Life: General Challenges and Solutions
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. — Albert Einstein
As far as I know it was David Allen of GTD fame who proposed there are only two fundamental challenges in life:
- You don't know what you want.
- You know what you want, but don't know how to get it.
But perhaps we can simplify further to THE single challenge at the core of our lives: how to be happy. Of course, one must discern what happiness is first, to avoid foolish errors such as equating happiness with shopping. Methinks we now know what happiness is — positive psychology having organized and condensed the world's wisdom on the topic in the last two decades:
In short we can be happy in 3 ways, and they're potentially complementary:
- Pleasure, or physical pleasures that most people are at least familiar with such as food, sex, and novelty. As Seligman points out, this kind of happiness is the most common, the most fleeting, and requires progressively larger "doses" to elicit the same subjective sense of happiness.
- Flow, or complete engagement in an activity with a timeless quality; recently recognized and investigated by psychology. Its prerequisite is the development of significant skill.
- Meaning, or devoting one's life to what you believe is meaningful. Methinks the main challenge here is courage and self-knowledge, as what is particularly meaningful to you is almost certainly not what society's norms would dictate.
Now, in seeking and experiencing those 3 paths, we all face shared constraints:
- Incomplete and imperfect knowledge, on all scales of space and time, including incomplete self-knowledge.
- Finite time and energy, and thus, choice and opportunity cost.
Given the challenge and the constraints, what strategies and tactics can we marshal? That's what I'll address in this section; I claim no great expertise, but will simply share what I've used successfully, or at least observed to work.