Methinks Auntie Tild needs some Anti-Hacks

Hi-ho, readereenos. By way of introducing an interesting post I read today over at ZenHabits, I think it’s about time I gave you all a brief overview of the current life situation of your kindly old Auntie Tild. (You know, that mildly odd person who’s been putting up stuff on this blog for the past 4 and a half years.) You know her, you love her, you can’t live without her — oh yeah, that’s your kindly old Auntie Tild alright.

So. What’s going on in my life? Well, let’s see…

I will turn 56 exactly a month from today.

My youngest child graduated from high school last month.

In 2 weeks, he and his brother the junior at the U of M Mpls are both moving out of the house. (That would be fabled Tildebunkport, the house we’ve lived in for the past 15 years.) Those 2 guys are all the kids I’ve got, which means that in a month Tildebunkport will be an empty nest.

After decades of extraordinarily good health, a few chickens are finally coming home to roost for this perennially fat and stressed-out woman now in advanced middle age, in the form of back problems akin to sciatica that manifest themselves as severe chronic pain in my right leg. Sleep is challenging. I tried vicodin for a while, and felt a lovely and deep spiritual kinship with the lovely and deep fictional Dr. House, but no pain relief, so I’ve gone back to my usual painkillers, massive quantities of ibuprofen and very dry Fino sherry — not together, of course. *

The novel I’ve been writing (very fitfully) for the past 10 years continues to molder in my hard drive and on 2 online backup sites. Haven’t added a word to it in over 3 years.

In short, I’m at a point in my life where I could really use a new direction; a shift into a different gear; a tilt towards a new perspective; a great big sudden change. How to do this? How to go there?

Those kind of questions have been taking me to zenhabits.net more and more often lately. I really liked this post today about productivity and ways of thinking and mainly about making changes in one’s life via the use of what the author calls “anti-hacks”. Yeah. Maybe that’s what I need right now: some o’ those anti-hack thingies…

8 Great Anti-Hacks to Fundamentally Change Your Life

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Clay Collins of Project Liberation and The Growing Life.

Albert Einstein stated that “problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Einstein, of course, was right. Sometimes our problems require more than life hacks, tips, tweaks, etc. Sometimes our lives don’t need optimization, they need to be fundamentally reconfigured.

So What are Anti-Hacks?

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for every one striking at the root.” – Henry David Thoreau

Anti-hacks attempt to solve problems by approaching them at a higher level of thinking (the prefix “anti,” by the way, can mean “instead of” as in “anti-drug,” or “anti-folk”). For example, while David Allen says that “mind like water” (piece of mind) comes from creating exhaustive to-do lists and getting everything out of your head, an anti-hack might involve meditation, because all the list-making in the world will not bring you to a meditative, mind-like-water state.

A hack might help you optimize your car’s engine so you get better gas mileage, whereas an anti-hack might involve moving near your place of employment so you can walk or bike to work.

(By the way, creating a new word for an old idea can be a pretty pretentious thing. But I’m asking you to cut me some slack here. I’m not trying to push my own vocabulary, build a movement, or be clever; I just couldn’t think of a better term. Use whatever terms you want – I have no agenda. Still, I think the term “anti-hack” highlights a significant distinction between optimization — hacks, tweaks, tips, etc. — and reconfiguration).

Here are some of my more offensive thoughts, packaged as …

8 Random Anti-Hacks For Living

Please keep in mind some of these “anti-hacks” may not be practicable for you. These aren’t “one size fits all” solutions.

1. Embrace Your Inner Dilettante, be Flaky, and Denounce the Cult of Permanence. After college graduation, we’re allowed a couple years of experimental wiggle room. And when those years are over we’re supposed to semi-permanently stay put. We’re supposed to stop vagabonding through life. We’re supposed to sit down and shut up.

In this day and age, staying put in one’s situation (i.e. one’s career, job, company, city, town, etc.) is how you become an expert, advance in your field, and win the respect of your peers and family. We’re fed the myth that staying put affords us dream jobs. And we want this permanence as well: we want tenure, we want seniority, we want bedrocks and sure things.

But radical and rapid-fire growth often happens when you have freedom to try new things. Rapid-fire growth doesn’t require traveling across the country, starting a new business, or flooding your senses on a daily basis, but it often requires a high level of latitude. Radical growth often requires the ability to rapidly change directions, change contexts, and change situations. Rapidfire growth often requires a dilettante-esque mobility. And if you exercise this mobility enough, other may very well perceive you as someone who hasn’t “found himself.”

The problem is that post-higher-education life just isn’t configured to encourage growth; it’s configured to reward stagnation. We’re rewarded for stagnating, for unnecessarily sticking with things.

2. Stop Hiding Behind the Comfort of Stepping Stones. So many of us live “stepping stone lives.” We spend the majority of our waking hours working for goals that are merely stepping stones to other goals. For example:

We do well in high school so we can get into a good college.
We do well in college so we can get hired by a good company (or get into a good graduate school).
We do well at our jobs so we can get even better jobs and make more money.
We join committees to pad our resumes or impress our bosses.
(Question: what would your life be like if you cut out all the stepping stones?)

We are uncomfortable going after what we want in ways that aren’t culturally or institutionally approved. But we would all do well to live courageously by directly going after what we want.

(I realize that not everyone has the luxury of avoiding stepping stones. If your dream requires a medical degree, for example, you’ll need to suck it up and stay on those stones).

3. Pursue Self-Development over Productivity. Productivity often poses as self-development, but self-development and productivity can be two very different things. What is best for us as individuals can be bad for our on-the-job productivity.

4. Get to “Mind Like Water” the Original Way (i.e. Mindfulness). There is a myth among many productivity evangelists that productivity – or a productivity system – can lead to the meditative state likened to “mind like water.

“In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.

“[I]f you get seriously far out of that state–and start to feel out of control, stressed out, unfocused, bored, and stuck–do you have the ability to get yourself back into it? That’s where the methodology of [my productivity system] will have the greatest impact on your life, by showing you how to get back to “mind like water,” with all your resources and faculties functioning at a maximum level. ” – David Allen

The mind like water myth is the myth is that any productivity system can be the starting point for having “all your resources and faculties functioning at maximum level.” The myth is that a water-tight task-handling methodology, an elaborate folder system, a clockwork method for handling your inbox, a label-maker, and a set of routines come first.

The “mind like water myth” is that that productivity — or a productivity system — is the path, and that mind like water is the destination. Bruce lee once said that “all fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability” and that “the possession of anything begins in the mind.” I believe Bruce is right: possession of a “mind like water” begins in the mind. It’s not productivity first, mind like water second. It’s the other way around.
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* Um, about the Fino… If you ever have reason to be gift-y with your kindly old Auntie Tild, or are just in the mood to savor some exquisite, bone dry, lovely with tapas, none of that sweet cream sherry crap, wonderful wine, just remember one little word: Fino. F-I-N-O. Spanish Fino only, por favor. I recommend Lustau East India Solera; the reliable old classic Tio Pepe; and my absolute fave rave: Pedro Domecq La Ina.

Si, among many other things, your kindly old Auntie Tild is also a sinverguenza wine snob.

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