Life Hack: Be Who You Are

[This cat does not care how you organize your life.]

All the news is depressingly grim today, so here is a picture of some kittens and an article about how you shouldn’t try to get up early. All the people who say you should get up early are insane and why would you want to be as productive as them. I’m not being sarcastic, its a really nice article. You should read it.

I am reminded of that thing I used to believe before I started obsessively reading work-life balance articles and wishing I could cram lots more brilliant and accomplished productivity into every day. It was something like, Be whoever you are. I know, deep, right. The other way to say it is, The World Turns On Envy. Not necessarily envy for more stuff—I mean, I am envious most of the time of those people who have less stuff—but envy for the kind of life that other people appear to have. This is the tragedy of the internet/social media age. We see each other, we grow disconsolate, we envy, envy turns everything to ash, we go back online and see each other.

It’s the terror of the listicle and pinterest and instagram all rolled up into one miserable lustful jumble. And it’s given rise to age of platform building. A few people know how to harness the devilry of giving people the kind of advice that makes them feel like they will be able to change whatever it is that is making them sad, and then, by virtue of that simple, easy alteration—just wake up at 3 instead of 7—they will be happy the way that shiny rich person is happy.

Except that there are only a few people who wake up at 3 instead of 7 on purpose. All the rest of the people awake at 3 am are upset about it, because that’s the middle of the night, and the work day ahead will be really terrible with 4 whole hours of sleep gone, poof.

It’s the anxious tightrope walk between being who you are and not worrying about it, while struggling against true sins, of which envy is one, and the dissatisfied search for a better way of life built up on the life hacks and perceived happiness of other people. The latter is thoroughly American. The former is something most of us only read about in books any more.

I started “reading,” by which I mean listening, to Consider the Fork yesterday and I think it’s going to be a fascinating catalogue of people being unhappy about something and trying to improve it—in a good way, an inventive way, a human way. This spoon is awful and the wrong shape and cracked along one side, so I will go out into the woods and hack down a tree and make a new one. I wish I could have this piece of bear boiled instead of roasted and I live next to a geyser, so I will bury it in the ground and it will be delicious. Oh look, if I take this lump of clay and exhaust myself for upwards of a week, I will have a beautiful pot which means this whole fish will not crumble away in the fire and I will not be so hungry as I was all the days before this one. None of the improvements that we make in our lives would be possible without those energizing fits of dissatisfaction that fall like a curious madness and leave us with newly rearranged living rooms, or glorious pots of stew, or new sweaters.

But that is very different than looking at someone else’s instagram feed and thinking, ‘I wish I could have that life.’ I wish I could wake up at the time he wakes up and have the happiness that he has and the money that he has and the clean house that she has—see how sexist I was there. It just happened effortlessly without me even trying.

Whereas, what if you are a person who wakes up at 7? Is there some law, unless that is the hour of your work, that you have to wake up at 3? What if you live happily in a cluttered realm? What if you like reading in the afternoon? What if you would rather blow through all your laundry in one day rather than bothering to develop any kind of rational system? Are your children fed and alive? Is your job done? Maybe just be who you are. By you I mean me, obviously.

Anyway, I’m not giving up waking up at 4:30 because it’s the way I’ve figured out to read and write without interruption. And I’m not giving up my basically clean house because I can’t think when there is paper on the floor. But you shouldn’t try to be like me. You should just do whatever you want, within the constraints of moral wisdom, and be who you are. And I will try not to envy you. Except I will—I will totally envy everything you show me of yourself on the internet.