The Simple Life (Title Feel Boring? This Episode Is For You)

We live in a time where life is anything but simple. Every day seems to be chock-full of work hours, life management tasks (food prep, dishes), and all the added tasks that come from owning more (car registrations, mowing the lawn.) You get the idea. Yet it's been encultured into us that to really live a meaningful life we must have more. This episode explores this social construction and the possibility that the capacity for joy in having very little may actually be at the core of our happiness.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello and welcome,

My dears,

To this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

I am your host and fellow human traveler,

Tiffany Andres Myers,

And today's podcast is inspired by a quote that I recently heard or read by Mark Nepo.

And the quote has stuck with me ever since I read it.

It says,

The extraordinary is waiting just beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.

And this so stood out to me as such a beautiful embodiment of the idea for the title of this podcast being called Wake the Fuck Up.

There are so many things that I hope to offer here that we can wake up to in our human experience of the world around us and inside of us.

But this idea of the extraordinary waiting quietly beneath the skin of everything that is ordinary,

I think speaks to the heart of what it means to actually wake the fuck up.

And if I could put this in another way,

It's really opening our eyes,

Opening our ears,

Feeling through our skin,

Smelling through our nose,

Tasting through our mouth,

And probably experiencing with senses that we're yet unaware of everything that the world has to offer us,

The sense of richness that's here all the time that just naturally and as a product of having a human mind goes unnoticed.

And I'll probably talk about this in 150 different ways,

Depending on how long I continue to record these episodes,

But today I want to talk about it from the perspective or the difference of two things and that is the idea of contentment versus happiness,

But also the difference between simplicity and abundance.

And I'm going to use the word abundance as a contrastor to the word simplicity rather than the word abundance actually embodying sort of what I'm talking about,

Which is that every moment has the potential to be abundant,

Right?

And so maybe I'll change that word as we move through this episode together.

But I think I want to start by letting you for a moment imagine what your life might look like when you actually imagine yourself as finally happy.

So you might close your eyes unless you're driving or something of that nature and picture like what is it that you want to have in your life that you want to attain or achieve?

What are the goals you have for yourself that you feel like when you finally have those things you'll actually be happy?

And maybe actually just take a moment to think about it.

If you can kind of let your mind actually paint a picture,

What do you look like in this alternate reality of happiness?

What do your surroundings look like?

What do you feel like in this life?

And depending on where you are in your journey,

Maybe this image is really clear or maybe it's a little bit blurry,

But I feel like it's so ingrained inside of our human experience to feel the sense of I'll be happy when,

Right?

And without diving too deeply into that experience because that's not the intention of this episode,

I feel like that feeling is so very human,

My dear.

So if you find yourself having it,

If it's hard to deal with,

If it's an emotional experience,

If there's the sense that I'm just never going to be happy,

I'm sitting here with you today to tell you that happiness is possible.

And maybe we can start here with this idea of the textural difference between happiness and contentment.

And this was a huge shift for me in my early adult years.

I once heard someone say that in order to be happy,

We actually have to let go of what we think happiness looks like.

Well,

What the fuck does that mean?

In order to be happy,

We have to let go of everything we think happiness contains.

What that basically means in my own experience is that as we walk around looking for everything we think happiness is supposed to contain,

What it inherently means where we're doing is actually rejecting everything that's here right now that has the possibility of making us happy just as we are.

I also want to kind of bring to light this felt experience that I've had that happiness is only existing in our moments of highest attainment and our moments of greatest joy and our moments of elation,

If you will,

That these are the moments where we're really happy and everything else just doesn't quite cut it.

And so we spend our lives in this endless pursuit of trying to make every single moment the greatest moment we've ever experienced.

And I can't remember if I've said this before or not,

But I want to offer what I think is the reality of being human and having a human life and experience,

And that is that if we could plot our experiences on a graph from the most uncomfortable,

Painful experiences of suffering to the most elated,

Joyous experiences of happiness and everything in between,

I think we'd find that the majority of our life experiences fall softly in the middle.

It might be a bell curve,

If you will,

Right,

Where like 1% of our experiences are really fucking bad and 1% of our experiences are really fucking good and like 98% of them fall somewhere softly,

Gently,

Right about the middle ground.

Well,

The crazy part of being human is that everything that falls in the middle doesn't affect our survival.

It doesn't mean that we're going to make it until tomorrow.

And my dears,

Your human brain is attuned to noticing and taking in everything that impacts our ability to survive,

To reproduce,

To pass on our genes,

To be alive another day.

And it's designed to ignore everything that doesn't affect that.

The numbers that I've heard are that in any given moment,

There are about 3 million bits of information that we could be using to paint our picture of reality moment by moment and that our brain ends up using about 175,

000 of those.

And while that's an enormous fucking number and there's no way moment by moment I could identify the 175,

000 things that I am using to paint my picture of reality,

What that also means is that we are ignoring 2.

8 million bits of information every single moment.

And this is necessary.

If we were taking all of this in every single second,

We'd be tired by about five minutes in after waking up.

So this is a beautiful capacity of our humanity,

But what I want to point out is your brain doesn't really give a shit if you're happy.

Your brain gives a shit if you survive and make it till tomorrow.

So there is this power in waking up and understanding what comes naturally to our mind and the ability through seeing it clearly to work with giving our attention to things that we choose,

Intentionally granting our attention to places that don't come naturally to create an experience of lasting fulfillment,

Contentment,

And yes,

Even happiness,

Even though I'm using this word in contrast.

So why do I want to contrast the word contentment with happiness?

Why do I want to contrast the word simple with abundant?

Because I feel like at least in the culture in which I grew up,

The culture of the United States,

And I feel like this is a truth that extends beyond the borders of the US,

Maybe because the US has sort of infected so many other places,

But inside of this culture,

I can feel a tangible realness to the idea that simple is plain,

Is boring,

Is mundane,

Is to put it quite frankly not enough.

When I think of the word simple,

And maybe I'll give you the space to do this on your own before I put my own connotations into it,

But if I were to say think of a simple person,

Who would you think of?

What do they look like?

What kind of life do they lead?

Would you inherently classify this person as happy?

In an interesting way,

I think we tend to think of simple people,

Quote unquote,

As people who don't have very much,

Whose lives aren't very rich or abundant,

And therefore are boring,

Less than,

And probably not very satisfied or happy.

There's a sense that to be really successful,

To have attained what we wanted,

We have to have a lot of things surrounding us.

Our life has to be abundant in contrast to simple.

It has to be full.

It has to be fraught with unexpected experience,

And in some way,

Maybe even that we have to be really picky and discerning that life is only good if I have the things that I like and I don't have the things that I don't like,

And the more I attain,

The more picky I get,

Because I can and I should,

Because I've worked hard and I deserve to be this picky.

Does this sound real to you?

Maybe not,

Maybe so.

I invite you to get curious about what we might imagine,

Let's say in contrast to a simple life,

What would you imagine for a person that you would call rich or abundant?

What does their life look like?

What are the foods that they're eating?

What are the drinks that they're consuming?

What kind of textures and surroundings are around them?

What are their homes filled with?

Are they happy?

I found it very interesting in my life that as I drive through the city of Atlanta and take in the homes that I pass by,

Which I absolutely love doing,

I noticed one day that as I passed these big,

Lavish,

Beautiful homes,

There was an immediate felt sense in my body that those people were happier than I was.

And in noticing that,

I had to be like,

Whoa,

Catch yourself,

Girl,

That's bullshit.

Every human is a human regardless of how much we have,

Right?

And the reality,

I think,

Is that the more we have,

The more we actually have to lose,

The more fear there is around keeping what we have.

So what does it actually mean to be simple?

What does it actually mean to be content?

And it's so interesting and fascinating to me that I think these two words carry a connotation of shitty and not enough.

Simple content.

If I were to tell you to chase contentment,

What would you say back to me?

Fuck that.

That's not enough.

I hear it all the time.

And I think it's such a powerful reflection of what we've built into our culture and our society,

Which is the subtle knowing that we as individuals are not enough.

That to have a simple and content life is not enough because we are not enough.

We constantly have to be striving for more.

And basically,

I believe,

And this is a little bit of a tangent,

Our capitalist society wouldn't work without this.

We have to be constantly needing more,

Spending more,

Buying more,

Needing the next upgrade.

Or how does our society function?

How does capitalism work if everybody is content with a simple life?

I would argue it really doesn't.

But I would also argue that this greed and this not enoughness is driving the demise of us as individuals,

Of us as a population,

Of us as an entire species on this earth because our over-consuming is not filling the void.

Why?

Because the void has to be filled from inside out,

My dears,

Not from outside in.

I've recently been given the beautiful gift of having an astrological reading and I loved hearing that as a Taurus and a one degree baby Taurus,

My purpose on this earth is to learn basically contentment in simplicity,

Which before my reading had already become pretty much my life goal and to offer that and hopefully teach that to as many people as humanly and inhumanly possible.

The idea behind contentment and simplicity is that if we stop,

Slow down enough to actually take in what is inside of us and around us in every single moment,

What we discover is that life is fucking rich.

Life is abundant inside of its simplicity.

It's the most confusing experience of coming to being awake,

This conundrum of abundance being inside simplicity,

Simplicity being inside abundance,

Happiness being inside our ability to be content,

That the way we attain happiness is by being willing to let go of everything we thought happiness was and opening our fucking eyes and our heart to the happiness that's here just in this moment as it is.

It's been a novel experience in my life and I want to be open,

Totally open with this to wake up in the morning,

To take a deep breath,

To feel that I can feel my whole lungs being infused by oxygen,

To acknowledge that I have a wife that's an incredibly compassionate,

Loving,

Kind,

Connected and intentional human being,

That I have a 12 year old son who is full of life,

Who is also just so loving,

We go back and forth with,

Hey mom I love you,

Hey Kai I love you,

I love you mom,

I love you Kai,

Back and forth until one of us finally gives up.

How unlikely is that to have with a 12 year old boy?

I don't know but I feel incredibly lucky and infused with gratitude.

I open my eyes to see my puppies sleeping in their beds,

To see the wooden floors beneath my furniture,

To see the beauty of the decorations and the intentionality with my wife has adorned things on our walls,

To think about the friendships that have recently grown in my life and the family that I was gifted as I was birthed into this world,

To look outside the window and see the sunlight infusing through the blinds,

The sense of green color that comes through the texture of the trees as the sun comes through the window.

All of this my dears is simple and yet as a recent experience in my life,

Simply by bringing my attention to these things every single morning,

I'm reminded of how lucky I am and a sense of contentment and satisfaction fills my heart all on its own.

I offer this to you because as I reflect on myself and my life as a youth and in my younger years I was not happy,

I wasn't happy with myself,

With my body,

I am driven naturally by a sense of perfectionism.

I graduated top of my class all through school,

My undergrad and graduate years and all of it provided me with a sense of lacking,

Of not enoughness,

Of being unsatisfied with life.

Early in my 20s I found a group of people to spend time with that were partying all the time,

That were really seeking those highs in every single moment of the day and the contrast between those moments of highs and the moments of normalcy,

Of mediocrity created such a sense of dissatisfaction that even the moments of highs never really felt like enough.

It's again the oddest conundrum to finally come in contact with the reality that to live simply to be satisfied by the most normal ordinary things means that every single day has the potential to be full of joy,

Of life,

Of contentment,

Of satisfaction,

Of happiness,

Of goodness,

Of flavors and textures,

Of being satisfied by the food that I'm eating,

Of the coffee that I'm drinking,

Of the water that I'm tasting,

Of the light coming into my eyes.

It all has the potential to be beautiful.

My hope in offering this podcast,

This episode is to encourage a reframing of the words simple and content.

Play with these ideas my dears.

Walk into your life,

Open your eyes and ask what might I feel if I let go of what I thought happiness was and I open to what it is right now.

And I promise you if you take this journey with me you'll find that the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of everything that is ordinary.

Thank you all so much for listening to this episode,

To being here with me.

I send my love,

My joy,

My contentment,

My simplicity out to each one of you.

I can't wait to be with you again.

Thank you for being here.

Peace.

Reviews

We don’t need to look too far to find what is right inside already. 🙏

Profound! And so simple. Thank you 🙏🏻 definitely something I needed to hear. ☮️