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I've found the best times to build new habits are when my existing habits are already being disrupted. It gives a "clean slate" effect where I can change things as radical as my sleep schedule, my eating habits, what have you when the old habits are already disrupted. In this way, the New Year absolutely fits the bill: the hectic holiday season, at least for me, disrupts all of my normal rhythms of day to day life, and I find myself yearning in January for a good amount of boredom, at least for awhile.
I also use things like business trips that have me away from home for a week, or planned vacations. Beforehand I get whatever I want ready, be it a home workout routine, a gym membership, what have you and then once all my routines are out of sorts, I can leap straight into a new set of them with seemingly far less friction.
YMMV of course.
IIRC, this disruption lowering of barriers to new habits, with its drop in customer acquisition cost, makes pregnancy a highly valued signal for advertisers.
It was also something I appreciated about travel-as-lifestyle.
I’m convinced New Years Resolutions are at least partly successful, if for nothing else that the 6-8 weeks of holiday distractions (family, travel, gift shopping, holiday treats, etc) are finally over. January is a blank canvas where you can finally find some traction.
For a man to succeed, he should maintain good habits to fulfill a purpose.
The habits and the purpose are doomed to fail if not guided by a meaning.
The meaning the man finds or invents for his life.
> habits and the purpose are doomed to fail if not guided by a meaning.
To complicate this, I offer that purposes can be unknown to the doer (w/ their meaning even further from awareness).
ex: What drives behavior tied to self-esteem may never be known, yet the behavior continues for a lifetime.
Any tips on finding or inventing that meaning?
pick one, it’s not as important as it seems, and you will refine it and improve it with time. My only suggestion would be to avoid seeking money, which it is just a tool, not a destination
I don't remember if it had practical tips for finding/creating meaning in your life, but "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Great book. He survived a concentration camp during the holocaust. The book is about how having meaning in life was a crucial part of his and other's survival. I highly recommend it.
Full disclosure: I think of finding meaning often, but have struggled with it. I suspect this has to do with my current situation and I hope to remedy that when it changes.
One more thing: if you're a man please find friends and build a community as you age. Many of us are terribly lonely once we reach a certain age. I believe working on my social and community life will help me find that meaning. Maybe that's the same for you.
Good luck!!
> I think of finding meaning often, but have struggled with it. I suspect this has to do with my current situation and I hope to remedy that when it changes.
> I believe working on my social and community life will help me find that meaning.
I also found that performing service helps fill the void where I feel purpose and meaning are missing. And if service isn't the whole solution, a partially filled void is easier to top off.
According to Irvin D. Yalom, “One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning”.¹
Yalom considers that “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts — not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter”.²
For Frankl, best-known for his psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, meaning comes from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.³
Ernest Becker’s book The Birth and Death of Meaning asks the question, “Where does meaning come from?” The short answer is: meaning comes from culture – our lives feel most meaningful when we believe we are participating successfully in the cultural hero-system, and we measure the success of our performance through social affirmation. Culture prescribes the roles, how well we execute the roles creates feelings of meaning and self-worth, and we assess the success of our execution by way of positive social regard.⁴ For a long time, the cultural hero-system came from religion, and according to Becker “The crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. If the church, on the other hand, chooses to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must work against the culture, recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time”.⁵
I don't think that meaning can arise solely from an intellectual pursuit. It comes from a blend of experience and emotional engagement. In The Developing Mind, Daniel Siegel declares, “The way the mind establishes meaning is closely linked to social interactions and both meaning making and relationships appear to be mediated via the same neural circuits responsible for initiating emotional processes”.⁶
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8768078-we-humans-appear-to...
[2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/28/loves-executioner-...
[3] https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/03/26/viktor-frankl-mans...
[4] https://www.themortalatheist.com/blog/the-birth-and-death-of...
[5] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7577300-and-the-crisis-of-s...