by Phil Ossefie (with contributions from Pierce Ng and Todd Ler)
TLDR: Choosing to not hurt anyone is a good start.
Priorities
We’re suggesting approaches to living, not telling anyone how to live. How could we? We’re not even sure how to live ourselves. We all have different priorities, The 10 functions as a quick and easy way to see what ours are, if we weren’t already aware.
They can also help us re-evaluate if we’re prioritising the most worthwhile things. At the end of the day, even if most of what we do hits multiple categories, no matter how leveraged we may be, we have finite waking hours.
Developing one aspect of our life will at some point come at the expense of developing another.
Other than sacrificing Physical Health for Career, some of us could be prioritising Fun over Money, or putting Romantic Relationship, Family and Friends before and Career, Money.
Sometimes doing what we want isn’t the same as doing what we should. Deep down inside, we can feel it whenever those two aren’t the same thing. We know best, it just takes some introspection. All The 10 is meant to do is serve in that process whenever we choose to stay still.
What does The 10 say about us?
“I play a hardcore sport with a team M-F mornings, I have a part time job, and I’m studying for an extremely difficult exam to advance my career. I have a couple of close friends that I see a few times a month. I’m a musician that plays every weekend for 1k people.”
If we dug into Reddit OP’s post, we’d find out that IV. Romantic Relationship alone was causing her enough grief to find an otherwise fulfilling life unpleasant. True, she didn’t need a framework to know the source of her unhappiness, and even better to appreciate all she had going on in her life.
However, we may not always be as attuned to both bad and good things going on in our lives.
A review
Just for kicks if anything else, why not inspect how we’re doing in the 10 aspects of our own life. Let’s rate ourselves in each category out of 10 and try quantifying our overall quality of life as a score out of 100.
No one is as self-aware as we think we are, but it’s best practice to rate ourselves objectively, so be as honest with ourselves as possible. While it’s harder to be “accurate” with an inflated ego than low self-esteem, at the end of the day, the only person this score matters to is ourselves. So the exercise still somewhat accurately reflects who we judge ourselves to be right now.
I-III = ?/30
This score shows how successful we see ourselves. The traditional definition of success is Wealth and Power, not a fulfilling family life or enjoying hobbies. Success is our material results and how much we’ve changed society around us.
Note that it’s entirely possible to have a large Impact on society without being rich or possessing official authority, though it is fairly uncommon.
IV-VI = ?/30
This score shows how wanted we feel. “Life is relationships, the rest is just details” applies here. Let’s say we’re successful, financially free and improving the lives of many people we don’t know. But we have no one close to share in this joy or accomplishment. Would that feel a bit empty?
It’s a genuine question, the answer can be no.
The only way to really know is to become successful, burn bridges with friends and/or family in the process, and check if it bothers us that we lost them. It might not, but we’d have to ask ourselves if we ever cared about anyone to begin with and what kind of person that makes us.
VII,VIII = ?/20
This score shows how frequently we think our life is difficult. Running in tip top physical and mental condition in the long term makes daily living range from feeling light (at best) to neutral (at worse).
Even when times get stressful in the mid-term, or we run into short term difficulties,
we don’t plunge too far into darkness because we’re operating on a high level of stability. Give it enough time and things feel back to alright again.
It might sound unfortunate that high scores of Physical and Mental Health only lead to feeling neutral as opposed to great, but with so many victims to depression, anxiety, addiction and so on, “alright” often gets dismissed as a given when it could be considered a blessing.
IX,X = ?/20
This score shows how enjoyable we find life. Being in good health only gets us up to feeling alright. To feel good consistently, we rely on our habits.
Some aren’t always good for us, usually unending cycles of consuming things that spike our dopamine. Some are more sustainable, like practices or actions completely unrelated to our Career, i.e. hobbies. However, it’s fairly rare to achieve a lasting, higher level of baseline happiness just by following our natural likes and interests alone.
Higher happiness probably comes with paying more attention to things that are already present in our lives, as opposed to adding non-essentials on a regular basis.
To see what is already there in a new light, we’d have to slow down to really notice what we missed or took for granted before.
That’s probably the first step in a journey to renewed appreciation of what’s around us. A lot of development here revolves around improving how comfortable we are with uncertainties ahead that we can’t prepare for. This may also be an unending cycle of renewal, but it tends to feel better, more lasting and worthwhile.
Don’t kid ourselves
Ultimately, it’s still about being honest with ourselves. We can totally give ourselves 100/100 if we genuinely feel balanced and satisfied in every way, from the bottom of our heart. Since it wouldn’t be just a facade that crumbles easily, no one else’s judgment of our perceived perfect reality would really matter.
Low Scores Across the Board
In the opposite scenario, some can interpret The 10 as “10 ways to lose at life.” Born with disadvantages, in a bad neighbourhood, with bad genes, bad family etc. It’s definitely the truth and reality for some of us.
The world is currently structured far from ideal. The unfairness in distribution of resources and intense competition especially among the disadvantaged classes isn’t controversial news.
While we can’t say for sure how truly unfair the world is, it’s not unusual to see people claw their way up at someone else’s expense.
But the goal is to add value regardless of who we are or how tough life is. Operating in a zero-sum fashion by stepping on someone else means exactly that no value is added. It’s net zero because we basically took value from someone or somewhere else for ourselves. Staying stagnant to avoid hurting others is maybe not so bad, but it probably doesn’t feel very fulfilling.
So the only alternative left is being
positive-sum: to add value to ourselves and/or others, but at no one’s expense.
This may be more difficult, but it’s not impossible. Some might say it’s unexpectedly easy despite the current unfairness of the world. We wouldn’t know any better about that, but we do know that we’re not living well if someone else has to lose for us to gain. Besides, there can be value in actions that cost us nothing.
By Ourselves
This is where we ask:
“How many of the world’s problems will be solved by each of us becoming better people, individually?”
Sam Harris, Waking Up
Regardless if the answer is zero or what our circumstances are, the only thing in the world truly within our control is ourselves. We can’t force anyone else to do anything, only influence/persuade them. Here’s how things may change:
- As we grow on our own,
- we become more likely to convince others. Our effect on the world around us may increase.
- We change our circumstances in the same direction of our own progress. If we’re becoming better, so will the situation, and vice versa.
- A better situation in turn enables us to grow even more.
It’s almost as if what’s within our control is enough—our capabilities, integrity, emotions, responses—we don’t need more than that. We can choose how to see things, how little we care about things that may not serve us and how much we feel like we’re winning.
Some of our perceived results are verifiable with cold hard facts,
e.g. we won’t believe we’re getting wealthier if we’re unemployed and doing nothing about it.
However, a lot of what we get out of life isn’t verifiable and remains subjective to us, e.g. the feeling of purpose and happiness. There’s a lot of room to adjust our outlook on the world around us.
Ultimately, if we choose not to develop ourselves in any way, the person loses out the most is us. Even if we can’t add much, anything small is enough of a difference for things to not stay the same. There are 10 ways we could be living right, and 10 causes of misery. So when something’s not going well, we can work on the specific problem(s) sooner, and spiral less overall in the future. Armed with such awareness, Reddit OP was already a step ahead in this.
We hope to affect others positively, but if we’ve had no noticeable effect, at least we hurt no one in the process. We don’t have to worry about the rest.
Live well,
Phil