Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

What do you love to do? What is it that drives you to get out of bed and go to work? Is it the passion for work itself, the money, or the ability to provide for your kids or for someone else? Or is it a combination of all three?

I find myself thinking about this a lot these days. I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago where I was deliberating the things I hadn’t yet “achieved” to the extent I wanted to as a kid. Money — check. Nice group of friends — check. More diversity in my friend circle (which was predominantly Indian male) — check check. Hell — I even wanted to travel a lot — and at this point I’ve traveled so much that the thought of getting on a plane gives me anxiety attacks. (I threw up the last time I was about to get on a flight. Fucking joy.)

I guess when it came down to it, I realised that I had basically crossed off everything that teenager Shitij had set out to do. This either means that (A) I can die safely tomorrow a happy man (?), or (B) I set the wrong goals for myself, or (C) There was no point to these goals anyway, and the journey itself was the reward. Blah blah blah.

Frankly, I don’t have an answer. When a colleague asked me the other day what I thought was the purpose of life, I told her that it was to find interesting things to do until you die. Problem is — doing interesting things in itself doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be happy or satisfied when you’re on your deathbed. It just guarantees that you’ll be.. interested. For example, I’m spending most of my time at work on this data problem which refuses to reveal itself to me. It is the bane of my existence and causes me to pull my hair out on some days, but on the flipside — it keeps my brain engaged enough to not be thinking about existentialism, what it means to be happy, and whether I’m doing enough in my life or not — simply because I’m too busy living it. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t think about these things, but it helps sometimes to not bother about all this and just get on with life, because there are no real answers to this anyway, and often leading a fulfilling / interesting life may not necessarily lead you to the most happy one anyway.

A while back in college when I was obsessed with consuming drivel in online forums, I found a wonderful framework on how to think about leading a balanced life in terms of three very specific aspects: Health, Wealth, and Relationships. All of these have 2 sides to them too, i.e. inner and outer Health (mental and physical), inner and outer Wealth (self-worth and monetary wealth), and inner and outer Relationships (what you feel towards others, and what others perceive of you). Keep a decent balance across all these — and you’ll generally be a happyish person.

Of course — this doesn’t work all the time; but it does give a decent guideline that when things don’t quite feel right — rather than packing your bags and doing something dramatic — examine which of these three aspects seem to be lagging behind, and fix those first; the rest will hopefully line up.

Pico Iyer summarises all this quite well in an interview, where talking about mental health, he suggests that “it so often happens that somebody tells you to ‘change your life’ — and you decide to repaint your car, rather than re-wire the engine.”

So. Time to re-wire that engine folks.

Happy Friday.