Mind-Manual

What if Everyone Followed Their Dreams? There’d be no garbage pickers!

This is a question that shows up in various forms, such as, “If everyone awakens, will we all starve?” Usually, this is an excuse to justify the fear that causes us to not pursue what we truly want. Not being courageous enough to pursue our goals is ok, its the denial that that is the real issue is what will hold you back. The first thing is to acknowledge it. Courage is like a muscle and you are simply a bit weaker than your goal requires. However denial will only hurt you in the long run.

That, I believe, is the real reason people ask this question. It’s easy to feel good about yourself if everyone else is also stuck in the same place, or if you can assign some external reason for why you are not doing what you really want to do but don’t have the courage to right now. Those reasons enumerated, I do want to answer the question as asked:

Like I said previously, a massive change like everyone following their dreams will not happen suddenly. If anything, it could be argued that its been happening slowly over the last many decades. Massive social changes like that rarely happen very quickly (they’re called revolutions if they do). “For example, if everyone did what they felt their purpose was and there were no garbage-collectors left, this is some of what might happen: 1. The wages for a garbage collector would skyrocket. 2. People would have to clean up after themselves. 3. There would be a greater demand for solutions that didn’t require humans or as many humans, such as automated cleaning machines, and the people who really enjoy solving society’s problems using technology would love to create that.”

There are every kind of people. Paul taught me about this. This may sound really, really strange to you, but there are people who ENJOY being garbage collectors. The Fred Factor is a book about a postman who brings so much joy and purpose to his work. Most people would think that being a post delivery person would be dreary and boring, but Fred loves his work. The value of these people who really love to do this would go up dramatically because they are so rare, so they could actually make a lot of money doing something that others would consider “dreary”.

Finally, we, as a species/culture, can adapt to massive social changes such as if everyone is starting to follow their dreams. We’ve gone through a number before now. For example, I’m willing to bet that someone said at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, “What if everyone went to work in jobs in factories and left the farms; we’d all starve!”. And we have not starved. This henny penny, “the sky is falling” stuff is usually overrated.

Let’s say there was suddenly a severe shortage in the number of postal workers. Courier businesses would probably skyrocket, people would stop sending as many letters (as they have), the wages of postal workers would skyrocket, faxes and emails would grow much greater in number, many entrepreneurs would step in to attempt to come up with solutions that are cheaper and/or more efficient than the current system. Perhaps instead of getting mail delivered to our doors, each neighbourhood or block would get its own central mail box racks where you go to pick up the mail, like a PO Box, this is pretty common in many places around the world.

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Discovering My Life Purpose

I have a feeling that this period in my life will probably be seen as crucial when I look back on it. This is the period when I am seeking my life purpose, to step out of my old context of need (a powerful idea, I highly recommend reading the link) and into a new context of purpose. I’ve been reading Pavlina‘s site for years now, and I’m aware of his emphasis on purpose.

Even though Pavlina claimed Purpose = Freedom, I never really felt that way, however I had faith that if I pursued personal growth, I would eventually find my purpose, if it was something worth finding. It seems that that faith is working out. Over the last few months I had inklings of what my life purpose might be, including helping people fix their finances, learning and sharing ideas and just making people happy. None of these resonated that well with me although I knew I was getting closer to my purpose. The first two examples were not really life purposes, anyway, they would be more like missions. Being happy and making people happy is the closest to the level of abstraction that a life purpose is supposed to be at, but the wording seemed awkward. “My life purpose is to be happy and make others happy” just doesn’t resonate with me at the level it should.

I also realized that I felt purposes were restrictive. That is, you were restricted to one or two things for the rest of your life. However, as I made the switch from thinking of three-part essay structures as molds to be filled to skeletons to be covered, I was able to make that switch for life purposes, too, as I suggested at the end of my recent entry on Formulas. If you feel that purposes are like molds, you would clearly prefer to have the larger space of goals open to you than the smaller, restricted space, which is how I felt. I didn’t want everything, nor necessarily to keep my options open, but simply to have a larger goal-space available to me.

However, yesterday while trying out the new “Random Article” link on Pavlina’s site (which he added to use IM to find solutions to problems…and I found the answer to a big one the first time I used it, chew on that for a bit), I stumbled across an article called, Purpose = Permanent Message + Temporary Medium and it really struck home with me. If you notice, the first line of the above article has to do with the question of whether you just have one purpose for the rest of your life, an important question for me. At the end of the article, he suggests that:

Your message is undoubtedly simple, probably something you can reduce to a single word: joy, connection, love, forgiveness, acceptance, peace, reason, honor, sensuality, passion, relaxation, nonviolence, curiosity, synergy, justice… whatever.

That first one, joy, really resonates with me. I am not 100% sure joy is really it, but it really does seem like joy is a thread in my life, looking back on it (though this could simply be an example of information-seeking bias). I love to create and share joy. I love being happy. I dunno why but “joy” feels better than “happiness” in this context. Other words that resonate with me are peace and freedom, but I think it is the joy of freedom that I enjoy, and I seek peaceful joy, with joy again being at the top. My life purpose is to be peacefully joyous, enjoy freedom and encourage peaceful joy in others. Sounds kinda awkward so I’ll have to play around with the wording and so forth, but the meaning of that feels almost completely right.

So, what does this mean? This means that now that I have a message, I can find a medium. I could be a stand-up comedian, or I could write amusing blog entries, or I could share my love of ideas with others, or help people get in control of their finances so they can also enjoy peaceful joy. I realized that I really admired Ze Frank, and he does the same: share ideas he really loves and creates joy through humour. This will help me to figure out what to do in life.

I don’t know how many people enjoy my narcissism as I write incessantly about myself, but I hope something here is of use to you. If so, I always appreciate comments.

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