Wherever We Go, There We Are
You wake up on a cold, dark, wet winter’s morning in London. Not quite ready to face the world yet, you reach for your phone.
Scrolling through social media, you see someone else's life - the dream job, dream home, seemingly endless holiday days - and you wish you could be them.
It’s Monday. You drag yourself out of bed, sleepwalk through showering, brushing your teeth and getting ready for work. You’re now on the tube, surrounded by solemn faces rocking back and forth in the rattling carriage. You sit and think of the problems ahead of you this week: the tough client conversation you need to have, the looming project deadlines and the ever-growing life admin to-do list.
You sigh and think, “If only I didn’t have any problems, life would be so much easier.”
Sound familiar? No judgement, we’ve all been there, myself included.
As I made my coffee this morning, I heard this line from the philosopher William B. Irvine:
"I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that you are living the dream life. The bad news is that the dream in question probably isn’t being had by you. It is instead being had by someone else."
What does Irvine mean here? Somewhere, someone (in fact not just someone, but millions of people) woke up this morning dreaming of being able to live your life. You might be thinking: “But my life, with all the problems that I have, isn’t that great. Why would someone else want to live?”
People are waking up in extreme poverty or a war zone, dreaming of safety, food, a warm bed. They’d look at your job, your home, your bank account, and your fridge - and wish they could be in your shoes.
But you also don’t need to look far to find people who dream of having the things that you have in your life. The cleaner in your office whose shift starts as you leave for the day, or the barista handing you your morning coffee - they may look at you and wish they could have the material comfort that you enjoy.
Now, I do not want to undermine the challenges that you have faced and may be facing today in your life. I am not judging here at all or wanting you to feel any sense of shame. I also want to share that I recognise that many materially comfortable people are immensely unhappy, suffering from mental health challenges.
In knowing me, I am sure you know that I am not minimizing or undermining any of that.
What I am saying is that often we compare ourselves to people who appear to be ahead of us in life, in station and circumstance and what I’m inviting you to do instead is to shift your attention - from those whose lives you wish you had, to those who might wish they had yours.
There’s a concept in psychology known as the “Gap Theory of Happiness”. It says that a major cause of unhappiness is the awareness of a gap between what we have and what we want. Our default response is to try to close the gap by getting the things that we desire - new car, a promotion, another holiday.
But here’s the catch: once we close the gap, another one opens. There will always be something else. What if, instead, we closed the gap by wanting what we already have? What if, rather than chasing what we think is missing, we appreciated what’s already here?
As Ryan Holiday reminds us:
“Perspective is everything, so choose it wisely.”
In the grand scheme of things, many of our daily problems are not as serious as those faced by millions of others today. And this brings us to another important truth: we will always have problems.
As Sam Harris puts it:
“Most of your life is the process of solving problems - it is not and never will be the condition of basking in the absence of problems.” You resolve one issue and another pops up. You speak to the client who agrees to the overruns, only for a team member to raise a new concern. You pay the gas bill and the electricity bill arrives.
Recognising that life is just a series of problems to be solved can actually be rather liberating. Letting go of the idea that there’s some magical future without problems is incredibly freeing. As the Chinese proverb goes: “Everything will be okay once you are okay with everything.”
And this is why Harris warns us that “above all, there is one mistake you can’t afford to make: you can’t wait until you solve your problems to be happy.”
Joy is one of the key pillars of our Sustainable High Performance Approach, because it is a powerful performance enhancer and one that’s often overlooked by driven, high achievers. To many A-Types, joy is mistakenly treated as an afterthought, as something to turn to only once the to-do list is done.
But that to-do list will never be done and what could be more important than enjoying the life you’re actually living?
As Harris also says:
“Wherever you are hoping to get to in life, the quality of the journey must be more important than those fleeting moments when you actually seem to arrive at your destination - because most of your life is the journey.”
Or, in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn:
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
We are high performers. We have things we want to achieve and ambitions we want to fulfill. And rightly so, we want to stretch ourselves, we want to grow. And if something truly isn’t working in our life, we should take action to make a change. But, at the same time, there is also value in maintaining perspective and being just a little more grateful for what we already have, while we are in bold pursuit of our goals.
So, how do we maintain perspective and be grateful?