This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 782, the Joy of Opting Out by David Kane of Raptitude.com, and I'm Justin Molick, your narrator, where I find the best blogs in the world related to personal development, productivity, and minimalism, mostly. I get permission from the authors and simply narrate them for you. Somehow this idea is turned into five podcasts where we narrate blogs, and this one specifically, won the podcast awards for Best Health Podcast, thanks to you. I really appreciate your vote on that.
It means a lot. David posts from David Kane, an excellent writer that I got to meet at FinCon in Dallas a few months back. So let's get right to you today's post and start optimizing your life. The Joy of Opting Out by David Kane of Raptitude.com.
Sometimes improving one small, seemingly obscure skill can make you better at dozens of things at once. One time at a backyard get-together, I was chain-eating potato chips when a well-meaning friend made a useful observation. At a natural break in our conversation, he said, you're gonna sucker for a bowl of chips, aren't you? He meant no offense by this, and I took none.
We were both observers of human behavior. I knew I liked chips, but I hadn't realized quite how unhinged my chip-eating is compared to the people around me. Most people will graze on chips when they're around a few at a time, but I tend to fall into a whirlpool of near-continuous chip-eating. I spoil my appetite, I park near snack tables and mingle from there.
Interestingly, I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of potato chips, and I only really eat them at get-togethers. I don't derive any real joy from eating them, the way I do with chocolate or spring rolls. For whatever reason, I just have a repeating mechanical habit of reaching into nearby chip bowls when they're around. If it's true that people are either moderators or abstainers, then I'm an abstainer.
In my experience, it's much easier to refrain from eating the first chip than of the subsequent to 80. I don't think I'm an outlier in this regard, however, one of the laziest slogans is, but you can't eat just one. This is a transparent bluff, of course. Laze wants you to take and lose this bet every time, not to test your metal against snack temptation in a serious way.
They certainly don't want you to regard not reaching into chip bowls in the first place as an provable life skill. But not reaching into chip bowls is a skill, just like tying your shoes or peeling boiled eggs. Like anything else, you can be a hapless novice at not refraining from reaching into chip bowls or a true master. If you were to make a conscious practice out of it, eventually, it could become trivially easy.
Unless potato chips are somehow single-handedly destroying your life, that may not sound like a spectacularly useful thing to get good at, but it definitely is. The ability to forego chips and other sensory temptations happens to be an extremely transferable skill. The ancient art of non-participation. An ancient spiritual practice is what sparked my recent interest in mastering the powerful art of chip non-eating.
In a narrow sense, my goal over the holidays is to learn what it's like to leave a nearby bowl of chips untouched, but this campaign in conscious chip non-eating is really a way of practicing a much more fundamental skill, one that makes life easier in virtually every area. Western Buddhism has a great word for it, renunciation. Renunciation is one of 10 trainable qualities, known traditionally as the Pyramids, the others being generosity, resolve, patience, morality, effort, insight, loving-kindness, equanimity, and truthfulness. I think of these qualities as 10 often weak muscles each of us can strengthen during day-to-day life if you look for opportunities.
The stronger these traits get, the less trickier collisions become with certain recurring experiences that make life difficult, laziness, ill will, greed, egotism, and so on. Theoretically, if you master those 10 qualities, there isn't a lot in the realm of ordinary human experience that will give you much trouble. Actively practicing them is new to me, but so far it seems as though every single moment of difficulty in life can be harnessed as a chance to strengthen one or more of those potent muscles. The stronger we are at renunciation in particular, the easier it is to refrain from making tempting, but costly choices in every area of life by practicing chip non-eating or any other specific form of renunciation.
You're simultaneously getting better at avoiding wasteful purchases, going to bed on time, declining a third drink, and otherwise quitting while you're ahead, whatever the context, because they're all the same skill. We tend to think of renunciation as a long-term personal decree. I renounce aimless web surfing forever. Life-long degrees are hard to stick to, perhaps even impossible, since they require you to decide for the person you will be tomorrow, next year, or next decade, and future you may not agree that such a drastic rule was necessary.
The key, as I see it, in my limited experience, is making our renunciations very small. I don't know how to renounce snack food forever, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to, but renouncing my participation in this bowl of Doritos is always doable. It's a small feat with a lasting benefit. Future temptations of all sorts lose a bit more of their pull.
Although such a renunciation is small, it is the forever kind. It's just that the lifespan of a bowl of Doritos at a Christmas party is not very long. So wearing off snacks forever is unnecessary, as long as you are capable of saying chip bowl number 8,046, I'm gonna let you live and die without my involvement, and mean it. It's within the power of each of us, if we want to calmly and silently renounce participation in this gossipy conversation, this impulse purchase, this Twitter argument, this strike of the snooze button, this passing tray of Ferrero Rocher, forever.
A pleasure that lasts. If you start practicing renunciation on this scale, you might notice an interesting side effect. There's a kind of pleasure to be found in saying no. Your silent decision opt out makes you feel empowered and wise, right then and there in front of the box of turtles.
It's a softer but less conflicted kind of enjoyment, more akin to the pleasure of giving a thoughtful gift than of downing a drink. There is real pleasure in potato chips, turtles, and gossip too, of an intense, costly, and quickly fading sort. If you pay attention, the lifespan of this pleasure can often be measured in seconds while the costs last much longer. Developing a taste for the subtle sweetness of renunciation makes it progressively easier to take pleasure in the choice that improves the rest of your life too.
I'm new at working the renunciation muscle, and I'm probably still experiencing what Jim nerd's called noob gains, easy progress that happens to a body that's never been stimulated in quite this way before. But I can see the trajectory, the gravity around the objects of my bad habits, phone apps, chips, second helpings, feels a little weaker each time I let the opportunity go by untouched, sitting quietly without reaching for anything as a warm glow of its own. Best of all, practicing renunciation of this sort doesn't come with a feeling of martyrdom. You don't have to wall anything off or deprive yourself of frivolous pleasures.
The option's always there. You're just adding a new pleasure to the list of possibilities. And for once, it's a kind that stays with you. You just listened to the post titled The Joy of Opting Out by David Kane of Raptitude.com.
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Today's post was titled The Joy of Opting Out, which makes me think of opting out of emails. And reminds me, I'm overdue to talk about this. If you ever send me an email that goes unanswered, sometimes it goes to my spam folder. We also had technical difficulties a long time ago.
I think those are all worked out now. I usually try to respond to all the emails we get, but I hope you understand if I wasn't able to get to yours or if I didn't get through for one reason or another. Sometimes I see them, really appreciate them, don't reply in the moment or get distracted. I have to come up with a better system, but I just want to say that those messages mean a lot if you didn't get a reply or got a really late one.
I hope that doesn't diminish the importance of your email and how much it means to me and to everyone who's part of the OLT podcast. And I don't want this to discourage you from emailing because I really do love getting your emails, so please continue sending them. Okay, with that out of the way, thank you for listening all the way through. That means a lot too.
Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you on the Thursday show tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.