There Are Three Ways to Live Life: Only Two Are Right

Make the right choice

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

You have three options for how to live.

The first two will make you happy, but they’re the paths few choose.

The last choice will give you low-level anxiety for the rest of your life, but it’s the path most people choose.

This last choice seems logical on the surface. Many people make the argument that this, in fact, is the good life, but they’re totally wrong and they’re lying to themselves to cope.

Let me explain…

The Two Right Ways to Live

• You should either have sky-high ambition or none.

• You should either seek to get rich or not care about money at all and live an ascetic life.

• You should either go all out to gain as much status as possible or you should live a quiet life.

Aiming extremely high or low both have benefits.

Both really rich people and poor people pay next to nothing in taxes

There’s peace in not caring about status at all. You can also get so much status that you realize it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.

If you’re poor and just gave up on the idea of making money altogether, you can be happy. There are people in remote villages that are way happier than the average American.

If you make a ton of money, you’ll come to find out it wasn’t the answer to all your problems, but you’ll have freedom and security.

If you’re wealthy and powerful, you can ‘escape the matrix.’ If you’re poor and powerless, the matrix doesn’t care about you because there’s not much it can extract from you.

When it comes to opulence, excess, and hedonism, it’s better for you to drink deeply from the cup until you’re sick — get it out of your system—or just avoid drinking it altogether.

Contrast this with the worst option of them all—the option most people choose.

The Middle is Where Your Dreams Go to Die

Most people choose the middle, mediocrity, the status quo, a life that seems great on the surface but slowly poisons your soul.

Look at some of the examples above and run them through the lens of the average person stuck in the middle.

Middle-class people pay a ton of money in taxes each year because they have enough money to be taxed, but don’t know how to avoid taxes like rich people.

Middle-class people care about status too, but they don’t fully commit to it. Instead, they put on this facade of modesty when their behavior shows they care about status because they are trying to keep up with the Joneses.

They buy homes they can’t really afford. They’re in debt and overextended so they can look a little bit rich even though they’re just in debt — the BMW, lululemon yoga pants, latest Nikes.

I live in a small town with many corporate types. I know some people in town who just work at bars and restaurants, get drunk and sleep around, and overall have a great time. I also know very serious entrepreneurs aiming for big wealth and feel a sense of pride and contentment.

It’s the middle-management types who always look miserable.

They are the exact archetype of the type of people society uses to build their psychological prison.

They spend all of their time working because they have these debts and expenses to keep up with — ‘golden handcuffs’

When you’re in the middle, you get just enough of a taste of the good life to be pissed at yourself then you’re not doing more to live a great life.

The middle gets wiped out first. When there’s a recession, middle-management departments are the first to go.

It seems like a stable position, but the minute a few variables change, you’re a lot closer to the poor house than you think. And since you’re not used to the poor house, it’s going to hurt a lot more to be poor than it would be if you were used to it.

All of your behavior shows that you clearly care about money, status, recognition, importance, purpose, and legacy, but you can’t shift into a higher gear, so you tell yourself this story about how you are so content when you’re not.

Your life is like this meme:

Even when it comes to intelligence, it’s better to just be dumb and enjoy life or fully transcend a ‘normal life’ which leads you to the same conclusion as the dumb person, which is that you should just go for whatever you want because life is to be enjoyed.

It’s the middle types who follow all these little societal rules, have elaborate explanations for their mediocre outcomes, the ones who come into my comments and say:

“WELL AKKSHUUALLLY AYO”

Living a kind of good life is a strange hell.

How do you escape it?

Both of These Options Work

Your life will get a whole lot better if you either:

• Stop daydreaming

• Start executing your daydreams

Unlike many other self-help writers, I won’t tell you that you must succeed in order to be happy.

You don’t.

You can, and maybe should, give up on the idea of an extraordinary life altogether.

I have a friend like this. He has a relatively low-effort job that nets him $70k or so a year. He’s married and his wife earns similar. They have a decent-sized house and drive decent cars. He has no ambitions to be wealthy. He puts all of his cash in index funds and will retire with 3-5 million by age 60.

Wait, doesn’t his life sound like the middle-class hell I just spent several paragraphs writing about?

There’s one key difference…

He’s actually content.

He’s one of the most unbothered people I have ever met —comfortable in his skin, pragmatic, with no illusions about his life, and has no delusions of grandeur.

If he read this post, he wouldn’t be bothered at all. He’d tell me I’m the dumb one for chasing desire. But he’d actually be saying it from a real place of contentment. It’s rare.

There are people like this. You can be like this. But you probably aren’t like this.

Here’s a quick tell: if you, in any way, feel bothered by the content of this post, you’re probably not one of them.

I love when I write articles about ambition and someone comes from the peanut gallery to simultaneously scold me and tell me just how happy and content they are.

Happy and content people don’t leave paragraph-length explanations of their happiness on a random internet guy’s blog post.

They’re coping. I hit some cognitive dissonance trigger and they can’t deal with it.

Those people would be better off doing what it takes to get what they want or abandoning their dreams altogether.

Then you remove the tension.

Rid Yourself of Needless Anxiety

You have this low-level ‘refrigerator hum’ of anxiety that runs in the background of your life because you know you have dreams you’re just failing to execute on.

“Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.”

As I said above, you can remove a lot of this tension by accepting the middle path fully. Or you can choose my preferred option.

You can go for it.

All of it.

You can go for it with every fiber of your being and do what you know you’re supposed to do. You can answer the f***ing call.

You can use your talents and strengths to build a purposeful and profitable career or business. Instead of having to wonder ‘what if’ you can find out what success is like for yourself.

You can stop lying to yourself and come to this realization.

You have noble reasons for following your dreams and you have petty ones. Honor them both.

You want to find a career you enjoy and make a lot of money by providing something good that the world needs. But you also want to rub it in your ex’s face and prove all the people who doubted you wrong.

You mostly want money so you can have your time back and enjoy your freedom, but you want to flex a little too.

I love to write for the sake of writing. It is my calling. But, of course, I love watching the numbers go up — the views, the subscribers, the bank account. DUH.

All human beings crave a little status and validation. There’s a healthy way to get both, which is to answer the call, your call.

You don’t need an article to tell you what your dreams are.

You know exactly what you’d do if…

• You weren’t afraid

• You knew everything would work out

• You had tons of resources at your disposal

In fact, these remind me of an easy method you can use to discern whether or not you’re full of it.

If you could snap your fingers and make it exactly the way you wanted it to be, would it look like it does right now or would you maybe, just maybe, change a thing or two?

I don’t know you or your situation. But I do know that you probably need to pick a side. Doesn’t matter which side you pick—total acceptance or total ambition—but pick.

Your life depends on it.