The Hustler and the Yogi pt. II
A flawed spectrum
For the motivated yet mindful this tradeoff feels like an impossible game of tug of war. You seek to improve yourself - your career, your health, intellect while striving to keep this ambition in check and not live in a perpetual state of not enough, stopping to smell the roses and appreciating what you have now instead of always looking towards the future at a place you’d rather be.
As someone caught between both worlds, wanting to be both the hustler and the yogi, this has felt like it exists on a spectrum. As I grind to scale a startup, biohack my way to better health, work with life coaches to improve myself I’m implicitly putting out to the world that I’m unsatisfied with my present state. I see something that’s wrong or at least could be improved and I put a plan together for how to get there with the idea that in the future I’ll be happier with this “better” state.
This felt inherently at odds with what I’d read in books about how to live a better life from history’s greatest philosophical traditions spanning disparate parts of the globe across different millennia yet all aligning around a central truth - you have to be content with what is.
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.
Seneca
If you find contentment, you are rich beyond measure. Do not seek it elsewhere; it is within your own heart, here and now.
Ajahn Chah
However, the more content I’d be with what is, the more I’d feel like I'm just being lazy and inhibiting my growth.
It felt like this spectrum of two diametric opposites that are inherently incompatible with each other having differing goals and values, leading to radically different approaches to life and thus entirely different outcomes.
The more you focus on one, the less you become like the other. It looks something like this:
You don’t want to be burnt out, yet you still want to exist in this world making something of yourself. According to this model then, the conclusion is….
It’s all about balance!
A real cop-out. Sentencing one to a life of mediocrity.
Thought of the Day
Thinking about duality as of late.
What's up Jack! This is very alive for me!! Thanks for sharing