to (or not to) work on relationships. It is not representative of specific relationships, as they will come and go. You will have some relationships though regardless of circumstance that you will have to manage on a personal level.
Each one of these things can be improved or focused on independently. Each one can likewise affect the other. Working on improving your body and health through exercise will undoubtedly improve your mental state and likely the state of your relationships. Conversely if you choose to let your body fall into a sustained healthy state, you will possibly feel negative mentally and perhaps have a negative impact on your relationships.
This can occur either way either by proxy or directly. In other words being unhealthy can negatively impact your relationships from the direct impact that it has on them (concern for health from others or disdain or anything in between) or your actual physical ability to interact with people. It can also be by proxy in that creating a negative mental state as a result of failing health can result in an impact on relationships.
Improving your mind specifically can most certainly impact your state of health or relationships in direct or indirect ways as well. Choosing to improve the mind can positively affect relationships or lead to a change in them generally.
The point in each of these categories is not to qualify positive or negative but to simply see the relationships direct and indirect between all three and to see that these exist within you regardless of the world around you.
EXTERNAL:
The internals are all things that you would deal with regardless of circumstances. Everything around you could fail and people could come in and out of your life. Everything could drastically change in your environment and you are still left with your body, mind, and relationships (whatever they may be in a given state).
All of these environmental or luck related things are external factors. These externalities are the things that can change around you at any moment, either subtly or drastically. If the bombs drop and we are suddenly cast into a dystopian Mad Max like reality you are still left with your internals (body, mind, relationships).
That is not to say that these externalities do not affect your internal factors. On the contrary they are incredibly important and have great effect on you. However they could all change in an instant and you would still be left with the internals, just in a vastly different state of things. Again try not to look at this in a qualitative sense and just try to look at the relationships between categories.
There are many externalities, many of which have close bearing to the internal factors but still are more to do with the world around you then your relationship with the self. A few examples of this as displayed in the chart are your career, finances, ambitions/dreams, well-being of those outside of yourself (different from state of relationships), luck (good or bad), religion or belief structure, and a host of other material, external, or environmental factors.
No one would argue that your career and state of finances has an effect on your body, mind, and relationships. It certainly does. Worrying about money is one of the leading causes of stress and mental deterioration that I can think of. This is well documented. This is an external factor though and fully subject to change. No one has control over the markets. You have no control over the dropping bombs. You do have control over your mind, body, and relationships despite these things.
Externalities may uproot you and place you in a more or less attractive (depending on preference) place on the map but there’s nothing you can do about that. You can just begin working the self (internals) and towards something again from this new place on the map, whatever it may be.
So once again externalities have the ability to affect your mind, body, and relationships. They even drive internal desires, however these things are all created and driven within the context of the world around you as opposed to the internally driven states that exist regardless.
THE TWO WAY RELATIONSHIP OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL
And there’s more! We established that externalities can affect your internal states of mind, body, and relationships. Note that this is not a one way street. It is true that stress on the mind or on relationships can result from something external, as in losing a job or mounting bills. The internal things also directly affect your externals.
Cultivating the mind and body certainly has a direct effect on your performance at work and therefore your finances. An extreme example of this would be letting depression or addiction ruin your career.
Losing a loved one is an externality that can drastically affect the state of your mental and physical well-being and there is nothing that you could have done from your stance (most of the time) to have affected change from the stance of your relationships, mind, or body. This type of thing can affect you and make you depressed, affecting other relationships and externalities as well as the state of your physical health.
These are just a few examples of the complex web that we reveal by examining the internal self and its relationship to the externalities. One can think of many other examples that can be placed in the external category or split hairs about the nature of some of them (how internal is your belief structure versus how much of it is affected by externalities). This isn’t the point. Feel free to adjust small details so they in fact fit you and your belief structure about such things. The point is to examine the balance between all of these things and their effects on one another.
MEANING
In many instances through the improvement of the internal we are searching for meaning. Sure we may be trying to exercise so that we can look better in a bathing suit, but it may be more than that to us. Likewise in pursuing something external, like the next position in your career, or something material you may also be trying to find meaning. Again sometimes you just want the career change to better pay your bills and meaning doesn’t come into it.
We can derive meaning from external things (career, goals, ambitions, well-being of others), and we can also derive meaning from internal things (mind, body, relationships). They can also be derived from the intersection of the two. Perhaps improving your mind directly correlates to getting a new job and that new job derives meaning. Perhaps improving your body is so that you can be healthier longer for your children or grandchildren (who are external) but allowing you to improve the quality of your relationships across the board. In this intersection we can easily derive meaning.
What is meaningful is different for everyone. How we derive meaning is also different for everyone. There are people who have careers that are incredibly meaningful to them. There are also those that have careers that they do not find meaningful, however use them as a means to an end in pursuing that which is.
MEANINGFUL SUFFERING:
There is an interesting thing when it comes to anything in the internal or external category. Humans have the incredible capacity to experience suffering. We can derive suffering from innumerable external sources. We also find that suffering can arrive from internal mechanisms.
Suffering is interesting. There is no faster way to find meaning then to suffer. That is not to say that the suffering is quick. I mean that through transcending suffering we are often forced by proxy to discard that which is not meaningful. Suffering immediately forces a framework and a trial by which you personally decide whether or not something is worth it. Transcendence of suffering is a mode of finding meaning in many people’s works. Often we see this idea that suffering is meaningful and how you bear it in life greatly helps determine meaning for you (this is my interpretation anyway).
To understand this we can look in a gym to find people in great physical discomfort paining themselves for something they find meaningful. We can also look to something way more serious such as the pains experienced in the Holocaust.
Victor Frankl discusses how meaningful existence was derived even as a prisoner in a concentration camp in “Man’s Search for Meaning”. I can certainly say to a lesser extent that my dealings with military deployment and the more heavy side of human suffering have proven a lot of this true (to me).
This can be something as simple as physical discomfort in exercise transcended. It can be something as difficult as being tortured or having an awful accident happen to you or to a loved one. Through the suffering there is a window into meaning. It is not impossible to find meaning outside of suffering. Nor does suffering have to be overly dramatic. It seems though, that the higher the amount of suffering one must endure for something, the more meaning can be derived from it.
MEANINGLESS SUFFERING
This is not an endorsement on suffering for the sake of suffering though. Note that I placed and up arrow from suffering and challenge in order to symbolize transcendence. There are plenty of instances where people force themselves into a state of unnecessary suffering. There are addictions, pursuits, often vices of every kind that can cause immense and seemingly endless suffering. What’s worse is that the person can descend to these states and derive absolutely nothing from it with the exception of the suffering. This is what I call meaningless suffering. This suffering one should never descend into voluntarily (although we know we will from time to time).
Anyone who has had a large headache after a night of hard drinking can attest to the feeling. It’s meaningless, you’ve learned nothing, and likely you will do it again soon. This is a light example but consider the extreme continuation of this from something like alcohol addiction. The internal physical, mental, and state of relationships is definitely affected, as well as the external (maybe) career, finances, and other material things. If the person does not transcend this and change the path all of the suffering will have been for nothing.
The sad thing is that people often choose to continue to suffer for nothing. We all will at some point though, the key is in trying to strike a balance or avoid the meaningless suffering as much as possible. It is almost inevitable that we will choose at some point to suffer for nothing. We will also sometimes choose to suffer in order to gain in the long run. The latter is how voluntary self-development occurs. I am not so naïve as to think that we won’t sometimes choose to do something that result in meaningless suffering but we should seek to minimize this otherwise balance elsewhere becomes difficult as the negative repercussions to the external and external build up.
From my interactions with people who have dealt with the more serious bouts of meaningless suffering like addictions I can say that it can work out. People who come back and transcend this suffering and choose a different path often have strong meaning found in their life and relationships. Mainly because they have seen and chose to see for too long, the world from a low place. Again, that is not an endorsement on becoming an addict so that you can recover and hopefully find meaning. While I do think some people can find value in experiencing the bottom as there may be no other way to push up unless they touch bottom, I wouldn’t recommend it as a pursuit. For those who are pursuing meaningless suffering often do not know that is what they are doing.
BALANCE
The overarching analysis is simply to view the framework objectively. If you take all of the components of your life and frame them where they belong within this framework (and yeah you’re going to have some bleeding between categories) you’ll begin to see your own personal map of meaning. In the intersections you’ll see cause and effect.
On the one hand you’ll see all of the things you think affect you from an external perspective. On the other you’ll see all the things you are doing internally either to move towards something or away from it. As these areas bleed and intersect you’ll find suffering, and meaning. If it was all written out with size to emphasize importance to you, you might just see where you’re off balance, what you’re over or under emphasizing. Then it is just a matter of adjusting course; making a plan, checking results and trudging forward. This isn’t to tell you how to do that though. You should note that this map is fluid, and that your levels of importance and meaning placed on different things change daily.
I struggle with achieving balance, I believe I always will. My eyes are also too big for my proverbial stomach when it comes to how much I try to accomplish. I believe though that making a mental map of all the components that make up one’s personal well-being and sense of meaning and critically thinking about their interactions has helped me to put it in perspective.
