Good Burdens
My need for quiet rises in the folds of mid-morning. My hands stack papers sorted then filed. The handwork is a kind of mind-work, decluttering the mess of the early day. Of running up and downstairs seeking mittens and children. Of tending to hot pans and smears of toothpaste. Of walking home in crisp air, tripping over the long-tired lists already running through my head.
I sit on the floor and sort.
I start many workdays this way. Tell myself that if the room is tidy, my mind will tidy; my thoughts will lie out flat, my heart rate slow, my soul quiet.
But the truth is, it doesn’t work.
For all the outer order, my inner landscape remains desolate. Shame lurks in corners, assuring me my work is of little worth. I sit at a tidied desk swarmed with fear.
No, the quiet space is farther. It’s buried beneath my ribcage, a sharp point in my fleshy centre. I have to get down on the floor, on all fours. Knees bent on hardwood desperate for mopping, elbows jutting down while hands lace up in prayer. My head comes low, all the way down to the floorboards, and I must call out.
I call out for the Great Quiet. I call out to the Star of the Sea. She is the settler of storms. He is the calm for these waters.
I need quiet, yes. A silence within. An empty ark on a Monday, needing to be filled.
Our days are full.
For most of us, from the moment we wake up in the morning our days are ripe with noise, busyness, and rushing. At the end of the day, we are tired. So very exhausted.
Can you relate to any of these feelings?
I’m tired of trying to keep it all together. My team needs me. My spouse needs me. My kids need me. I feel like I am already living with a wall of regret.
I’m exhausted. I’m on 24/7. I feel like I can’t turn off because if I do, my career will slow down and my boss will think I’m lazy and I will miss my dentist appointment and I’ll never get my side hustle off the ground.
I come home from work feeling numb. The only thing I have energy for is scrolling and Netflix. And more Netflix. And more Instagram. And more Facebook. At the same time. I’ve been on social media long enough to know it’s a waste of time but I. CAN. NOT. STOP. I don’t know what else to do.
We want a simple lifestyle, but we also want all the comforts of the rich. We want the depth afforded by solitude, but we do not want to miss anything. We want deeper connection with loved ones, but we also want to watch television and grow our social media following.
“Small wonder,” writes Ronald Rolheiser in his book The Holy Longing, “life is so often a trying enterprise and we are often tired and pathologically overextended. Medieval philosophy had a dictum that said: Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many others.”
It takes a powerful no to say a powerful yes.
Happiness is Love, Full Stop
In 1938, Harvard University started following 268 male undergraduate students in the longest-running study of human development in history. The goal of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, often called “the Grant Study,” was to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing. Harvard researchers measured their subjects on everything: personality type, IQ, drinking habits, family relationships, even “hanging length of his scrotum.” Everything.
The head of the study, psychiatrist and professor Dr. George Eman Vaillant, published the findings from the study, which is ongoing, in his 2012 book Triumphs of Experience.
The factor of life success Vaillant refers to most often is the powerful correlation between the warmth of a subject’s relationships and their health and happiness in later years. What the study specifically found was that men who were most satisfied with their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty. Research participants who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of $141,000 a year more during their peak salaries than those that scored lowest. They were also three times more likely to have professional success worthy of inclusion in a Who’s Who list. Of the findings, The Harvard Gazette wrote: “Good genes are nice, but joy is better.”1
If there’s any part of you rolling your eyes right now, you’re not alone. In 2009, Vaillant’s insistence on the importance of this variable was challenged, and he returned to the data for re-analysis. Not only did he find that he had accurately correlated the quality of relationships to well-being, he determined that it was even more closely linked than he had previously thought.
Vaillant measured warm relationships as having close friends, maintaining contact with family, and being active in social organizations. In relating this to the Grant data he said, “it was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”
After seventy-five years and 20 million dollars spent on the Grant Study, Vaillant concluded that the key to human flourishing can be summed up in five simple words:
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
I see happiness on the face of one young man in my neighbourhood.
His name is Sam, and he lives down the street and around the corner from me and my family. For at least an hour each morning and every afternoon, he stands out on the sidewalk. I learned Sam’s name after nearly a year of us smiling at one another, saying hello and chatting briefly about the weather, politics, or whatever was on Sam’s mind that particular day. I asked him his name so I could write it down on the little neighbour map I keep at home so I would remember.
I don’t know Sam well, but I do know he is a young adult and is around the house most of the day. His speech is a little slow and sometimes he has a hard time fully forming his thoughts. But Sam’s always got opinions. About the neighbourhood. About the weather. About government (and the giant political sign hammered in his family’s front yard). And he’s always sharing them with the biggest, brightest smile in the world.
I think a lot about Sam. He’s my favourite fixture of our neighbourhood. I look forward to travelling down his block on foot, by bike, or even in my car, just so I can see his face. He always has a smile for me. Always.
What is Sam out there looking for?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw a way of life so at odds with the human experience I often found it difficult to breathe. I saw us belittling our human vulnerabilities, addicted to distraction, trying to life hack (doesn’t it just sound terrible) away our imperfections to keep pace with our machines. I saw us out for ourselves. Worst of all, I saw Silicon Valley billionaires abandoning the world — us — altogether by building bunkers in New Zealand and shooting past the moon to reboot civilization.
I saw a world with no time for a person like Sam.
The Change
COVID-19 helped us change.
As if startled from slumber, we awoke to the truth that it’s all so very fragile, these limbs, lives, life.
The change helped us recall some things. We remembered:
That we don’t need to spend much money at all.
That we are deeply tied to and dependent on the natural world.
That humanity could be better if we wanted to be.
That being kind is the only thing that matters.
That we can easily make most of the food we buy.
That we are good at distancing from our emotions.
That we keep chasing things we really don’t need and are way too indifferent to what happens to each other. We are even strangers to ourselves!
That we were doing too much we didn’t enjoy for the sake of doing.
That our needs are far fewer than we think.
That hours in a day can increase if we just slow down.
That we rely on the outside world to tell us how to behave, think, and feel.
That our families need us more than we thought they did.
That we can actually save the Earth, if we want to, without spending a single penny, by just staying home.
That almost everything we do is non-essential.
That adversity and fear bring out the best and the worst in people. Both lurk in the deepest part of each of us, and we must decide which will prevail.
That relationships are important. Life sucks if you do it alone.
We’ve changed.
I see signs of the change all around my neighbourhood. Literal handwritten signs. There’s the makeshift Where’s Waldo search-and-find propped on a nearby lawn to entertain neighbours out on a distanced walk by. There are The Ministry of Silly Walks directives instructing pedestrians to STOP and proceed only with their goofiest footwork. There are the Black Lives Matter and Thank you, Essential Workers missives plastered across living room windows. There’s the wild-looking tiger cutout propped in the tall grass of our own yard with a speech bubble intended for our gentle-hearted mail carrier that says, Thank you. We can do this.
I’ve watched neighbours spill out of houses onto front porches and set up camp — the new outpost, the respite from the tyranny of video calls, wild indoor thoughts, and rage-inducing news.
We’ve come outside to see if the world, if we, are really still here.
We’re still here.
The Trade-off
Sometimes you need someone else to ask the question to discover what’s really true about you.
Not long ago, Nigerian-born Canadian Ony Anukem invited me on her Twenty5 Podcast to ask me what I wish I had known when I was twenty-five. Ony is smart. I intentionally arrived at our recording time unprepared, hoping to let my answers slip out naturally instead of spouting canned responses the way I sometimes think I should. (Got to stay on message. Got to hit the talking points.) As I shared my circuitous career path through public broadcasting, freelancing, communications, publishing, and early parenthood, I heard myself tell her this:
All of the best things that have happened in my career and in my life had nothing to do with me controlling them.
A wave of shock reverberated through my body as I heard myself say these words. In an instant, I saw how my efforts to control had so persistently let me down and how everything meaningful and good in my life had come by some other means entirely. They all had something to do with openness, a wild trust in my instincts, and, I’d go so far as to say, serendipity: meeting the right people at the right moments.
I want more good in my life, more meaning and joy. Don’t you? If I couldn’t control my way to those outcomes, what could I do?
Technology reinforces our impulse to control.
On an average day, you and I spend more time with our digital products and platforms than we do with any single human being. Because of this, we constantly put ourselves in the way of the three sirens of consumerism: comfort, control, and convenience — the drivers of Big Tech, Big Corporations, Big Everything. Over time, they’ve shaped the way we think about relationships, the way we work, create, and even the ways we’re willing to love.
But what is the cost of this constant orientation toward comfort, convenience, and control? Over time, these systems constrain what we are willing to do.
You know that the act of creating, of making anything worthwhile — whether it be a family, a resilient mind, a vocation, a marriage, a vibrant neighbourhood — doesn’t work like that. There’s nothing efficient or comfortable about it.
All of the best things that have happened in my career and my life had nothing to do with me controlling them. Chances are the same is true for you.
Here is what I’m getting at, Joy Seeker.
The tech that shapes our lives is at odds with the way humans actually work.
At our core, you and I are after one thing: love. But here’s the thing: love is the opposite of control. Laziness is the opposite of love. The way we experience love is through the inconvenient joys of relationship. Warm relationships are our greatest source of happiness and relationships aren’t easy, they’re effortful.
Comfort, control, and convenience, the promises of our tech-obsessed world, aren’t going to get you where you want to go.
Think about it: the things you are most proud of in life — the child you are raising, the marathon you completed, the community garden you’re starting, the major project you hit out of the park — these required all of you: all of your attention, all of your love, all of your courage, all of the risk. Could you control it? No. Were you all in? Hell, yes you were.
It is in these great effortful pursuits that we experience not only the outer reaches of our abilities but our limits, requiring us to rely on others and in turn deepening our love of the people and projects that mean the most to us. They’re good burdens.
The burdensome part of these activities is actually just the task of getting across a threshold of effort. As soon as you have crossed the threshold, the burden disappears.
And what are you left with then?
You are left with joy.
It’s what you were made for.
Good Burdens
“What happens when technology moves beyond lifting genuine burdens and starts freeing us from burdens that we should not want to be rid of?” asks philosopher Albert Borgmann in his 1984 book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. “If we believe that we, as humans, were created for relationship and meaningful work, work that provides for families and serves neighbors, work that engages our bodies and creative faculties, then it follows that we would value a certain kind of burden,” he explains.
He called them good burdens, commitments that tether us to people and the physical world. Like the burden of preparing a meal and getting everyone to show up at the table, or the burden of reading poetry to someone you love or going for a family walk after dinner, or the burden of letter-writing — gathering our thoughts, setting them down in a way that will be remembered and cherished and perhaps passed on to our grandchildren.
Albert points out that these types of activities have been obliterated by the readily available entertainment offered by every screen in the 21st-century world.
Stepping out of your algorithm is essential to moving out of a set position and into relationship. Mary Clark Moschella, Roger J. Squire Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at the Yale Divinity School, once told me: “The joy of being in relationship is that we step outside of ourselves.”
It is that act of stepping outside of ourselves that often gets us unstuck; how do we move outside of a space we’ve inhabited so long?
Reclaiming Effortful Living as the Path to Joy
Good Burdens is a reclamation of effortful living as your path to well-being.
Over ten dispatches (leading up to the launch of the book — October 12 — pre-order now,) I’ll challenge you to channel your energies online and off toward good burdens: caring relationships, community, and creative projects that bring you joy. Using historical data, real-life stories from leading mindful tech leaders, and a rich personal narrative, I’ll make the case for increasing the intentionality in your day-to-day life, while offering concrete solutions for flourishing in the digital age.
Good Burdens will not teach you how to break up with your phone or pawn off cheap life hacks to prove you can get more things done. Instead, you’re going to learn how to stop living life on autopilot and start living a life so wild and good, so brimming with joy, that your screens dim in comparison.
I am going to teach you how to take up good burdens — commitments to people and creative work that shape the beating breathing world — because “genuine love, with all the discipline it requires, is the only path in this life to substantial joy.”
A life of passive consumption is not what you were made for.
You were made for more. You were made to love.
It is worth the effort.
. . . .
Originally posted on my new dedicated blog on Medium.com
