Exist Within Your Living Means
Week 16: Experimenting w/Absurdism
I’ve missed a week somewhere. Maybe two, but even if it takes me 100 weeks to do 52 weeks of Experimenting with Absurdism, I’m doing it, because I’ve learned a valuable lesson this week about taking the time I need to accomplish something. I’m calling this existing within my living means.
Did I just make this up? Yep, but let me explain.
I’ve always heard the phrase “Live within your means” as advice solicited to people who appear materially insatiable. My sister is one of these people: Quit buying $8 Starbucks coffees; You don’t need a new jean jacket; You can’t afford to double fist $20 margaritas at the Nicki Minaj concert if you’re behind on your bills. Sorry, Dee. This is all sage advice.
But’s not what I’m talking about here.
What I mean when I say “Exist Within Your Living Means” is more spiritual and immaterial advice. It encompasses the material stuff, but you have to first decide who you want to be and live accordingly. For example, if my sister decides she wants to be the type of person her children can depend on, she’ll need to decide that first, then take steps to make it happen, and her finances will follow suit. I love my sister so, I’ll stop telling her business and use my own life as an example from here on out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about morality and how to live over the past few weeks, and after reading Kant, Mills, and Aristotle, I’ve realized a lot of my ideas about how to live a good life come from the Stoics - and the existentialists. It starts with duty. We have a responsibility to live how we want to live. I want to live a creative, helpful life that allows me to think and learn and use my talents for the betterment of myself and others around me. And it’s my responsibility to try and do that. Today, I tried to embody that.
I woke up this morning dreading my month Rabbit Holes and Reflections workshop, which I usually love and called my mom to see if I can’t quell some of my dread. The workshop is today (Monday) at 5:15 PM CT for those of you who would like to join. The worksheet is free, but the guided walkthrough is for my paid subscribers in the Discord.
You get the link when you sign up, but message me if for some reason you don’t have it.
I told my mom I had was dreading the workshop because I’m not good at “selling” my services and a good salesperson would have sent out a reminder last week, but instead I was in Chicago dealing with family stuff, and didn’t finish my book proposal because I wanted to support a friend who needed me. And now, I was on the phone gabbing with her on the way home from dropping my daughter off at school - another distraction when she could have taken the bus! My mom said she had been very critical of herself in her morning reflections, too, and we commiserated about how hard life was. But I told her I didn’t want to whine. I just wanted to feel better.
I told her I wished I could be more like my husband who is so disciplined when it comes to being a “salesperson”. He’s gotten up every day for the past decade and made his own business hum. We’ve gone through periods where he’s struggled, and he takes time off when he needs to (mostly), but overall that man has cultivated the discipline to run his own business. It’s impressive to witness his trajectory. He went from no education to running a multi-million dollar business that provides for his family and allows me to pursue work that is important to me. It wasn’t always that way, though.
In December of 2010, I was struck by a lightning bolt of baby fever, and I needed Ken to grow up. I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, but then when I held my childhood besties baby, a warm maternal glow washed over me, and I turned to Ken and said: We need to have a baby. Part of that meant that he needed to figure out how to make a consistent income. I fully planned on being a working mom, and probably the breadwinner, but I was making about $27,000 a year as a grad student and we had a mortgage. Don’t ask me how I made this happen - I’m just a wizard like that, that and Obama’s First Time Homebuyer’s credit and about $10k from his grandma who had just passed. But he needed to get a job. That man had went from telemarketing to waiting tables to working for a janky-ass “start-up” selling VOIP phones, and was trying for the 3rd time to start his own Social Media Marketing business when he never even had a Facebook. I told his ass to go down the staffing firm and get a job by our anniversary in May, cuz we were going to Mexico to start making a baby or we were going to divorce court.
On April 29th (oh shit like exactly 13 years ago today!) I got home from work to find him prancing around the house rather glib. “You got a job?” I asked, oozing incredulity. “Yep. At Robert Half.” I thought they found a temp position for him, but he was going to be a recruiter. They required a college degree, but luckily they didn’t mind that his was “in progress”. He went from dead broke to 6-figures in a year, and I’ll never forget the shock I felt when this man put on a khaki three-piece suit and got on the train to go to the downtown office. We got pregnant right away - he was pretty proud of himself during this time, and I had the best 9 months any pregnant woman could ever imagine. It was a good year.
But about a year after Nova was born he wasn’t having so much fun working in corporate. He had to find a way out, and to help him I made some career sacrifices that haunted me for a very long time. But ultimately, he always wanted to be in business for himself, and I wanted him to be able to try again. He made it work - I guess 4th times a charm. Now for the last 10+ years he’s gotten up every day and reminded himself that he wants to live on his own terms. Over the past 3 years he’s wanted to make me happy and pay me back, in a sense, for the career sacrifices I made.
I tell you all of this Ken because the kind of guy who exists within his means, and this is what I told my mom. He’s decided the kind of life he wants to live, and he persists in trying to live that life. He’s always been like this since I met him. He wanted to be with me, and so he’s done what he needed to do every step of the way to make that happen. When I met him he had a mug that said “Future Millionaire”, and he’s just about accomplished that goal with his business. We used to dream out loud about what our house would be like, and we both wanted a slide from our bedroom window like the kid from the movie Blank Check. We just about made it, and my mom always says nice things about how far he’s come.
My mom also commends me on how far I’ve come, though. She tells me how much she appreciates my outlook and perspective and how I always make her think about things. She tells me I “changed her life forever”, and now that I’m older, she takes my advice. I see her growing even in her 60s, and I never realized how meaningful it is to have been a part of her growth. When I look at Ken, I admire his discipline and courage, but I also recognize that my discipline and courage aren’t going to be used exactly the same way because I don’t want exactly what he wants. I want to help people in my life that I care about, and people in general, and I want to do that life filled with learning and loving and laughing. (If I ever find a TJ Maxx placard it’s going on my wall) I don’t as much about selling monthly subscriptions as I do about making meaningful activities every month and writing meaningful newsletters. I woke up this morning wishing I had sent you a reminder about the workshop today, but I needed to recharge after an intense week taking care of family stuff. I’m glad that I lacked the “discipline” to forsake my newsletter when my family needed me. I took my kid to school because she needed an extra hour of sleep, and I called my mom because who knows how many more conversations we will have with our moms.
I want to live a life of constant effort - one where I improve by experimenting and not one with specific outcomes (book published by January, retire by 60, etc). The kind of person I want to be values their relationships. Sure, I want certain ends, but only insofar as they allow me to exist within my living means. I don’t want to stretch so far that I break for myself or for anyone else.
I think there are three steps to existing within your living means:
Figure out your means and decide the ends you want from this
Have courage and discipline to stay the course.
Measure and assess the “outcomes”.
Repeat and reapply using your assessments.
My means are to create and to learn - and to relate what I create and learn to other people. I know this from years and years of self reflection (like I do in my workshop… ya’ll should join me I keep telling ya). The kinds of ends that are possible from that are limitless, but if I want to sell my book for example, I need to focus my means on building an audience around the topic. I have been doing that steadily, but not at the cost of important moments with people I love.
The courage it takes to stay the course means not pressing on the gas as much as I have in the past, or as much as I want to. Before 2021, I was living outside of my means. I sacrificed family, relationships, and my mental health to achieve things that turned out to matter far less than I thought. The discipline to stay the course means getting up every day and sitting down to write, and being thoughtful about how I can help my loved ones and beyond. Discipline also looks like reading aloud on LIVE daily even when I don’t want to. It means attending to myself when I needed to rest this weekend. It means going up North to deal with family stuff when I didn’t want to. My means looks different than Ken’s because we want different ends, and yours would look different from both of ours.
The ends I’m talking about can be short- and long-term, but they should be integrated. What I mean by that is that living a creative life is compatible with being a good mom/wife/friend/daughter/sister, and I have to assess my progress knowing that there is a give and take in all those domains. When I work steadily, I progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it. That’s part of the creative process. Publishing this book is a relatively short-term end in comparison to building a good relationship with my mom, which is a long-term pursuit made up of short-term events. For both, measuring these outcomes must be done in the short-term, with the long term in mind. I call her a few times a week, and it’s hard to say that our relationship has grown over a few months, but when I look back to years ago, it’s clear it has. As far as building an audience, maybe I didn’t grow my paid subscribers this month, but last month I gained 4. This month, I put a lot of energy into my proposal, and even though it’s not done, it feels like it’s getting good. That conversation with my mom was meaningful, as was the time spent with my family this week, even if it was hard. On a personal level, I helped a lot of people this month, and I know this because they’ve told me. They don’t always tell me, but I really felt it this month. So, I while my assessments are largely subjective, I’m making progress in having good relationships with people that I value, I’m helping people who value me, and making progress a creative goal for my career. I’m used to only the latter which is why it feels as though I’m not progressing as fast. I want to live a more integrated life using all my means to their maximum potential - and sometimes that means missing a week of this newsletter but you better believe I’m always experimenting.
Thought Experiment:
What are your means? The possible ends from those means? Are these ends you actually want? Think about my perspective on money vs. Ken’s. I feel like I should want the same ends as him, but I don’t.
What kind of discipline and courage do you need to accomplish these ends while living within your means? Is sticking to a rigid deadline important for accomplishing your ends? Is it even within your means to do so?
How will you assess how well your means are working? At the end of May what do you want to have accomplished? There is no right answer, only your answer. Again, you should come to the workshop!