#36 / Happy, Meaningful, and Rich
Hey y’all,
We’ve had too many overcast days in a row. Normally I love this kind of brooding weather, but like anyone I don’t like to go too long without at least seeing the sun. And living at the eastern edge of a time zone as we do, it is now getting dark by 5 o’clock. To top it off, starting tomorrow Chicago is once again under a lockdown, although this time it is “advisory” rather than a mandate.
Of course, we were already basically locked down, anyway, so nothing much is changing for us. We were already resigned to a long and stifling winter—not that this makes it much easier to deal with. Some of the things we’re doing to keep ourselves sane include: putting out winter decorations early; refocusing on cooking healthy meals; watching light movies and TV shows, reading books, and playing games; acquiring more plants.
At least it’s not going to get cold cold for a little while here. Given that I’ve been working 100% at home for so long, though, I think I’m going to have to keep getting outside no matter how cold it gets. Hopefully you will be doing the same. Let’s all stay sane together!
The Psychologically Rich Life
This short article in Scientific American opened a window of insight for me. The “psychologically rich” life is pitched as a new, third alternative in the classic debate about whether it is better to pursue a happy life or a meaningful life. It includes elements of happiness and meaning as well, but instead of focusing on either of those, it prizes “complex mental engagement, a wide range of deep, intense emotions, and diverse, novel, and interesting experiences.”
Reading that was revelatory; I felt seen and validated. I’ve spent a lot of time pursuing happiness in the form of social status and career or artistic achievement. When I created a book-tracking app a few years ago, I wanted to have fun and build something useful, but I ended up getting sucked into the lean startup movement and tried to turn it into a business. It didn’t work because that’s not what I wanted in life; it turned out that what I liked about the project was the psychological richness of it—the creativity, the interesting problems—not the opportunity to make a bunch of money and make a name for myself.
Since then, I’ve had an idea in my head that entrepreneurship wasn’t what I was meant to do in life, and that I needed to figure out what I was meant to do. A lot of writers I enjoy and respect talk about how important meaning is, and how to listen for your calling and follow it. But the harder I tried to discover my calling, the more elusive it seemed to become. Then I read about the idea of multipotentiality, which is a theory that some people don’t have a single calling or purpose in life—they have the ability and the preference to develop many different skills and pursue many different interests. Whether this is a scientifically robust theory or not, it fit my experience, and it gave me permission to think differently about how I make choices.
Multipotentiality and psychological richness might be different ways to describe the same thing, or they might be complementary. Regardless, what these ideas tell me is that I can find both happiness and meaning in curiosity and experience itself, and that paradoxically, I can be both happier and more purposeful by giving up the search entirely.
Podcasts
This recent episode of On Being, with guest Resmaa Menakem, is probably the best, most powerful podcast episode I’ve ever listened to. I don’t want to say too much about it, just because I feel like I couldn’t present it in the way that Resmaa and Krista present it, and it’s such an important, nuanced discussion. It’s about race and trauma and how we feel these things in our bodies, how to notice them, and how to build better practices that move us toward wholeness.
Mood
Islands — “The Weekend”
I wasn’t sure whether to go with or against the weather for this pick. I settled on an upbeat song, because I think we all probably need it. Also, I’ve continued to be on an Islands kick for the last couple weeks, and since the first song I sent you was very pensive, I wanted to demonstrate that Islands also makes really exuberant, danceable stuff, too.
The Weekend - song by Islands | Spotify
Islands · Song · 2016
If you received this email from a friend, you can sign up here.
Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron