#73: How to practise being instead of doing
Look at you there, always striving, always becoming, always hustling. When do you ever get to pause and just ... be? Do you even know how? Plenty of us don't. We had no problem just chilling and enjoying the moment when we were kids, but somewhere along the way, we lost that ability. We don't know how to enjoy life any more. In which case, what's the point of any of this? Put your existential angst on ice, friend, because The Academic Imperfectionist has you covered.
Go here (and thank you!) if you'd like to donate to my fundraising for the brain injury charity, Headway.
Read Laura Vanderkam's short article about savouring here.
Reference:
Bryant, F. B. and Veroff, J. 2007: Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (Routledge).
Episode transcript:
Why can’t you just be?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, my imperfectionist chums. How are you doing? Do you remember episode #65: Reflections on a recent failure? I made that episode after failing to complete a marathon back in July. I made it 20 miles and then had to drop out, frustratingly close to the end. Well, the next marathon is looming. Marathon Eryri, or Snowdonia for you non-Welsh. It’s happening the day after this episode is released. As you can imagine, after July’s DNF experience - did not finish - I have unfinished business with marathons (pun intended). And aside from that, I’m trying to raise money for Headway, the brain injury charity, in support of a wonderful friend who suffered a traumatic brain injury back in June - he’s currently doing fantastically well, by the way. If you feel able to send a donation of any amount, I will be incredibly grateful - you can visit my fundraising site: justgiving.com/page/marathonsformarcus - I’ll put the link in the episode notes.
As you might be able to imagine, the last marathon attempt was barely over before my thoughts were turning to the next one. I mean, obviously I paused to reflect on the experience (and made a podcast episode about it), and obviously I dialled down my running so that I could recover before diving into training for the next one - but mentally, I was all, ‘what’s next?’ I have plenty of coaching clients, colleagues, and friends who do this too. They achieve something they’ve been working towards, and the moment it happens, their thoughts are turning to the next challenge. Until recently, I never saw anything remotely problematic with this approach. If anything, I thought of it as healthy and wholesome. That ‘identify your core values’ exercise that I keep encouraging you to have a go at, and which you can find on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website? The first time I did that exercise, which was about 3 years ago, I identified my most fundamental value as Personal Growth. I felt I constantly had to be developing and improving in some way. Because if I wasn’t, I’d be stagnating, right? Classic binary thinking. Either you’re hustling or you’re stagnant.
I started suspecting that maybe this focus on personal growth isn’t as healthy as I’d thought when I started seeing how it would manifest in coaching clients. People would be working towards some goal - finishing a project, getting a job, whatever - and then the second they succeeded (or so it seemed) they’d start thinking about the next challenge. Sometimes I’d have to say, ‘Wait a minute, shall we pause and think about what you’ve just achieved and how you’re going to celebrate it?’ I don’t mean that they weren’t pleased when they got where they’d been trying to get. It was more the background assumption that of course this was never going to be enough - it wouldn’t do just to sit back and enjoy life without turning towards some other challenge. The idea that maybe it would be ok to just be wasn’t on the radar. Successful, worthwhile people are those who are constantly striving, constantly hustling. They’re never just complacently sitting back and chilling, at least not for long.
Which is … incoherent, when you stop to think about it. The idea that successful people are those who are constantly in a process of growing and becoming, never in a state of simply being. Because why would you be in a state of growing and becoming unless you or something about your life wasn’t acceptable in its current state; in other words, unless you aren’t yet successful? It doesn’t make sense. Consider how this idea plays out in religion. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and no doubt more, are all structured around the idea that our earthly efforts are directed towards something: heaven, paradise, nirvana, a state where the striving stops and you level up to a higher state where you get to just be. We see this in Ancient philosophy too. For Aristotle, we develop the virtues in order to attain a state of eudaimonia, which translates as something like happiness or flourishing. Achieving ataraxia - an ongoing state of mental tranquility - is the goal of Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism. I’m glossing over a lot of nuance here, but my point is that throughout history and across the world, it’s been common for religions and world-views to include some reassurance that your existence isn’t just hustling and suffering all the way down. There’s an end state where it all becomes worth it.
That doesn’t sit well with you, though, does it? Even though, in all probability, you’ve been raised in a culture that emphasises the idea of an ultimate reward. If any of these religions turn out to be correct, you’d gain admittance into heaven and you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. You’d have everything you needed, there’d be no more pain, and the teachings of every major world religion state unambiguously that your body would be 99.9% dopamine (just kidding, at least until Andrew Huberman makes a podcast episode on the physiology of the afterlife) - and you’d be there going, seriously, is this it? I’m just supposed to hang out at this banquet forever, not even thinking about SMART goals, like a complete loser?? It’s the striving, the becoming, that gives you your sense of purpose - always has been. Can you even imagine what life might be like without it?
So, let’s say, instead, that you don’t give up the striving and the becoming. That’s all you do, right up until the end, and if the end is not really the end, then you carry on striving and becoming after that too. There’s no end state of serenity and bliss in which you’re just being. Am I painting an attractive picture here? I’m not sure it would really sell as a religion. You suffer and strive throughout your life, then you die, and you suffer and strive through the afterlife. But that’s, effectively, what a lot of us are doing. We get into a mindset where we’re always doing, always becoming, never simply being. There’s no stopping to smell the flowers. We never allow ourselves to enjoy the fruits of our efforts for long - instead we move on quickly and start planting new fruits. So, what’s in it for us? Is the striving its own reward?
Here’s what I think what’s in it for us. It’s not that we keep on striving because we find the striving itself rewarding. Usually, we do think there will be a reward for our successes - financial security, a nice home, making a contribution to society, or whatever it might be. But when we reach our goals and there comes an opportunity to pause and enjoy what we’ve achieved and just be for a change, we find we don’t know how. For one thing, we’re used to being in striving mode, and turning that off feels weird. But also, it’s scary - so scary that it’s often easier just to throw ourselves into the next challenge so we don’t have to think about it. Because pausing to be instead of to do, after the initial ‘I’ve done it’ euphoria has subsided, raises questions like: is this all there is? Is this as good as it gets? Was it really worth it, for this? And the answer to those scary existential questions is both yes and no. No, it’s not all there is, and it’s not as good as it gets, in the sense that of course you can carry on and do more things, if you want. On the other hand, if you lack the skill to pause and enjoy the things you’ve achieved, then the answer might be yes, this is all there is, and yes, this is as good as it gets. Is it worth it? Well, that’s for you to decide - but if you’re going to throw so much effort into achieving your goals then it makes sense to ensure that you’re capable of enjoying your achievements, doesn’t it?
So, what if you don’t have that skill - you just don’t know how to sit back and enjoy something, you’re not comfortable with pausing and just being? Well, then you need to develop it - and I’m directing this advice to myself just as much as to you. And you need to develop it as a priority, because without it, there’s no point striving for those things you’re striving for. But, how? And, is it even possible?
Of course it is. You used to have this skill. Think back to when you were a child, and doing something you enjoyed. Children know how to enjoy the moment. But somewhere along the way we tell ourselves - or someone else tells us - that it’s bad to just enjoy the moment. We need to be productive. We need direction. We frame things in that binary way I mentioned earlier, where we need to be striving, and if we’re not striving, we’re stagnating. Stagnating means being still and unproductive in a bad sense, where things are about to decay, where nothing can flourish, except perhaps mosquitos. But there’s a positive sort of just being, too, and it’s actually what lots of us seem to want: coaching clients, when I ask what the ultimate aim is, talk about wanting to reach a stage of life where they’re satisfied, at peace, where things feel tranquil and free and easy - descriptions that are not a million miles from the end states promised by religions around the world. The problem is this: if you don’t know how to pause and enjoy life right now, what makes you think you’d be able to do so later, at some undefined future point when you’ve achieved everything you want to achieve?
Okay - so, you need to give up the idea that you’re either striving or stagnating, with nothing in between. Because the in between - the space between striving and decay - is actually where you’re trying to get. Next, practise pausing and enjoying life. Practise just being. It’s hard and awkward at first, I know. To help, I have a strategy I want to offer you. It’s an idea popularised by the psychologists Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff in their 2006 book, Savoring. That book contains some great suggestions for how to, well, savour positive moments in your life. One suggestion is what they call a daily vacation exercise. Think of the way you view an upcoming vacation: you look forward to it, you think about how you’re going to spend your time during it, and when it arrives, if you’re lucky, you spent at least some of the time allowing yourself to switch off and do relaxing and enjoyable things without feeling guilty about it. The trouble is, for many of us, vacations like that don’t happen very often. A few times a year, if we’re lucky. But what if you took a vacation every day? Even for just twenty minutes. Twenty minutes that you could look forward to, plan something enjoyable to do, and then do it without giving yourself a hard time about it. That’s the idea behind the daily vacation: you take the mindset you usually adopt to the longer vacations that you get to enjoy only a few times a year, and you apply it to smaller, more frequent pockets of time. Times when, perhaps, you’d otherwise be scrolling through email or procrastinating about going to the gym. There’s a great summary of Bryant and Veroff’s ideas about savouring written by Laura Vanderkam on the TED website - I’ll link to it in the episode notes.
What it all comes down to is this. There’s no point striving for goals if you’re unable to pause and enjoy what you’ve achieved once you’ve achieved it. And pausing to enjoy what you’ve achieved - and, more generally, allowing yourself to stop doing and just be - is a skill that you need to develop, or at least rediscover. But you can do it. You can do it if you’re willing to peel back the layers of nonsense that we’ve piled on top of the idea of being - nonsense that leads us to think that striving is the only acceptable way to live. And you need to make the effort here. Don’t kid yourself that it will happen naturally, when eventually you’ve achieved enough - that, at some point, magically, you’ll attain the capacity to relax and say to yourself, ‘this is what it was all about!’ Because that capacity doesn’t come from achieving more and more. It’s not like a computer game, where you complete enough tasks to unlock a new level where you actually get to enjoy life. It needs to come from you, now, not later.
Take care, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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