My Motto: Don’t Be a Loser

Athena (They Say Dogs Always Forgive)

I was watching the fabulous sequel to the enthralling series “Breaking Bad”, the movie El Camino today. A wonderful script, unparalleled performances. It, plus a few other factors, have me thinking that perhaps my best bet is simply to play defense; keep the status quo; satisfice instead of constantly striving to win; put simply: “Don’t Be a Loser”.

I lost my ever-loving mind today. Truly. However, I gained it back within the hour.

I have a dog, Athena, who is quite sick, but hopefully on the mend. We need to get her back to the internal medicine specialist on Friday to check her liver function again, but suffice it to say, this last week has been very challenging, both emotionally and financially (vets make an absolute killing, I believe!).

We have to give her literally 8 pills a day, and since her appetite is depressed, we can’t easily hide them in some kind of food or “pill pocket”. So we are stuck “pilling” her, which basically entails trying to get a 125-pound Great Dane who is pretty stubborn to open her jaws willingly and do something she detests. Over and over and over again. It drove me to my wit’s end this morning. I won’t go into details, but I snapped. She seems bulletproof when I am mad at her, looks me dead in the eyes – always has, not sure why. But the little guy, a beagle mix, Freckles, was no doubt affected. I was affected when I saw my parents fight, rage, or drink. I am embarrassed, but that’s what happened.

Hostility contributes to heart attacks; that is a medical fact. Cortisol, which is secreted by the glands in response to chronic stress, has a very pernicous effect on the heart, blood vessels, and generally speeds up aging.

I don’t want to die. And I don’t want to suffer, as the Buddhists say. In the book Spirituality for the Skeptic, philosopher Robert C. Solomon discusses emotions and mental states that feel “uncomfortable” to the individual and which can detract from life satisfaction, well-being, and psychological adjustment:

“Hostility, vengefulness, anger, hatred, contempt, and what the Buddhists call ‘agitations’ are plainly opposed to the open-minded acceptance that is essential to spirituality. Also shame, embarrassment, and guilt. But among the lot, two stand out with particular notoriety – anger and resentment.”

Athena took her pill in a piece of bagel. I now get a little reprieve until tonight, when the saga continues. It’s all pretty monotonous and disheartening and frustrating – the pilling, the seeing her be weak, the remembrance of putting her big brother Atlas down about three years ago. As my friend Bob reminds me – who has faced more than his share of eye issues and surgeries, like I have – “getting old ain’t for sissies.” Wanting to “shift” my mood, I turned on the “Breaking Bad” sequel, El Camino, and was quite pulled in.

Today, I feel lost, low-energy, self-doubting, on-edge. I feel like I need a vacation. My work life isn’t going terribly well at present (read: a real estate project that is expensive and delayed) and I’m not taking a class a semester at this time. I have glaucoma that isn’t being treated successfully with medication. Every day is a new forehead-slapping experience when I watch the evening news. If it’s not shootings it’s Trump and if it’s not the Emperor With No Clothes, it’s wealthy people trying to feather their nests at the expense of the rest of humanity.

“Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another, and subverting one desire for another — which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfill any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where its existence will hardly register…” noted the modern philosopher, Alain de Botton, in his Status Anxiety. Ironically, I did buy a pretty pricey BMW a year ago. It does feel good to drive now and then, but mostly my wife uses it as her daily driver. Boy, did I want that thing. Now, if my wife is like, “Should I take the Bimmer or the Subaru (SUV), I don’t much care either way.

Maybe I should take the books Think and Grow Rich and the poster that reads “Keep Grinding!” and throw them away. I mean: Stop trying to be a success, become wealthier, and prove to myself I am successful enough. My “big why” as they say in the world of investing is probably a bit of wanting to have enough money to live well and weather whatever storms are on the horizon. But it’s also more than that.

I was given access to significant financial opportunity because of my family. The best way to describe it would probably be to frame it as “an inheritance”.

But it didn’t just fall in my lap. In fact, in my case, considering I was raised pretty normally and who was made wealthy through financial connections, there is a nagging voice that whispers: “You’re not worthy of this money. You’re not a self-made millionaire. You might lose this and then where would you be? You don’t have the skills to grow this money.” Indeed, I sometimes think that those who are middle-class, working individuals resent my good fortune and fairly privileged lifestyle, and those who are very wealthy think of me as insignificant.

On the other hand, feeling that you know it all and have “arrived” is probably something that earns the attention of the gods, who, in their jealously and pettiness, will unseat a person exhibiting hubris from their horse. Roman author Publilius Syrus noted that “He bids fair to grow wise who has discovered that he is not so.”

Psychotherapist John R. O’Neil: “Men and women confronting shadows have described themselves to me as hungry for change, disillusioned with what they do, or buried alive in work. They may feel bored, ashamed, undeserving, or scared by their success. Or they may feel they’ve lost their edge. One man told me, ‘I’m running on fumes and I don’t know where the next gas station is.’ A woman said, ‘I’m in a kind of spiritual bankruptcy. I know I have great personal assets, but right now they can’t keep up with the demands on me. I need some time to reorganize, regroup, and redeploy.” Yes, I second that notion.

Materialism and a hyper-focus on my net worth is not a good thing, overall. Fred Rogers, who is “Mr. Rogers” of television fame, believed that “It’s not so much what we have in this life that matters. It’s what we do with what we have.” Excellent advice from an excellent man. He virtually embodied the virtue of kindness, and it is good advice to someone who probably spends too much time thinking about the self. Frankly, parents, people in the armed forces, and the unintelligent just don’t spend much time mulling over minutiae.

“There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” ~ Fred Rogers

The tireless athlete Larry Bird commented that “A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.” On the other hand, though, there is a certain honor in retiring when the time is right, rather than believing that one must go on and on and on ad infinitum. Perhaps each of us must determine what they feel success means to them, subjectively, personally. At one point, the wonderful actor Sean Connery retired. He just felt like Hollywood wasn’t what it used to be, and he made one flop and thought (I presume), Geez, I made The Untouchables; I made many Bond films; I killed it in Finding Forrester. Shouldn’t I let my work stand, at some point, or must I cart out my sagging skin and bald head and keep doing it over and over and over again? When will I have “succeeded” as an actor, if not today?

Which leads me to my perfectionism. Perfectionism to me feels like: “You have always doubted yourself; seize the opportunity and become wealthy enough that you will have ‘mailbox money’ and freedom and a sense of power; keep grinding; don’t give up; wake up early and go to bed late.” Building wealth and avoiding losing money can be like watching paint dry at times, and fighting a badger at other times. Folks who are perfectionistic take account of who is watching and what they’re thinking and what it all means about the self. There never seems to be enough to fill their self-created cup. It’s like filling a cup with a hole in it. It can reach Sisyphean proportions.

The other aspect is that I have pretty refined tastes, and pretty high expectations. This makes my relationships with other people fraught at times. I tend to see the glass as half-empty. Why was I so pissed that Athena didn’t want to take a bitter pill? Because I wanted her to and she was thwarting me. Why do I sometimes get angry with my wife? Because she can irritate me. Why do I tend to dislike every Realtor, contractor, driver, and UPS delivery person I come across? Because I know how stuff is ideally supposed to be done and they almost always fall short. This is what being “Type A” is.

I’m not saying I am a know-it-all; I am pleading with others to do their jobs with integrity, excellence, and consistency. I kind of wish I were a football coach at times; they can expect a lot from their players and yell and take life too seriously, and folks admire their wisdom, grit, and charisma. Players try to turn in stellar performances in part to impress the coach.

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers,” wrote the author of the mind-blowingly successful book The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck.

I believe that part of the reason I have been working so long and at-times, hard, on Values of the Wise, is because I know what these values are supposed to look like. I have great admiration for them and have been looking into them for a long time now. I get what integrity means; I know real passion; wisdom is not an esoteric and confusing phenomenon; courage is a millennia-old virtue. I sometimes feel like society is so challenging because drivers don’t know what respect is; because leaders don’t know much about modesty; because Post Office counterpeople don’t know what hustle means.

So let me arrive at my main point: I don’t want to be a loser.

I spend so much time trying to grow and change and succeed and be impressive and all that that I think I have worn myself out. I feel like I am at times stuck in a mindset that is about worrying, impatience, and dissatisfaction. I keep going and going, striving and striving. It’s not that I work 15-hour days, but it’s that I never seem to be satisfied. The philosopher Alain de Botton describes modern society in this manner:

“The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.”

“A wise man will be the master of his mind; a fool will be the slave.” ~ Publilius Syrus

Something is clearly wrong when I am on anti-depressants, when I rage at my dog, and when I get my heart rate way too high due to watching politicians, driving on the roads, or dealing with a plumber. It just doesn’t seem like I have the formula for lasting and convincing “success”.

And I am not the only one. Many, many people use legal and illegal drugs; some overdose. Some people kill themselves. Some shoot others in a murderous rampage. It almost always, in this time of social media run amok, involves us comparing ourselves unfavorably to others, to media-generated imagery. “We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we know about ourselves to what we don’t know about someone else,” noted Rob Bell in his interesting, slightly-saccharine book Be Here Now.

We often feel others out there in society, in the schoolyard, and on social media are happier and more fulfilled and enjoy greater success than we do. In America, it’s about getting thinner, staying young, making money, and outdoing others (by and large). “Live fast and leave a good-lookin’ corpse” is something you can picture James Dean saying, and certainly that ideal has only grown since the 1950s.

But are the beautiful and the rich any happier? I know for a fact that watching your stock holdings lose 3% of value in one day because Trump says this or because the rapacious CEO of some corporation did that is corrosive to feelings of satisfaction and security. Obviously, the poor and the dumb and the obese have it a lot tougher than I do! Society now is really pretty screwy. I have seriously thought of just tuning out; dropping out; saying fuck it all.

“Money talks. But it don’t sing and dance, and it don’t walk. <br>As long as I can have you here with me, I’d much rather be forever in blue jeans!” ~ Neil Diamond

I don’t mean killing myself or divorcing my wife and moving to Europe. I mean going on a “media cleanse.” Not turning on the news; not reading the paper; just basically looking out for Number 1. And that is embarrassing for a liberal to do. That means to me that conservatives (the wealthy and politically-connected folks) and extremists (the Trump Republicans) have won: I can’t sit on the sidelines and watch the power-brokers do their thing. I just don’t feel I can stay involved. I also hate computers, phones, and social media. I feel like I need Prozac.

Perhaps that is too extreme. But today, I was thinking of an idea:

Don’t try so hard to win; to get ahead; to impress anyone, including yourself.

Just be. Just live. Play defense. Don’t be a loser.

By don’t be a loser I mean two things: 1) don’t behave like a loser does; don’t do unethical things to other people. People who do bad things to get ahead of others and who aren’t classy and civilized are losers. You know, jerks. 2) it also means, I don’t have to win, I just don’t want to lose.

Maybe getting an 85% in life instead of 100% is okay.

This desire to succeed, excel, be admired, and be powerful can take on a financial aspect, but it can also manifest in other ways, too. First, the financial:

“A tendency to be insatiable has long been recognized and condemned by philosophers and moralists. It is rooted in human nature and the social character of man, not (as Marxists would have it) in the dynamics of a particular economic system, capitalism.” This is a quote from a book entitled How Much Is Enough: Money and the Good Life, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. They go on: “But the Marxists are right to this extent: capitalism has inflamed our innate tendency to insatiability by releasing it from the bounds of custom and religion, within which it was formerly confined.” In case you are wondering, they go on to note that “This inflammation takes four distinct though related forms.” They are, briefly (and I quote):

1. First, capitalism’s competitive logic drives firms to carve out new markets by (among other things) manipulating wants;
2. Second, capitalism greatly broadens the scope of status competition.
3. Third, the ideology of free-market capitalism has been consistently hostile to the idea that a certain sum of money could represent “enough.”
4. Finally, capitalism enlarges insatiability by increasingly “monetizing” the economy.

I won’t continue sharing the voluminous details of that book, but it can be read about here.

One cool quote is in reference to an essay that the noted economist John Maynard Keynes naively wrote in 1928. It was entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” His point was basically that with automation and other efficiencies capitalism produced, and the concept of “a rising tide lifting all boats”, humans would be prescient enough to forego ever-escalating wants and just be happy. After all, there were at that time cars, jobs outside of sweat shops and farm fields, a few vaccines, and the Great Depression was but a whisper on a passing wind. The author of the Skidelsky book review, Larry Elliott, pens this interesting encapsulation: “In one respect, Keynes was right. Capitalist economies have become more efficient; indeed, the leaps in productivity have been even greater than he predicted. But he was completely wrong in his belief that workers would ever feel satiated by their material possessions, and devote more of their time to painting, reading or watching ballet.”

“Benjamin Franklin was among the first to envision a world devoted to rest and relaxation. Inspired by the technological breakthroughs of the latter 1700s, he predicted that man would soon work no more than four hours a week.” ~ Carl Honore

Beyond money, take the example of my sister, who tried extremely hard in high school – all honors, all the time. She graduated from a top university in three years. Anything but an A was unacceptable. Why did she try that hard? What difference did it really make? The epilogue with my sister, in fact, is that after a master’s degree from the most prestigious film school in the country, she is a stay at home mom. There isn’t anything wrong with that, but it’s awesome in retrospect how hard some of us try at some things, only to realize it was a relatively poor use of time, energy, money, and sweat. I have gone down many a cul-de-sac in life, only to end up turning around and back-tracking. I think we are talking about perfectionism.

Nor is it necessary to get straight A’s and attend the $60,000-a-year University of Southern California. Thomas J. Stanley notes in The Millionaire Mind that folks who always got the A and scored highly on the SATs and believed they were destined for great things did not become the millionaires he is now-noted for studying. It’s like the “tortoise and the hare”; the hares enter typical professions, wear Brooks Brothers suits, and live in the showiest houses. Millionaires, he found, never quite fit in when they were younger, and they became very wealthy by trying something different. They leveraged their strengths, got involved in careers such as business and investing, and worked very hard.

Dr. Stanley notes that being the smartest guy in the room, the person who chases power and prestige, and the one who works from sun-up to sun-down will miss the important things. He writes of a prisoner who wrote him, bragging and trying to get a leg up. He came across as more arrogant than wise: “There are people like this convict who are gifted intellectually, but that doesn’t mean they also have high integrity. The halo that surrounds smart people often blinds us. We automatically think they are better in all of life’s key dimensions. In fact, some smart people are not people of high integrity.”

I would say that “rich” and “beautiful” and “from a powerful family” could be inserted into that statement by Stanley, and the point would hold as true.

There appears to be something to the idea that getting ahead in life should be priority #1. You see it especially in Asian-American cultures, and think of the recent college admissions cheating scandal (in  which, perhaps not coincidentally, USC was caught up). It is, I’m afraid, quintessentially American: the rich get richer by taking advantage, cheat to get their kids into top schools (and everyone else is left to fend for themselves). Tack on a relative 20% tax rate for billionaires and you got yourself an anti-meritocracy. But you can search my other blogs if you want to read about class warfare and social criticism.

“All virtues spring from honor.” ~ Albanian proverb

Clearly, “false prophets” of social media, food, sex, drugs, and the like are addictive and potentially-destructive as well.

Values are extremely important. Having good ones and being the kind of person that my deceased father would want me to be is worth more than gold. “Kindness, generosity, compassion, and other moral qualities, which are not present in animals and cannot be reproduced technologically, are human attributes less common and more valuable than intelligence,” Ruben Benítez wrote. And money, methinks. 

“…what makes life valuable is morality; is virtue; is ethics. So, why is a person’s life valuable? Because of the amount of virtue manifested in that life. …So, the better the man is in terms of his virtue, the more valuable his life is; the more meaningful his life is. This is an idea which also goes back to Plato,” noted the philosopher Colin McGinn (and of course, the same holds true for women!). McGinn is an interesting fellow, in fact. A gifted philosopher at The University of Miami, he fell victim to hubris and lust and sexually harassed his way out of a job. I bet he wishes he could go back and do that over. In fact, he is trying to leverage the experience to lift some corporate cash from worried CEOs (LINK).

“Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold,” said the brilliant composer Beethoven, who eventually fell deaf. Socrates would certainly have agreed. “Folly and wealth, not wisdom and wealth, go together,” pointed out the Christian apologist Marcus J. Borg. “Epicurus says that being rich is not an alleviation, but a change, of troubles. In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that breeds avarice” (Michel de Montaigne).

“The human being is so constructed that he presses toward fuller and fuller being and this means pressing toward what most people would call good values, toward serenity, kindness, courage, honesty, love, unselfishness, and goodness,” indicated Abraham Maslow, the famous psychologist. He would probably say that the pursuit of money and a ceaseless striving to be better, richer, and more eminent is a low-value value. That is, higher on the scale than eating and screwing, but below what he called “B-Values“. “Money is a great servant but a bad master,” the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon noted all the way back in the time of Shakespeare. The personal growth writer Napoleon Hill believed that “Happiness is found doing, not merely possessing.”

“The very same generosity that we extend to the world is the generosity that returns to us — materially, emotionally, physically, and spiritually — and we are each learning this at our pace.” ~ Jan Phillips

I took the money I had access to starting a decade ago, added some hard knocks and a stack of books two feet high, and took my chances. Real estate investing is challenging, and the wheat is pretty mercilessly separated from the chaff, as it were. Stanley notes that “Becoming wealthy is, in fact, a ‘mind game.’ And millionaires often talk to themselves about the benefits of becoming financially independent. They constantly tell themselves that it is very difficult to achieve without taking some risks.” I think I got into real estate and have taken it pretty seriously since not only because I need to earn a living, but I need it for self-esteem.

I hear what he is saying, but I want to consider this: Perhaps this is a mind game, and those who want to become rich and powerful and successful and admired and permanently secure are on a wild goose chase. Perhaps indeed the best that I can do is to run out the clock instead of running myself ragged trying to put points on the board. By most standards, I have turned in a decent performance and I’m up by 20 in the last two minutes of the game, as it were. What am I so scared of? Why don’t I get that I can be a winner starting today if I just believe that I am?

Confucius, one of the world’s oldest philosophers, indicated that “The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.” That is a bit hypberbolic, but it is true that a small-minded person, such as Scrooge, focuses on money as though it is the end his heart seeks. But it can’t keep you warm, literally. It was much more inspiring and fulfilling for Scrooge to give a wonderful turkey dinner to his employee and his family than to withhold a little pay in order to fill his coffers a bit further. I think Dickens was elucidating the fact that we humans, especially perhaps men who weren’t raised with much love and self-esteem, try to accumulate wealth, power, and prestige to attempt, in vain, to fill a void. Some figure it out and, like Dee Hock, achieve both material wealth and have solid, spiritual and wholesome values; others, like Jamie Dimon, never seem to get it and will probably only grasp this kind of wisdom when faced with a cataclysmic event, such as a terminal illness. If then.

The question is, Why do we try so hard to get more, be better, and outdo others? Who are we trying to impress? What does it mean to have more money than you really need? Power, security, and the allure created by the media seem prominent. Helen Keller believed “Security is mostly an illusion. It does not exist in nature, nor does humankind as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

“Don’t confuse fame with success – Madonna is one, Helen Keller is the other.” ~ Erma Bombeck

“Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.” ~ Gary Keller

I think I am so perfectionistic that I worry too much about work, about growing wealth, about getting ahead, about “keeping up with the Joneses.” I seem to fail to remember that the wealthy aren’t really any happier, they are just less inconvenienced. Above $100,000 a year in income, the effects on mood and life satisfaction wash out. A Ferrari doesn’t make one happy for long. The human mind evolved to get used to anything you throw at it — from being handicapped to being the owner of a bright, red Ferrari. I think that is why Jerry Seinfeld got married, had kids, does stand-up comedy, and likes to try out different cars and talk to wonderfully funny people over coffee in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” He literally owns over 100 Porsches; he could sit around and watch TV and wax his cars and grow fat. He doesn’t.

Maybe I am just being a damned baby. An entitled fool. Again, Helen Keller: “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

The eminent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, I spelled that right!) points out in his landmark book Flow that perhaps relaxing like a Buddhist monk and reading a book all the live-long day is not the right path to fulfillment for me or anyone else. He believes that “Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” His thesis is that when we are deeply involved in an activity, we “lose” ourselves and enter “flow” and that is the place where passion and love and engrossment and focus exist in copious amounts.

“…success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This is probably akin to the finding that charity and helping other people pays dividends far greater than any financial investment.

I think whether I watch a sunset and play with my dog versus writing a book or learning a musical instrument is not the crux of this issue. I believe it is more about not trying to achieve so highly, like a Type-A, neurotic and insecure person who must prove his worth to himself. Who fears the loss of material possessions and financial advantage. I think instead of being driven by the thought of using money to make money, I should “play defense”. Instead of You must try every day to become a winner, I should be content with the idea of simply not losing what I have already achieved, and what is truly within my power to grasp right now.

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us,” Keller also observed. “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow,” she counseled. This woman here with no sight and no hearing was pretty insightful, helpful, and dedicated!

I want to, Ms. Keller, I do. Happiness is probably everyone’s top goal (Aristotle believed this, as did John Stuart Mill). What a shame it would be to die texting while driving, or to fritter away my life trying to get a 9% return over a 7% return on an investment. That’s the problem faced by the Dickens character Scrooge – indeed, much too late in life.

“The dominant political and economic model today allows, indeed encourages, citizens to make the pursuit of their own interests (understood largely in terms of material wealth) the chief goal of their lives,” points out Australian philosopher and author Peter Singer. “We rarely reflect, either collectively or as individuals, on whether this dominant conception is a wise one,” he notes.

“Call no man happy until he is dead,” the Greek leader extraordinaire, Solon, advised. It is an interesting and somewhat hard-to-grasp idea he was referring to, when considered through a 21st-century lens. The Skidelskys enlighten us: “The crux of the mystery is that eudaimonia, the Greek word conventionally translated as ‘happiness,’ does not refer to a state of mind at all, but to an admirable and desirable state of being. It is a matter of public appraisal….” They are referring to something more objective than the word “mood.” They point out that “All ancient visions of happiness, with the important exception of Epicureanism, are objective in character; they address the question: ‘What is the good life for man, the most complete, most fully human life?’ They are not concerned with the attainment of certain states of mind.”

I take from this two things: one, living in the right way is important, even if it does not engender more of a “serotonin-laden” existence. That is, happy mood. For example, my wife and I have given more to charity than most people make in a year, this year, and we feel good about that. It’s not quite a feeling, though; it’s more like a sense of satisfaction that “good fortune is best shared,” as the saying goes. Living rightly is certainly a worthy thing. That means charitability, and it means not being really fucking mean to your dog.

Secondly, though, I think about how Plato and others thought about happiness: it has more to do with being involved in virtuous activity, something engrossing and carefully-matched to one’s self. Contemplation was his thing. Incidentally, virtue in Greek means excellence more than it translates as “moral goodness”. It would be wiser to pursue well-being and excellence and fulfillment of one’s potential (and one’s nature) than it would be to experience joy or excitement. Contrast fulfillment with mood. Certainly, wealth was less-coveted then.

“If we turn to ancient Greece, we find a vigorous philosophical debate about the real nature of the good life; but none of the leading philosophers taking part in this debate see success in terms of the acquisition of money or material goods,” one of today’s most influential philosophers, Peter Singer, points out. Socrates said, “May I understand that it is only the wise who are rich, and may I have only as much money as a temperate person needs.”

Looking at research, including the happiness levels reported in various countries, the Skidelskys ask: “Is absolute income irrelevant to happiness? Have laptops, Kindles, foot spas, foreign holidays, takeaway sushi boxes, and all the rest added nothing to our collective well-being? Happiness economists like to remind us of the power of adaptation. Most material gains have only a fleeting effect upon mood, after which it reverts to its customary level. Income can rise steadily, while happiness does not rise at all.” 

Gulp. So, it can get you out of some jams, but it’s not going to keep you warm. In fact, it is a sorry sonofabitch who tries to use money to gain friends. It’s a fool’s errand. Everyone knows when you’re trying to buy them. And if they aren’t quality friend material, no amount of money will engender friendship, anyway. It takes a considerable amount of maturity, I think, to realize what money can buy and what it cannot. “Money is not required to buy one the necessity of the soul,” the individualist Henry David Thoreau noted. J. H. Jowett pointed out that “The real measure of our wealth is how much we should be worth if we lost our money.”

“Money can’t buy you happiness. Apparently, everybody knows this except Americans, who keep thinking that economic prosperity automatically brings all sorts of goodies, from democracy in the former Eastern Block to satisfaction with one’s own life here at home. Well, the data are in, and the conclusion is that money really cannot buy us happiness,” claims philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.

I was influenced by the little book some would call pap, Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, the author writes: “We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over, and that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it — and have it repeated to us — over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important.” ~ Morrie Schwartz

Now I want to watch Dead Poet’s Society, the movie about sucking the marrow out of life and seizing the day, with Robin Williams

The book, which is about author Mitch Albom’s influential former college professor (Morrie), who is now-ailing and on his way to shuffling off this mortal coil. During weekly visits, Albom receives such wise counsel that he writes a best-selling book based on his friendship with the dying sage. Spirituality is, more or less, what Morrie is advising. Spirituality is, more or less, what I am missing. I’m missing something akin to spirituality, be it a philosophy along the lines of Stoicism or some kind of deeper view of the world and my place in it. My values need adjustment, as it were.

Robert C. Solomon, again from Spirituality for the Skeptic: “Spirituality, like philosophy, involves those aspects of our lives that are not reducible to career strategies, personal psychology, civic responsibilities, the fluctuation of our economic or romantic fortunes. Spirituality, like philosophy, involves those questions that have no ultimate answers, no matter how desperately our various doctrines and dogmas try to provide them.”

Solomon goes on to say more about this topic that has certainly piqued my interest: “At the very minimum, spirituality is the subtle and not easily specifiable awareness that surrounds virtually anything and everything that transcends our petty self-interest. Thus there is spirituality in nature, in art, in the bonds of love and fellow-feeling that hold a community together, in the reverence for life (and not only human life) that is key to a great many philosophies as well as religions.” I think that without children and a religion, and the nature of my mind (e.g., my psychology), I definitely need to identify and try to focus on something more spiritual and richer than just checking my account balances, checking in with my business partner every day or so, and keeping tabs on the efforts to impeach and remove Donald Trump from high office.

I do love to excel, though. I didn’t work all that hard in high school, due I think to my tumultuous family life. In junior college, I was just trying to get by — and barely earned a B average. At the University of California, however, where I studied a very unique major called psychology and social behavior, I was very “Type A” about my studies and performed very well. I graduated with highest honors and was inducted into the honor society founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa. I went right into a 60-unit master’s degree program, and then did 3,000 hours of practicing psychotherapy. Values of the Wise, a restuarant, moving to Charleston, becoming a real estate investor, and developing a 15-acre parcel of land have consumed my time since earning all As at one of the best public schools in the country. It’s hard, as you can guess, to slow my roll. Solomon writes: “Spirituality may not be an achievement or a success in the sense that winning a track meet, doing well on an exam, surviving an ordeal, or getting over the mountain is. But spirituality is adopting a framework or a positive attitude in which all sorts of possibilities open up that may not have been evident before.”

“Everything we are is a gift of God. Our job in life is to give back to God something of what he has given us.” ~ David Isaacs

When I write about money, happiness, overcoming, mental illness such as perfectionism, and good values, I think of my dad. At his funeral, I recounted that hours earlier I was walking around the streets of Los Angeles, a city that was instrumental in his development. I was listening to music, alone, and keenly feeling his loss. I saw some morning glories, and I was hearing the trumpet of Miles Davis. It was poignant to me that though my dad was now-gone, I lived. He couldn’t enjoy all the fruits of life (not like he was great at seizing the day, anyway!), but I still had sand in my hourglass. I made sure to note, mentally, then and there: though my dad is now gone, all is not terrible and depressing; there are still morning glories and Miles Davis songs in the world, and I am alive to experience them.

The following was written to me by his widow, my step-mom, on his birthday last year:

“When I met [your dad], I was not ever interested in a relationship with anyone, but he would not give up on me. You know, I was very poor and worked 24/7. He didn’t give me money, but went about showing me ways to do things a little different that would help me a great deal. I was also very sad from the loss of my oldest son [in a car accident]. If you remember, your dad had his big heart attack and bypass surgery right after we started going out. When I could see how much it meant to him for me to stand by him, it meant as much to me for all the times he was there for me. We had fun together, and had many things in common. He got better, and we decided to marry. For many years, he was nice to me. As he aged, he became meaner. The only time he got [hostile and abusive] was at the end of his life when he was not himself anymore. I dealt with it in two ways: I would have talks with him, and by remembering he was not “my old Mort” anymore. As far as I’m concerned, he lived with pain everyday his doctors could do nothing about. He would not allow them to drug him. He did the best he could.  And often he would take my hands, look me in the eyes and thank me for everything I did for him. I would do it all over again….. Your dad was a wonderful man; he was a sweet, kind man. I have also been treated for anxiety since I was 17; I know what its like to live with. My childhood was hard, your dad understood; I understood him — he took a lot less medicine while we were together. I hope you understand I know how much we really loved each other. He loved you kids so much, too. He wanted to see you happy; that was very important to him.”

My father’s mind always planned, analyzed, and considered. Over and over and over. He required Xanax, Valium, or Klonopin just to live a somewhat normal life. If, as the Buddhists say, “monkey mind” is the mental state of going from one thought to the next with no mindfulness or self-control, then my dad had a chimpanzee hyped up on caffeine in his mind! My mom, sister, and I are always thinking and it reaches “the point of diminishing returns” very quickly, sometimes. It’s kind of a curse to have an intelligent, obsessive mind. The author of the interesting book In Praise of Slow, Carl Honoré, points the following out: 

“Like a bee in a flower bed, the human brain naturally flits from one thought to the next. In the high-speed workplace, where data and headlines come thick and fast, we are all under pressure to think quickly. Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation…Keeping the mind active makes poor use of our most precious resource. True, the brain can work wonders in high gear. But it will do so much more if given the chance to slow down from time to time. Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively.”

The real estate investor Paul Moore writes about “swinging for the fences” vs. the more prudent strategy of hitting singles and doubles, to use a baseball metaphor. He advises playing it safe with investments, but when it comes to life in general, living with passion and taking some risks. To really suck the marrow out of life, as Byron or someone would say. He describes, in this article: “…a recent study performed by terminal care nurse Bronnie Ware. Bronnie says the number one regret of the dying was that they didn’t pursue their dreams and aspirations. Rather, they settled for what others expected of them. These people wish they had swung for the fences. But it was too late.” He goes on:

“I love ‘taking risks’ with people in public—to show people that someone cares. I engage in conversation with strangers. I encourage people who look depressed. I offer to pray for people who are sick. I give away two-dollar bills to kids. It’s a lot of fun to swing wholeheartedly when it comes to people. And it makes for a lot of memorable (and a few awkward!) situations. I believe we were created to receive love and to love others—even strangers, co-workers, and enemies. And like I tell my kids that shyness is no excuse. Are you holding your cards close to the vest? Playing it safe? Protecting yourself from pain? I can confidently say it’s time for you to take a swing.”

I also know of the wildly experienced investor, Dutch immigrant, Rod Khleif. He has a fascinating story about how he had all the trappings of success, but neglected his family on his way to “success” and big-time wealth. Here is a glimpse into that formative aspect of his character:

“I always wanted this big house on the beach, and I literally dreamt about if for 20 years. We lived in Denver. There’s no beach in Denver, no palm trees. Ultimately in [the year] 2000, I built this 10,000-square-foot testament to my ego on the beach [in Florida]. It’s beach on one side, a bay on the other side — a spectacular, eight-million-dollar house. What was very interesting is that I was floating in the pool one day, [which has a] waterfall from the second floor into the pool, it’s lit up different colors at night — just a magnificent home! I’m looking up at this thing, and I’m depressed. I’m like, ‘What the hell’s going on? I’m supposed to be happy. I’ve achieved this incredible goal I’ve worked for my whole life,’ and I was totally unsatisfied. There were two things going on…. One is: never achieve a big goal without having other goals lined up behind it. Like the good book says, without a vision, the people perish. I realize there was something else going on too. I was successful, but I was unfulfilled.”

Rod goes on to note that, in addition to his now-broken up family, he also was not a charitable person. He didn’t really share the wealth. With the help of his brother, they started to feed local families at Thanksgiving, and it made him feel fantastic. Rod went on to do a lot of significant philanthropic work over the years. I think he felt like money was supposed to make him impressed with himself; he was under the impression that more stuff would equal more happiness. Bereft of other, deeper things such as in-tact family and charity, his seemingly-perfect life was actually vacuous. He might have ended up lucky that the Great Recession took the vast majority of his wealth and caused him to have to “start over”.

Kids can be spoiled by money, wealthy adults can act like Ebeneezer Scrooge, and folks can spend their lives working extremely hard, only to find that their happiness turns to ash in their hands.

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen (with James Allworth and Karen Dillon) wrote an interesting book entitled How Will You Measure Your Life? At his Harvard Business School graduation, Clayton looked around and observed his happy-looking classmates. These men (mostly) were supposed to be the gifted, the privileged, the special, the amazing. Great things were destined to occur to these winners.

“We clearly had much to celebrate. My classmates seemed to be doing extremely well; they had great jobs, some were working in exotic locations, and most had managed to marry spouses much better-looking than they were. Their lives were destined to be fantastic on every level,” he notes. Can you see where this is going?

“But by our tenth reunion, things that we had never expected became increasingly common. A number of my classmates whom I had been looking forward to seeing didn’t come back, and I had no idea why. Gradually, by calling them or asking other friends, I put the pieces together,” he writes. He lists some of the accomplishments, the trappings of success, these uber-individuals could boast of.

“Despite such professional accomplishments, however, many of them were clearly unhappy. Behind the facade of professional success, there were many who did not enjoy what they did for a living. There were, also, numerous stories of divorces or unhappy marriages. I remember one classmate who hadn’t talked to his children in years, who was living on the opposite coast from them.”

Christensen continues: “My classmates were not only some of the brightest people I’ve known, they were also some of the most decent. At graduation they had plans and visions for what they would accomplish, not just in their careers, but in their personal lives as well. Yet something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed. …One of our classmates — Jeffrey Skilling — had landed in jail for his role in the Enron scandal. …it not only shocked me that he had gone so wrong, but how spectacularly he had done so. Something had clearly set him off in the wrong direction.”

“Each of us has an inner voice that speaks of the gold in our shadow. It is the voice of our secret, hidden self (our most authentic self, in many ways), the parts of us that have lain dormant because they were ignored or denigrated by our parents or by society. If we listen, this voice can give us information essential to our continued growth and sustained success. Too often it is drowned out by the clamor of an overly busy life.” ~ John R. O’Neil

Christensen teaches MBA students, and he is famous for asking them tough questions. He asks them to share theories about what makes a successful and happy life. On a chalkboard, he writes:

How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career? That my relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness? That I live a life of integrity and stay out of jail? “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do,”  Steve Jobs believed.

“It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers and even unhappy lives, it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us,” he counsels.

One hand-hold I can offer as to what the book’s main points are is the following: the difference between hygeine factors and motivational factors. Hygeine factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies and so on, he points out. “If you instantly improve the hygeine factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you merely won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, it’s an absence of job dissatisfaction.”

The author is saying that things like pay (or investment income) is not going to make one happy; it can’t the the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. To think it will be is to mistake the uses of money for the power of money. Remember, Rod Khleif had a pool with a waterfall and an eight-million-dollar house, but he had a nagging feeling that this couldn’t be the purpose of life. Wealthy people kill themselves, they become drug-addicted, they engage in child sex rings (Jeffrey Epstein, famous as of this writing). It’s definitely a mistake to go to Harvard and take on a $200,000 loan so that you can take your economics degree and go to work for J.P. Morgan and get that awesome car and eat with people you barely know at restaurants that cost $100 per person. It’s just not going to float your boat, as it were.

It can be a gross situation. He explains that his classmates take these types of jobs, thinking they can make enough money to attract the right people and have all the toys and eventually, then do something meaningful with all that power they accrued. “Just one more year…” or “I’m not sure what else I would do now” is how these young professionals lament their sticky situations. Their incomes do swell, but they don’t get happier. “It wasn’t too long before some of them privately admitted that they had actually begun to resent the jobs they’d taken – for what they realize now were all the wrong reasons,” he writes. And note that student loans are never dischargable; they will be with these poor fools, earning interest, forever.

“Worse still, they found themselves stuck. They’d managed to expand their lifestyle to fit the salaries they were bringing in, and it was really difficult to wind that back. They’d made choices early on because of the hygeine factors, not true motivators, and they couldn’t find their way out of that trap. The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygeine factors are satisfied, but the quest remains to make more money,” is the main point. “Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives,” Clayton M. Christensen counsels. I think that is wise. I don’t always “do relationships” well, but I do get that things like that and religious beliefs and being a parent can really provide deep satisfaction (the frustrations of those pursuits notwithstanding).

One more quote by Christensen: “… the siren song of riches has confused and confounded some of the best in our society. In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more responsibilities to shoulder. There’s an old saying: ‘Find a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.'”

In the book Spirituality for the Skeptic, philosopher Robert C. Solomon discusses the pernicious effects of envy and resentment. “Envy stops with contentment,” he notes. “‘The wise man is one who is content with what he has,’ says the Talmud. But contentment doesn’t mean the end of striving. It only signifies the absence of strife. We can still pursue our projects, including the desire for a new sports car or a larger house, but this does not mean that we should lose our identity by defining ourselves in terms of what we have (or, the flip side — what we do not have).” Incidentally, he shows that forgiveness is the way beyond resentment.

“Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.” ~ Aesop

Einstein points out that: “The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable pre-condition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities.” As well, Aristotle said: “Without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” “If money is all that a person makes, then they will be poor — poor in happiness, poor in all that makes life worth living,” Herbert N. Casson points out.

In sum, to the degree that I can encapsulate such a wide-ranging and at-times, rambling, piece as this, I want to remind myself that to me, Don’t Be a Loser!, means, I am already pretty far ahead in life, according to quite a few metrics. I am alive, for goodness’ sake. I have lost quite a few people over the years, in fact. I spend so much time trying to excel, that I miss the passing scenery. I’m liable to get where I am going, and then regret that I didn’t enjoy the journey very much. If I even get there; hostility is related to heart disease. As long as I don’t lose (my life, too much money, too much time), I am, in a way, a winner. If I can be happy with an 85% score instead of a 100%, I can drop my pencil, turn in my test at long-last, and get the hell out of the classroom! It’s the same reason we longed to go play at recess when we were kids; we let our hearts guide us; progressing was a goal we just didn’t see the value in. I need to slow down. Relax. Smell the flowers. Appreciate what I have while there is still time. Ω

A few more quotes about fulfillment, meaning, happiness, and success:

What is success? To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.” ~ Daniel Kahneman

“Happiness is not fame or riches or historic virtue, but a state that will inspire posterity to think, in reflecting upon another’s life, that it was the life one would wish to live. We can say of no man that he is ‘eudaimonios,’ that his was a truly flourishing life, until his days are over.” ~ Daniel N. Robinson

“Because we believe that money is necessary for the fulfillment of our needs, we think we must devote the majority of our waking hours to earning it. This fixation on money as the key to getting what we want often displaces our other needs — for affection, security, intellectual stimulation, contribution to society, rest, play, creativity, and freedom.” ~ Vicki Robin

“Our idea of success should be more closely related to our ideas of excellence and fulfillment, and to our idea of happiness. A careful look around the world will show us something in this connection that’s very interesting. The happiest people in the world are people who love what they’re doing, regardless of whether wealth, fame, power, and elevated social status ever come their way. The most fulfilled people are individuals who delight in their work, whatever it might be, and strive to do it well. They are people who derive their rewards from the intrinsic enjoyment of what they are contributing to life, come what may.” ~ Tom Morris

“The world of play favors exuberance, license, abandon. Shenanigans are allowed, strategies can be tried, selves can be revised. In the self-enclosed world of play, there is no hunger. It is its own goal, which it reaches in a richly satisfying way.” ~ Diane Ackerman

“Riches leave a man always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow.” ~ Adam Smith

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman

“The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.” ~ Bertrand Russell

“When we spend most of our lives indoors, what becomes of our own wilderness? Safe and dry in our homes, clean and well-lit, at arm’s length from the weedy chaos outside, no longer prey to weather and wild, we can lose our inner compass. Nearly three years ago, for instance, when I broke my foot and was seriously disabled for two years, I felt lost. …We need a healthy, thriving, bustling natural world so that we can be healthy, so that we can feel whole. Our word ‘whole’ comes from the same ancient root as ‘holy.’ It was one of the first concepts that human beings needed to express, and it meant the healthy interrelatedness of all things.” ~ Diane Ackerman