Please tune in until the end, where I have a couple somewhat-disturbing-but-eye-opening thought experiments to do with your kids over family dinner. Ha!
The movie Fight Club forces its audience to confess the sins of their egos: hyper-consumerism, corporate fervor, and insistence on things being easy. One scene stuck out in particular as I watched the classic for the first time recently: Brad Pitt, who plays a quirky soap salesman named Tyler Durden, holds a convenience store shift worker at gunpoint in the store’s parking lot. We think Durden will demand money from the till or from the man’s wallet, but something profound happens. He asks the man, trembling on his knees, what he always wanted to do for a living. Imagine that! The honesty with which you outline your life’s purpose being a matter of life or death.
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Durden forces a commitment, of sorts, which requires the man to pursue his life-long dream of being a veterinarian instead of eroding from the inside out, working his mindless job that is ringing up cigarettes and managing drunks. Durden provides a strict timeline, requiring the man to begin the schooling required, and to abandon his very stable yet purposeless cashier-gig, within a week’s time.
I tried to picture what I’d do if I was put in a similar situation. How sad is it that our lives being threatened is what it would take for us to achieve Maslow’s concept of self-actualization? The highest peak on our hierarchy of needs is “self-actualization”, that which is only achievable after we’ve secured things like food, water, sex, meaningful relationships, and even social recognition. According to Maslow, self-actualization isn’t achieved in step-like fashion; we do not simply step into enlightenment by virtue of our age or our distress or our traumas. To be fully “actualized” is to unabashedly understand the self, to accept oneself for those traits which cannot be changed but to pursue betterment regardless.
The self-actualized is a journey, rather than an endpoint, of personal development characterized by living truthfully and standing strong in the face of moral (and sometimes physical) danger. As Fight Club demonstrates through Edward Norton’s character, many of us wait far too long to evaluate ourselves, or we grow too defensive to understand the missing link in our personal pursuits. We proceed to sleep through our absurd existence that is mindless, vapid small talk; receiving and sending of emails only to email people back telling them you received their email; holding urgent meetings about the urgency of having meetings; splitting hairs with clients over whether or not an additional 30 minutes will suddenly launch them into their progress which has stalled for a decade.
A mom I work with for my “real job” recently asked me if I enjoy my work. If I’m being frank, I internally recoiled at the question. It put me in a strange position, mostly because I talk publicly so often about the total scam that is behavioral health and most psychotherapy, in tandem with my hatred for insurance-funded work. While I adore the family, the forced work of billing for what is essentially babysitting is in no way, shape, or form fulfilling. I do not like it--- not even a little. But you know what? Building character means committing to that which is dread-worthy and, sometimes, painful. I imagine reframing my perspective on these endless sessions, and maybe even trying to find something new or fresh about them, will result in some form of actualization down the line. While I’ll never be one to “put a positive spin on things” just for the sake of hollow optimism, I do believe this is building my character in ways that’ll only reveal themselves as I mature.
“Oh, I love it.” I responded plainly. Sometimes shit is just not worth the effort to explain. Being an adult means occasionally lying to people if honesty is not worth the effort. Now how many therapists are willing to tell you that?
I care about most other people, and I couldn’t imagine telling this poor woman, “You know, I really hate my job. Sorry if that means I, by proxy, hate you, your daughter, and your husband, but I really get nothing from all this other than a paycheck. Same time next week?” Yup. Love it. So rewarding. Where is a shirtless Brad Pitt when you need him?
Fight Club illustrates in its quirky, roundabout, somewhat tangential manner how desperately we fall into the blind obedience of everyday work life, thinking stability is what drives us forward, that life is meant for hustling and investing and saving and crunching numbers, that spending is both the bane of our existence and as fundamental to our wellbeing as our organs. Do I pursue a passion and hope it doesn’t eventually become a job? Do I remain a miserable employee who at least gets paid a very comfortable, consistent paycheck to do next to nothing? I suppose the answers are different depending on what your values are. They’re also entirely amenable to change as we age and our priorities shift with the times.
Modernity and its luxuries may offer a wider array of choice (i.e., you can choose from over 85 flavors of Oreos alone), but neither have succeeded in helping us live out those values closest to our cores. We cannot have hobbies because we medicalize them through unrelenting tracking of them, optimizing them, comparing them to faceless hobbies of others on Reddit threads and public posting boards discussing the trials and the tribulations of said hobby. Why have no-strings-attached fun when you can optimize fun?
But there is no optimal, because we’re dysfunctional and strange and irrational people whose perceptions change too frequently to try to measure with any sort of accuracy. Maybe life is as simple as Durden claims it to be: "The things you own end up owning you." Our accumulation and supposed ownership of information or material possessions only makes us slaves to them. It’s a tale as old as time, since the era of Epictetus and his insistence on events or things themselves not being problems, but our thoughts which make them so.
Perhaps I’m yet another millennial shmuck yearning for the fairytale that is a cabin on the countryside, detached from the hustle and bustle and worried only about my crops and my cows. But if not for my coveted membership in the warm, infected pool that is the social compost heap of the human race… what would I worry about? Would I become worried that I wasn’t worried about anything? How would my time be occupied if not for the routine I’ve grown so accustomed to; that is, complaining about the stupidity of my job but proceeding to do it to the best of my ability? How else would I complain to people I love about trivial matters until they’re as miserable as I am?
The angst that is dependence on an employer has bred bottomless motivation to start my own business, to “be the change” that elementary school posters remind us to be, to mouth off to authority in a way just tactful enough to keep the paychecks coming. With this endeavor in mind… Am I even capable of living slowly when it hasn’t been something I’ve ever found comfort in? And, alas, I’ve revealed what is man’s learned virtue: comfort. Sure, your day-to-day is riddled with pointless blubbering and analysis and decision-making. But isn’t that still easier than, say, bringing your “dream life” to fruition?
This most recent season of White Lotus was a tad slow for my liking, but entertaining nonetheless. Much like Piper’s realization in the final episode of the show, if you’re a watcher… What if it’s easier for us to dream of disconnection just like we dream about our dream life? Stated differently: what if the comfort in our sub-par existence and keeping our ambitions at arms-length is just another form of avoidance we’ve commodified as goal-setting? By all means, you color-code that calendar and map out precisely every possible wrong-turn you can take for the next 9 years with medical-grade precision, all while reminding people how “busy” you are. But much like rapid consumption of self-help books often results in the same outcome that is zero action toward self-help, we hoard more information than we bother to apply, and our “dreams” and “aspirations” are no different.. Fight Club made me wonder if I’m no different.
Piper, the daughter to very wealthy parents in the series, has inherited a life of fathomless ease, devoid of seemingly any financial worry. Sure, money cannot buy happiness, perse--- but to break free from the stipulations that are financial woes is a glee indescribable unless you’ve experienced it. It is this exact reason that she seeks emotional asylum in Thailand, within the walls of a monk-like retreat at a meditation center which intentionally nixes phones, cars, nice houses, and nearly any permanent product of modernity. After Piper spends only one night in the meditation center at her mother’s urging to “just see how it is,”, she ruefully admits to her parents the following morning that she’s weaker than she thought. Her dream-life only felt dreamy in frenzied glimpses through the glory hole of her mind.
At first, she griped about seemingly trivial details: the food, which “wasn’t organic and vegetarian”; the box-like room with a stained mattress and zero air conditioning. The Buddhist monastery revealed to Piper what she thought she’d outgrown or transcended: a fetish. A fetish for solace, a lust for only those challenges which are still within the realm of comfort and familiarity. As tears well, she states, “I know, I KNOW I shouldn’t become attached to these things… I don’t know… I think I am. I KNOW I am… The idea that I’m this princess that needs things to be a certain way is just… pathetic.” Her mother looks on in smug contentment, knowing full-well (and admitting earlier in the season) that she is unwilling to live an uncomfortable life. She claims she’s “just not cut out for it.”
I wonder if this would be the case for me, or for you. I did not grow up wealthy by any means. We were staunchly middle-class. But we reveled in any and all the American amenities we could afford, those which developing countries like Thailand could only visualize as meditative fables.
Much like it’s easier to wait for others to “be the change” rather than changing circumstances ourselves, filtering our day-to-day for simplicity is another thing that we seem to want others to do, or that we just want to talk about doing versus actually doing. Optimization is not progress, we’re realizing, but neither is talking about how much less we can get by on all while refusing to actually try to get by on less. It’s similar to voyeurism in that peeping through tiny glimpses into slow, country living are just enough for us to drudge through another overly complicated day, longing for the next forbidden glimpse. I’d love to do that one of these days, we say with a nonchalance we know is bullshit. But this is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time (another gem from Fight Club.)
On a large enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero. How’s that for mindful? Choose your minutes wisely.
YOUR THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS TO CONSIDER…
The Mirrorfeed Protocol
Scenario: In the near future, a company releases a wearable device called Mirrorfeed—a mindfulness enhancer that reflects your mental state back to you in real time. It visualizes your thoughts, feelings, and attention patterns via an AR interface—beautiful fractals for clarity, static and glitches for distraction.
Everyone wants to be seen as "present."
But:What begins as a personal feedback tool becomes a social status symbol. People start curating their internal experiences, manipulating their own attention not to be mindful, but to look mindful. Mindfulness becomes performance.
Thought Experiment:If you’re aware of your awareness because you want others to see it, is it still yours? At what point does self-awareness become another mask?
The Delete Key
Scenario: A near-future mindfulness tool allows you to erase distracting or painful thoughts permanently—regret, cravings, anxiety, intrusive memories. You just press a button, and the thought dissolves.
At first, it’s therapeutic. But then you notice:You’ve stopped growing. You’ve become a flat, polished version of yourself. Nothing sticks. No lesson hurts enough to change you.
Thought Experiment:Are unpleasant thoughts distractions—or messages? If you delete them all, are you present—or are you hollow?
Fincher Twist: You eventually meet someone who remembers your original self. You don’t recognize them. You smile politely as security removes them from your curated life.
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