I’ve been reading a little bit about work/life balance lately, because who knows what work is going to look like once ALL THIS is over, and mainly because I’ve always had trouble drawing lines between what I do for a living and my “real” life. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’m writing this at 11:30 at night, everybody else asleep in the house, Kraftwerk on my headphones. I don’t think my mom and dad did it this way.
Anyway. One of the stories I read is a piece by Arthur Brooks from The Atlantic on how most people peak in their careers much younger than they think (gulp). There’s a lot of good stuff in there about what our work means to us, and what it should mean to us, and at one point Brooks wanders off to India to talk to a guru. It always fills my heart to read a magazine with a big travel budget.
But the thing Brooks wrote that struck me most was this:
What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.
Yesterday I was talking with a friend who wrote something that got criticized on Twitter, which is not exactly narrowing it down, because everything gets criticized on Twitter. I told her I’ve been thinking about dumping Twitter, or at least cutting back to the bare minimum — not just because of the meanness and snark, but because it’s rewiring the way I think. When writing columns was the main way I made a living, I used to walk around in the world and see everything in a column-sized box. Now, everything I process, my brain turns into a tweet. That can’t be good.
Plus, Wright Thompson has a point.
My point is, there’s a lot I need to chip away — a reverse bucket list — to make my life closer to what I want it to be. Reducing my Twitter use is one of the many things on that list. Or, at the very least, curating my social media better to filter out some of the trash.
Maybe my reverse bucket list is more like one of those dumpsters people rent when they clean out a house. There’s a lot to get rid of.
— TT