We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work.
THOMAS EDISON
To begin, I must restate my Grand Unifying Theory. There is a simple and effective solution for every endeavor. I have spent a lot of blogging on the GUT because it is my overarching thesis in thought and life. The Gentle Reader should have picked up on the idea that the GUT runs through all of my thoughts and writing. I am a man in search of simple and effective solutions. I am not in search of perfect solutions because I do not believe they exist. I can point to the flaw in every one of my strategies. These flaws do not trouble me because I think they are inescapable. There is one flaw that runs through all of my GUT strategies. This is the requirement for work.
I don't have sophisticated solutions for life. I like to refer to my GUT strategies as "blue collar." This begs a question. What does a white collar solution look like? White collar solutions are where a sophisticated type comes up with complicated schemes of working smarter instead of working harder. Virtually all of these schemes amount to sticking the work to someone else while Mr. Sophisticated takes his cut. I could write volumes about these parasites, but I save that for other posts. The most deleterious effect of the white collar solutions is that they beguile the public into thinking that all problems are complex and require complex solutions. This isn't true.
I do not believe in work purely for the sake of work. I am not going to dig a hole just to fill it in again. This is madness. Everything I do must have a purpose or a telos. Conversely, I do not believe that you can escape work. When you do nothing, nothing is all you get. The secret is to find the golden mean between doing nothing and doing something that is worthless. My blue collar strategies aim for this mean. The way I achieve it is through doing what is simple and effective.
The aggravation of my life today is the chronic exhaustion that comes with being the survivor of a traumatic brain injury. I have found that the first and most important thing is to take as much off of your plate as you can. This is why I don't pursue various hobbies, interests, and ambitions. I don't have the energy for that anymore. Consequently, I don't do anything except what is absolutely and fundamentally necessary. I am used to saying no to everything.
All of those extraneous things belong to what I call "thrive mode." Thrive mode was my lifelong dream that was always thwarted by the lack of time, money, and energy. The loss of my energy has made me accept that the rest of my days will be lived in "survive mode." I don't know how I feel about that. I have had almost seven years to come to terms with that. I wanted to do big things in my life. I am left with doing small things.
A good illustration is the McMansion. Many women dream of having a big home, so they buy one with a hefty mortgage payment. To make those payments, her husband is tasked with working his tail off to afford and maintain her dream. On her end, she is tasked with trying to keep that McMansion clean. The size of the place is tremendous work, so she concludes she needs to hire outside help for the task. This help is not cheap, and the husband is already maxed out with his job. So, the wife ends up taking a job to pay for the work she doesn't want to do. You can see the absurdity here. Why not choose to live in a smaller and simpler home?
For me, a sudden tornado destroyed the McMansion of my life and left me living in an RV camper on the lot of the destroyed home. The disaster is a curse but also a blessing. It is easier to clean an RV camper than a McMansion. My GUT strategies tell me to not wait for tornadoes to simplify my life but to choose simplicity at the outset. I spend my time thinking of ways to save time, money, and energy in the survive mode of my life. Efficiency is of vital importance.
The RV camper is easier to clean, but it still needs cleaning. You can't go smaller than that unless you like sleeping in a tent on the ground. That creates its own hardships. You can only reduce life so far but no farther.
I find that the biggest waste of energy in life is overthinking. People overthink because they want to avoid necessary work. The belief is that if thinking begets efficiency then you can think yourself out of work altogether. This is stupid. There comes a point where you have to stop thinking and start working.
For me, thinking is as exhausting as working. This is why I save the cerebral portions of my recovery program for the margins of my day and my week after completing chores and errands and doing physical exercise. These blog posts are brain busters which is why I save them for Sundays or rainy days stuck inside. I keep writing as a form of therapy for my damaged brain.
Knowing that work is inescapable, I am left with one question. Is this necessary? Do I need to do this? I ask myself this question because of the energy that it will cost me. When the gas tank is almost empty, you're not going to waste what is left on joyrides around town.
Ultimately, the GUT strategies and solutions are about eliminating overthinking and wasteful activities. When you do something, it has to count for something. Survival is success. I survive one day at a time. You can't get any simpler than that.
