Two Worlds, the Future, and You (Part 2)

If you’re here without having read part 1, I recommend going there first. What I write here will reference it heavily and I think it’ll make more sense with it in mind.

Did you ever read Death of a Salesman? Because you should. It’s one of my favorite works of literature and possibly one of the most intriguing treatises ever written on life satisfaction/dissatisfaction. I’m going to share some pieces of it here to illustrate a few important parts of your next step in building the-world-that-should-be.

Willy Loman is an old traveling salesman who has come to the end of his career—and his life, because the two things to him are one and the same. He was only ever an average salesman, but he spent his life delusional, thinking himself bigger, better, and more important to the company than he was. He lived a lie of his own making. He regretted not having made different choices. And he makes it to the end only to find that he’s gone nowhere.

Willy is sad.

And why? Because he spends the lion’s share of his life chasing a dream that doesn’t fit his reality or who he really is. He gets caught in the fog of what he thinks he should want. This is cautionary. Your world-that-should-be needs to be honest. Don’t chase someone else’s dream. Willy thought that as a man in America, his dream should be wealth and success. He had a better time doing things for and with his family, but his “dream” kept him on the road away from them.

He projects this onto his son Biff and Biff spends years reprogramming himself when he realizes that what his father has raised him to want isn’t what he wants at all. He wants something simpler. His dream is honest.

There’s no room for shame

If you aren’t proud of your world-that-should-be, you’ll never own it. This is why I gave the advice to interrogate your dreams. Don’t do half of that work—take the house of your dreams down to the studs if you have to. Make sure you comprehend its every part. Otherwise, you might spend yourself chasing a dream that never fit you.

Another piece to the cautionary tale of Willy Loman is that we can’t live in fog. Clarity, real self-concept, and a firm grasp on the reality of our situation is so important. Be Biff. Come to terms with uncomfortable truths about yourself. Take responsibility for them. Own what and who you are. That puts you in a place to either embrace it or change what you feel honestly needs changing. Until you apprehend yourself and own your pieces, you have no agency to change them or embrace them.

Let me restate that because it’s so crucial here: you cannot do anything until you own who and what you are. Willy never put that work in and he ended up miserable, dissatisfied, and suicidal. Biff did the work and gained something Willy never had: hope for the future he really wanted.

Hope is necessarily grounded in truth. Hope for a falsehood is empty and foolish—I’ll go so far as to call it vain. There’s no point to it.

Living in the world that is

Our original quote said that in our two worlds, we have to live in the one that is in order to have any hope of creating the one that should be. I want to highlight a specific word there:

Live. We are not to be mere survivalists of reality. We are to live here. We need to live in the now. There are three aspects to this that I find worth mentioning:

First, we have what Willy and Biff taught us. Living in the-world-that-is requires us to be become aware enough and honest enough about it so that we aren’t trying to live in fog and fantasy. Reality is real. To live here, we must also be real.

Second, once we have begun to design our world-that-should-be, there’s a temptation to retreat to it. Don’t give in. There is no comfort in living a half-realized dream. There is no joy in pretending at getting what you want. Be grounded. Have an eye on that desired future, but have your feet planted in the-world-that-is. Failure to do so will undercut your progress, disappoint you, and knock you from your path.

We only have power to affect the world around us when we choose to live in it. If you find yourself slipping away from your mooring to reality, adjust as necessary. Make a new goal. Redefine where you are. Get real about it. If it’s uncomfortable, be uncomfortable. You owe yourself the truth.

Living in reality gives us options that ignoring it robs us of. If I recognize that I have spending problem, I can do something about it and make an adjustment. If I delude myself into thinking that everything is fine, I have no power to change my situation. This is true on every level.

Third, we have to learn that living and not merely surviving is about mindset. Living can be fun. We can find joy in things. We can make time for what we love. If we are just going through the motions and trying to get through whatever reality we find ourselves in until the better one comes along, we’ll miss the point: the-world-that-should-be isn’t a destination. It’s the journey to it. Live your life—don’t become a survivalist of reality.

Building the-world-that-should-be

It is only from this place of power and options we obtain by living in reality that we can begin using the blueprint we’ve designed. With no fog of delusion, we can clearly see where sections of what-should-be don’t match up with what is. We might not yet fully understand the process of changing these areas into what they need to become, but the clearer our two images—that of what is and that of what should be—are, the easier a time we’ll have of doing the work to get there.

We can talk to experts, research people who have done what we want to do, and make small, actionable goals to get each piece in alignment with what-should-be. Remember that this is the work of years. This isn’t going to be something we build in a month. Any such structure wouldn’t have the supports necessary to become truly real.

That is, after all, what we’re involved with. We aren’t simply dreaming—we’re building a new real.

It’s for you too

I know there are folks reading this who feel that it’s too late for them. They, like Willy, have come to an advanced age (or an age they feel is advanced) and are dissatisfied or miserable. They feel they don’t have years to be about building something new. And where would one even find the energy for such endeavors?

I find that the more life one has lived, the more raw materials exist for the-world-that-should-be. Your options are greater. You have more to work with that can be repurposed and built upon.

The hurdles you face might be more internal. Can you change your thinking? Can you live in reality if you’ve spent a long time out of it? Can you become honest with yourself about what you want without shame? Crossing these barriers will be far harder than repurposing the tons of raw life that lay behind you. You have much to do, sure, but you have a lot to work with.

What I’m saying is that it’s not too late. This isn’t a crisis. This is an opportunity. What isn’t serving you or making you happy? Define it. What does? Define that. Adjust accordingly. You’ve lived with yourself for a long time. You have more potential to know yourself than a younger person might. Utilize that and build on it.

Finishing up

Wherever you are, be there. Wherever you want to go, understand why. I’ll have more to say on this in the future, I’m sure. For now, I invite you to begin the sometimes uncomfortable process of defining where, who, and what you are, living it honestly, and designing your world-that-should-be based on what you find. If you have any groundbreaking stories about those efforts, send them to me. I’d love to hear from you.