Lessons - How to Escape the Toxic Hustle Culture and Live a Life You Love (Telic vs. Atelic)

This is not a video hating on all of your hard work, but it is a flag to let you know that you need some more balance in your life. Let's get real about this whole hustle culture thing. I don't care if you say you aren't hustling, I see it at my feed, I see people crushing it from the time they get up to the time they go to bed, they're pushing hard to get ahead, trying to level up, they're trying to be productive 24-7 and even if you aren't building a business and you're not working 120 hours a week, I know you're still trying to get that promotion, get that next job, hit that next financial milestone, everybody is trying to keep up. I know you're paying because I've fallen into this constant achievement trap again and again and again and it's so interesting because when I do these videos, I always usually do videos on topics that I know would help you, but also topics that make me take a really hard look at myself because I don't want to preach and say that it's easy to remove yourself from the rat race to remove yourself from the achievement trap completely and that's actually not the answer because the answer is that you have to find balance in equilibrium, that's what we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about the different activities that can give you balance in equilibrium in your life and why it's so important to your health, to your wellness, to your financial, business, career, success, but there is a hustle hard mentality, especially in North America, but at the end of the day, a lot of it is a coping mechanism for unfortunately a deeper sense of inadequacy, I mean it's a drug, you keep chasing this temporary relief from feeling that we're not quite enough and trust me, I know because I've checked all those boxes, those high achieving life boxes, climbing the career ladder, building status, getting all these shiny things that you think would make you happy, but it never really brings lasting fulfillment and I'll explain why that is, there's a lot of psychological reasons but whenever you chase something and you get it, you always feel left a little bit empty inside and then you want to chase the next thing and this is what I've realized because at the end of the day we are on a hamster wheel and our worth is not exclusively defined by productivity and achievements yet that is the box the society puts us in, you as you are right now, you are already whole, you're already sacred and honestly even if you don't accomplish anything else, you are enough and I think that that isn't told people enough and even if you hear from me and even if I told it to myself, I'm still not going to believe it, it takes a lot to break free from society's constant achievement narrative but the goal is not to break free of it completely because that is really impossible as much as we would love to not have to stress about performing and getting the next thing, it's not real but what we can do is we can understand that that constant achievement, that hamster wheel, it's not healthy, how do you find balance in activities that are actually beneficial to that struggle and that actual achievement cycle? So this is really the thing that I want to focus on today and beyond all of this hustle culture lies something called atelic activities and beyond hustle culture lies this world where we have these achievements that we strive for but we also focus on moments where we're not striving for anything and we are living in the present in the moment. Now let's go deeper into this concept so of course striving for greatness achievement, it's an admirable mission, I always look at the people who plan their careers, they stick to the schedule, they take on all these personal projects, work projects, fitness regimes whatever, this is me, this is probably you and the act of continually creating and proving, excelling, learning, discovering, this is life, this is life because if we're not progressing, what are we doing? We're done and if we are challenging ourselves, it is way too easy to grow stagnant but there's a temptation to view growing and learning as a series of milestones and sometimes we tie our entire self worth to these milestones maybe you're looking at progression is finishing a big project that worked maybe you only feel satisfied when you've mastered adding another plate onto your deadlift and I'm starting to realize as many people do through their sort of journey of self discovery growth can't always be about completing something it's not exclusive to meeting a goal or hitting a milestone or mastering a skill you can grow through everyday activities that you know without sounding too airy fairy really speak to your soul picking up a sketchbook if you like to draw taking a stroll on the beach listening to a new music album spending Sunday afternoons gardening these activities don't have an end goal but they can be as useful and enriching as any professional or personal accomplishment and we're going to talk about this through the lens of telek and atelic activities and why you need to find a balance between the two so we have learned a lot from great philosophers in the past one of these great thinkers is Aristotle in metaphysics one of his works he made the distinction between kinesis and energie kinetic or telek activities always have a destination in sight the Greek word telos refers to an end goal implying that the activity is terminal for example you decide you're going to learn an instrument the end goal is to be able to play that instrument well if you're writing an autobiography the end goal is to finish and publish it if you have a large client project to complete the end goal is to deliver it and move on to the next task an energetic or atelic action is something that you can't really exhaust spending time in nature doesn't have an end date writing daily journal entries can be done every morning and you will never run out of anything to say or because it's an open-ended mindfulness practice and now there are a few confusing cases for example if you can play a guitar every day and you never run out of tabs to learn isn't that atelic here i would say it depends on your intention if you're trying to gain guitar playing skills and get better at it it's probably telek if you are already learning how to play and you're enjoying the sort of the habit of playing for five minutes each morning before work that's atelic and it's all about the tangible end goal or lack thereof now like most of the topics that i speak about on you know on my channel and my newsletter um i came across these terms talic and atelic when i was doing a little bit of research so the philosopher Kirin Zatiyah published midlife a philosophical guide in 2018 now this is a deep thinking book about finding purpose and satisfaction in the second half of life and it particularly focuses on midlife crises now Zatiyah talks about his own midlife crisis which she experienced at the age of 35 and it was as though life suddenly lost all of its meaning and you'll understand why midlife crises happen in a second but it felt like a series of like pointless accomplishments and it filled him with a massive amount of intense dread so what Zatiyah encountered and though he wrote about it in much more detail than i'll speak about here it's something called anewi now anewi is the feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction that comes from a lack of meaning purpose or occupation and he was faced with the futility of life and we'll come back Zatiyah in a second that's the first point i want you to remember next the german philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer shook things up with his theories of an irrational universe and you may have heard of Schopenhauer he has a reputation for being very pessimistic and he believed that life is an endless cycle of suffering and striving and even when you do joyful things that you love they bring you pain now we can never really gain satisfaction because it's fleeting according to Schopenhauer and after a certain point our accomplishments and achievements start to become meaningless and to be honest i think we all play with these ideas through our life everything ends so what's the point we're just going through the motions until we reach the inevitable conclusion but i found it interesting to read Zatiyah's book and hear a solution to Schopenhauer's problem he suggests that if you view life as a series of goals and accomplishments tellic activities you're naturally going to feel dissatisfied by the temporary nature of those accomplishments this is where tellic and atelic activities become relevant so in pursuing a goal you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye this is how Zatiyah introduces the idea of tellic versus atelic activity see points out that goals with a destination in sight are often short live particularly in the first 20 to 30 years of your life because it's easier to reach a destination after destination without feeling a sense of meaningless but at a certain point though this is the mid-life crisis we tend to feel the weight of the endless striving which is what Zatiyah felt at 35 so where do we turn? well Zatiyah suggests recognizing and embracing a different means of fulfillment in atelic activities and he recommends a switch in focus from the value of getting there to the value of being on the way you heard this in motivational quotes before you know life is about the journey right and unless we're mad scientists workaholics I know that most of you are saying okay well I do atelic stuff I have a decent mix of tellic and atelic activities I mean I go outside I see my family I play some music whatever it is it's just natural I mean you probably some of us keep a journal a lot of us spend time with our families you probably take weekend trips you watch documentaries read books you maybe take a walk with your dog or or without you sometimes go on a picnic land the blanket to wash your stars when there's a meteor shower is there a particular topic that you're fascinated by and you like to research it isn't tied to your work um are there any hobbies that you dip into every once in a while just for the sake of it painting uh whatever arts and crafts these are all atelic activities and obviously I just described a whole bunch of things that you all do and they don't have to have an end goal and they don't necessarily require us to do anything we can simply be present and enjoy them there's no achievement associated um and we don't enjoy them just by getting something out of them we enjoy them because we just do it to do it like I said you're probably already doing a bunch of atelic activities a lot of us do it's just that we haven't recognized them because they don't necessarily contribute to our resume or help us reach a milestone so we think about them as pastimes what I'm saying and what you're trying to do instead is to shift which activities tellic or atelic you see as the most important societal norms and the way that we're raised typically demand that we focus on tellic activities and view them as the most meaningful these are the goals these are the achievements these are the raises these these are the uh revenue milestones in our business these are the the financial goals we're meeting in our life however atelic activities can bring you just as much if not more value in terms of learning growth satisfaction if we can't learn to find fulfillment in the meaningful activities with no end no destination and no goal then we're going to struggle and we're going to wrestle with those sharpened haurean feelings of futility you are not defined by your measurable accomplishments life shouldn't just be a series of I finish that what's next it's great to have goals and ambitions it's not so great to view those as the only means of growth and satisfaction and for those of us it don't have balance there are massive risks in living atelic centric light full throttle goal pursued 24-7 365 has costs goal striving stress this is a real thing you chronically activate your fight or flight response causing anxiety and exhaustion science confirms ambitious goal setting comes with psychological risks so perfectionistic overachievers over strivers are more prone to depression and the burnout and while some telek activity obviously drives progress you have to recognize your human needs too you have to balance goal hustling with rest and presence so you can't just live for the end points open ended atelic activities also help you with flow state so this is that magical state where we lose self-consciousness where we're so involved in what we're doing that we don't pay attention to time and what not and this is actually where we do our best work but when you're so focused on outcomes we become too worried about performance and then we can't surrender the present immersion so goals can actually obstruct flow state and this is why you have to make space for unstructured time you have to make space for allowing yourself to forget end points and to just melt into the moment in targets so activity significance depends wholly on measurable success and this fragilizes self-worth failure will devastate you because progress defines our worth but atelic action has value beyond outcomes so you have to recognize activities that bring these psychological rewards creativity connection growth pleasure remember your value is not contingent on achieving goals another thing we have to be aware of is that goals imposed by others breeds a ton of resentment so even self chosen objectives and goals that you set for yourself of your entrepreneur they can become oppressive have tos instead of being the inspired want to I know for a fact I do a podcast there's days when it becomes a have to and not a want to and actually to bring up another philosopher Nietzsche called this internal coercion so excessive deferrence to external standards robs us of an inner compass let me say this one more time excessive deferrence to external standards robs us of an inner compass you have to preserve your autonomy through atelic action. Atelic living has massive downsides if you aren't mindful of and don't get me wrong I'm all about the hustling and achieving goals but the balance thing we need to focus on the balance obsessively chasing goals gives us tunnel vision very bad research confirms that when we hyper focus on specific outcomes telek activities our attention narrows like we're wearing blinders we get so fixated on these predefined endpoints that we block out new ideas and possibilities are thinking become so rigid and closed off and inflexible that we miss things actual opportunities that could help us this limited headspace makes us so cognitively biased we lose the ability to shift gears see different perspectives ever notice how intense goal setters achievers drivers seem unwilling to consider alternate ways that's why blind pursuit of achievement above all else gradually reprograms our neural pathways over time we become addicted to crushing metrics at the expense of living spontaneously and enjoying the journey is not a healthy state another major risk is burnout plain and simple pushing hard with no rest activates the fight or flight freeze response as I mentioned before which scientists have coined goal striving stress our adrenals pump out cortisol and other stress hormones nonstop as we obsess over milestones this leads to mental fog physical fatigue anxiety depression not fun studies actually show ambitious goal setters are more likely to suffer burnout and emotional issues our brains didn't evolve for endless achievement we need balance but with telek dominated lives everything starts to depend on measurable results our self worth gets tied to external markers of progress like pay raises and trophies and when you base value solely on hitting targets you're primed for a confidence crisis whenever you miss failure sends you spiraling because your identity depends on telek success not to mention valuing activities only for their outcomes really strips away their inherent joy how many times growing up if you played sports think about this has happened to be quite a bit if I was playing for fun I played a lot of hockey playing on the outdoor rink in the winter grouping Canada and it was just tons of fun and it was flow state it was mindless in the best way possible but the second you step on to the ice for tournament game or a finals game and it's stress anything anxiety and there's really no fun there's performance and there's telek mindfulness and it's so interesting because the same activity could be telek or atelic depending on the conditions that you're performing that activity in but the second you try and accomplish something to achieve a means to an end there is no joy in it the music loses magic if you just do it to master the instrument not for the love of the process um even worse when you relentlessly pursue goals it often feels like chorus you're always hustling to satisfy these external pressures and it just kills motivation it kills autonomy so the tolls of telek excess are real rigidity blindness burnout loss of freedom loss of presence like everything in life balances key so let's get back to that midlife crisis probably fueled by overloading telek activity and if you're experiencing anything close to this 35-year-old midlife crisis maybe you're consumed with thoughts about life and existence are concerned with what you should have done or should have done more achieve more my first response to you would be to go read seti as book but in terms of actionable steps i can't emphasize this idea of atelic living enough look at your life and really identify those everyday meaningful activities that you find joy in acknowledge the way they make you feel except that if your entire life went by without another measurable accomplishment you could still find deep meaning and satisfaction in goal free activities if you're having trouble identifying atelic activities in your life there's tons but here's a list finding a nourishing recipe you've never tried before cooking it eating it taking the walk without listening to music spending an hour in the garden watering plants picking flowers drawing painting coloring taking a yoga class focusing on the breathwork rather than the poses writing in your journal sitting quietly for 10 minutes with no distractions to just think about your thoughts and your feelings reading a book that has only to do with work or school or career goals something just for fun watching sunsets watching sunrises listening to an entire album from start to finish atelic activities don't have a destination that's good that's what you're looking for they don't typically lead to accomplishments and they're not necessarily measurable but that doesn't mean they can't just be as meaningful and enriching as tellic activities if not more so see by breaking habitual thought patterns atelic activities create that space for previously overlooked options possibilities will start to emerge you will think differently about problems in your life science validates what philosophers thought centuries ago open-ended rests and reflection separate from goal driven busyness are crucial for us to flourish as human beings our brains require atelic time so in summary be wary of over optimizing life for productivity and achievement as Aristotle said the best existence blends purposeful activity with purposeless being striking a balance between work like goals and soulful goal free activities is one of my top priorities very difficult for high achievers but it is one of the things that i'm actively working towards i know what it feels like to be consumed by the cycle of achievement and ambition and i think it's crucial to recognize that there are other ways to grow there can be joy in everyday activities even if it doesn't look like productivity or progress on your resume