Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (2 page)

The topic of happiness began peeking its beautiful little head into our conversations more frequently as time passed. With each promotion at work, with each award or fancy trip we won, with every nugget of praise we received, the happiness accompanying those things quickly came and went. The faster it came, the faster it was gone. So we sought happiness by attempting to get more of these nuggets of praise, trying to improve our feelings of self-worth and significance by “achieving” more. We worked harder and harder to obtain these nuggets, often working twice as many hours as the average American to prove our value. 

It was something like a cocaine high. The more praise we got, the more we needed it just to function, the more we needed it to feel happy. It got to the point where we were living just to break even emotionally. 

Discontent flooded our lives. We knew something needed to change, but we weren’t sure what. So we did what most Americans do: we tried to purchase happiness. Even though we were both earning over six figures in “well respected” positions, we spent more money than we made, purchasing things like luxury cars, large houses, big-screen TVs, fancy furniture, expensive vacations, and everything else our heavily-mediated consumer-culture told us would make us happy.

But it didn’t make us happy. In fact, it brought us even more unhappiness and discontent, because not only did the old feelings stick around, but we added to those feelings by going into debt. And when the temporary high from each of our purchases dissipated, we were left feeling depressed, empty, alone, and helpless.

And then, in late 2009, a series of dreadful events made Joshua begin to question every aspect of his life, including his material possessions, his career, his success, and the meaning of life.

A Slow Burn

But let’s rewind our story a bit, because our discontent didn’t suddenly descend from the heavens, striking us like a bolt of lightning. We didn’t wake up one morning and say,
Gee, everything was fine yesterday, but today I’m unhappy
. Discontentment doesn’t work that way. Rather, it’s a slow burn; it’s a pernicious problem that creeps into your life after years of subtle dissatisfaction.

It Started When We Were Young

The first signs of discontent appeared in our lives well before our days in corporate America. It started when we were children.

The two of us met twenty years ago in the fifth grade in Lebanon, Ohio (a small town between Cincinnati and Dayton). We were ten years old, and even by then our lives were filled with discontent. We both grew up in dysfunctional households during the 1980s (before
dysfunctional
was a popular term). Both sets of our parents were divorced. Joshua’s parents separated when he was three; his mother fell victim to alcoholism, forcing him to raise himself most years after age six; his bi-polar, schizophrenic father died when he was nine. Ryan’s mother had similar substance abuse issues, which later led to substance abuse for Ryan as a teenager. Both of us were raised in less than ideal conditions for much of our childhoods, which in retrospect, was a recipe for disaster.

By age 12, we were both overweight, uncool, and utterly unhappy with our lives. We did things to try to escape. Back then, the easiest escape was food. We experienced instant gratification by stuffing our faces; we felt certain we would be happy, at least for a moment. It was one of the few aspects of our lives we could control, because everything else felt so out of control. We lived in dilapidated, cockroach-infested apartments with single mothers who cared about us, but who were more concerned with getting drunk or high than providing for their children.

As we approached high school, Ryan moved in with his father, into a much more stable household. His father owned a small painting-and-wallpapering company and was able to provide a better lower-middle-class lifestyle. Ryan’s father was the antithesis of his mother: he held a stable job, he showed he cared in myriad ways, and he was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, among other radical differences. The long list of positive changes were too much for Ryan to handle all at once, so while he did his best to conform to the strict household rules, he also rebelled, experimenting with alcohol, marijuana, and harder drugs.

Joshua took a different route. While he didn’t experiment with alcohol or drugs—most likely because he was so turned off by his mother’s rampant alcoholism—he found another way to cope: namely, obsession and compulsion in the form of OCD. He discovered that even though he couldn’t control his living situation—the crappy apartment, the drunken mother, the lack of money—he could control himself. So he lost a lot of weight during his freshman year in high school, in an unhealthy way (by eating very little), and he spent hours organizing his meager possessions, obsessing over the smallest things, looking for some kind of order in a world of chaos.

During our last year of high school, we had a memorable conversation that we still talk about today as being the tipping point that led us into the chaos and confusion of our consumer-driven culture. Because we grew up relatively poor, we thought that the key to our happiness would be money. Specifically:
If we could just make $50,000 per year, then we’d be set.
Our parents hadn’t earned that kind of money, and they weren’t happy, so we figured if we could pass some kind of arbitrary threshold ($50,000 per annum, in this case), then we would somehow be happy. It sounds ridiculous now, but it made perfect sense to a couple of eighteen-year-olds who were about to enter the world on their own.

We graduated high school in 1999 and went in our own directions for a few years. Neither of us went to college straightaway. Instead, we both entered the working world.

Ryan worked for his father, hanging wallpaper and painting walls in opulent houses throughout southwest Ohio. Joshua found a sales job with a large corporation. Both careers were steeped in certain monetary expectations. Neither of us particularly enjoyed what we were doing, but we didn’t know any better—we didn’t realize you could actually do work you enjoyed. For us, our jobs were designed to do two things for our lifestyle: allow us to make money and give us a certain kind of social status.

Ryan was making enough money to live. It wasn’t great money, but it paid the bills. He also earned an identity from his job. The fleet of half-a-dozen
Nicodemus
paint trucks that patrolled the streets of Warren County, Ohio, spoke volumes for his future. Plus, there was comfort in knowing that one day he would take over his father’s business, making it his own, and maybe even passing it on to his future children.

But Ryan also knew the painting business wouldn’t make him rich. He was painting multi-million-dollar homes, which he knew he’d never be able to afford, even when he took over his dad’s business, which, if he worked really hard, he’d be able to do once his dad retired in a decade or two. There was a fair amount of discontent that showed up for Ryan, realizing that he would never be able to get something he wanted. Although, at the time, he didn’t know why he wanted a palatial home or why it would make him happy, he was merely unhappy with the fact that he would never be able to afford such a luxurious house. So Ryan searched for contentment in other ways.

Joshua found a job in which he had the potential to earn more money than the people with whom he went to high school, a job that had long-term career-growth possibilities. All he had to do was work like an Iditarod sled dog to “get results.” So work like a dog he did, often working more than a month straight—seven days a week—without a day off. The more he worked, the more he sold. And the more he sold, the more money he earned and the more he was showered with praise. At 18, he was already making more money than his mother ever had. He was poised for (corporate) greatness. At least ostensibly.

But Joshua experienced discontent too. Although he was making over $50,000 by age 20, he had little personal time. The corporate world of “performing” and “achiving” was taking its toll, so he tried to purchase happiness. He tried to manufacture a life of contentment.

Manufactured Contentment

Unhappy with our jobs and our personal lives, we tried to fix our discontent in different ways.

Ryan turned to a couple extremes. First, he turned back to his father’s religion—the religion of his childhood—swearing off drugs and worldly activities, becoming a devout Jehovah’s Witness, embracing its tenets, and searching for life’s meaning through religion. Ryan married his high school girlfriend at 18, a few months after graduating high school. He and his wife adopted the JW religious tenets, bought a small house in the small hometown in which they were raised, and started talking about creating a family together. 

But it turned out to be a marriage saturated with fear and distrust. After three years of tedious matrimony, the marriage ended nastily, upon which Ryan turned back to drugs and alcohol, looking for an escape from his painful failed reality.

Joshua, on the other hand, continued his laser-focused work in corporate America. He worked his tail off, consistently performing as one of the best sales people in the entire company. He earned his first promotion to a leadership/managerial position at 22, making him the youngest person in the company’s 130-year history to have earned the position. 

With this promotion came more money, more responsibility, and somehow even more work. Joshua’s life was consumed by work. At age 23, he got married, bought a house in suburbia, and continued to work more and more as his personal life seemed to occur somewhere in the unfocused background—somewhere to the right of the frame. He hardly realized he had gotten married. He neglected and took for granted the relationship with his wonderful wife. He hardly noticed the purchase of a large house with more bedrooms than inhabitants. He hardly noticed the discontent that was brewing within him. He simply knew he wasn’t happy, but life went on at its breakneck pace.

To deal with his more subtle discontent, Joshua tried to buy his happiness. He spent money on
stuff
, buying fancy clothes, expensive vacations, consumer electronics, gadgets, and multitudes of unnecessary junk. When those things didn’t bring lasting happiness, he turned to his childhood vice of food. By his early twenties, he weighed more than he had ever weighed; he was 70 pounds overweight and severely out of shape.
But at least I’m making money!
he thought, giving himself an identity in his job, giving himself a certain kind of status and satisfaction in knowing that he performed well at his job, albeit a job he didn’t love and wasn’t passionate about.

Reconnecting the Duo

It was around this time that we reconnected, almost accidentally, at the nadir of our early twenties. 

Ryan decided that taking over his father’s business was not for him. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he thought he’d give the corporate world a shot. Because if he could just make over $50,000 per year, then life would be good and he would be happy, right?

So, in 2004, shortly after Joshua got married and Ryan got divorced, Joshua hired Ryan to work at the corporation in which he had slaved for the last half-decade. Like Joshua, Ryan quickly excelled, working incredibly hard and becoming one of the company’s top performing salespeople. 

We both earned several more promotions over the years, during our mid- and late-twenties—promotions with fancy titles like
Channel Manager
,
Regional Manager
, and
Director
. And with those titles came more money and more responsibility and more work. Sadly, some far darker things came with those promotions as well: anxiety and stress and worry and overwhelm and depression.

And yet, try as we did, our search for happiness through status and material possessions never yielded real lasting happiness or contentment. By our late twenties we were earning great money at jobs we hated, but we were in debt—financially and emotionally.

Back to the Future

Fast forward back to 2009, back to our 80-hour workweeks, back to our ostensibly perfect lives that were crumbling on the inside.

On October 8, 2009, Joshua’s mother died of stage-four lung cancer. She battled it over a year, enduring repeat chemo and radiation treatments. But the cancer spread to her brain and other organs, and she was no match for the disease in the end. 

Oddly enough, the cancer seemed to be a metaphor for Joshua’s life as well. While things looked good on the surface—the marriage, the fancy job, the cars, the material possessions—there was something seriously wrong on the inside.

Truth be told, neither of us were happy. When we told ourselves a decade earlier that we’d be happy if we could just make $50,000 per year, we were wrong. At first, in our early twenties, we thought maybe we had simply miscalculated the exact amount required to be happy, so we changed our estimation: If we could make $60,000 per year, then we could be happy, right? And when that didn’t work: If we could make $75,000 and then $90,000 and then $100,000 per year, then we could be happy, right? It was a never-ending cycle. Each year we made more money, and yet each year we spent more than we earned in an effort to subdue our perpetual discontent created by the lifestyles we were living. The equation itself was broken.

After Joshua’s mother died, we had another conversation about happiness. We discussed why we weren’t happy and what it would take to make us happy. Obviously the old formula of “If we could make $X, then we could be happy” was not panning out. We were both making over six figures; we were both successful twenty-eight-year-old young executives; we both “had it figured out” according to certain cultural standards. But we knew the truth: we didn’t have it figured out at all. 

Was this what we had been waiting for all our lives? Were we going to continue to work ridiculously long hours at a corporation that didn’t care about us? Were we going to work our way into upper-level management—becoming COOs or CEOs with seven- or eight-figure salaries—just to be even more depressed by the time we were in our early forties? It didn’t sound appealing to us—our dreams of climbing the corporate ladder seemed more like nightmares the more we talked about it.