The art of doing stuff
Our lives are a culmination what we do, but it's harder than ever to do stuff.
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
C.G. Jung
We spend most of our time on autopilot doing things that are functionally important, but cosmically insignificant.
Every day we rush through meals, work, errands, TV shows, and scrolling on our phones until we realize it’s time go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.
We don’t really “do” anything, so it’s no surprise that we struggle to remember how we spent our time. We move through most days letting life happen to us without ever doing anything meaningful.
When we’re not intentional with our time, it feels like life is passing us by (because it is).
We all have a voice screaming in our heads saying, “do stuff! do something! do anything!”. That voice is suppressed by the convenience of consumption and socially acceptable platitudes like “there aren’t enough hours in the day”.
Every day, it becomes easier to do nothing, but inaction breeds anxiety. The more we suppress the voice urging us to “do stuff”, the more anxious we feel.
Inconveniencing ourselves
Our typical reaction to anxiety is stepping back and giving ourselves time to rest. Instead of going out and doing stuff, we retreat, build a plan, and try to think our way out of the problem.
Despite our instinctual reaction, inaction only digs us deeper into the same hole. The best way to take control of our lives and overcome anxiety is to do stuff.
We need to snap out of autopilot and do things that are meaningful and memorable.
A lunch with friends, a walk in a park, reading a great book, tending to a garden, or making a home-cooked meal are all that’s needed to add texture and meaning to our day.
In a world of routines where the path of least resistance is sitting on the couch with an endless supply of highly entertaining and personalized content, doing stuff is undoubtedly inconvenient by comparison.
We have to leave work early, go to bed late, or disrupt our routines in some way to replace what’s easy and safe with something worthwhile and memorable.
However, inconveniencing ourselves to engage in these simple, but meaningful experiences proves that we’re in control of our lives and doing things that are worth our time.
Doing stuff is what separates drifting from one day to the next from creating a life filled with rich and rewarding experiences.
If we’re not careful, we can live our entire lives without doing anything, but to enrich our lives and become better, we need to do stuff!
We need to get up and go places. We need to learn new skills, get outside, talk to people, create something, do something hard, and make progress on things that are important on the scale of weeks, months, or even years.
Become an author, not an actor
The key to a fulfilling life is doing stuff.
We owe ourselves more than clocking in and out of work just to sit around and wish there was more time in the day. We have to take advantage of the time we have by making intentional efforts to do stuff.
Our lives are nothing more than a culmination of what we’ve done. We can’t experience anything if we don’t do anything.
We need to do stuff that we’ll remember. Do stuff we’re proud of. Do stuff we don’t have time for. Make an effort to do something worthwhile and take action. We’ll remember it. It will feel good, and it will give us the push we need to do it again and again until we feel like we’re the authors of our own lives instead of supporting characters in a story we didn’t write.
Prompts
What is something you always dread and want to cancel but are always grateful for afterwards?
What meaningless activity can you give up this week to make time for doing something meaningful?
If you were the author of your own life, what “stuff” would you spend your time doing? How is that different than what you did last week?
Deep Dive
The Art of Making Memories by Meik Wiking
How to Create and Remember Happy Moments
A coffee shop in Tahoe and an incredible mantra to keep things simple and do stuff that we’ll remember
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin