Does it Bring You Joy or Chaos?

Disclaimer: This is not an advice column, it's more like true confessions.

So, I’m pretty busy, I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, and I’ve got a lot of things to take care of. There’s nothing special here - I’m actually just living the American dream where if something is good, surely more is even better. Stuff and doing stuff is all too often what we are, and what we do. I’m acknowledging it’s a spectrum disorder, but I’m on the wrong end of it. My wife is on the other end - which reminds me on a daily basis that I have other options.

For example, I recently started deleting 4000 plus email because I didn’t want to clutter this brand-new laptop with lots of useless garbage. Kind of like when you move to a new house and take a bunch of boxes of dubious stuff with you. That would be the same crap which you didn’t have time to go through the last time you moved, and yet here it is again - going into the new attic. And it’s not just the physical junk I’m talking about.

In and amongst the thousands of emails that I deleted was one on how to declutter your garage (life) which I’d obviously never read or paid attention to. The only part that caught my eye on this recent pass, was where the author pointed out the importance of doing this declutter thing on a regular basis. Like so many areas of life, reflection and reconfiguring makes sense. But that takes maturity and nobody should want too much of that. . . I’ve tried many times to clean up my act.

During my freshman year at college I was searching for a general ed course that would fit in between my premed classes and labs. An economics 101 course fit the bill, and to my surprise, I learned important things like the relationships between marginal costs and marginal gains. It’s a very cool and important principal for economists and business people but I’m still trying to internalize it.

The take-home message for me was: If I have all that I need, and all that I have time to fully enjoy, I get diminishing returns by buying more stuff or doing more things. For me to buy just one more guitar would be a prime example of foolishness if I rarely have time to play any of the three I already own. If I were a collector of guitars that would be a different story. But I buy them, deluding myself into thinking I’ll actually play them - when so many two-wheeled vehicles, wings, keyboards, tools, skis and lenses are all clamoring for my attention.

Whitney McClintock - The Record.com - Five Time World Champion (but not my hygienist)

Cost Versus Benefit Analysis

So many of the things we intentionally bring into our lives have obvious benefits but also unintentional costs, including opportunity costs. We so often find that relationships are the most common sacrifice made at the altar of our business. Our frenetic lives allow little time to reflect on our priorities and the small things that assure us that it’s good and right to be here. Those small things would be the ones with negligible costs and under-rated gains.

Occasionally, as I’ve slowed down a little, I’ve gotten fleeting glimpses of a more balanced life. One where I prioritize what truly brings me at least happiness if not actual joy. Paradoxically those things range from the most complex and extravagant, like flying, to the simplest - like spending quality time with my family. Building connections with people outside my usual circles is also becoming increasingly meaningful.

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“These are the good ole days” can morph into “These are the good old moments.”

For instance, last month I rode my bike across town to get my routine dental cleaning and check-up, and it went well. My wife and I had moved from the mountains of Upstate New York to the plains of Wisconsin only two months before the worst pandemic in a century. It was downright exciting to see that the staff in my “new” dental office actually had faces and teeth.

Somehow through the forty-five minutes of skillful scraping, picking, probing and buffing, we got to share stories. Who would have known that the hygienist I’ve seen, maybe five times, was a mother, wife and semi-pro water skier who is passing on that passion to her kids.

In between mandatory mouth openings, I shared stories of early fall, sunrise water-skiing adventures on our upstate lakes. She shared the joy of watching her kids take to the water like she had. As the subject of recent storms came up, she voiced her frustration with her husband’s procrastination about getting their car repaired from hail damage a few months ago. And then she shared her embarrassed joy over the more recent pummeling of the same car in another hail storm while at work. She can now get the insurance to legitimately fix the old and new damage.

The dentist came in after the cleaning and asked what I’d done over the long Memorial Day weekend. I explained it was good but clarified that it was a work weekend as we helped my son and his lady friend paint their new house. She shared how her weekend was also filled with labor - as she and her husband completed the teardown of their barn after the recent tornado removed and relocated it’s roof. That storm that we sat out in our basement went from abstract to very real as she related her experience.

Over the course of forty-five minutes, we three went from being just hygienist, dentist and patient to three humans, connected by previously unrecognized threads - and it was good stuff.