Let’s talk about your “journey.”
Maybe this will sound mean-spirited, but I swear it’s not. I just can’t help but snicker every time I hear people describe their life as “a journey.”
I've written several books, but I'll never have a bestselling self-help book because I refuse to use that word.
Unless I’m referring to the band.
Yes, your life (and mine, and everyone's) is perplexing, turbulent, and often a vast mystery. But constantly calling it a journey sounds a bit pretentious, don’tcha think?
I suppose it bathes you in some kind of spiritual aura. But come on. You got up this morning, you put on clean underpants, sat in traffic, did your job, texted your friends, drove back home, ate a couple of tacos, walked the dog, then binged two more episodes of your favorite show.
Is that a journey? Or is it simply life? Some of you even quietly skipped the part about the underpants. Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with clean drawers.
The WHY?
The psychology of this is interesting to me. The big question is: Why do we have this need to elevate the mundane into something extraordinary? And I certainly don’t equate “mundane” with something bad. In fact, the definition I associate with the word is “characterized by the practical and ordinary.”
Hey, most of us live ordinary lives, as described above. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Hell, in an overscheduled and overstimulated world, doesn’t mundane sound pretty damned good sometimes? How many of us would love to have a dot-free, uninteresting weekend every once in a while?
Perhaps it’s telling that the popularity of the word “journey” coincides with the explosion of social media and reality TV. I never remember anyone calling their life a journey prior to 2002.
That’s when the TV show “The Bachelor” first became popular. All those contestant began describing the process of surviving elimination on the show as “their journey.” It became a buzzword.
So by that definition, a journey is having sex with as many strangers as possible. I suppose that is a spiritual connection, of sorts.
Putting that aside, take a look at the social media aspect. Today, you can’t scroll for more than ten seconds without being subjected to photos of someone else’s fabulous life: vacations in Greece; children graduating from an Ivy League school; hiking the Canadian Rockies; hosting a dazzling dinner party catered by a five-star restaurant.
Let’s just be honest: For nearly 20 years, life has turned into a game of keeping up. Now we must paint our existence on a public canvas with glorious colors. We must define our life in exciting terms. To stay one step ahead of a comparison-based depression—and don’t think for a moment that’s not a real thing—we must make our lives sound much more interesting.
It’s all a game
The thing is, we all know we’re playing this game, just like we know the photos on a fast-food burger commercial have been staged to look a hundred times better than the real thing. We know the photos of a home for sale have been staged by a professional to make that fixer-upper look like a palace. It’s even an actual title: Home stager.
We each act as the stager of our life, dressing it up to impress. And we all know we’re all doing it.
Thus, by polishing it up, it’s no longer just a normal life. We will now describe it as a journey.
It’s funny, really. We embellish our lives to feel better about our daily routines and to fool everyone into believing we don’t even pass gas. Nobody is fooled, but we all agree to play along. I’ll pretend to buy your bullshit, you pretend to buy mine. And we all go merrily on our way.
But to bring all this home, what does it take for our lives to really qualify as some virtuous journey? To earn that description?
How about this simple suggestion:
Go out and do something exceptional today that completely alters your path or—even better—makes a substantial difference in another person's life. THEN we can discuss promoting your daily existence to a journey. You’ll be truly taking yourself from one place to another, metaphysically speaking. One of the components of metaphysics, after all, is purpose. Another could be described as something transformative.
Until you really transform your life or the lives of others through your deeds, I think you’re just living. Which is fine.
But you can certainly start a real journey today.
In the meantime, Don’t Stop Believing.
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Sometimes Dom would like his journey to take him straight to an ice cold beer, or even a mug of tea. If this essay resonated with you and you’d like to make his dream come true, you can buy him that tea or beer right here. That would be very nice.
