509 | The Fix

Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh I bet that you'll be fine without it Yes, welcome to the minimalist podcast where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn and joining me here at Earthling Studios in beautiful West Hollywood, California. This is my good friend TK Coleman. What a wonderful world. Oh, Takao, we got so much to talk about today. Let me look at this. Coming up on this episode, we're talking about feeling defeated because of limitations. We're also going to talk about problems that just won't go away even though I fix them that keep popping back up. Also other people's cluttered spaces and much, much more. Also on page three, I've got this thing for you. We're going to talk about five things you should never feel guilty about letting go of. Let's start with our callers. If you have a question for our show, give us a call. 406-219-7839 is our phone number. Or you can just email a voice recording, real simple, right from your phone to podcast at theminimalists.com. Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all. Advertisement suck. Yes, indeed. Oh, by the way, when you're calling in, we're looking for all kinds of questions here, right? When I'm thinking about the questions that I'm looking for, and I'd love to hear from you, TK, we're looking for some fresh questions. I always love the sort of emotionally charged questions when you're right in the middle of it. Like, I'm struggling to let go of this thing. Or it could be a non-thing that I'm struggling to let go. I'm struggling to let go with something. Or I just let go of the thing and now all of these new emotions are popping up. But then there are other questions we're looking for as well. What are some of the unique questions you'd like to hear from our audience in an upcoming episode? I like the relationship clutter questions. The ones having to do with how do I endure or navigate the complexities that other people introduce to my life? That's a favorite of mine, and I think that's something that everyone can relate to. And it never gets old because the details vary just enough to make it a little bit tricky so that it can be hard to apply the principles you extract from one answer to a different situation. And so I love kind of working around those types of issues. I would love to hear more of that. So we have a whole bag of questions, but we're looking for some fresh ones here. Do you have a unique question you've never heard us answer on the podcast? Give us a call. And our first question today is from Katarina. Hi Josh, Ryan, TK, and the rest of the minimalist team. My name's Katarina and I'm from Toronto, Canada. I've been a Patreon subscriber for the last couple of years, but a listener of the podcast since 2018. I recently dislocated my left knee for the third time and it's left me feeling really defeated. Each time it happens, I work hard to heal. I do the exercises and I'm cautious with every movement. But it still happens again. Now I feel anxious even about the simple things like turning in bed, and I catch myself wondering if the rest of my life will be about missing out because of my knee. My question is, how do you cope when a recurring injury or limitation makes you feel discouraged about your body and your future? Thank you. So TK, Katarina feels not just discouraged, she feels defeated, she said, and she feels anxious around this. And like, this thing happens and then maybe you feel like you get it fixed and it pops back up again, or it just feels like this recurring injury or sometimes you just feel like you have this limitation. I was doing some research for this episode beforehand. I stumbled across this quote from the French essayist, Anaya Ninh, and she said that, how can I accept a limited definable self when I feel in me all possibilities? And there's something really fast because I recognize that I do have limitations. I'm 44 years old right now. I'm not going to make it into the NBA. I recognize that, but I also feel in me all possibilities. And so for me, when I hear a quote like that, maybe it's like, okay, well, why would I want to be in the NBA? Right. And what is, because what's possible through that is still possible, maybe through other means. So if Katarina comes to you with this question, I've got this injury, I've got these limitations, I feel anxious, I feel discouraged, I feel defeated. What do you tell her? Well, I think about the advice of Peter Daniels who said over the course of your lifetime, read a thousand biographies, because in doing so, you'll build a vast vocabulary for overcoming incredible odds. Stories are one of the most powerful ways that we can learn how to contextualize our lives. We develop a vocabulary through engagement with other people's stories for sense making. And when it comes to injuries and rehab and making comebacks, we have a lot of stories of human beings who have gotten injured and who have gotten re-injured and whose lives are never the same. I'm from Chicago and we just celebrated Derek Rose, whose career was cut short because he went from being MVP, Bulls number one seed to having that injury. And he would work really hard to come back and then the next year get injured again, work really hard to come back and the hopes are up and then he'd get injured again. And you have lots of stories like that. And one of the concepts that you see come up when you engage these stories is the concept of self-reinvention, where people have to make a shift in their mindset where they go from trying to get back to this place that they once were defining some point in the past as the pinnacle. And they say, I'm never getting back there. I'm never going to be who I was in my so-called prime, but I'm going to have to redefine what my prime is. I'm going to have to reinvent the way that I play the game, what I expect from the game, what my contribution is to the game. Maybe I've never identified with playing it this way, but it's time to recreate myself and adjust those expectations. And so I think one of the most important things to let go of is this mentality of, I'm going to get back to an ideal state that I once lived. You're not the same. That past is over, but you can recreate a new goal and aim after a new ideal and improv your way towards that. Yeah. I think about limitations in my own life and whether it's a recurring problem or some sort of recurring, for me I've had recurring injuries, but also like health problems as well, right? But I also look at as an opportunity to reexamine my recurring habits because quite often my recurring problems are a byproduct of my recurring habits. I mean, even if it could be something as simple as I have a knee injury, but I start playing basketball before it's fully healed and so I re-injure myself in a way, right? And so when I think about chronic illness in my own life, it kind of reminds me how nice most things aren't. I'm going to give you an example here. I had to go to West Elm a few months ago. It's a furniture store and it's not far from our studio here and I was picking up this dish. I was buying it for someone, right? And I'm in the store and it's filled with all of these really nice things, nice furniture. There's a really nice leather sofa over there and there's like this gorgeous marble top coffee table. And then over here there's like this really great wood, solid wood credenza. And over here there's this oak table that's like a side table. All of these things I really like. There are these really nice things, right? But that day I was feeling particularly good and I realized I've been going through some, I had spent several years going through those health issues when I discovered I had those autoimmune conditions, right? And it re-contextualized my life in a way. And it made me realize all these things that I think are so nice that I'm attracted to, they're not really, I'm not as attracted to them anymore because the pain that I was experiencing before made me really realize what was important. My health was important to me. And as soon as I lost that, it's the Confucius line. A sick man or a healthy man wants 10,000 things and a sick man wants but one. And you can see that standing there in your favorite retail store, you're at the furniture store there and like all of these really nice things. If you're healthy and you don't have that perspective of the injury or the recurring problem, you might look around and say, wow, I want everything in here, right? This is what's important. This is what will complete me. I want these 10,000 things. But when you've dealt with like the significant suffering and pain of illness or loss, you realize like, oh, all the things I thought I wanted, that's not what I really wanted. I want what I already have. And now that I'm in a healthy state, wanting that, which I already have, I can appreciate it much more because I do have it. And those other things are fine. But needing to acquire them in order to fulfill me is no longer a requirement. That's very good. You know, when I think about this concept of the infinite possibilities, I think about the Jay-Z lyric, right? I got a million ways to get it. I don't think being a person of infinite possibility is necessarily about the abandonment of constraint or the rejection of limitation. You know, I can't just magically transform myself into a rock or a tree, but it does mean that there are, that we have rarely, if ever, exhausted the possibilities for how we can show up for the life that we want. So I like to think of dreams as having an energetic essence. You form in your mind the image of something that you haven't had that you think you want. Maybe it's this new car, or maybe it's to marry a movie star, or maybe it's to be a rock star someday. And that represents something for you. And that image is an approximation of the energetic essence. It's the best, most tangible, concrete concept you have of what will give you that good, deep down feeling that you want. But everything that we want, we want it because we believe there's some kind of feeling that it's going to give us. And sometimes you have to sit with that and say, what is the energetic essence of my dream? Because if I never ponder that, I'll get attached to the particular vehicle that I think is going to take me there. And when that vehicle crashes, or that vehicle shows that it's just not good enough to take me that far, then it's, I'm lost, I'm depressed, I'm hopeless, but it's not about the vehicle. It's about the energetic essence. And when you realize that, you can get there by many different ways. And so I think it's worth spending some time with your concept of the good life and realizing that this picture or this story is only an approximation of something that is far less tangible, something that is far more spiritual and vibrational, if you will. And that gives you a sense of fluidity with how you allow things to unfold in your life. I think there's a flip side to that too. I think you're right. Behind that purchase or the thing that you want often has to do with that good feeling I'm going to feel. Or maybe the other side of that is it might have to do with letting go of a bad feeling. I put bad and air quotes there, right? Something that's unpleasant to me, right? And sometimes the pain there, it's more painful without a purpose. So I go to the gym and the next day I'm sore because I did some sort of curls and my biceps are sore and then I do these, I do a bench press and my chest is sore. I wake up the next morning and it's sore. And it's like, oh yeah, I know why that pain is there. That pain is necessary. In fact, I've partnered with that pain in a way, yeah. As opposed to if I just didn't, if I didn't go to the gym and I woke up one day and all of a sudden I was sore like that. And it's full body inflammation. It's like, uh-oh, what sort of chronic illness do I have? What's the purpose for this pain? This pain feels purposeless. And as soon as the pain feels purposeless, that's when we get to that level that Katerina's at with that level of despair. Like, I feel like this doesn't have a purpose. So my question, anytime that I'm going through some sort of pain like that is how can I partner with this pain? Partnering with the pain means learning from it. It means better understanding it. Better understanding my habits that led me to this or my habits that will lead me out of the pain. Was it my habits that actually got me here? You know, I live by this heuristic and it's not fundamentally true, but I find it to be really helpful in my own life. And it's pretty simple. Anything bad that happens to me, bad mean unpleasant, right? Something I don't want, an undesirable outcome. Anything bad that happens to me, I take full responsibility for it. I take the credit for all the bad things and anything good that happens to me, I attribute it to other people and to luck. And that is a really helpful heuristic for agency. It's like, and also it keeps my ego from being fueled by any lucky sort of thing that happened to me. Because the truth is there's elements of truth on either side of that. Anything quote unquote bad that happens to me, I can blame someone else, but I don't find that to be particularly useful. Even if someone else is responsible, what did I do that put me in that situation? I don't mean victim blaming myself, right? I mean understanding what I could have done differently because I can't change the past, but I can change my habits and behaviors going forward. Conversely, if something great happens to me where we're nominated for an Emmy or becoming New York Times bestseller, and that's ostensibly great, I have arguments as to why those things don't really matter that much. To me, it's like, well, yeah, I give credit to others. Part of that is luck. Part of it is the other people who are involved in the process because the truth is I couldn't have done it without them. Yes, I could take some credit if I want to, but man, it sure feels better to hand out the credit anyway. To say, oh, big thanks to TK for making this happen. Big thanks to Matt Diavela or Professor Sean or to Savvy D or the post production Peter for making the audio sound so good on this show. Giving them the credit. And by the way, I lucked in to meeting most of them anyway, right? It's all the fault of luck and it's all the fault of other people when things go well. But if something is going poorly in my life, I like to see how I can step up and take responsibility, not to blame myself, but so I can learn from it. You said something some time ago about music, how you have a certain amount of time to write a hit song or to make your best work and then you spend the rest of your career chasing that. What's that thought again? It's a Matt Carney line and it's from his first album. He said you have 25 years to make your first album and two years to repeat. Chail's son and the retired MMA fighter has a similar line where he says something like, you have 20 years to do your best work and then you spend the rest of your years trying to recreate that and chase after it. And you know, when I think about the old Adage, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. There are two ways that can bear out in our experience. One is we get injured and we heal in a way to where it's less likely that we'll be injured in that same spot. We heal and we just get stronger in a direct sense. But the second way is we get injured or we get hurt. We're never the same in that area. We always feel a little tender, a little weak, a little delicate. But that forces us to evolve in a different direction that we would have never been incentivized to do. And so we learn how to develop new strengths, new ways of expressing ourselves. We become creative in areas where we previously didn't have to. It's like the person with a lot of money, every problem they have, they can just throw money at it and it goes away. But then they encounter a problem that they can't throw money at and that forces them to evolve and become more creative. Or it's like aging. When you're young, you can just solve things with a lot of energy and more time and hard effort. But then when you get older, you don't have that flexibility or that freedom and you learn to be better, but in a different way. You never become young again, but you become better than you were when you were young in a different way. And that's directly connected to the loss of that youth. And so the question that I would leave you with here is in addition to the thought of how can I reclaim what I once had, I would be asking myself, how can I evolve to become better in a different way? What can I now do differently because of my motivations, because of my needs, because of the way in which even rehabbing has developed my character and expanded my self-confidence? What way can I be better than I ever was in the past? You need a new goal, not just an oven to recapture. Katarina, I'd love to give you a clutter counseling session with T.K. Coleman. We can unpack some of this mental clutter that's going on here, this anxiety that you're working with. Let's set her up, Savvy D., if you could reach out to her or maybe Professor Sean, one of you could reach out to Katarina and give her a free clutter counseling session. For anyone else, head on over to TheMinimalists.com. Click Counseling there at the top if you'd like to book a clutter counseling session here in Los Angeles or anywhere in the world via Zoom. Before we get back to our scholars, T.K., it is time for the Lightning Round where we answer the Patreon community chat's question of the week. This is where we attempt to answer your question with a short, shareable, minimal, maximum. You can find this episode's maxims in the show notes over at TheMinimalists.com and every minimal maxim ever at MinimalMaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox if you sign up for our email list over at TheMinimalists.com. We'll never send you spam or junk or ads, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity. The question of the week this week, what problem keeps popping up even after you fix it? I think this fits well with Katarina's question here. It's about problems that are recurring, right? What problem keeps popping up even after you fix it? Now, before we get to our pithy answers, let's see what some of our listeners had to say. Jake said, a problem that keeps popping up is the contentment of having enough. I feel like nowadays it's easy to desire more, whether it's experiences, physical things, etc. Why is it so hard to appreciate where I am at the present moment? Why is that so difficult, TK? I mean, it's very easy to deprive ourselves of all the beauty that the now moment has to offer when we're too eager or anxious about the next moment. You think about a transition job, you know what you really want to do, but you're at a job that's just kind of a means to an end. It's easy to kind of just half-ass your way through that and not be fully present. And you could get so many connections, so many benefits, so many valuable experiences in a way that could change your life. But when you treat it like it's just a transition, you treat it like it's just an in-between sort of thing. You get in-between results. And so sometimes we have to find a way to say, I know that where I'm at right now is not where I'm going to be forever, but I'm going to focus on it like I'm going to be here forever so that I can get everything out of it. So that when I move to the next phase or next step, I can look back and I can say, I'm glad I squeezed all the juice out that lemon, you know? And isn't that always true? Even if you're at the top of your game, you're Michael Jordan in the late 90s, right? That's not where you're going to be forever, right? Even that is a means to some other end if you're looking at it as an outcome that is out there. But I think what made someone like him so great is there, yes, there were outcomes, but he was also hyper present. And he was there in a way that was like, we call it flow state or whatever you want to call it. Like there is this moment of, I'm right here. I'm noticing everything that's going on around me. I can't perform unless I do that. If I'm thinking about next week's road trip, what's going on here in front of me is going to fall apart altogether. And so that's true at the highest levels. It's true if you are a baggage handler at LAX right now and you're using that to pay the bills and you have this dream of becoming, of starting your own limo company, right? Great. Here's where you are right now. But even that, once you start the limo company, there will be some, that'll be a step towards something and you'll still be struggling to stay present. And if you're always looking at the horizon, you'll never be looking at what's going on right there in front of you. Susan said, I struggle with too many emails in my inbox and too much junk mail. That sounds like a problem that keeps popping up, right? Yeah, for sure. You fix that and more just shows up. I remember I had this strange epiphany. I'll get back to her answer here in a sec. I had this strange epiphany. I was on my phone years ago and the email app, I don't have email on my phone anymore but I had gotten to inbox zero and it said, you have no emails. You can enjoy your day. Oh. And it was like, oh, the implicit message there is I'm not allowed to enjoy myself until all of these emails are taken care of. And maybe that's the thing that Jake was talking about earlier. It's like, it is possible to enjoy going through the emails, at least more so than resenting them, right? I can show up with either disposition like there's got to be something. It's a slot machine anyway, right? And so I'm showing up and here's my email inbox and I can treat it like it's my sanctuary and I can try to opt out of as many things as I can. But yes, someone might still find their way through the, your whatever firewall you've set up. In fact, Susan says, I unsubscribe to emails. I don't want and I use catalog choice.org to get off mailing lists, but they keep coming. I hear you. I hate junk mail, both electronic and physical. For physical mail, I use an app. They're not affiliated with me at all. And so do your own reading to make sure it would fit for you. It's called Paper Karma. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. If you want to check that out, it's like two bucks a month. And then anytime I get junk mail in the mail, I just put it on the counter, I snap a photo of it and it unsubscribes me from that list. And it's pretty effective. It's not 100%, but I'd say it's north of 80%, maybe even north of 90%. I get way less junk mail. You know, I moved like three or four years ago. It started the whole cycle over again. I was getting everyone else's junk mail as well. So I had to put them into this system also. And after a while it pared down. And it's probably 80 to 90% less when I was getting three or four years ago. Also dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com. I list both of those early on the website at theminimalists.com. We have this 21 day journey. Day 15 has to do with digitizing certain things, but also getting rid of the junk. So if you go to theminimalists.com slash day 15, it lists both of those there. You can opt out of some of these catalogs and you can sort of prescreen yourself out of some of these areas that there's, you get signed up for junk mail in a thousand different ways. And then these are some clearinghouses to maybe help you sort through some of that. Tatiana says, my dining room and kitchen table, no matter how hard I try, it keeps getting cluttered. On this question, TK, why is it that my dining table at my house in Ohio, California is never cluttered? And yet Tatiana's always is. Now I have no judgment for her. I certainly don't think I'm better than her or anyone else. I'm just wondering what's going on behind the scenes in my mind and her mind, because it doesn't even cross my mind that my dining room table might ever be cluttered. That doesn't even feel like an actual possibility to me. Yeah, my guess here is that it's not because of a difference in virtue or skill, but because of a difference in sensitivity. So right now I am drinking black tea, but let's say I didn't like green tea. Let's just say for whatever reason that was gross to me. Well, suppose, you know, someone pours some green tea here, I drink it and I spit it out. And then you look at me and you go, hey, man, how are you so good at that? Are you so good at not drinking green tea? I would say I'm not good at not drinking green tea. It just disagrees with me so strongly that even if you paid me to do it, it would be hard for me to sustain. Sometimes the easiest things for us to do are the things that just agree with us so strongly, which is why when people live together and one person likes to leave their clothes on the floor and the other person's really good at not doing that. Sometimes it's because the person who, you know, doesn't like clothes on the floor. They have like a little sensor that goes off. You know, it makes them feel like they can't relax. They can't sleep. They can't be at peace until those clothes get picked up. Whereas the other person just doesn't have that. And so they have to go off memory and discipline, whereas the other person just goes off sensitivity. And so since we all have different sensitivities, sometimes we're naturally good at things because our sensitivity supported and other people need to remember it. They need to follow it like a rule. They need a strategy. They need discipline. And they have areas that are like that for them that are not like that for us. I think the difference is likely, it comes down to something like that. I have a friend in Cincinnati who has celiac disease and he can't eat any bread at all. He'll have a terrible allergic reaction. He's not just sensitive to it. In fact, we were having dinner once, years ago, maybe a decade plus ago. And they brought out his order of food to the table. There's just a little side of bread there. He's like, I'm sorry, you have to take the whole thing back. I can't have anything that touched bread. And so maybe I feel like I have celiac disease for clutter in a way because I can't imagine. I can't have a table that was touched by clutter even now. Obviously that's not, that's a hyperbolic example. It's a parodic exaggeration of, but I also, there's some truth to it. If I were to come home and there was clutter on the table, I would think someone broke into the house and left some things behind. It's like reverse shoplifting to a certain extent. And so I like what you're saying there. Maybe what you're saying, we talked about this earlier with the pain piece, right? Maybe Tatiana isn't feeling enough pain around that clutter. This happens with our health all the time. You know, someone that when enough pain shows up, they finally end up going to the doctor. And it's like, oh, I really wish I would have went a year ago, six months ago, two years ago, whatever it is. I wish I would have taken care of this sooner, but it required a certain amount of pain for me to do something about it. And so for Tatiana, maybe what she needs is realizing like, this is way more painful than I realized. I can't keep tolerating this pain because you encourage whatever you tolerate. And so if you tolerate a little bit of clutter, you tolerate a little bit of pain, what happens? More of it shows up right there at your doorstep. Tolerance is great as a first step of realizing what the problem is. But if we just sit there steeped in pain, mired in clutter, what happens? We get used to it. It becomes an everyday occurrence. Ah, it's just a little bit of clutter. Ah, it's just a little bit of pain in my ankle and my wrist or my knee. Ah, I'll get to it later. And the pain or the clutter it builds and builds and builds. And before we know it, you see the people on the TV show Hoarders. And the clutter didn't show up there overnight. And they're at a pain point now where it's so overwhelming that they need professional help to come in and just haul things out. But it's not about the stuff. It's about the story they've attached to the stuff. In fact, with Tatiana, there's a minimal maximum of yours that I wrote down here. I was hoping maybe you could expand on it for me. You said stories are to problems. What space is to possessions? That's what makes room for them. Maybe expand on that for me. Well, you can't have a possession unless you have space, right? Which is why when we buy things, we consider where we live. Where would this go? Do I have room for it? And if I don't have room for it, I either have to say no to the possession, or I have to give up something else in order to make room, or I consider moving into a different kind of space that accommodates this if I want it so bad. So it's not that space is bad or that this is a value judgment about the nature of space. It just identifies space as the necessary condition for things to even exist in the first place. And it's a similar way in the relationship between stories and problems. What is a problem? A problem is something that gets in the way. A problem is something that creates difficulty. But what makes that problem a problem? Because for someone, your problem is not a problem at all. It's a problem for you because you have a story about where your life is headed. I have a story that happiness is living in Tennessee. Happiness is having this much money. Happiness is marrying this person or having this home. Or my purpose in life is to do this and to be that. And then when I encounter something that gets in the way of that, I experience it as a problem. But you can eliminate every problem by eliminating the goal or the sense of purpose that's connected to it, right? Because that is what makes it a problem. Now, that doesn't mean that our stories are bad, but what that means is if you have a problem and it's nagging you, you can negotiate that problem at the level of the symptom by pushing it away or managing it. But you can also recontextualize that problem by changing the story that you're telling about it. You can also change the habit, right? So like if the symptom is the table is always cluttered, there's probably something going on behind that. Why is the table always cluttered? Why is that stuff showing up? It could be a simple habit like, well, I check the mail every time I come home and I just put it on the table. And I say, I'll deal with it later. We have something we call the no piles rule. And it's pretty simple. The no piles rule just says, I don't let anything accumulate on flat surfaces in my home. Everything has a home. It doesn't get a temporary purgatory. That's what happens with the dining room table or a entryway table or any flat surface credenza sideboard coffee table. They become these repositories of stuff. And then it's there for a day and then a second day shows up and a third day of stuff shows up. And it's not even that big of a deal after one or two days, but after a week or two weeks is like this thing's already cluttered. I guess that's the way it is. Well, yeah, that's the way that the habit is. But if I change the habit, the clutter just goes away automatically. Steffi says, there's a saying in German, you grow with your challenges. Oh, I love that. To me, that means the point isn't always to find a permanent solution because some problems have a way of returning in new shapes. Instead, the value lies in how we approach them each time and issue resurfaces. It offers an opportunity to expand our perspective to learn and to grow rather than aiming for problems to disappear once and for all. I've come to see them as reminders that life is dynamic. What mattered yesterday may change tomorrow. And what felt like such a setback can later become a source of strength in that sense, quote, solving is less about erasing the difficulty and more about developing resilience and a broader way of seeing the world. Steffi, you Germans are so wise. I love this. Some problems have a new way of returning in new shapes. Some problems have a way of returning in new shapes. How poetic is that? Your comment is the perfect summary for this whole discussion here. How about you listeners? What problem keeps popping up even after you fix it? Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat. Okay, give me something pithy, TK. What problem keeps popping up even after you fix it? Change the frame, change the picture. I think about reoccurring problems in my life and one of the things that jumps out at me is that each time you solve a problem, you're really just graduating to a new set of problems. This is one of the observations of systems thinking and it's born out in our experience. To solve a problem here at one level just introduces complexity at another level and you're just graduating to a more sophisticated kind of problem. And so the way that you have to deal with that is by changing your paradigm entirely. I love James P. Karst's work, Finite and Infinite Games, where he says a finite game, the goal is to win. And for an infinite game, the goal is the perpetuation of the spirit of play. And for me, I find the reoccurring problem is one where I solve something and I think I'm going to be happy and then another problem comes up. And then I solve that and I think I'm going to be happy and another problem comes up and I find myself, oh, I lost myself in a game of making happiness conditional on my problems going away. And then I switch back to that infinite game and I say, no, no, no, the goal of life is to play. What do we do when we seek out games? We literally seek out problems. A game can't be fun unless you can introduce a constraint that makes it difficult. If I say, all right, the goal is to throw that ball in the hoop, but you got to do it with one arm, but we got to raise the hoop up 10 feet high. But you can only shoot from here. It doesn't even become fun unless there is a problem or something that gets in the way. And remembering that and approaching things with a spirit of play is actually what allows me to approach life by saying, hey, problems are problems, but that's not a problem. Yes, which brings me perfectly to my pithy answer, which is the solution is the problem. I wrote this essay a couple of years ago. I'll read it real quick. You can find it over at theminimalists.com. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Most people want, quote, solutions because we're unwilling to dig down to the root of the problem, the real problem. So-called solutions are but an opiate. Most how-to lists, step-by-step instructions and habit change remedies are drugs that mask the symptoms, yet they compound the problem in the long run. What if, instead of numbing the pain, we sidestep the solutions and scrutinize the problem itself? If your desk chair is a flame, reading the fire safety manual won't save you. The problem isn't a lack of instructions. The problem is your posterior is on fire. If you own too much stuff, watching a 67 decluttering steps video won't help. The problem isn't a shortage of decluttering tips. The problem is the attachment to stuff. If you want to find tranquility, pondering the seven habits of effective people won't bring you peace. The problem isn't your bad habits. The problem is thinking good habits will trigger joy. Solutions are seductive, but they rarely solve anything because chasing a, quote, fix removes our attention from the problem. It is only when we understand the fundamental nature of the problem that it is eradicated. If you understand the why, the how takes care of itself. I think that covers a lot of what we were talking about today. I'm not against mechanical how-to's. They often make sense. You know, if you want to, if you've never gone golfing before and you want to learn how to hit a golf ball, understanding the basic mechanics will help you, right? You didn't even know that was a problem. You didn't know it wasn't a problem for you until you get to the T and you're like, oh, my problem is I don't know how to hit a golf ball. And so some mechanical things will help me do that. It's not going to help you become the greatest in the world, but that may not be the outcome there. If my Wi-Fi router is not working here at the studio, I'm going to look for how to reset that in order to fix the problem. But many of the so-called problems we have, they don't have a fix like that. They don't have a mechanical fix. They require an understanding. It goes back to the cluttered table discussion. The fix in the moment is, let me just clear the clutter off. Oh, I fixed it and popped back up again. Oh, just fix it again tomorrow. I'll keep fixing it. Keep fixing it. But the real fix is understanding what the problem is beneath the clutter. Imagine a basketball team. They're just standing on the court looking lifeless and hopeless. And you say, what's going on guys? Why aren't you playing? And I say, oh, we've got too many problems. You say, what's the problem? Well, first of all, you see that rectangular line and we go, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we can't dribble outside of that. We also, we only get six fouls a game. We can't hold the ball without dribbling and run with it. That's called, there's a rule against that and entire rule against that. You actually have to give the ball to the other team if you're caught doing that. And we've got all these problems. You laugh at that thought because you know that those problems are the very boundaries that make the game possible. But sometimes we lose ourselves in the game. We forget that it's a game and we get very serious about it. And this happens in sports all the time, right? Like lives get threatened. People get into fights and human beings have their ugliest moments sometimes playing games because we lose ourselves in it and we forget that, hey, this is a game. And there's a reason why we're playing it and it's ultimately to have fun. And we chose these boundaries. We chose these constraints because that's what's going to bring out the creativity in us. Well, that's almost the end of page one. We still have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to. But first real quick for right here right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. I was going to mention we have Sunday Symposium coming up. It's a special one. It's in Ventura. By the time this episode comes out, all the tickets might be gone for that. You can check SundaySymposium.com. But since we're talking about some of the pain and the fixes, I've been dealing with this pinched nerve in my neck for a while. In fact, it's been over a year and a half now. Somewhere around the C5 and it's causing all kinds of pain down my lumbar spine and the rhomboid muscles and the delts and other places. And this pinched nerve, it's exacerbated by all kinds of things, including certain exercises. I can't do as many push-ups or pull-ups anymore without messing with it. Long car drives will mess with it. But also sleeping. If I sleep in the wrong position, I'll wake up and it's just like, oh my God, nine or 10 out of 10 pain. And so I started something recently. I want to do an episode about this in the future. I started sleeping on the floor a few weeks ago. Let's start with the ultimate minimalist solution. A lot of Japanese people do, this is part of their culture, right? They have these sort of Japanese futons where it's a two to four inch thick, not a mattress, but like a pad basically. So I have this little tiny mattress topper that's two or three inches. And I put it right there on the hard floor and at first it was difficult. Because I woke up, I'd wake up with pain in the weirdest areas, but then I realized I started reading all these different reviews of people. This is guy Mike Chang. Let's put a link to this video in the show notes. He had this video that went viral a few years ago. He talks about why he sleeps on the floor. So his family sleeps on the floor. His wife and kid, they sleep on the floor and he talked about why he does that. And to me, actually, you know what, Sean, maybe we can pull that up if you're willing to find it. Just go to YouTube, type in Mike Chang floor sleeping. I'll talk about it here for a second while you're pulling that up. But we won't watch the whole video because it's a long one. We'll put a link to it in the show notes, but I was compelled by this. I was especially compelled because I started reading the comments and I saw these people who had like really bad backs and slipped discs and they're like, as soon as I started to sleep on the floor a few years ago, it totally changed my life. And me being the person who's willing to experiment, I never even thought about sleeping on the floor. But as a kid, my brother and I used to, we had a little futon and we would take turns. He would sleep on one night, I'd sleep on the next night or we'd do one week on one week off and I would sleep on the floor right next to it. And that's how we did it growing up and everything was fine. And so maybe there's like the comfort crisis also extends to our bedding. And so I'm rethinking something that was fundamental to me. Like, oh, what if the thing that is giving me comfort is actually giving me pain? Did you find that, Sean? That's great. Let's pull it up. So how we sleep make a really big difference in the way we feel in the morning time and also in our body. How we're able to rest our body. So this bed here, we actually just brought this bed into the room here about maybe four or five days ago because my wife said, I like to have a bed in here because before that this is what we sleep on. This is a three inch mattress copper about three inches. It's latex. This is what we slept on for about maybe three years now. Now her and my son most of the time sleep on this. There was one here before I sleep on this one. This is just a rug. And if you look, there's just a foam underneath and that's it. The rug is pretty thin. The reason why I like to sleep on things like this are very firm is because about 10 years ago, I was sitting on the ground, like I am right now. And back in the day, I was muscle bound and I was like this bodybuilder guy and I thought I was like really tough. And I remember sitting on the ground and feeling pain in my thighs. I was on the ground like this and I remember feeling pain in my thighs and I was like, how this kind of hurts. Let me find a more comfortable position. So then I was laying on it, on the ground like this and then I felt pain in my arm and my side. And I remember thinking like, wow, this kind of hurts too. Can I find it? Let me try to find a comfortable position. And then I remember laying on the ground like this and then I felt pain in my tailbone and my back. And I said, okay, something is wrong with this situation. If I can be so strong in the gym, but in reality, real life, I am so weak. I can't even sit on the ground. I can't even get my body to just lay on the ground. Something's wrong with this. You can stop it there. And so for me, I said, I'm intrigued by this. I'm looking at Savvy D right now because I bet he's intrigued by it too, just because he likes doing these crazy experiments that I like to do. And I like questioning everything because even when we were doing tour stops, there were a few times where I slept on floors, but I treated it as though it was almost a punishment. Like, oh, I can't believe I have to do this. But now I'm like, as long as I'm sleeping on the floor now, I've had pain that's resolved in areas I never even anticipated. In my calves, in my ankles, and I find I'm more flexible, I'm more mobile, and it's just been a few weeks. It took me about six days to really get into it. And at first it was like, I'm forcing myself through this because I'm trying to deal with this pinched nerve in my neck. And that's improved a little bit as well. But other areas I didn't even, wasn't even doing it for, they have improved. So I'll report back to you. I just thought it was fascinating. I stumbled across this video and I said, I'm going to give this a shot. Worst case scenario is it doesn't work for me. And I go back to sleeping in my really nice plush bed, but maybe this is a new way forward. Question, because I know people will wonder, what do you do for a pillow? Do you use the Japanese style, just hardwood with the arc or a real pillow? I use a real pillow right now, but I'm definitely open to that. In fact, I'd like to try it without a pillow at all. But I use my standard, really, it's like a thin Ikea pillow. It's nothing special. But yeah, I just use one basic pillow. And that's the other thing. I used to have a bunch of accoutrements where in my bed I'd have a pillow between my knees, and I have to have the right pillow underneath my head. And then I have a pillow that I'm hugging or maybe I'm sleeping on a second. All of a sudden it's like, why do I need all these damn pillows? And so I'm going to even question that. And I find that fascinating. It's like, it's not that I'm looking for a permanent solution. The question is like, what's the real problem here? It's only been a few hundred years that we've slept on mattresses. And many people throughout the world, including so-called advanced societies like Japan, the civilized, we can look at them and say, why are they sleeping on these little, like what Mike Chang is sleeping on there? Why are they sleeping on these little futons and mattress pads? And that's uncivilized. Well, why? Because we say it is. Maybe it's more natural. And so I'd love to hear from y'all. If any of you have tried floor sleeping, what's your first impression of that though, TK? I'm just interested. I want to finish watching that video sometime. So, and I may conduct a little experiment to see how it goes. My wife is trying it as well. So we're doing it set separate times. And she has found that like she had this recurring back injury from, she does kettlebells like four days a week. And as soon as she started sleeping on the floor, that recurring injury healed much quicker and it hasn't come back since. So I don't know. Maybe there's something to it to be determined. I don't know. And I would encourage you to look at it yourself. But yeah, I was very intrigued by this. And Mike Chang is like this mobility specialist guy. He's super healthy. And yet I'm looking at him like, yeah, yeah, that might be an outcome that I want. Right. And if sleeping on the floor gets me there, I'm willing to do it. And by the way, isn't that one of the most minimalist things you could do? Anyway, all right. Much more coming up. But first here is a minimalist tip from one of our listeners. Hi minimalist. This is Courtney. I'm a Patreon subscriber and I just had a little tip that might help people who are trying to assess their amount of clutter. I guess I would call this the nightlight tip and it was born from my baby's being born. I started minimizing when I had my first daughter. And so sometimes at night when she'd be sleeping, I would just get out of bed real quick and take out my flashlight and kind of get a sense of what I was going to work on tomorrow. Because I was really into it. And what was kind of cool about that is that with the lights off and just this one light to shine on different parts of the house, I wasn't distracted by how I didn't like the decorations or the decor or the aesthetic. And I was able just to focus on the things and see what was cluttered and what had some space. And that really kind of helped make a black and white situation of what normally could be visually overwhelming. So kind of simple, but if you're up in the middle of the night or it's dark out, you can just take a flashlight and peruse through your house and take a mental list of what you think looks a little too full of things and what looks nice and open. So I hope this helps someone. Yes, Courtney. Thank you for that helpful tip. Oh, maybe we have a new rule, the nightlight rule. For anyone else has a listener tip about this episode or any other episode insight, answering one of these questions. If you have some other insights would love to hear from you, send a voice memo to podcast at the minimalists.com. Also reminder, we're looking for some fresh questions from you as well. Do you have some decluttering questions that we can help you out with? Send a voice memo podcast at the minimalists.com or you can give us a call 406-219-7839 up next page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandulation break. We'll be right back. All right, that's the first 36% of episode 509. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two hour maximal edition, which includes answers to a bunch more questions. Questions like, what should I do if I have to live or work in other people's cluttered spaces? Why should I handle someone who is guilt tripping or manipulating me? What does financial infidelity look like in a marriage? Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the minimalist private podcast on Patreon. One of my favorite page threes we've done in a while. Some great conversations around just in case items and scams, sort of new age scams that are going on right now. And actually some old scams that just carry forward into new forms. All that is so much more on Patreon. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus you'll gain access to all of our archives all the way back to the very first episode in 2015. And that is our minimal episode for today. Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space. On behalf of Ryan Academis, T.K. Coleman, Post-Production Peter, Spire Jeff and Spire Dave, Jordan No More, Tom Kat, Professor Sean, Savvy D. and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields-Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, why don't be this? Love people and use things. Because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace. I hope you enjoyed this video.