Towards a New Lifestyle: Burning Bridges and Overcoming Fears

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.” Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

I've never been much of a reader of self-help books, be they on management styles, career choices or lifestyle designs. They often strike me as 10-page Powerpoint presentations inflated into 300-page yarns just so as not to appear too naked in front of the reader. Also, a life governed by aims and goals seems like a life reduced to flowcharts and spreadsheets. I personally prefer reading philosophy or psychology books, yet somehow came across a rather interesting example of the lifestyle design genre, “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. It is essentially a guide to live a life rich in experiences on a modest budget whilst creating an income that frees up most of your time to actually have those experiences rather than postponing them to an uncertain future.

One thing that struck me was how similar the whole attitude was to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. I have written about Epicurus before and the method was being applied specifically to financial situations and material desires. However, the same method can be used for any kind of personal dilemma. I think that having a method is more important than following someone else's to-do lists. Such lists are the final action points but are useless at generating the kind of Socratic dialogue with yourself that makes those actions meaningful. How many New Year's resolutions go begging by mid-January? Was it even worth the mental energy used in making them? A resolution without resolve is pointless.

The sub-title of Ferriss' book is “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.” Information technology, the internet and outsourcing all those tedious parts of our lives can transform a lifeless drone existence into a life less ordinary. The book has lots of practical advice but those parts that impressed me the most are those exercises in discovering one's own very personal and very real fears. I must admit to being homeless – not in the sense of not having a roof over my head but in that a house is just a dwelling, not a home. There are many such nomads in the world, either born out of two different cultures or living a peripatetic childhood. Having no allegiance to any one country means the whole world can be your home. It is just a matter of mind-set and a few practicalities. But you don't have to feel like a nomad to wander this world and experience the richness of lifestyles and cultures.

What would be your dream lifestyle? What would be your dream job? Where in the world do you want to go? Do you prefer walking barefoot on a sandy beach or feeling the crunching snow beneath your boots? Why are you where you are? And is it the best place to be? What about all those things you'd really love to do but are too petrified because they seem somehow too extreme – they are so far outside the box that you can't see the box any more.

What stops most people living their dreams is not physical but mental and emotional. Many fear that a major change in lifestyle means burning their bridges back to the safe, predictable, boring past. What few consider is that inaction means burning the same bridges but to the future and from the wrong end. Where Ferriss is full of the can-do spirit, Epicurus warns against losing things that are truly important. Running a beach-front bar on a tropical island sounds like a dream job, but if the love of your life is 10,000 km away then your real dream is only half fulfilled.

The idea is not to run away from anything but to free yourself from an unfulfilling existence. The first things to free yourself from are your fears. This is where the to-do lists fall apart and a sequence of questions-and-answers is a much better way to discover new things about yourself. The mind has this amazing capacity to create a construct of reality; only problem is that it isn't always very accurate. The mind seems to construct 'plausible narratives' and thereby sacrifices consistency and often truth. Seeking to edit that narrative so that it makes cogent sense will probably unearth a number of delusions. Changing our lifestyle is primarily about changing ourselves, and to do so means putting ourselves under the microscope.

The mind constructs its reality from its inputs. It is therefore important that your plans or problems are written down along with the questions and answers to each step. Your own written words thereby become new inputs rather than just the same doubts going round and round in circles as part of your mental chatter. Writing everything down, most especially the questions, means your mind will continue to process these inputs even when you're not consciously aware of it. The answers may come at any time; sometimes they will involve some action, sometimes they will raise new questions and sometimes it will strike you that it was just a matter of finding the right key.

In Carlos Castaneda's books on the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, the very first lesson is in overcoming fear. Such fears may be either internal or external. It could be the fear of confronting one's own inner psychic content or it could be the fear of approaching strangers. Tim Ferriss says he overcame many fears by forcing himself to contact famous people to ask for advice or assistance – he found most of them to be perfectly human and in no way divine. He also overcame his fear of water by learning to swim in 10 days. As you work through your personal questions-and-answers be honest with yourself – be brutally honest as if that person in the mirror is someone else. If your aim is to change the way you live then start by looking at the absolutely worst scenario. How would you manage it? Is it really all that bad?

Everyone has their own story to tell and their own fears that they hide from the world – and which they hide even from themselves. Building those bridges to a better future means crossing those bridges one by one. The passwords that let you move through the toll-gates are the answers to those questions you were afraid to ask. The sum total of all those bridges is the network of our life. In order to change that life some bridges need burning whilst others need building.

Time to rewrite that lifestyle narrative.