It’s coming up on eight years since I had my moment of reckoning and set off on the path that led to creating Farther to Go! I had no idea what the outcome would look like, but I did know what I wanted: a consistently satisfying and meaningful life.
First I spent some time exploring past instances when I had experienced my life as satisfying and meaningful to see what they might have in common. In each of them, I had been active, engaged, challenged, solving problems, taking a risk or two, possibly overextending myself, working hard, and making a few waves along with some kind of contribution—all while interacting with a group of similarly engaged individuals.
Having sketched out the contours of the kind of life I wanted, I subsequently identified my Big Picture Wants, which included vitality, stimulation, impact, creativity, exploration, discovery, and connection. They did not include things like happiness, contentment, and balance. Some of that may be due to my personality, but I think more of it is due to my being a human.
I don’t have anything against the experience of happiness or contentment; they’re both quite enjoyable. What I take issue with is the (in some cases almost virtuous) pursuit of either or both. On one hand, we’re fed the notion that happiness is not only a choice, but a choice we can and should make—because, like broccoli and exercise, happiness is supposed to be good for us. On the other hand, we’re encouraged, non-ironically, to attend to getting our needs met while putting our wants aside.
Neurochemically speaking, this makes no sense whatsoever. And trying to be happy and content all the time makes us gullible and vulnerable and prone to cognitive biases. It can lead to a variety of personal, interpersonal, and societal problems, not to mention some very odd perspectives.
Sometime last year I came across an article by a coach or therapist who was giving blanket permission, so to speak, for people to aim for being ordinary. This really seemed to have struck a nerve as hundreds of people commenting expressed enormous relief at being let off the hook! They just wanted to be happy and content. They didn’t want to feel obliged to accomplish anything.
Initially I wondered why anyone would need permission from someone else for that. But then I realized nearly everyone described the push to accomplish or excel as coming from outside themselves. They didn’t appear to have any meaningful intrinsic ambitions or aspirations.
That’s often where we end up when we aim for being happy and content—and ordinary. We lose touch with what we want, leaving ourselves at the effect of what the world tells us to want. We can’t identify a juicy desired outcome to save our lives. Our locus of control shifts from internal to external. We actually experience more distress and pressure than we would if we were actively pursuing something that mattered to us.
Yes, most of us have the freedom to live as small and contained a life as we decide to live, focused on our own happiness, being content with the status quo, without ambition or aspiration. But we only have that freedom because our ancestors as far back as the Pleistocene were not able to make such a choice. They were too focused on surviving (and, as it turns out, doing a lot of those other things I identified as being part of my satisfying and meaningful life). If they had had the ability to choose to pursue happiness and contentment, and had made that choice, we wouldn’t be here today trying to see how low we can set the bar and how comfortable we can feel about sitting the game out.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
—Michelangelo Buonarroti
It’s our human nature to see problems and try to solve them; to sometimes take risks instead of shoring up our safety; to experience a wide variety of emotions, both joyful and painful; to want (and want to create) many different things, tangible or intangible, perhaps seemingly out of reach; to fail a lot and occasionally succeed. It’s human, most of all, to get out on the field and into the game!