Existentialist Self-Help

You can do anything but not everything.
DAVID ALLEN

Reading David Allen and Sartre at the same time has a profound effect on you. Sartre tells us that we are free. We are free to choose the lives we wish to lead. We can do anything we like. Then, Allen adds his two cents, ". . .but not everything."

I doubt David Allen was thinking of Sartre when he penned that best known quotation of his. He was simply pointing out a truth. You can choose to do anything, but when the choice is made, you are automatically choosing not to do other things. For Allen, he is obviously talking about the amount of time available in a given day to accomplish your goals and how to make better use of it. But he is also talking about a much deeper truth.

To choose one path is to not choose another. To go left is to choose not to go right and vice versa. You can't go down both paths. You have to choose and live with the consequences. Those choices may also involve regret and envy.

To see how this plays out in a practical way, I give a real life example supplied by a friend. He has a cousin who worked for a major outfit, and this job required extensive world travel. The guy loved to travel. This is not really a problem. The conflict came when he also tried to be a husband. His wife was not too keen on his travel or his job. Not willing to give up the job or that lifestyle, the two of them eventually divorced. He could be the world traveler or the devoted husband, but he could not be both.

Life is full of just such conflicts. As Allen put it, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. We are slammed in the face with the necessity to choose. You may have 500 channels to choose from, but you can only watch one at a time. Similarly, there are many paths you can take in your life, but you can only take one. Because of this reality, it creates problems for us.

The first problem as I have illustrated is conflict. You can't serve two masters. You will love one and hate the other. People will argue that they can pull this sort of thing off. They can have their cake and eat it, too. I strain to see who is able to pull off this trick. When I see people trying to defy this reality, all I notice is the imbalance in their lives. I see plates spinning, and I know they will fall. This is a problem that I have in my own life. In doing some things, I neglect others. The answer is to choose.

The second problem we have is regret. This is a dumb response but one we can understand. We want to rethink our choices. We imagine what our lives would have been like if we had taken option B instead of option A. The irony is that if we had chosen option B, we would have gone on to regret option A. It is a no-win situation. Life is always better in some parallel dimension of our minds where we made all the right choices. I know this is foolish thinking, so I have few regrets in my life.

The third problem is envy. We see people who made different choices from us. The bachelor envies the married man. The married man envies the bachelor. The poor man envies the opulent lifestyle of the rich man. The rich man envies the simple life and pleasures of the poor man. Like regret, this is also foolish thinking.

The remedy for all these problems goes back to David Allen's advice. You can do anything but not everything. You have freedom, but that freedom comes when we choose and sacrifice the alternatives because even choice becomes a form of tyranny. We become paralyzed with an array of possible future regrets. In order to live, we must also have the courage to accept the consequences of those choices. Every life has some negative consequence. It cannot be avoided or escaped. The surf bum and the Wall Street trader have very different lives, and you can't be both. One is poor and happy. The other is rich but perhaps happy in a different way.

I know in my own life that I have made certain choices, and I live with the consequences. One of the choices I made was to give up drinking and hanging out with the party people. It is fun hanging with those folks, but at some point, you are going to have the drunken driving conviction, the physical altercation, the weekend in jail, and the endless drama. As I pointed out to a guy who had a fight outside the bar one night, that shit never seems to happen to me outside the library or Starbucks.

Another choice I made is to always live in South Carolina. When I look at the map, I see all the other cities where I could live and do so many things. I spent five years in Orlando being homesick. I was glad to be back in SC. This place isn't much. But it is home to me. I have the option because of my work to transfer to a lot of different locations in the country. Living simply, all of my stuff could fit easily in a U-haul truck. I can go anywhere and do anything as someone pointed out to me. But I've done that before, and I know there are regrets to that as well. It makes more sense to stick where you are and make the most of that.

Another choice I made that readers already know about is eschewing white collar professions. I know I am sacrificing status and money, but I gain in job satisfaction and the ability to sleep well. I don't lie awake night grinding my teeth at the office politics or wondering if my employees will show up for work. I don't work selling financial products to my helpless customers who are clueless victims. I don't dread going in to a boring ass job that makes no sense. I wake up every morning with a tingle of excitement as I contemplate all I will accomplish that day. If this makes me a loser, I am fine with that. Being a loser feels much better than when I was a "winner."

The last choice I have made is to just remain a bachelor. I need to face the fact that I would make a lousy husband and family man. I enjoy my work and my projects too much. I like being alone for long periods of time. I don't understand the neediness of women and children. I am not built for that sort of thing. I am just a divorce waiting to happen. As in the example of the well traveled divorcee, I'm not a good match for a woman wanting to settle down or do a reset on a failed marriage. I hate being nagged, and I will ignore and neglect any woman for the sake of the things that make me happy.

Make your choices and accept the consequences. Realize that you can do anything and not everything. No choice is necessarily better than another, and you should never waste time in regret or envy. Your life is yours. Own that motherfucker. Be who you choose to be. This will bring balance and self-acceptance to your life.

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