Stop Doing That Sh*t

by Gary John Bishop

  “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”

  —Martin Heidegger

  Isn’t that just a GREAT quote? You were born into a vast spectrum of potential that you’ve slowly turned into a single item. As you age, your view becomes more and more restricted; you become a narrow, constrained, polarized version of what you started out with. In short, you are addicted to the version of yourself you have become, and your entire existence is about perpetuating that myth.

  I mean, think about it. Of all the twists and turns your life has taken, from all those possibilities for yourself, you somehow turned out this way.

  You’re now a very specific, very definitive you with clear-cut characteristics, hang-ups, and familiar emotional states and behaviors.

  Also, if you’re like most people, you’re now spending quite a chunk of your adult life working on improving that “you.” Making it fitter, smarter, more confident, less worrisome, more successful, less anxious, more likeable, less insecure, more powerful, less uncertain, more attractive, and on and on and on. You’re now a definable, set thing that you have to make better, improve upon, and eventually win over. But why?

  CLICKBAIT

  In your earliest years, your life was all about what was going on around you. It wasn’t about you. You were gripped by a compelling curiosity about the world you’d been dropped into.

  It was all about the discovery of your environment. Your entire life was lived in moments, and you were “there” for all of them.

  Oh boy, has that changed.

  These days? These days your life is completely about you, how you’re doing, how you’re not doing, how others are affecting you and have affected you. It’s about fixing you, improving you, altering you, changing you. A life of trying to get to that day in the future when it will all turn out in that perfect happy ending you’ve always imagined.

  That “someday” when you eventually “find yourself” through the indigo haze of ayahuasca on the slopes of the Inca Trail or when you get handed that spot on Shark Tank or the big promotion you’re after or become the next Silicon Valley gazillionaire or Tiffany Haddish or Tom Brady or just a bit more like your idol or older sister or best friend or whatever your thing is, big or small, doable or near impossible.

  That day in the future when you’re like a fucking ninja and you finally get everything you wanted. And the birds are singing. Yeah, the birds would be there too.

  And that’s what keeps you stuck. You’re trapped in the struggle to be free, yet your thrashing and squirming only keeps you contained right where you are.

  There’s an irresistible link between happiness and where your attention is pointed. Same goes for unhappiness, of course. When your attention is primarily on what’s out of reach, there’ll always be something you never quite have. And so, you struggle to have it . . . and on it goes.

  If you spend your life wanting to be happy, by its very nature you’re constantly starting from a place of unhappy.

  You, like all human beings, live each moment of your precious life in the pursuit of something that is, of course, out there in the future, regardless of whether the thing you are after is five minutes or five years ahead of you.

  Except the peace or joy or satisfaction you’re after isn’t “out there” at all.

  It’s an illusion. It’s clickbait for your brain.

  That’s right, clickbait. You are hypnotically following that ever-so-tempting juicy morsel of hope or stability or success or accomplishment, only to get there and realize that ain’t it. I know, not you, you’re different. It’s other people who do that, and the thing you’re after will solve your BS—except no, it’s you too. That thing you’re currently pursuing in your life? The job, the car, the house, the location, the business . . . that’s what I’m talking about. You’ll get duped. Then you’ll do it again and get duped again. And then again. And again. And again. And then you’ll die, and that will be that.

  For what it’s worth, that day in the future will never come. Why? Because even when you do accomplish great things, when you do get there, you very quickly realize it’s still the same you.

  YOU haven’t really changed. And that’s the problem. Different life, same you, and ultimately that’s what you’re trying to change!

  You’re not a better you, a more confident you, a more whatever you. It’s just the same you with a new accomplishment in the bag, which soon plummets into the black hole of your past accomplishments. It didn’t work—that is, it didn’t take care of what you thought it would take care of, it didn’t bring you the happiness you were looking for—so off you go again. Clickbaiting the hell out of your life.

  You might be sitting there right now saying, “Aha, no, Gary, I USED to do that, but not anymore. I’ve done the work on myself, I’ve had that realization, and I’m definitely different now.” Eh . . . no. You’ve now set your life up like a fragile game of chess where you’ve so far been able to avoid, minimize, or suppress what I’m pointing to here.

  That’s not a life, that’s a strategy, and you haven’t addressed the impact it has had on your full self-expression and the diminishing of your aliveness and potential. The dulling of your edge.

  Settling.

  You’re as much a diminished version of what you started with as everyone else. Smarty-pants.

  CLICK

  While neuroscientists can detect the very beginnings of consciousness in the brains of babies as young as five months old, it’s not until around two years that we each begin to develop the fully blown concept of a “me,” that self-awareness and self-consciousness which tell us that we’re an individual, that we’re separate from the people and things around us.

  Click. Let the games begin. From that moment, your life—what it’s about and your special brand of sabotage—starts to get put together.

  You start to understand things like embarrassment and possessions and what it is to be wanted and loved and known. You’re now confronting the idea that it’s “you” in the mirror and that image is what others see when they look at you. You’re forming an early opinion of that chubby little ball of innocence.

  Many of you still can’t deal with that experience to this day. You are uncomfortable staring at yourself, not okay with who you are, and addicted to changing yourself in one way or another.

  You’re more about self-fix than self-improve.

  Thus, you become self-conscious—i.e., conscious of a self—and that self-consciousness carries right on into adolescence and adulthood and all the way to the grave.

  Long after the innocence of childhood wonder has dissipated into memories, you make the extraordinary ordinary. Maybe not right away, but certainly over time. Think about the first time you got a cell phone. How about a new car? Your dream home? Remember when that was the most exciting of things? Now? Meh. You’re off on search of the next fix. Click.

  It’s not just material possessions. It also applies to love, relationships, friendships, goals, dreams, and everything else in your life that once upon a time you might have appreciated or treasured. It all gets minimized, made ordinary, and shoved down in the pursuit of something else.

  Now pause. Instead of looking ahead, stop right here in this moment to take stock of your life. Think about the dreams or accomplishments or goals that, as soon as you achieved them, withered, added to the shelf in your memory alongside that third-grade reading certificate, first date, college acceptance letter, new job. What was the thing you used to think that, if you just had it in your life, it would make all the difference for you, only to be accomplished and then cast aside in favor of your latest shiny thing?

  FLOW

  “It is understandable that people tend to be so nostalgic about their early years . . . many feel that the wholehearted serenity of childhood, the undivided participation in the here and now, becomes increasingly difficult to recapture as the years go by.”

  —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the guy
who coined the now-famous term “flow,” tells us that the more complex we become as human beings, at both societal and individual levels, the more we experience psychic entropy—which is a fancy way of saying that the more complex life becomes, the more miserable we’re likely to become. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can fill the void.

  Like everyone, you have fallen into the trap of trying to fill the void by constantly trying to fix what you think is wrong or not good enough about yourself or your life.

  To kids, nothing else exists but the moment they’re in. It’s the ultimate state of Zen, if you think about it. There’s no anxiety about the future, no preoccupation with the past. Only now and dealing with the item that presents itself right now.

  That’s right, you were a fucking Zen baby and you blew it! As adults, we struggle to get to that level of “flow,” that same level of unrestrained bliss and presence that marked the simpler times in our lives, so we turn that into something to pursue like everything else! These days, you might meditate, pray, do yoga poses, skydive, head off into the wilderness, play sports, read, basically anything you can to get away from the humdrum of the life you have built, to try to squeeze yourself into that most precious glimmer of a present moment, to release yourself from that ticktock drive to get ahead. Driven to try to get your Zen on!

  Perspective check: you currently exist on a planet inhabited by millions of species of animals, draped in oceans and mountains with gushing volcanoes and waterfalls and creeping deserts; spinning in an endless universe, with stars and suns and solar systems that stretch wildly beyond anything your limited little imagination can muster—and yet you’re fucked up because your job sucks or you are carrying more weight than you want or your nose is bigger than your friend’s or your phone is three models older than everyone else’s.

  That’s what this life of yours has come to. A competition. The pursuit of love or admiration or things. You’ve wrapped up this miracle—your life—in a mundane web of petty, shallow expressions of what it is to be alive. Then you wonder why you’re not happy or satisfied or fulfilled! I mean, it’s right in front of your face!

  I’m not even asking you to be grateful. (Boy, that gratitude thing has been DONE. TO. DEATH.) I’m asking you to check in. To wake up to something a little grander than your belly button and your myriad of trifling concerns.

  To begin to take stock of what you have turned this life of yours into.

  As you sit here reading these words, this is your opportunity. This is your shot. You, like most human beings, have allowed your life to drift, to meander from one drama to the next without any substantial intervention from you. That’s not a put-down but rather something for you to finally come to terms with. Whatever you have done or not done, it just hasn’t been the kind of substantive force of nature required to elicit real-life change.

  If you truly want to end this, you have to get committed, to give yourself fully to the notion that you are, once and for all, done with the life you have had to this point. It’s time to interrupt that drift. Put an end to it.

  We’re about to paint a picture, some of which you will recognize, some of which might at first seem confusing or maybe even a little surreal, but it will leave you in no doubt that the magic little sponge that you are has hardened. You need to begin understanding what it is that has become trapped in those once eager pores and how you managed to become so hoodwinked by your own game in life.

  Remember, we are first building a framework, one you can lay over the confusion of your life and finally make some sense of it for yourself. It’s probably not a good idea at this point to start telling everyone you’ve finally worked it all out and that you’re a sponge and all you need to do is figure out what is stuck in the various tunnels and pathways and then you’re good to go.

  I dunno about your friends, but for a lot of people, that kind of outburst might not go down too well. What happens in sponge club stays in sponge club, right?

  05

  A Throne of Throwns

  Ultimately, who is to blame solves nothing. All it does is explain and keep you stuck.

  So, you were born a willing and eager magic little sponge free of preconceptions and ready to soak up the exciting adventures of whatever life has to offer. How do we get from there, from that thirsty and enthusiastic stage, to sabotaging ourselves over and over and over?

  We are going to start uncovering what got sucked up into those thirsty nooks and crannies of your subconscious. There are two pieces that set the stage for how we come to live a life of sabotage, how that magic sponge becomes heavy and weighted by significance. We’ll talk about the first piece in this chapter. And it starts by looking at what you had NO say in.

  “HAD NO SAY IN!? Doesn’t that make me a victim?”

  Well, yes . . . and no.

  Look, I know there is stuff in your life that you were either blind to, coerced into, or forced into or any number of ways in which you don’t feel as if you had much of a choice in the matter. Fine. You’re still on the hook for the quality and success of your life in the aftermath of that stuff. Period.

  It might not have been your doing, but it’s on you from this moment forward.

  What I’m referring to is based on something Martin Heidegger called “thrown-ness.” These are the things in your life that you didn’t choose, didn’t pick, but were thrown into. Basically, they existed before you did, and you had to adopt them and adapt to them pretty damn quickly.

  Let me explain.

  I was born Scottish (we did this already, remember?). I didn’t choose that. You might have been born American, Canadian, French, Chinese, or Yemeni. No one gets to choose where or when they will be born. Nor on that fateful day had we chosen our parents or our race or our gender. There is a litany of things you had zero say in but your life is modeled around.

  All of that is part of your particular thrown-ness.

  Your genetics—how tall you are, what color your hair is, how far apart your eyes are—that’s part of your thrown-ness. The era you were born into, whether you’re a child of the forties or the nineties (or, God forbid, the zeros!), the financial and social status of your family when you were born, the culture, the customs, the language, all of it. Even the very notion of being a human being you had no say in. The fact that there are a sun, a moon, and stars, that there are such things as trees and a society and laws and cars and science and school and that life revolves around seasons—you were thrown into all of it, had it rammed up your nose the minute you were born, and ever since then you have had to wrestle with it to make sense of this madness!

  It’s all part of your thrown-ness!

  That magic little sponge of innocence arrived with a slap and a scream and was thrown into the tide of humanity and the hypnotic trance of “making it.”

  You had no say in any of this, yet it doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair. It doesn’t matter if you like it, loathe it, resent it, or appreciate it. You’re here, and you’ll have to deal with it like everyone else before you and everyone after you. This is where the road to peace of mind begins. Acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you agree or give up; it means you accept something for what it is and what it’s not. Period. You actually can accept what you were thrown into and live a life free from its grasp.

  Acceptance is the gateway to real change. It’s also something you need to give some real thinking to. You need to deal with yourself and what you haven’t really accepted and what you’ve burdened yourself with by not accepting things as they actually are.

  “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Either way, you’re going to embrace all of it (every single, last drop) or you’re going to be a victim to it. There’s no in-between. Either you’ll own it or it will own you. Not all victims look like helpless souls sitting by the wayside of life and pleading for help. Many of them are successful and driven and would balk at the idea of even being called a victim.

  L
et me break this “thrown-ness” down a bit more. If you’re physically bigger (or shorter or wider), you might have found yourself steered to participate in certain activities at school—say, basketball or arm wrestling (okay, maybe not arm wrestling)—and encouraged to like them. If your brain is wired so that you are great at recollecting lots of data, you were most likely someone who was thrown to participate more academically.

  Environmentally, maybe you’re the kid who got picked last in a sports-centric culture or struggled painfully at math in an academia-centric one. If you grew up in sunny California (the lucky location you were thrown into), you might’ve spent your childhood surfing or skateboarding with certain biases and dos and don’ts, while the kid who grew up in perpetually gray and cloudy Glasgow was inside watching TV or playing football (yes, it’s football; it’s a ball and you use your feet, for the love of God) in the pouring rain, with an entirely other set of dos and don’ts about life, people, and what’s possible.

  How in the hell was any of that fair? You didn’t choose to be unathletic, or bad at math, or stuck under a giant angry cloud in Glasgow, and you certainly didn’t select “bullied” as one of your life choices either as a kid, did you? No, you didn’t, but you were thrown in there anyway. No matter where you grew and expanded, each environment was slowly shaping and molding you, and while you could see and explain some of that influence, there were other huge swathes of conditioning you were completely oblivious to. Again, no say in that either. That magic little sponge had a lot of “juice” to choose from. And boy, did it choose.

  TREES? WHAT TREES?

  There’s another thing you were “thrown” into. Conversations.

  When I say “conversations,” it’s not just the general ones of society but also the ones specific to your family and your early environment, the ones handed down from generation to generation about every aspect of life you could care to imagine. A giant, meandering forest of opinions reaching back God knows how long into the past, and you’re so deep in it you can’t even see it. What were people talking about before and immediately after you were born?