🦾 What is a Deep Life?

The hardest thing in life is figuring this out

👋 Hey, Colin here! Welcome to this week’s ✨ Better Human Newsletter ✨. Each week, I send 2x emails full of actionable content, articles, books, podcasts, quotes, and more. Also included is the 💰Better Money💰 section to help you navigate the rapidly-changing world of finance, money, Bitcoin, real estate, and more. Subscribers get access for less than $5 a month.👇

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GM, It’s Colin, your secret weapon to becoming a better human.

He also has this idea of a Deep Life. Since selling my company and having a lot of time on my hands, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What is a meaningful life? How do I spend my time? How much with kids, work, play, fitness, etc?

Here's the article. It's worth a read, but even more worth thinking about in your life. Here’s Cal:

Those who embrace the deep life often push some of these efforts to a place that seems radical to outsiders, but it’s exactly in this extremeness that they find the deep satisfaction. A life focused intensely on the things that really matter — even if it’s riddled with ups and downs — trumps a comfortable life that unfolds with haphazard numbness or excessive narcissism.

Having kids has redefined my relationship to money, work, time, play, and leisure. At first, I was anxious and always battling between working and helping with the kids. Now that we have a routine, time frees up, and I have to figure out how much of everything is the right dose. I’m trying to find the Golden Mean for everything.

The more I work through this, the more I think about money and how much is enough. I don’t have enough the way I define it, but I’m getting close, I think. I say I think because I know how these things go: get what you want, then miraculously you have something else you want. The never-ending trap of more.

I often think about certain friends I’ve had over the years. Some of them have no desire to work. Some do the bare min and still have a healthy income (lawyer). And some work all the time, and it’s part of who they are. Most of my adult life, I've been the latter—one who is always hustling and known for my work ethic. I’ve been thinking about those friends that are better at not working, because I realized not working is a skill, even though my younger self couldn't understand how people could be OK with not working hard. I’ve changed my mind on that, or at least updated it, as I’ve realized that you don't need a lot of money to live a happy and abundant life.

The hard thing about life is finding what is just enough. That’s compounded by the fact that our “just enough” changes throughout the various seasons of our life. So every time we have it figured out, we have a new figuring out to do.

Finally, I return to duality to remind myself that hardness is good because it defines goodness. Without hard, nothing has meaning. Without struggle, life would be pointless.

This is the process, so all we can do is embrace it with an open and willing mind.

I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter. If you aren’t yet a paying subscriber, you’re missing all the content below + the Monday email edition. Subscirbe here.

-Colin

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Here’s what you missed Monday: 🦾 So Much Value

1. 🔻 What is shrinkflation and how is it hitting you?

2. New section:⚕️Health is Wealth 🪙 and 😎 Human Skills 😜

3. The new productivity app I’m obsessed with (and I’ve tried them all).

4. 😂 A genius—and funny—story about Steve Jobs and the iPod 📱

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👇 Today (Subscribe to get it and the rest) 👇

1. History: How the Nazis spread propaganda so fast 📻

2. 🇺🇸 Proud of your nation, but not your government (this guy)

3. 📘 After reading hundreds of productivity books, they all agree on this…

4. What I always keep in my freezer when I don’t feel like cooking 🍳