The Elements of Lifestyle is a trusty companion for your next existential crisis.

Chasing the Ball around the Gym

Some people whiteboard; I shoot hoops at the gym.

Running around an empty half-court, throwing a leather ball at and occasionally through a 10 ft. high orange fiberglass hoop over and over and over again—that’s when I do most of my best work. Now, when I say work, I’m not necessarily referring to anything of great importance. Sometimes it’s a joke or an awesomely bad pun to tell my girlfriend (which will almost certainly be met with an eye roll and a sigh), sometimes it’s the beginning and end to a blog post like this one, and sometimes it’s “work” work, like putting together an algorithm or considering what data means.

It’s not until I’m driving home that I start to work on my shot. In just the last few weeks alone, I’ve come to the following realizations at stop lights: My shot is beautiful when my thumb is as far away from my forefinger as possible; When my right foot over-pronates, I’m more likely to be off balance; When my hands are dry, my grip suffers and my shot becomes more erratic. I would think about all this while I’m at the gym, but man, I’d never get anything done.

To be sure, I still think I suck at most of the things I just mentioned, including basketball. But I shudder to think at just how bad I’d be if I didn’t allow myself the freedom to get away from it all from time to time. Yeah, it’s just a leather ball, and it’s rolling away from me because I forgot to focus on the back of the rim. But it’s also a lede, an NP-Complete problem, and the Pope shitting in the woods.

Seneca the Badass

In addition to being at the forefront of Stoic thought and misquoted in any number of bad Tumblr posts, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) was a prolific essayist and playwright, a wildly successful investment banker, and an advisor to Roman Emperors and scholars alike.

He also had the single most metal death of all time.

Though he had tutored Nero, the last Emperor in the Juio-Claudian dynasty, from the time he was 11, Seneca nonetheless stood accused of being a part of a larger conspiracy to assassinate him, and was ordered, along with a handful of others, to commit suicide in AD 65. He tried slitting his wrists, but, due in equal parts to age and the low resting pulse that comes with being a Stoic, he bled extremely slowly. So he had the arteries behind his knees cut. Same deal there. He knew a guy who could get him some poison, so he drank that. But again, nothing happened. He was eventually led to the steam baths, where he suffocated. On his way there, he turned to his friends and loved ones who had already begun to mourn him, and said (paraphrasing here), “Why are you crying? I’m the one that’s dying.”

Something to keep in mind the next time you think you’re the one having a bad day.

Profiles in Being Stuck

“I’m 48 years old and still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” my former manager and mentor admitted during a conversation we had at the peak of the recession. “Well, that’s not true. I just cant get off the treadmill of making money to pursue it. I take the LSAT every couple of years. I get accepted each time to Yale, Harvard, Michigan and Stanford. I never go. I guess I just take the test to remind myself I have that option.”

In Series 2 of the U.K. version of The Office, Tim Canterbury, the prototypical (and better) version of Jim Halpert played by Martin Freeman, recites an old adage about changing careers: “It’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than halfway up one you don’t.” Poignant and eminently re-tweetable, sure, but I think I like my manager’s metaphor better.  There are no consequences, after all, except for maybe mind-numbing apathy, if you stop and take a break while on a ladder. Sure, you’re stuck in a job that bores the ever-loving shit out of you, but it’s not like the bottom’s about to fall out. There’s no risk of flying off of a ladder, literally or figuratively, unless you’re flat out doing it wrong.

Make no mistake about it, though, my former manager is definitely on a treadmill.

“My wife is pushing me to take this full time job,” he said, referring to prospect of making permanent the interim CIO gig he’s held for a few months at a college about two hours away from home. “The kids would get to go to school here for free, which would save me 35k a year. She likes the idea of benefits, free college tuition, and four weeks of paid vacation.”

“So you gonna do it?” I asked.

“Ahhh fuck, I don’t know. I like it here and it would sure be better if my family was here with me, but it would be a big cut in pay.”

It’s important to stop and clarify that the “big cut” being referred to is roughly the difference between making an unbelievably large amount of money as a consultant, which he’s done for the last 27 years, and making a ludicrous-but-totally-believable amount of money as a full time employee.  Total first world dilemma, I know, but when you’ve lived your life like a rolling stone gathering an ever-increasing number of kids, an epic house, expensive habits, and a wife in place of the far more economical moss, you’re still entitled to an existential dilemma or two.

And you really start to realize that this treadmill goes to 11.

I worked in an office once that was so soul crushing that, upon learning I had been offered a promotion, a veteran co-worker pulled me aside and said, “Get out while you still can.”

“So why are you still here?” I asked.

He didn’t have a good answer for me, or at least one that was memorable enough to repeat at any length here. But I remember thinking that he sounded like a soldier stuck on a remote island for the last 45 years, not realizing that the war was over, or worse, that his family was being held hostage. He was acutely aware that there were greener pastures, but he was too complacent or psychologically crippled to pursue them. But it’s not exactly like he had anything forcing his hand, either. Talk about being stuck on a ladder.

Raise Anchor

Two summers ago as Michael Phelps was busy cleaning up at the Beijing Olympics, much was being made of his diet, which, you may recall, consisted of the kind of fare that lands ordinary humans on The Biggest Loser: an entire pizza, a pound of pasta, two ham and cheese sandwiches… and that was just lunch. And yet despite his 12,000 calorie a day intake, Phelps publicly lamented his inability to weigh more than 194 pounds—an annoyance for someone trying to generate more power in the pool, but something to aspire to for many folks watching at home.

The thing that struck me about The Michael Phelps Diet was not his superfluous mayonnaise consumption just to make weight, it was the fact that with nearly every mention of fried eggs and chocolate chip pancakes came a disclaimer from a healthcare practitioner essentially saying to the general public, “Please don’t try this.” At the time, I didn’t see why this was even necessary. I mean, surely nobody thinks it’s a good idea to eat 12,000 calories in a day, right?

I was missing the point.

Clearly, everybody knows that eating a week’s worth of food for lunch is a poor decision unless you’re an elite athlete. That’s not what this was about. The warnings were necessary because when people read that Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day while he’s training, what they really read is “chiseled aquatic multi-millionaire eats without consequence, bangs hot model,” perhaps overlooking the part where he spends six hours a day in the pool. This is an example of anchoring, a natural tendency to assign importance or attention to something based on inherent desires while ignoring other information that might otherwise inform our decision making. It’s the same reason we’re likely to overeat when we’re hanging out with skinny friends who can “eat whatever they want”: it’s not so much a matter of assuming that the same rules that apply to others also apply to us; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what those rules are to begin with, driven largely by the innate human compulsion to believe in magic bullets. When the outcome is delicious comfort food, it’s perfectly natural for us to infer advice from the example of others.

But unlike Michael Phelps’s meal plan, most things in life don’t come with a disclaimer, and that can be a problem for the ever-increasing number of people who can’t easily silence the part of their brain that wants to kill them with food. Take, for instance, the Travel Channel show Man v. Food. Though admittedly a little husky, host Adam Richman never gains a considerable amount of weight from one show to the next, taking on one insane food challenge after another. Instead, the only thing he appears to gain from finishing a human infant-sized burrito in the time allotted is a rare guitar, his picture on a wall, and a kiss from an attractive lady. And that’s all the information we have when we watch Man v. Food; the producers leave it up to us to be an adult about things and treat the show as entertainment, not a grocery list. You wouldn’t know, then, that Richman fasts for a day leading up to his biggest food challenges and works out with a trainer twice daily while he’s on the road, or that he eats just enough to get enough footage for the shot and eats like a saint when cameras aren’t rolling, or that he regularly has his cholesterol, liver enzymes, and blood lipids checked. You’d have to Google that.

I know. Not bloody likely, right?

Merlin Mann made a 40-minute video the other day about the fallacy of shallow internet advice (the explicit kind), and how it necessarily keeps people from being anything more than Advanced Beginners. It is a natural human tendency, he argues, to seek out advice on things we have a passing interest in when we’re not sure who we want to be when we wake up in the morning. The problem, again, is not the availability of said information, it’s that we are seldom mindful enough to stop and question a) if the person giving it is even remotely qualified, and b) whether or not they have a disincentive to really help us get to the point where we no longer require their advice.

The real danger in giving our attention to advice on which we have no intention of acting lies not in the lack of any sort of real progression or the double motives of shady internet publishers, it’s the mental rabbit hole that invariably follows. It leads to us creating preconditions for beginning things that we weren’t motivated enough to just do, and wondering later where time went when we realize what it was we really wanted to be doing all along. “I can’t start running until I have the right shoes,” you find yourself saying. “What am I looking for in a midsole? Maybe I should find an article about lacing methods. Do I need that Runner’s World book about eating?” Dude, just run. It’s like the one thing your body already knows how to (sort of) do. Pretty soon you find yourself not so much anchoring, but doing whatever the masturbatory opposite of anchoring is that makes you focus on everything except the one thing you ostensibly wanted to do.

I had enough to write about for the first few months after I started The Elements of Lifestyle, but sometime in mid-August posting dropped off considerably. (Read: Entirely.) It wasn’t because I ran out of things to say, either—I had simply become lost in a rabbit hole. I had read a piece Kurt Vonnegut had written with advice to students about writing, and got stuck on one particular point.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

This was, on the surface, a point about the importance of the economical use of language, but I read it as, “Nobody cares and nobody wants to read your bullshit.” And so I found myself second-guessing everything I wanted to write until I was too crippled to write anything at all. I’m hesitant to call it writer’s block; I had plenty to say, after all, I just chose to otherwise spend that time coming up with perfectly good reasons not to say it.

Figuratively speaking, I wanted to drill a hole in my brain like the guy at the end of Darren Aronofsky’s movie Pi until I received a nice message from someone I went to high school with and with whom I’d since fallen out of contact. Not only had he read everything I’d written up to that point, but he seemed to genuinely enjoy having read it. I realized then that I had read Vonnegut’s Point Seven all wrong. Clearly, the only person I pitied was myself.

It’s funny how we make terrible decisions when we stop thinking for ourselves, if only for a second, or start to look outward for meaning where there’s no meaning to be found. Indeed, nothing is more poisonous to idle minds than the example of others. Having at least some idea of what it is that you value, then, becomes essential to making it through the day.

Being an adult is hard work.