We have enough, slow down
A friend of mine, who happens to help develop a lot of the content gave me some words of wisdom recently. I told him I was having trouble writing articles. I enjoy writing. It’s not great literature and what it does do is help me communicate information as well as hone my message regarding health and longevity.
His words of advice, and I’m paraphrasing, were start by writing what you feel—not what you are trying to say.
Which got me thinking about what I am feeling recently. It’s an odd time. Look around. It’s just weird. From political polarization, to warning about AI superintelligence, horrible regional conflicts impacting global economies, midterm elections and all the noise we can’t escape. But there was something larger bothering me and in thinking about it, it crystallizes for me in two words.
Noise and abundance.
The noise is the constant clanging of social media: look at me; the world is ending; AI will rise up and destroy humanity; I have the cure; this is the one thing you need to do today on your iPhone; reminders to do this today on your app… It. Never. Ends.
Abundance refers to a concept I have thought about for quite a while. The concept of enough. Enough money and material possessions to have a good life. Not only for me and my family but for the wider human race. There is enough, when you really think about it, for every person to have enough and to take care of every person if we really wanted to do so.
This noise has only been made worse as I’ve spent more time on social media as our son, Chance, is in the midst of recruiting season for a place to play lacrosse in college (that process deserves a post of its own). Insane is being kind to the level of pressure the process places on parents and most importantly young men and women. More on the results of that later in the post.
As I’ve tried to discern what all this means I’ve spent a lot of time doing two things very intentionally. The first is praying. I take time every day to do that through reading the Bible and being quiet, allowing God to speak with me. Sometimes there is just silence, occasionally my mind settles on a passage I’ve read or a reflection I’ve heard. It helps me to know—and I firmly believe it to be true—that there is way more to our existence than this life. Trying to prepare for that eventuality today keeps me humble and asking questions, mostly of myself.
The second thing I did recently was to purchase a magazine subscription. An actual physical magazine to read! (I only stopped getting a physical newspaper two years ago). The articles are 6-10 pages long and in starting to read them I realized how very out of practice I am at sitting in one place for 20 minutes actually reading. It is also something I love to do. It has forced me to slow down and really focus my attention on absorbing a well written article. The reward is when finished, I feel like I actually accomplished something as opposed to doom scrolling or even reading articles on my phone from my news feed.
So I have thought about those things in light of what I am seeing in my patients and in speaking to hundreds of business leaders as I travel around the country. Anyone involved in a particular endeavor long enough will see trends. The term pattern recognition is used. If you’ve been a teacher, businessman, farmer, doctor, etc. after 10-15 years you can predict what is going to happen in a particular situation. It’s not foolproof as life continues to keep you humble as you navigate unique circumstances at any one specific time. Nonetheless the pattern recognition persists.
So what is the pattern I am seeing today? Quite simply it is the end result of a treadmill that continues to speed up, ever so slightly over time until you get to the point that you are flung off the back of it after reaching the breaking point. It’s the old Lucille Ball skit at the end of the candy assembly line when her and Ethel can no longer keep up with the machine pushing out candies to wrap. It’s worth 3 minutes of your time.
A lot of people feel like this. No matter how successful, how much money, how big your company, how well off you are, you always want (and are told to want) more. In many ways, this is what has made America the country it is today: relentlessly pushing the boundaries of what is possible. In real terms we have more material success than any society in the history of the world. But there is a downside to that relentlessness.
I’m going to pause here to recalibrate a bit. There are people who have to work two jobs to put food on their family’s table. They are one large medical bill away from homelessness. Every day is a struggle. These are fellow citizens who have worked hard and fallen behind.
Their situations are not uncommon and require a concerted effort by their friends, neighbors, society; you and I, to lend a hand until they can get back on their feet and find stability. They are fellow human beings who deserve respect and help. I am not referring to them as having enough, to be clear.
But for most of us with a roof over our head, food on our table, clothes on our back and enough financial resources to buy the nice cell phone, car and occasionally eat out, there eventually arises a question. Truly, how much is enough?
Once you have all of the above, and you can take the occasional vacation and have a bit of money in the bank is when the spiral starts to happen. Because then you make apparently logical choices. Like staying at work that extra hour or two and missing your son’s soccer game. Saying no to a friend asking you out for dinner to talk because you are too ‘busy’. (As an aside that is a word I would like banned from the English language.) Delaying or cancelling that trip you had planned with friends because something ’came up’ at work. All of these decisions, at the time, were logical and had good reasoning behind them. The one thing you may have missed in the calculation is the opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost is the experience, relationship, or opportunity we forgo when we choose to spend our limited time and attention somewhere else. For many of us that means working, scrolling, being consumed in some endeavor and not fully realizing the impact and how it degrades the life we actually want to live. I am guilty of the above when I do this while seated at dinner and am looking at my phone instead of talking with my family.
It is what you give up by choosing to do ‘x’. Choosing to not see that friend for dinner may not mean anything significant unless he/she has something they need to speak with you about. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to another. Opportunities expire. Your ability to take that trip today is different than taking that trip 10 years from now.
Finally, and most importantly, compounding works in all aspects of your life. Compound interest in investments is what many of us are taught. Start saving, add to it regularly and that 401K plan will make you a millionaire in 30 years. The same is true in other aspects of your life, like movement or meditation. 15 minutes a day for 30 days and you will see remarkable improvements. Imagine it over 10 or 20 years. The same is true with relationships.
I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunity cost being 62 years old. As I tell my wife Amy, while I am not at the end, I can see the finish line. She loves it when I say that. Today I am able to do pretty much anything I want to do, physically and cognitively. 20 years from now I’d like to be skiing somewhere. That’s the goal.
But life often has a funny way of intervening when we least expect it. As the saying goes, ‘no one is guaranteed tomorrow’. May God grant me a few more tomorrows.
Slowing down is hard. How much is enough? Every person has to answer that question for themselves. I’m willing to bet it is less than you think. Unfortunately, in our society we are taught to constantly, consciously and unconsciously, compare ourselves to others. It takes someone with a fair amount of inner peace to make that very real decision, I am there. As I recently told Chance, the only person you need to compare yourself to is the person in the mirror.
So, what happened with Chance, and the recruitment process to play lacrosse?
After going through a pretty grueling process, physically but more so emotionally, he has been offered an opportunity to play lacrosse at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. It is a highly competitive program with, just as importantly, strong academics and a very good business school. He has accepted and will start the admissions process in a year.
As parents, you want what is best for your children. At some point they must take all those lessons you have tried to teach and head out into the world. Both his parents are incredibly proud of him and all he has done to reach this accomplishment. More importantly we are proud of the young man he is becoming.
My encouragement to each of us is to look critically at our life, be conscious of those opportunities, and decide when it is enough. Don’t miss the sign that says rough roads ahead. It may be sooner than you realize.
Be well.
