#03 The Feedback Loop from Hell
Thoughts on a new chapter
Hey everybody,
This week was a little more stress and boring oriented than the previous weeks of summer have been. Gavi and I are preparing to return to school on Monday (today) so the past few days were spent gathering information, buying supplies, and fighting ongoing battles with our financial aid office.
Once all our t's were crossed and i's dotted, I sat down to start building the systems that I would rely on to keep my life organized through all the chaos (calendars, todo lists, Notion databases, etc). This was incredibly overwhelming for me because for the first time, I had to sit down and realistically confront a schedule in which I'm taking 19 credits, working 40 hours a week, fulfilling commitments to my relationships / spending time with my wife, AND keeping time to do things that I love and rely on so much like writing.
I was hit with a tidal wave of existential dread. I was anxious about the future, which then turned into anxiety about feeling anxious for the future, to which I responded with anxiousNESS about being an anxious person. This is something Mark Manson refers to as The Feedback Loop from Hell. Now I already know what you're thinking,"Ben, find someone else to quote for your damn newsletter, it's been 3 weeks in a row." To which I respond, I know, I tried…but this fit too well to pass it up.
Now the reason I took on all this responsibility in the first place was because I knew that I could handle it and I truly valued all the outcomes that it will bring. When I was 18, I put off going to school for 4 years because I valued financial independence opposed to being liable to parents or loans like most of my friends who were students at the time were. In those 4 years, I was able to build a life for myself to which I now get to reap the benefits of. Now, I want to continue to grow the prospects of my future and I find a lot of value in what an education will do for me. But it's not going to be easy...in fact it's going to be pretty hard.
But that's the beauty of it.
We live in a society that promotes nothing but comfort. The crazy thing is, I'm starting to think we all actually believe that’s what we deserve….nothing but comfort.
This is called entitlement.
The problem with entitlement is that uncomfortable emotions like pain, loss, suffering, unease, etc are all inevitable. No matter what choice you make, you're going to run into a little bit of shit wherever you go. If we're not willing to accept that and take responsibility for what it is, we're doing nothing but creating lifelong turmoil and anxiety for ourselves.
As Mark says, "The point isn't to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with."
This is what yanks me out of that feedback loop. Dissatisfaction and unease are a staple part of human nature and are necessary components to creating a more constant state of happiness. The scope of what pain can do for us to make us better is incredibly wide, but at its simplest form, it sparks action. If you put your hand on a hot stove, you pull it away.
I love the life that my wife and I have built for ourselves. The only thing I love even more is the idea of continuing to improve upon it. That's why I choose to put myself in pains way…because without it, I become stagnant.
I hope this doesn't find you as existential or depressing. This kind of thinking is something I only recently started mulling over myself and was met with immediately by an assortment of doubts and depressing conclusions. But I stuck with the train of thought and I'm glad I did. I feel calm and ready to approach my new schedule with confidence, maybe even a little bit of excitement. 😏
I published a new essay on my blog this past weekend called "The Seed Parable." In it I discuss a new narrative that I've taken to developing and learning new information. I used this new approach to sort through a lot of the ideas that I discussed in todays letter. Without it, I may have left those Mark Manson ideas feeling "existential" and "depressing" and would still be swirling around in that feedback loop myself.
I know I said I wasn’t going to do a lot of links on this newsletter thing, but rules were made to be broken. When I was in high school I chased around the band The Avett Brothers. I went to more than 10 of their shows, I was obsessed, blah blah blah. Like most things from high school, I haven’t been interested in them in years. But this past weekend the released a new album that has caught my attention.
Just a couple raggity old artists dishing out some mid-life self reflections on consumption, fame, family and love. With nothing but a couple guitars and a banjo (a salute to their previous acoustic albums The Gleam I & II), this half hour of rich, southern storytelling did me good this weekend.
Here’s a video of one of my favorite songs from the record.
If you thought I captured these ideas well and know someone who could benefit from hearing this (or if you think I’m a loser and would like to send someone a copy of this so you can laugh at me together) I encourage you to share.
As always, I hope I get to hear form you in some way or another, and have an excellent week.
-Ben