The Load We Have To Move

I read James Wallman’s book on how we can improve the way we use our spare time, and in putting some remarks together, kept going off at a tangent. Wallman’s book is full of life-hacks, some reasonable and some utterly silly, and I don’t like hacks because I’d rather identify and solve the underlying problem. The underlying reasons for why people waste their spare time on junk activities are about the structure of their lives, and that takes us away from simple hacks to some serious reviews and actions that lack best-seller friendliness.

Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...

and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.

You are someone who respects themselves, and is lucky enough to have friends and co-workers who are considerate enough to express their thanks for what you do for them. Earn a living working in a company that produces something legal that people want and are not forced by law to pay for (*). Pay your taxes and not whine about it. Work hard, exercise, eat right, not drink too much, and not buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t care about. Stay away from junk culture, junk food, junk activities and junk people. Try all sorts of things until you find food, drink, music, literature, movies, dance, theatre, sports, athletic and outdoor activities, that you like. Learn to cook, buy food, and keep your lodgings clean. Learn how to recognise users, losers and abusers, and keep them out of your life. Learn how to recognise scientific, political, economic, commercial and personal fraud. (It isn’t as hard as you might think.) Learn to follow the money: ask, about anyone who is getting press coverage and telling you how you should behave, where they are getting their money from, who is financing them? Learn how to find tradesmen to do what you can’t, and don’t begrudge paying them a fair price. Learn how to find and make friends - keeping them depends as much on them as on you. Learn how to find jobs and interview well for them, and also to leave politely when it’s obvious the job is a crock.

You are not going to get married or enter into a domestic relationship unless your parents and her parents are still happily married. You are not going to have children until you are married, and unless you can think, right now, of three ways of keeping a four year-old, a ten year-old and a seventeen-year-old from being bored in whatever the weather is right now. (You should remember those from your own childhood.) Learn Game so you are not tongue-tied and awkward when you meet a woman you want to have an affair with, and especially the one you want to have children with, because you're going to need to Game her for the rest of your life.

That’s the load.

Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.

Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.

That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.

Because that’s what living is.