In marketing there is a principle which states that: “Most people, by the time they become adults, will lose their capacity for youthful abandonment. They will never lose the CRAVING for it but they become psychologically starved because they no longer have the ability.”
This is pretty fascinating when you consider all the advertising with images of adults with big beaming smiles on their faces while using the product – but when you think about it, how many adults do YOU know who have the ability to have that much fun?
By my own personal estimation, fun is probably one of the least commonly experienced emotions among adults.
When an adult says: “I’m having fun”, it is more often a vacuous jargon that means “I’m interested in what I’m doing” as opposed to the ecstatic abandonment they enjoyed when they were kids.
Of course, most folks would never admit it to themselves because fun is thought of as being the light at the end of the tunnel for achieving success.
You get to have fun during your leisure time, so if you want to have more fun, simply become successful so you can take time off. Right?
This is basically thought of as being a truism.
Probably because it WAS true at one point, but as you get older you do not realize your neurology has changed. (We are using the word “neurology” pretty loosely in this article -– but you catch my drift).
The way it works is basically like this.
Your neurology adapts to whatever circumstances you are most accustomed to.
So if you are a little kid who is used to playing around all day, you are probably going to feel antsy and restless when you are asked to focus on school.
And if you are an adult who slaves furiously to meet deadlines for years on end, you are probably going to feel trapped in your head when you are out trying to have fun.
This has been a topic on my mind for the past several years.
Around 2006, I noticed my personality had changed, both for the better and the worse.
On the positive side, I found I could hold multiple concepts in my head at the same time and see how they came together without losing my train of thought. My attention span seemed to increase noticeably while my fluid problem solving skills and creativity became lightening fast relative to where they had been before.
At the same time, I noticed everything I thought about, spoke about, or spent time on, was work.
Simple socializing like small talk and joking around and comical nonsense became awkward.
The only exception was LIVEvents and LIVEshops (workshops/bootcamps) because I could rationalize to myself that “this is for work”. Events and sessions always the part of the week I looked forward to because I could have fun and let loose without feeling guilty about it.
Then as I came into 2007, I made the ambitious decision to make it the “most fun year of my life”.
Now you might think to yourself: “Having fun?? Uhhh, that’s easy!”
The difference is that when you have got a people who relies on you to produce results, or else they do not eat and there is no roof over their heads, having fun suddenly becomes a source of stress because it feels like a massive waste of time.
On top of that, and this is obviously a generalization, I had noticed over the years that most of the folks who had a talent for being relaxed and having fun also tended to be flunkies and underachievers in their professional lives.
Usually they would spend a lot of time laughing and hanging out with friends and taking life easy, which gave them a sort of care-free vibe that was attractive and contagious.
But later as I would get to know them, I realized they were projecting an illusion of coolness, because their lives were mediocre at best (and a total train wreck at worst).
I have often suspected many of these guys were burdened by a delusion that someday they would get paid just for being cool. Like a male version of Paris Hilton or Tila Tequila, I am not sure.
The problem was that a part of their “cool factor” was they lacked an inviolable personal standard for the quality of their own lives.
Their “neurologies” were never burdened down with stress or compulsive analysis because if things were not going well, they would just laugh it off and rationalize. But years of living in this zone also left them with no ability to deal with friction, setbacks, or adversity because their higher priority was maintaining the flow and their happy vibe.
In my experience, this was a form of weakness because their external circumstances often were not in alignment with the happiness of their internal world, which forced them deeper into personal denial.
Put them into a situation where avoidance and rationalization could no longer deal with their problems, and suddenly they would be whining like young children with no ability to cope.
Again, this is a generalization of many people who I met over the course of my life. But I also feel it is fairly on point in terms of the commonalities I saw in many people who on the surface seemed socially super successful.
In my early years, I remember feeling somewhat nervous and approval-seeking around these types because they had something I wished that I had myself. But as I hit my late twenties I became more indifferent, if not sympathetic, because I realized they had taken a route that would cause problems for them down the line.
I guess that is what you would call “coming into your own” – which really just means you do not buy into other people’s values above your own. Funny enough, it often makes people question themselves because you seem so confident in your own way of doing things.
Anyway, over the years, I discovered that there are actually TWO ways of getting that carefree vibe.
The first is just to ignore reality and make having fun the higher priority.
But the second, which in my view is the more powerful way of doing it, is to continually challenge yourself in your professional life while learning the art of separating work from pleasure (or having no gray area between work and play).
What they do not teach you in school is that your neurology becomes ADDICTED to whatever emotional state you are accessing most of the time.
So when you notice that most people who party all the time seem mentally retarded in their professional lives, it might seem so sad and pathetic that it turns you off of letting loose.
But at the same time, you have to also realize if you sacrifice fun for the purpose of professional success for too long, you are essentially FRYING your ability to enjoy life – which is equally short-sighted.
Doing this will lead you to a place where having fun becomes going through the motions.
You become so analytical and disconnected from the REAL EXPERIENCE of true enjoyment that you do not even know what it is anymore.
As absurd as it sounds, you wind up analyzing it the same way you would a business proposal, with an objective criteria of what fun should be instead the emotions/state/moment you are actually experiencing.
“I’m doing something interesting (or that costs a lot of money. Therefore the conditions for having fun are now met, which means I must be having fun.”
There is no ACTUAL lighting up of the “happy centers” in your neurology. That part of your neurology has withered away.
It is like if you lie in bed for a year and now all the muscles in your legs have atrophied and withered away. How much of a work out can you really do?
Maybe you can exercise lightly for a few minutes, but then after that the tissue has been worked and you are forced to take a break.
Only after a few months of repetition have you gradually built back enough muscle tissue to work it without burning it in more than a few minutes.
This is the vicious cycle which so many adults wind up trapped in without their conscious knowledge.
You are having “fun” but you are not REALLY having fun.
You are not detoxifying yourself from all the cortisone that builds up in your system at work, so there is no renewal taking place.
You show up for a fun activity because you think you are “supposed to” but the truth is you would rather be back in your work-addicted comfort zone.
It is just that if you stopped going out altogether then you would have to admit to yourself that the way you have been living is wrong.
And that is almost impossible because you have so much invested in it personally.
So what do most adults do?
They use ALCOHOL as a crutch because it stimulates those emotional pleasure centers for them.
(At least for an hour or two before they become belligerant and a pain).
To get past this, you have to make a very deliberate effort to pump up your “happy” neurology on a regular basis, so it does not lose its capacity to process those types of emotions.
That means continuing to dominate in the professional arena and producing the results that people expect from you, but at the same time, making a clear separation between work and play OR making WHAT you do come form WHO you ARE thus having no gray area.
I had noticed over the years that the fear of being perceived as incongruent was probably the biggest hurdle which held people back from reaching their potential with success. So I knew I had to get back to a space like when I was pushing envelope in terms of testing out new behavior and not caring what people thought.
The cool thing was that over about 6-10 months, it became natural and internalized. I still felt my neurology being exhausted having too many hours of fun in a row, but the threshold where that would happen was a several hours more.
As a peak performer, the temptation is to make work your entire life.
You will make vacuous statements like: “You have to be well rounded” because you THINK you are supposed to say things like this (or maybe that “balance” might make you a better performer).
But it is as much of a rationalization as the flunky who talks about how he has rejected the professional world because he is above the fray of capitalist society, when in reality he could not secure a decent job to save his life.
The key is to treat both fun and focus as different muscles that need to be worked and trained independently (even if you are training them at the same time).
More than just pride of being a true producer, there is something philosophical about being a person who can talk about their dreams and really achieve them (as opposed to telling yourself random lies).
But you ALSO have to force yourself to laugh and have fun throughout the day. Otherwise your dreams will probably turn out to be meaningless.
That is because when you have lost your capacity for true abandonment, you wind up doing things just to do them. For no real reason at all.
I think Robert Pirsig hit the nail on the head when he said: “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.”
Peak performance is the art of being fully engaged with “focused present energy” and then renewing your mind and spirit with total relaxation and being fully unplugged.
And the cool thing is that by combining hard work and having fun synergistically, I finally HAVE been able to have the most fun year of my life.
The adventures this year never could have happened if I have not taken it to the next level in terms of my work ethic, but at the same time, I was actually able to enjoy them because I had also taken the effort to make having fun a personal priority.
So in my opinion you CAN have your cake and eat it too. (just like Jesus said we could!)
You do NOT have to become another victim of the professional world any more than you have to become a victim of being a burnt out party-person.
Moderation.
Harmony.
The Greeks have been talking about it for thousands of years and deep down you probably knew it was true.
My hope is that as I evolve and progress, people can look at me and say: “That guy is a really hard worker, but he also seems like a harmonious, cool guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”
The whole cartoon character thing is OK in your twenties because you are LEARNING and it is about trial-and-error.
In your thirties, it is about as uncool as holding onto existential angst. Uhh, NO.
There is a time and a place for everything, and I think that as you get older, you really need to work all this stuff out.
