I created a new podcast with my friend and colleague Morgan Watt. If you like Daily Zen, I think you’ll enjoy it.

You can listen here.

It’s easier than ever before to plug yourself into the news matrix and get 24/7 push notifications for dreadful headlines about whatever stuff your ideological biases predispose you to obsess over.

This new highly-advanced information delivery system is obviously dangerous and unhealthy. I try to read the news a few times a week, usually relying on three link dumps: one left, one right, one center. If bias is unavoidable, we might as well try to understand the various lines and where they intersect.

On every side of this multi-dimensional coin there’s mostly sensational bad news. But it’s funny — maybe 10% of the stories I read are positive and uplifting, with no real bias whatsoever. Whenever I see these I sigh and thing, “Why isn’t there more good news?” The weirdest thing is that these ‘good’ stories come across as the most sensational of all, precisely because they’re presented as being so uncommon. “What?!? Good news???” Meanwhile, the bad stuff is presented almost as if it’s the only stuff.

Maybe it’s a Freudian death drive or our natural penchant for comfy misery, but I have a feeling most news will remain relatively sensational and pessimistic on every side of the political compass for the foreseeable future. But all we have to do is look around to remember that, in most places, things are ok. People are wandering around doing their jobs, looking for love and raising families. It’s unglamorous and unsensational, but it’s not tragic. The more sensational something is, the more intrigue it carries. But extreme events are extreme because they are not the norm.

As if the information itself isn’t suspect enough, we project our own insecurities and immaturities onto the events of the world, symbolically experiencing events we never actually experience through a double lens of narcissism and pessimism. This is like trying to drive the autobahn with a sleep mask on.

Here’s the crucial thing to remember if the news of the day drags you down: bad things generate the most press precisely because they are rare. But when you catalog every extreme outlying event happening in the world in one place, you’d be hard pressed not to feel a sense of impending doom. And, on top of this already chaotic milieu, if you filter every event through a specific ideology, there’s a way to make anythingseem like a massive victory or a massive tragedy. Our news is the most modern form of entertainment we have. It’s reality exaggerated and reinterpreted as tragicomic spectacle.

The saddest part is that, when we spend more time consuming this information than actually living, we project the symbolic misery onto the actual world. Strangers who look like people we don’t like become people we don’t like for no reason other than assumption. Little things become dramatic symptoms of some abstract illness in society. The stuff of day-to-day life becomes tinged with a virtual pessimism. And for what? We invent this virtual misery to avoid having to confront the unglamorous everyday challenges of reality.

The solution? Take all of your content less seriously. When the lines between virtuality and reality, ad and content, image and reality, are blurred, it’s not fake news that’s the problem, it’s information in general. The symbolic can never truly reflect the real, especially when the symbolic is engineered to be virtual. When we rely purely on virtual information to inform our experience, we basically become robots. And you see a lot of folks acting this way both online and IRL, merely repeating memes and info-bits they acquired in the preceding minutes. That’s not expression; it’s excretion. It’s OK to consume junk food, just not 24/7. That will singlehandedly ruin your life pretty quickly.

This is one of the reasons why I think Zen practice is important today. It relies on immediate experience rather than symbolic consumption. You don’t learn about the world exclusively through reading or watching; that’s just part of it. The far more important part is how you experience your actual life. And, though we’re very confused about this nowadays, actual life is not just the life we’re living in front of a screen.

A loser in a basement can pretend he is influencing world events by becoming an extreme right-wing or left-wing political theorist on the internet, but he’s effectively just playing an informational video game on Twitter or Facebook. There’s not much of a bleeding edge into which that sort of discourse morphs into real experience, other than causing random strangers to fume and poke away at their respective keyboards in an infinite feedback loop of tweets and replies.

When we take the information we consume online at face value, we’re effectively no better than these keyboard commandos. Everyone I know, myself included, is somewhat guilty of this delusional pessimism projection. So let’s humble ourselves and not panic. Things aren’t that bad. Statistically, the world is the best it’s ever been.

I’ve tried being optimistic before, in different times with different version of myself. It didn’t really ever stick. I find myself remaining somewhat pragmatic, agnostic and ‘centrist’, a natural Zen position given our allergy to absolutes. But believing in ‘nothing’ isn’t really a belief system, it’s more of a regulatory mechanism that helps us not get carried away. For that, it’s very useful. However, I think we could all benefit from grabbing at the good once in a while.

The truth is that all people suffer. And most people suffer from varying degrees of the same things: love sickness, ostracism, loneliness, attachment, desperation. There are massive cultural gaps between different populations in varying levels of development or types of geographical terrain, but any two people you pick out from the world population are more similar than they are different in their core desires and motivations.

This is something to cherish and remember when things feel overwhelming. Reality is relatively uninteresting compared to the virtual epic of Good vs. Evil we subject ourselves to whenever we plug into the 21st-century informational economy. Reality is relatively good! And it’s good precisely because it’s uninteresting. It’s calm and peaceful the vast majority of the time in the vast majority of places.

There’s not a whole lot more to it, other than to remember to focus on the good, not as some delusional attempt at repression but because the reality of life is mostly good. At the very least, it’s neutral. Stuff happens, people deal with it, and we’re all very similar deep down. Our core motivators are unity, love and security. Everyone eats and shits. When you break it down to these fundamentals, humans are kinda sweet and cute, a far cry from the terrifying trigger-happy Ideology Monsters we read and read about on the internet.

I’ve been through many phases of deep pessimism and I feel like I’ve finally settled at a certain peace, an optimism that things tend to work themselves out if, both collectively and individually, we cultivate mindfulness, patience and compassion. The key realization for me was that we do these things naturally most of the time, without any magnificent effort or paradigm shift required. Things tend to resolve themselves. And if the occasional asshole doesn’t follow the natural cues, there’s plenty of other innocent people living somewhat honest and virtuous lives to balance out the scales.

Don’t ever get lost in thinking the world is doomed, or people are inherently evil. We’re inherently selfish, sure, and we occasionally slip up, but only because we want the best for ourselves. And, frankly, if we all share that desire, we tend to work together to help achieve it. We’ve been doing so for thousands of years. These countless years are merely punctuated by tragedy; tragedy is not their substance. And I believe we will continue to survive and thrive with a certain peace and innocence. The process will be more tolerable if we prioritize the real over the virtual.

PS. My new book with Penguin is out!

I could write a 1000-page listicle about all the countless oddities of modern life. Most of us can acknowledge that it’s weird living in a period of such complexity. Everything we think and do is influenced by micro-bits of information we acquire in the strangest of places throughout the day. As the systems delivering these bits of information grow more intelligent and nuanced, we’re left with a more chaotic spectrum of thoughts to process.

Romantic life is especially vulnerable to these influences. Sit through enough rom coms, primetime dramas, op-ed pieces, quote tweets and Reddit posts about love and you’ll eventually end up feeling condemned to confusion. What the hell is love, anyway? And what is it good for?

If we use entertainment or modern culture as our guide, love ends up looking like an extremely shallow series of ego projections, doomed to failure or delusion for one reason or another. It seems like it’s all about “searching”, when this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The experience of love is a direct reflection of our experience of life at large. In Buddhism, we acknowledge mindless desire as the root of all suffering. What could be a purer concentration of the experience of desire than love? And what could be more responsible for the everyday suffering of mankind than love?

That’s how it appears on the surface, at least. But nothing is so simple, especially not something as complicated as love. If love only caused us pain, it wouldn’t be one of the fundamental drivers behind all human behavior. In fact, love teaches us a lot about how desire functions. And it’s not so simple as chasing and finding, thankfully — imagine how boring life would be if that were the case! To learn to love is to learn to live. How cute.

Without love, life basically remains one-dimensional, precisely because love is the only experience that teaches us to see desire, joy, and suffering in a new light, and to grow in accordance with this heightened understanding. We see this in people who grow older without exposing themselves to any challenging or meaningful relationships, often consumed by materialism, self-pity or vapid sexual conquests.

Some lessons love teaches:

We learn that the more selfish and fantastical we are about what we desire, the harder we fall when reality fails to meet our expectations.

We learn that desire, paired with reflection and compassion, can create incredible relationships capable of allowing us to transform into our best selves.

We learn that when we let the ego, and not the true self, paint the objects of our desire, we often end up fantasizing and chasing waterfalls (thanks TLC), ignoring the beautiful people and things of our real lives. Or we become enmeshed in relationships based on false pretenses (uh oh!)

We learn that finding and experiencing love is often just a matter of remembering to look and be grateful.

We learn that love is strongest when the ego fades away and we become ‘one’ with another. It reminds us that we’re one with all things. It’s an antidote to both alienation and narcissism.

And that’s where all the chaotic cultural influences often lead us astray, as they do with just about everything else. Love is not about acquiring some ideal docile version of a person that flatters you in every way. If everyone found their perfect Hollywood ‘soul-mate’, some hot piece of ass or tall drink of water who never confronted them, challenged them, or rejected them in any way, we’d be living amongst billions of adult children. I’m sure soon there will be flattering romantic sex robots that allow adult children to remain adult children forever, but I certainly won’t be on that waiting list.

Love is the only form of desire that allows us to feel pure joy and pure yearning at the same time. Experienced in earnest, it’s the highest form of good. There’s nothing fantastical about it. There’s no healthy marriage without fighting. There’s no healthy relationship based purely on sex or flattery. When you sign up, you get the full package. You don’t get to pick and choose features based on your own projections. You might think you can, but no one gets away with this (and if someone seems ‘perfect’ they’re usually just hiding something). When we say, “I love you,” we’re accepting someone as they are. And we hope they will do the same. Because I am not perfect, and you are not perfect, and if either of us think we’re perfect we need love to remind us that perfection is not a goal nor a reality.

True love asks us to find nuance in our desire. It asks us to sacrifice, to make compromises, to let go of our narcissistic projections about what we want. It’s about acceptance, tolerance and compassion, three traits any person needs to not feel completely miserable and confused in this world.

And, in my experience, if we can learn to see love in this way, it’s really the only thing capable of saving us from ourselves. There’s no way to ‘hack’ it. You can’t buy a great relationship. You can’t fantasize one into existence. There has to be a decision to put the work into the process, to let go of the selfish part of yourself alongside someone else, embrace gifts and faults alike, challenge one another, and grow together, both as individuals and as a unit.

For some people, this means growing apart. There’s nothing tragic about that. Love is not some magical heavenly experience. It’s a process, ever-evolving alongside your own effort, your own desire to grow and help another person grow. People part ways, and this rarely ever happens by accident. There’s always a reason.

Participating in this process with the understanding that it’s a reflection of life, with all its highs and lows, allows the true lessons and beauty of love to flourish. Running in fear at the first sign of challenge is also a reflection of life, a sign that we’re not yet ready to grow. Love represents truth, and we can only tolerate as much of it as we’re ready for.

But love is always there, waiting for us. We don’t even really have to chase it down. Its lessons apply to everything we do. And it ultimately comes down to one question:

Are you willing to make yourself vulnerable, to expose yourself to reality, in order to grow and find joy and truth?

I’ll let you answer for yourself!

Wanna be my Valentine? Buy my new book. Jk I’m taken.

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity. If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kindhearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
 — Tao Te Ching, Ch. 16

Meditation is ‘boring’ by all conventional modern standards. I mean, you’re just sitting there. To an observer, you appear to be doing nothing. But doing nothing is still doing.

Most of the time, you’re doing something. Many of these somethings are important activities. But what if, in order to be able to do the somethings with excellence and precision, you need to occasionally do nothing with your full attention?

That’s how I feel about meditation these days. I’m merely balancing out external action with some internal action. Your energy and attention is finite. If you direct all of it towards the world ‘out there’, you neglect the world within. If you direct all of your energy to your inner-life, you miss out on the material world.

I took a break from meditating earlier this year. After a few weeks I noticed things that used to not bother me — a slow business day, a disappointing restaurant meal, traffic — were suddenly very powerful experiences capable of absolutely driving me up a wall. Woo! My anger was back, baby! I was not interested in stoking that old flame. Soon thereafter I started meditating again, and things lightened up. I’ve thought a lot about why.

It’s good to avoid extremes. Purely inner life (asceticism) and purely outer life (hedonism) are both extremes. Balance comes when we cultivate both sides of life, allowing for a symbiotic relationship to develop between them.

Strengthening your inner-self improves your outer-self. Strengthening your outer-self improves your inner-self.

Which is what leads me to today’s topic — boredom. Everyone gets bored. Especially today, when it’s possible to stimulate all of your senses simultaneously 24/7 at high capacity. I mean, good lord, no wonder everyone’s dopamine levels are out of wack. At times, boredom is a natural feeling. It comes and goes. But when we grab onto it and ride it around, it comes to represent a minor failure in our inner-lives, as well as an important lesson.

When I grab onto anger, I picture myself holding onto its horns for dear life as it bucks me around furiously. I’ve lost control. When we grab onto boredom, it’s feels like trying to ride a 200lb giant turtle down the freeway. We have too much desire for control but feel stuck about how to use it.

One of the benefits of meditation that took me the longest to pick up on is understanding the meaning of this balance between inner and outer life. In inner-life, we sit with our thoughts. It’s reflection time. We let them come and go, we watch. But in outer-life, we often can’t do this. We have to act, we have to do things and participate in the flow of the world.

Boredom comes when our eyes are open and yet we feel like we have nothing worthy to do. The solution is stupidly simple — close them. Look within.

These days, if I feel bored, I meditate. I take the energy that’s just staring into space waiting for something to happen and use it to look within, to reflect.

When I do this it reminds me of the aforementioned balance between inner and outer life. We can look within at any time. The questions that float around tend to eventually answer themselves. And then, when we open our eyes and return to life as we know it, we do so with a slightly refreshed sense of what to do and how to do it.

Every single time I do this, it works. I feel bored, then I meditate, and then it vanishes. It just sort of jogs me out of my stupor. It would feel like magic if it wasn’t so reliable.

The ultimate lesson is that there is never a reason to be bored. Your mind is just sort of stuck in a limbo between inner-mode and outer-mode. Consciously choosing one mode, and switching back and forth, shocks you back into mindfulness. It turns off the dreaded autopilot switch.

After doing this regularly for some time I’ve realized there is always something to do, even if that thing is doing nothing. Doing nothing can have great benefits if we do it mindfully. But floating in mental limbo is a type of dying-while-living. We’re denying ourselves free will.

I tried keeping track of the things I felt drawn to do immediately after using meditation to release myself from the boredom cycle. Here are a few:

— Journaling / reflection

— Writing

— Reading

— Exercise

— Cleaning/organizing

— Answering emails

— Brainstorming business strategies / new ideas to test

— Picking one very specific topic, and researching it. (Iran-Contra?? UFO theories?? The history of Bhutan??)

I saw a post from a guy who decided 25 years ago to learn one word a day in a foreign language, and he said he can now hold a decent conversation in 8 different languages.

There’s literally always something to do. And if you feel there isn’t, meditate to let your mind refresh itself. And then get back to living. Life’s too short to be bored.

PS. My new book with Penguin is out!
Get it here. It’s not boring, I promise!

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Ok, read the above quote. Replace ‘war’ with ‘conflict’, subdue with ‘calm’ and ‘enemy’ with ‘challenger’, all synonyms.

The supreme art of conflict is to calm the challenger without fighting.

Simply put, it’s about retreat.

In the spiritual community, a ‘retreat’ is when you spend $3000 to go to rural California for a week, live in a hot tent and do group meditation therapy or DMT with a bunch of rich strangers. But what does the word ‘retreat’ really mean?

In the West, we have a hard time acknowledging the potential transformative value of retreat. We view it as weakness. We’d rather burn alive than withdraw from battle. We have world record numbers of sports riots, corporate downfalls and failed foreign interventions to support this thesis.

In the second half of the 20th century, Sun Tzu, ancient writer of The Art of War, became popular among politicians, business titans and other ‘masters of the universe’, as well as regular people looking for a new way to meditate conflict. Lots of Eastern writings became more popular, in fact, after the world watched a decentralized army of Southeast Asian peasants and farmers win a war against the supposed most powerful nation on Earth. Despite his writings being cornerstones of Eastern tactical strategy since the 5th century BC, it took a long time for the West to recognize his value. This is no coincidence.

Sun Tzu’s attitude towards retreat is significantly more nuanced than our hard-lined Western ideological fighting stance. When you’re the biggest kid on the playground (see: the West until the middle of the 20th century) it’s easy to kick ass. But when other big kids emerge, you’re better off learning from them than turning your back to them, lest they trounce you with their superior tactics and steal your pizza money.

The full Sun Tzu passage is this:

“Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.”

On the other side of this, and beyond any historical or military context, we run into immense personal problems when we try to live our lives through some sort of ‘only the strongest will survive’ ethos. We all know at least someone who’s too much of a hard-ass to maintain jobs, relationships or friendships for long enough to experience their true value or joy.

In business or professional life, stoking conflicts exclusively in order to ‘win’ tends to backfire in creating new enemies and new conflicts. It’s as if each branch you chop off through over-aggressive means spawns 3 more branches in its place. People who do this end up with way more enemies than friends.

In relationships, trying to win a conflict through sheer force of will leads to screaming matches, miscommunications and saying things you can’t take back. The sheer loudness of a bad fight drowns out any opportunity for reconciliation. People who do this end up alone, or paired with shallow mates who never challenge them or encourage them to grow.

In social life, a disagreement between two friends over politics, religion, or lifestyle choices can escalate into confusion, misjudging, and even the termination of a relationship. People who do this also end up alone, or, once again, paired with other shallow people who never challenge them or encourage them to grow.

And in your inner life, attempting to “conquer yourself” through work, achievement, wellness or self improvement can alienate you from your true self and cause you to become someone else, an actor instead of a real person. People who do this get sucked into delusional or obsessive behavior, like those who start exercising out of self-care but then become addicted to unhealthy degrees of thinness or muscularity. This attitude leads to a lot of unhappiness and self-hatred.

Retreat doesn’t make us weak if it’s balanced with self-respect. Like anything done out of balance, using retreat as your only tool for living will not do much for you. But retreating at key moments, both for yourself and for others, can lead to profound respect, growth and satisfaction.

Meditation is a form of retreat. Meditating for 8 hours a day is escapism. But meditating for 20 minutes or an hour a day helps settle the equilibrium between activity and non-activity. It lets your brain recalibrate.

Acquiescing in conflict is a form of retreat. It doesn’t mean coddling someone while fighting and saying, “You’re right,” if you don’t mean it. But it can mean stepping back and saying, “Listen, we are clearly not on the same page, and arguing isn’t going to fix that while we’re worked up. Let’s take a breather.” That’s a strength, not a weakness.

Self control is mitigating a conflict before it escalates into irrational nonsense. That’s a strong trait. Weakness is letting yourself indulge in the escalation until you can’t control yourself any longer.

Lastly, pushing yourself just for the sake of being faster, better and stronger represents a loss of self-control. If you become so obsessed with improving yourself that you lose sight of what improvement actually means, you end up confused and unhappy. That doesn’t sound like improvement.

The ultimate lesson of Sun Tzu is that there’s value in both sides: confrontation and retreat. And this applies to all facets of life. To fight or argue is not inherently a bad thing. To sacrifice yourself or a relationship you care about to the fires of fury and self-criticism is definitely a bad thing.

We should remember to mediate unnecessary conflicts before they start. And if a conflict is necessary, we should set our ego aside and fight with the awareness that we want to get to a better place. This strategy allows us to engage constructively in conflict and confrontation without getting carried away. And it also reminds us of the great value that can come from not letting the ego interfere with personal or professional matters.

PS. My new book with Penguin is out! Get it here.

Marie Kondo is very in right now so I figure this is a relevant topic to discuss.

In Zen monasteries, every single organizational detail is meticulously accounted for. Nothing is undone, nothing is overdone. Essential tasks are tended to with absolute care. Different monks are given different responsibilities. But everything is cleaned and organized with consistency and care. Floors are swept, items are placed in their appropriate location, dishes are scrubbed, meals are cooked, and not a grain of rice is wasted. Clutter is non-existent. If an object does not bring value, it is not acquired.

Why?

The common answer is “a cluttered desk is a cluttered mind”, but there’s more. As laypeople, we think of meditation as its own activity, something we do when we aren’t doing something else. But if you actually do meditate, you find ample opportunities to apply mindfulness to other activities in your life. In this sense, everything is meditation. Every conversation, chore, work task and walk in the park is meditation. It’s all-encompassing. That’s precisely what makes the practice so powerful.

I had a brief period this past year when I stopped meditating. Sometimes I take breaks to see what my day-to-day life is like without it. The effects weren’t drastic, but if I had stopped for good I imagine they would have compounded over time and caused me some trouble. I found my bad habits got a bit worse, my anger was less under control, and I was more anxious than usual. I was less productive and creative, and my self-doubt seemed to increase an irrational amount. And I had become noticeably messier.

When I started up again, I noticed I suddenly began to take much better care of my day-to-day spaces. I found myself keeping up with household chores much more consistently. I reorganized my office. I cleaned out my car. And I enjoyed these activities not just because the end result is pleasant, but because it feels good to focus the mind intently on a given task, to treat it as a meditation.

The mental muscle you train while meditating doesn’t stop when you end your session. You’ll find it playfully creeping into other facets of life. And you start to see the immersive nature of Zen, how every activity we choose is deeply interconnected to other activities, as well as your thoughts and feelings about life.

Try making a list of activities you can apply this concept to. What do you do every day that you can root yourself in deeply and treat as a form of meditation? For me, the list looks like this:

— Walking the dog

— Cooking meals

— Answering emails

— Packing orders for my business

— Cleaning my office

— Weightlifting

— Writing

— Reading

These are activities I do every day, and when I approach them with mindfulness I enjoy them much more (and do them more effectively). Try this yourself for a week and see what happens. I find it strengthens both my day-to-day enjoyment and my actual meditation practice.

PS. My new book with Penguin is out! Get it here.

My new book is out! It’s a 180-page illustrated journey through Zen. I’ve worked on it for a few years. It is the culmination of all the work I’ve done with Daily Zen, and I spent a lot of time trying to distill everything I’ve written about into a concise and playful interactive text. I hope you enjoy it!

Order links:

Amazon

Books A Million

Barnes & Noble

Indie Bound

Penguin Random House

Self-care has become a popular term in recent times, almost a meme of sorts among overworked millennials seeking refuge from the various hurricanes of self-doubt and judgment they’re perpetually exposed to. Yoga. Health food. Spiritual vacations. Exercise. Meditation. Baths. Juice.

This ethos of self-care has been commodified and amplified to such a point that we tend to indulge in it as if we live in some sort of progressive bohemian utopia. In truth, we’re a new lost generation, born of 24/7 commerce, tech, and endless war. All the forces we’re conditioned to tolerate do not know how to stop, let alone move along with tact. On a practical level, many of us feel we have no choice but to work and consume constantly, with bosses, co-workers and partners maintaining endless contact with us through digital communication mediums. So we turn to these activities when we need some time “for us”.

So what’s the problem? It’s twofold. Firstly, we have become so accustomed to constant stimulation and activity that self-care just becomes an integrated remedial part of our nonstop routine. It becomes a new set of plans, activities, spending habits and consumption behavior. Secondly, when we stay ‘on’ at all times, even when we believe to be catering to our deeper needs, we never actually get any rest. Self-care is a bit of a myth in this regard.

As both a millennial and a business owner, it’s very easy for me to never turn my brain off. I can go for weeks on 5 hours of sleep, a constant diet of organic food, local coffee, craft beer and vaporized nicotine. I can never stop answering emails, designing new products, spending my budget and distracting myself after-hours with Netflix and Instagram. Just because we can keep our dials turned to 11 at all times doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I imagine such a life will, over the next 20 years, take the same toll on many young people that cigarettes, bad marriages and hard liquor took on their grandparents.

So here’s my extremely simple solution: find some time to do absolutely nothing. Maybe it’s a little time each day. Maybe it’s one day each week (if you’re self-employed). Just turn everything off. Do absolutely nothing. I tried this recently. I took a friday off and basically just hung out with my cat and for the day. I went for an aimless drive. I had a cup of tea. I went for a walk. I read a book. I did not use my phone, computer, or TV. It felt amazing, which is hilarious because to anyone living before 1950 it was basically just a day of leisure.

We forget how much the grand march of technological and ideological progress has infiltrated our everyday lives. Men and women alike think they’ve been “liberated” to work on their own terms; for many people this just means working nonstop, never finding enough free time to remember the life that could be reclaimed. We think the internet has opened our eyes, but in many ways it’s just focused our preexistent gaze. We still gawk at the same garbage, even when we have infinite access to all of the information ever generated.

This is why it’s so important to just turn off. Completely. Let yourself reboot. See what emerges. Go on, do it now.

When I was writing a recent short article about self-ownership, I started thinking about the idea of ‘borrowed time’. It’s a figure of speech simply meaning ‘limited time’, but the concept pops into my head once in a while when I think about work and action.

We tend to see time as a resource. The popular phrases ‘borrowed time’, ‘time is money’ and ‘wasted time’ all signify this idea of time as a finite commodity. Everything concerning who we are contributes to how we view and use our time. A more effective use of time reaps a higher reward. Meanwhile, a minimally-efficient use of time is ‘wasteful’, like throwing a home-cooked dinner in the trash.

Instead of picking all of this apart, I’d like to focus on the idea of “leasedtime” instead of borrowed time. Most of us allocate a certain portion of our day to forces outside ourselves; that’s the essence of existing in the world. We lease ourselves to various institutions — jobs, marriages, religions, political ideologies, etc. We do this in exchange for some sort of reward, be it physical or emotional. We expect a return on our investment of time.

If we don’t obtain some sort of added value for giving our time away, it’s akin to buying a rental property and letting people live in it for free. It’s a nice gesture, but will soon devolve into chaos and loss.

In the realm of work, I think it’s especially important to consider how effectively we manage our time. Many people obsess over public health, cancer rates, exercise and organic foods but then spend 30% of their time engaged in stressful and life-denying activities with minimal reward. Leasing ourselves to a parasitic third party either means we’re selling ourselves short, or that we haven’t taken enough time to cultivate external value in ourselves. Either way, this leaves people feeling under-confident and exhausted.

In relationships, many people think that the more of themselves they give away to another person, the better. And yet many people do not want to feel wholly responsible for the emotions of another. This is commonly referred to as co-dependency, a phenomenon which, much like overwork, often begins with good intentions and ends in exhaustion and confusion.

In spiritual matters, the cultural myth of martyrdom convinces people that the way towards spiritual fulfillment is ‘giving oneself up’ to a higher power. People think that just ‘giving away’ a certain amount of time and meditating, praying, doing service or going to a place of worship is enough to fulfill them. If this was true, we’d have a lot more enlightened folks walking around. Mere submission isn’t enough.

Politics functions similarly. People devote themselves to a specific side or ideology, negating all else in favor of finding those who agree with them and working towards ‘the cause’. They spend countless hours arguing on Twitter and at meals, convinced that someday their temporal investment in a limited dogma will translate into some greater good for mankind. For most people, this translates less into positive action and more into alienating their friends and more clearly defining their enemies.

I illustrate these diverse examples to show how we lease ourselves to the world. There’s nothing inherently wrong in giving part of yourself up for something larger than yourself, but how you do so often ends up defining your entire life, so it’s deeply important to lease your time wisely.

Combining this idea of leasing your time with the value of self-ownership is important. In work, we should cultivate enough internal and external respect and value that we can be efficient and passionate about what we do. In relationships, we should have a strong enough sense of self so that we don’t burden our loved ones with unrealistic dependency. In spirituality, we should cultivate inner-strength instead of weakening ourselves for the sake of submission. In politics, we should learn that every ideological force is linked to its opposition, that participating in the rabble is a wasteful use of our limited time on earth.

The way to approach any usage of time is with nuance and mindfulness. How you do this is up to you, but being more conscious of how we use our time is just as important as focusing on health, wellness or spiritual fulfillment.

If you liked this, I wrote a follow-up worksheet for this post here.