Becoming Useful

No one casts aside a a contributing member of society.

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I was watching a video over the weekend where Alex Hormozi, a young multimillionaire business and success guru who founded and runs Aquistion.com, was talking his way through open question and answer format about “finding purpose in life.” There's lots of good stuff in there, but the thing I keep coming back to as I reflect on and digest his thoughts is this bit:

[T]herapy with men doesn't work necessarily the same; we have to have a different approach. People think men need more love, and I just don't think that's true. I think we want more respect, and you get respect from being useful. And so, I make that the goal. No one casts aside a man who is useful. And being useful is an attractive trait. If you see someone who's really good at something, it's hard for… that is a contributing member of society. They do stuff. That helps other people. We want them here. You get status from that. And so, that means that skill mastery in a very real way can help you attract the mate you want. Which is why I indexed a ton of my life around getting better at stuff. And also, from a stress perspective…I see sometimes, these podcasts from successful entrepreneurs and they’re like, “Man, I’m still worried I could lose it all tomorrow.” I don’t have that. Like, I’m genuinely not afraid of losing it all tomorrow. ‘Cause I have lost it before, and I got it back.

If you were lucky — ‘cause there are guys who get lucky — and if you are lucky, then absolutely, you should be worried about it, because if you do lose it, you don’t know how to get it back. But if you have skills, then, like, I know that I can go to any business and help grow it, and that's valuable. That’s useful. Even reframing the word "value" as "usefulness" is probably also an easier way to do it, for people to kind of like, comprehend. But I think if you make that the goal, it also takes it away from you.

So the reason I hate…there’s a…I would say a friend-ish, well, I have a friend who’s single. And struggles. Because he’s not happy. Successful, but not happy. And so he obsesses on happiness. And I was like, “Do you know that when you obsess on happiness, all you do is think about you all day? It’s all you’re doing. You’re just thinking about you, all fucking day.” How useless.

And so, the nice thing with being useful is that in order to be useful you have to be useful to other people. No one can be useful alone. You have to be useful to other people. So there's a service element, but there's also a self-improvement element, which is: to be useful to other people, you need to improve yourself. And so that's why I think being useful has been probably my day-to-day goal of what I need to do, and that’s served me well.

If you’re interested, you can see the whole video here:

I lost my sense of purpose when my life stopped being about fighting for the Catholic faith. It was everything my life had ever been about, and it's why I was so terrified to let it go. My wife asked me four years before I quit why I was doing what I was doing if it made me so miserable (I was always up in arms what was going on in the Church) and it took me three days of consideration after she asked the question to come up with the real response: "Because it's my whole identity. I'm not just fighting for the Church, I'm fighting for my sense of self."

In a way, founding and running OnePeterFive made me "useful" to all the people who were feeling the same way I was about things. I wasn't writing about me. I was writing about a mission, an idea, an ideal.

And in another way, having that all come apart at the seams was exactly what I needed. I’d been going through life wearing this façade that hid the brokenness inside me. I was a Potemkin man, all hat and no cattle. I learned very early how to pretend like my life was just fine, but I don’t think there’s ever been a person who has asked me “how are you doing today” who didn’t get some kind of polite lie in return when I said I was “fine.” It was way past time to raze the movie set and build something real.

Unfortunately, since I've begun deconstructing everything that led to my faith imploding, I've been very self-focused, because like it or not, when something like this happens, that's usually where the answers are. Your interior landscape may as well be a crime scene. As Hormozi says, “when you obsess on happiness, all you do is think about you all day.” Whenever you’re in self-repair mode of any kind, you are by definition self-focused.

It’s gross, even if it’s necessary. If you’re stuck in that mode, you’re effectively useless.

And there’s no progress bar. There’s no way to measure how far you’ve come since you started rebuilding who you are. Maybe it’s a project you can never complete just by trying to make it to the finish line. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that until I can find a need I can serve in others, I will remain stuck in the world of “me.” If you’re doing a complete remodel, you don’t leave the home half gutted.

In his book, Your Life Isn't for You: A Selfish Person’s Guide to Being Selfless, Seth Adam Smith writes:

Your life isn’t for you.

Really. It’s not. Your life isn’t for you and my life isn’t for me. The truth is that nature didn’t design us to find fulfillment in living for ourselves. We can achieve the fullest measure of life only by living it for others.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Well, I think it does. But maybe that’s because I am not what you would call a people person. To be perfectly honest, people annoy me. I would much rather work alone in my garden than spend an hour or two socializing. So in a twist of irony, the philosophy I’m about to describe to you—this idea of living your life for others—is one that goes against the flow of my personality. If I were to have it my way, I never would have written a book like this. In fact, I’d probably be living in a cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with a pack of domesticated wolves trained to keep the humans away.

But I have learned—through sad and brutal experience—the dangers of taking my preference for solitude to extremes. Instead of my introversion being a healthy need for boundaries and personal reflection, it became an obsessive demand for control and isolation. I began to selfishly live my life purely for myself, and it nearly cost me everything. It was only after I nearly succeeded in taking my life, through an attempted suicide, that I stumbled across this life-giving philosophy about selflessness.

[…]

Honest selflessness is much deeper than our actions—it’s a condition of our heart. Being selfless is about opening yourself up to others and learning how to receive life from them and give life back to them. True selflessness is perhaps one of the most paradoxical things in nature: You don’t lose yourself for being selfless—you find yourself. You don’t lose everything for being selfless—you gain everything. Your life doesn’t diminish as you live it for others—it expands.

I sat down with this book this morning, hoping to find some practical answers. I was so hungry for some kind of useful advice that I devoured the entire thing in two sessions today. (Don’t be too impressed; it’s a pretty short book.) After reading it cover to cover, the only thing I can really pin down in terms of practical, actionable advice, is this:

“The only thing that matters is that you learn to love people. If you learn to love the people you are serving, then everything will just fall into place.”

Now, how to learn to love? That isn’t answered here. Except maybe by means of this quote, which heads up Chapter 10:

When we love someone, our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion…. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.

— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

I have discovered that I often feel love for others but don’t know how to show it. I live so deeply in my emotions and perceptions that I almost think that others should feel them too. Like it’s some kind of signal being broadcast that others can tune into.

But my effort to show love is often so self-focused. Maybe I’m working on a bad habit, or trying to get my temper in check, or figuring out how to deal with some trauma response that makes me react in ways that are unpleasant. Even if I’m trying to be better for the sake of others, I’m looking inward. I fight so many of these internal battles that I find myself exhausted by them, but they are battles nobody else can see. They only see what happens on the outside. They only see the effort that is discernible through action.

I also find it hard to love other people in a world so full of ugliness. Being very online doesn’t help — I see so much of the worst of humanity every day in my various timelines and feeds. This all makes it incredibly difficult to see the good in my fellow man. Truth be told, it’s not just online folk; so many of my casual encounters with people in the real world are experiences of rudeness or entitlement or inconsideration or seemingly willful incompetence. Whether it’s the people online or the ones on the other end of the phone or the people at the store or the people every day who cut me off in traffic or refuse to let me merge, my experience of humanity has habituated me to feeling more than a little misanthropic.

I don’t want it to be like this. I want to restore my lost faith in humanity. Life is so much better when you see the best in people.

So for me, I see three big areas of focus going forward:

1. Figure out what it means to become useful. What do I have to offer that can provide value to people? You may find it odd, but I honestly have no idea how to answer this question. I feel like I’m the most useless man on the planet most days. The one thing I’ve always been good at is writing, and now I’m stuck in this self-correcting cycle that keeps the focus too much on me. So I will be actively working on identifying and redirecting my focus back outward again. On how I can deliver something worthwhile that is helpful to others.

2. Look for the good in others. I really have become curmudgeonly in this respect. Many years of being dragged as an online public figure — one who notably left the faith that made him semi-famous — has pushed me towards trench warfare mode vs. the rest of the human race. There are a few exceptions, like most of the regulars here in the comments, but I am truly alarmed at how uncivil the world is becoming. I have to find something to love in other people again, or I will resist any nascent desire to love them, let alone serve them.

3. Learn what it means to actually love. My particular wounds have damaged my ability to both express and receive love. I have lived so much of my life in a defensive posture that the minute I perceive a threat I switch instantly into combat mode. And the feelings of love I do have are not enough if they do not translate into actions that are perceived as loving by those I am trying to love. It’s one of the most basic human needs, and I don’t know how to handle it. It’s a wild realization.

There are more things that surround these three. Forgiveness is something I’m bad at. I am eager to forgive, but I don’t know how to let go when the person who has hurt me isn’t sorry for what they’ve done. I’m terrible at self-love, too. It’s funny how many times you can hear a Gospel passage like “love your neighbor as yourself” and still treat people like garbage, because that’s how you treat yourself. If you don’t love you, how can you love anyone else? If you’re not whole, then when you enter into relationships with others, how can you avoid becoming a parasite who only takes but never gives?

What about you? What does “becoming useful” look like to you? If you’ve struggled with this, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned? If you’ve had to learn how to overcome old wounds and learn how to love, what was it that turned things around for you?

I hope you’ll share your stories in the comments.