Riff: Outsource Your Whole Life and Buy Back Your Time
What a beautiful thought from zevvdaily (Zevv?) about finding or removing meaning from life.
The synapses have fired and the few left have brought back, instantly, Click (2006) a classic Adam Sandler movie, my memory of it is fuzzy, I probably saw it once 20 years ago (!) but I think it encapsulated that same problem well: getting time back vs avoiding “bad” time.
Here the synopsys:
A married workaholic, Michael Newman doesn't have time for his wife and children, not if he's to impress his ungrateful boss and earn a well-deserved promotion. So when he meets Morty, a loopy sales clerk, he gets the answer to his prayers: a magical remote that allows him to bypass life's little distractions with increasingly hysterical results.
Spoilers ahead - I think
It goes as you can imagine, at first it’s fun to skip cutting the lawn, or 8 hours of drone work, then it becomes a dinner with the in-law or whatever and soon enough you skip more and more, leaving you to ask: what is life?
The answer is obvious and yet tragically so: life is what happens while we endure the endless pain of existance.
The bliss we feel at time is because of the baseline of pain life provides.
Let me put it another way: a cold beer after a long summer day in the sun cutting grass hits differently than a cold beer at 3 in the morning on the sofa while you mindlessly skip through channels (or youtube shorts, or whatever).
The pain is what gives the reward its meaning.
You know this to be true, and you can see soooo many examples of rich kids that have conpletely lost their bearing in life, unable to feel joy as all their pain has been anaesthetised since birth.
The only pain they can experience, and will supercharge in response to fill the void, is existential pain.
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but an important one:
Let yourself (or your kids) struggle, fail an cry, so that your successes are meaningful and remarkable on their own.
It’s hard, but the right things usually are.