Matt Mic

Society is full of little, insidious mechanisms trying to capture and divide your energy and focus This is completely against your own self-interest, but from this discourse this weekend on unhappiness in the face of abundance it should be fully evident that people are almost powerless to resist these forces This is because the smartest people in the world are hard at work creating novel approaches to highjack your attention, degrade your willpower and convince you to trade your money and your time for the next _____ which will surely, finally, bring your happiness But success, and contentedness, come from investing in *fewer* pursuits with *more* depth and intensity You only need a few great friends who you can count on and who can count on you. A couple of hobbies you are willing to be bad at for years until you slowly live your way into well-crafted mastery. Your career will flourish if you embrace the dogged pursuit of a single outcome over a long period of time This is the tension of modern existence, and the true meta-skill to hone and refine over decades. How do you live a deliberate life in a world that actively wants you to exist in a state of reactive desire? I don’t claim to have the answer, and would simply posit this: Become aware of all the ways society, and people, try to hijack your one precious life to divert attention toward things that really and truly do not matter, and even actively harm you And every day seek to build mental and emotional resilience against those forces and cultivate persistence in your pursuit of the few things that really and truly matter It is hard. Many days you will fail. But you cannot let the world knock you off balance and live a life defined by someone else’s terms It is perhaps the only thing that matters