They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.
This haunting observation of most people in the Western world was made by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chu Han.
We all have our own stories of trying to stay sane in the day and age of mobile phones, connected watches, a twenty-four-hour news cycle blaring from our devices, unceasing demands from family, church members, and our team, and …
Do you feel weary?
Do you feel burdened?
You’re not alone.
The most common answer to the question, “How are you?” is, “I’m good – just busy.”
That answer comes from everywhere, bridging gaps of gender, age, ethnicity, and class. Empty-nesters working from home are busy, even with their kids and grandkids spread across the country. New parents are busy, with a new mom headed back to work while the new dad begins the first week of parental leave. Even middle-schoolers are busy trying to juggle three different platforms of distance learning while helping around the home while trying to stay connected with their best friend in the neighborhood two streets over.
You feel over-worked, over-booked, and over-connected – how can you reclaim your health and wellness again?
THE QUICK SUMMARY – To Hell With the Hustle: Reclaiming Your Life in an Overworked, Overspent, and Overconnected World by Jefferson Bethke
Our culture makes constant demands of us: Do more. Accomplish more. Buy more. Post more. Be more.
In following these demands, we have indeed become more: More anxious. More tired. More hurt. More depressed. More frantic.
What we are doing isn’t working!
In a society where hustle is the expectation, busyness is the norm and information is king, we have forgotten the fundamentals that make us human, anchor our lives, and provide meaning.
Jefferson Bethke, New York Times bestselling author and popular YouTuber, has lived the hustle and knows we need to stop doing and start becoming.
After reading this book, you will discover:
- How to proactively set boundaries in your life
- How to get comfortable with obscurity
- The best way to push back against the demands of contemporary life
- The importance of embracing silence and solitude
- How to handle the stressors that life throws at us
Join Bethke as he discovers that the very things the world teaches us to avoid at all costs–silence, obscurity, solitude, and vulnerability–are the very things that can give us the meaning, and the richness we are truly looking for.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION
According to author Jefferson Bethke, after only a decade or two of living up to the unrealistic cultural expectations of our times, many of us turn around and realize we can’t find the meaning we thought we were striving for.
We’ve been hustling, but hustling toward an empty grave.
It’s as if millions of us are on a treadmill, believing we’re going somewhere when we’re actually going nowhere. All that work, energy, and effort – yet we’re running for nothing.
Only those who are anchored in a richer and deeper and more meaningful experience than the one our culture is currently offering won’t get sucked away.
I’ve began to understand that we are created for formation, not goal-setting.
Jefferson Bethke
In general, goals are usually about a finish line. Something you can reach for and then be done once you accomplish it. It’s about doing something.
Formations, on the other hand, aren’t about doing something but about being someone. One is usually about activity, while the other is about identity.
Goals are linear and resemble a straight line. Formations look more like a circle, where you are constantly coming back to the same place to seek renewal and refreshment in a particular practice. One is about a result, the other is about a process.
Why does this distinction matter so much? I think because Scripture doesn’t talk much about goals. But it is deeply focused on our identity. On who we are becoming.
Are we becoming more like Jesus by the practices and formations we are doing?
Here’s a quick way to think about it. Traditional goals are like an arrow aiming for a bull’s-eye. Formations, through are less like a bull’s-eye and more like an arrow bent in a circle.
One is linear and final. Once is circular and forever.
One doesn’t really change you. One can transform your life.
Jefferson Bethke, To Hell With the Hustle: Reclaiming Your Life in an Overworked, Overspent, and Overconnected World
A NEXT STEP
Author Jefferson Bethke says that we are becoming someone and something. We are being formed. We are an image that is reflecting.
Reflecting what?
Our society has long had a pattern of considering something new as invigorating and exciting, adopting it at full scale and with full embrace without questioning the consequences. Then, thirty or fifty years later, the negative impact begins to show, and regulations begin to pop up.
Consider your current use of social media platforms. Where do you find yourself in the following list?
- This is cool and exciting.
- The is actually the best thing ever created. How did people even live without it before?
- The is still the best thing ever, and I can’t imagine my life without it, but it seems to be hurting me also.
- It’s definitely hurting me and I probably need to live without it in some way.
If we are honest, many people would answer somewhere between “2” and “3” – and heading quickly toward “4.”
While this is not a diatribe or condemnation of social media, it is an accurate observation of how dangerous something like social media usage is to becoming more like Jesus.
Here’s a strategy suggested by Deep Work author Cal Newport to reducing some of the complexity in deciding whether a social media tool is useful to you in “being formed.”
The first step of this strategy is to identify the main high-level areas in your personal and professional life. When you’re done you should have a small number of areas for both the professional and personal areas of your life.
Once you’ve identified these areas, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you achieve that area of your life.
The final step in this strategy is to consider the social media tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity.
Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.
Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader
During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based, current events.
It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.
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