Doing nothing part vii: This is it

Keep the customer dissatisfied

To find earlier posts in my Do Nothing series, here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

I call my dad is the wisest person I know. Usually it’s within the context of eating. Even though he spends hours in the kitchen cooking gourmet meals, he only eats to 60% to full. Contrast him to me; I joke that my favorite feeling in the world is feeling uncomfortably full.

There’s a deeper reason why my dad is the wisest person I know. He has had debilitating back pain for decades so bad that twenty years ago he was put on disability. Every day for twenty years, my stepmom rubs his back and he goes to the park and does tai chi. Sitting hurts him; standing hurts him. Pain is at varying degrees, constant. Despite that, he’s almost always happy.

“The point of life is to be happy. Stop worrying and enjoy yourself,” he says. And he does. He takes joy in his cooking, seeing his grandkids, and checking his stocks on his computer. He enjoys going to the Chinese grocery and finding very slowly what he needs to make dinner. He doesn’t own a lot. Lives with my stepmom in a small condo.

Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know many people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. 

That's the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. — Warren Buffett

He’s a simple man.

A happy, unworried man.

I think things clicked for him about 15 years ago when, after many years of researching (potentially dangerous) surgeries, he stopped trying to find solutions to his pain. And decided to be happy.

Me, dad, and stepsister

In modern life, we have a belief that if things are not perfect, something is wrong. We find wrongness in life when it is not exactly the way we want it. We find wrongness in ourselves when we aren’t exactly the way we want to be.

We’re constantly scurrying, worrying, to make things better. To make ourselves better. It’s exhausting.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane.” —Anne Lamott.

So much better, but not happier

Culture matters.

A hundred years ago, industrialists had solved the problem of production; they could mass produce anything consumers wanted, and at volume. The issue is people didn’t need to buy everything that companies made. A series of booms and busts characterized the late 1800s and early 1900s, culminating with the Great Depression. Economists realized that the populace that valued savings and thrift would never support the consumption needed to absorb productive capacity. People had to be taught to value individual consumption over communal living and free time.¹ With the invention of radio and news media, advertising and mass marketing were also invented (yes, imagine before 1800 and industrialization, there was no such thing as advertising or marketing!)

The advertiser’s message: more is more (spiritually) fulfilling than enough.

The marketer’s message: there is something wrong (with you). And you can buy this thing to fix it.

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” - retail analyst Victor Lebow

“Unless (the consumer) could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.” — Frederick Allen

Our economy demands perpetual growth, which can only be fueled by spiritual dissatisfaction: more and there’s something wrong. Economist Hazel Kyrk explained, “a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard,” where envy of those above oneself in the social order (richer, better looking, whiter) incited consumption and fueled economic growth. This envy machine keep the economy going and keeps us chasing some ineffable standard of OKness. In capitalism, we can never feel OK.

There is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time — and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress.

— “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied” 1929, Charles Kettering, general director of GM Research Laboratories

The ironic thing: things have gotten so good because we demand things to always be better. On an objective level, life is so much better than life ever was because we always want more and believe things could be better. The hedonic treadmill: that’s what keeps the machine running. The reverse then becomes true: because we keep wanting more things and believe thing could be better, we are never be satisfied with things with things as they are. In other words, the present is not-enough.

Life is so much better but we’re no happier with life.

That’s what keeps you running.

The secret is not getting what you want

The problem is we think happiness is because of conditions: things on the outside. We think getting what we want makes us happy: the nice house, the promotion, the attractive spouse, the doing-well-school kids. We’re pulled along the progressive standard.² Example: I have many friends who buy the nice house. They go through the considerable anxiety of the home purchase process, get the big mortgage, and are so excited to move in. And then 5-7 years later, they aren’t satisfied with it. The yard isn’t big enough. Not enough bedrooms. Kitchen is too cramped. They “have to” buy a bigger house. The process starts anew. For others, it’s the promotion at work, which makes us happy for a couple of years, before we want another one. We want things, we get things, we get dissatisfied. Buddha would call it the cycle of dukkha. No matter how good we have it, no matter how good life gets, we can’t escape the basic human fact of dissatisfaction. And capitalism wants to accelerate that. Keep the customer dissatisfied.³ But, as my friend Jordan Grumet put it, money can only solve money problems. And most of our problems are not money problems.

There’s a famous story about the great teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, from when he was giving large outdoor public talks in Ojai, CA. This first person account is so good, I excerpt it here:

It was always an extraordinary experience, hearing Krishnamurti in person. Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Krishnamurti’s, described it as: “Like listening to a discourse of the Buddha—such authority, such intrinsic power.”

Part way through this particular talk, Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?” Almost as though we were one body we sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.

Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! He was in many ways a mountaintop teacher—somewhat distant, aloof, seemingly unapproachable, unless you were part of his inner circle. Yet that’s why we came to Ojai every spring, to see if we could find out just what his secret was. We wanted to know how he managed to be so aware and enlightened, while we struggled with conflict and our numerous problems.

There was a silence. Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, “You see, I don’t mind what happens.”

I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, and—deep inside yourself—you’ll feel good no matter what. You’ll feel good because you are connected to, one with, the energy of the universe, the beauty and power of creation itself. Or, as Krishnamurti himself put it:

‘When you live with this awareness, this sensitivity, life has an astonishing way of taking care of you. Then there is no problem of security, of what people say or do not say, and that is the beauty of life.’

There’s a belief in New Age circles that if you truly want something, and believe you deserve it, the Law of Attraction will bring it to you. The Secret is manifestation, which is a spirituality only capitalism could invent.

The secret to life is not getting what you want. The secret is liberation comes from surrender, from letting go of your tight, anxious demands for how the world ‘should’ be in order for you to be happy.

That’s the inner freedom I think my dad found out: he doesn’t mind what happens. My dad has decided to be content with life. He places no demands, internal or external, on his happiness. Wisest man I know, his back can hurt more one day than the previous day. His stocks can go down. But he can love and be loved by the ones he wants to be loved by.

His peace and clarity is free of conditions. Timeless spiritual truth. I don’t know how he got to this place, but he did.

Actually I do.

It was the sheer insolvability of his back pain that brought him to this place. The trick of capitalism, the tool of the advertiser, the message of the marketer, is to teach you that (1) something is wrong, (2) there is a fix, and (3) you can buy it.⁴ What he could not avoid, he was willing to face.

My dad’s wisdom: just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. We spend a lot of time making the world wrong. Too much taxes. Too little taxes. We’re taxing the wrong people. Not enough justice. Not enough freedom. Customer service won’t give what I want. My spouse, co-workers, clients are seeing things wrong. Making the world wrong is exhausting, and (I think) comes from a deep inner sense that there’s something wrong and there’s something wrong with me.

Transformation from suffering

In January I attended (online) the one year memorial of Thich Nhat Hanh’s death. At what I assume was Plum Village, there is a sign, at the very front:

This is it.

Can we love it?

The Buddha said that suffering, dukkha, was inevitable. The First Noble Truth. The rest of the Noble Truths tell us the root of suffering (desire, or craving/aversion) and how to escape suffering (cessation of desire, Eightfold Path).

I’ve come to realize that First Noble Truth much more subtle than I thought. Buddha was not only saying that our pain is inevitable, but our suffering, our resistance to pain, is inevitable.

Our craving and aversion are inevitable. We spend our entire lives believing “this is not it.” We run from dukkha, we are run by our dukkha. We always want more, scurrying, worrying, to make things better. Keep the customer dissatisfied. It’s inevitable. It’s exhausting.

But maybe pain is there for our transformation. All we have to do is stop running.

Stop running. Do nothing. Let go.

Life is not turned out for me the way I wanted. Maybe not for you? Certainly not for my dad. No one would ever choose constant back pain. In fact, you would probably choose to trade anything not to have it. But because my dad could not trade anything to not have it, he is now able to experience pain without suffering from it. Acceptance. Let go of your tight grip on how life “should” be in order to be happy. I think this is the secret that the dying have: love it all. They try to convey to us, but we can’t understand.

The secret is not figuring out how to get what you want. Doing so just keeps you the misery of the hedonic treadmill.

The secret is surrender.

I was born when all I once feared, I could love. — Rabia of Basra

On the other side, liberation.

Transformation awaits. Grace, ever present.

This is it. Can we love it?

Do nothing.

1. More reading: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210120-how-the-world-became-consumerist

2. Ever notice when your kid does well in school, it just sets them to have to do well in the next school? It never ends. We created that.

3. I have a feeling that we look for both the anxiety and satiation on the outside because we don’t want to face the anxiety on the inside. Very few people want to see their inner not-enoughness. So we blame the world, when how we see the world is only through the prism of our inner lives.

4. From an earlier post: Believing that there’s a solution for everything is adolescent thinking.