don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

The following piece was written by my collaborator on "I Can't Do It" thinking, the Australian polymath Grant Donovan, Ph.D. Grant has been interviewed and otherwise featured in essays on numerous occasions. He and I have discussed icantdoit thinking extensively. We plan to offer a wide range of icantdoit suggestions related to all three dimensions and skill areas of wellness advising everyone to "give up" in order to accomplish modest, reasonable and sensible things. Enjoy Grant's overview, and be well.                                           

Don Ardell

There are more than six billion people on the earth; for every one person alive today, 25 have already died. A more compelling statistic, in a world obsessed with sensational stories about an infinitesimally small number of deaths by murder and misadventure, is that more than one million people die every week - mostly in bed - no news there.

To say life is meaningless is an understatement. Each person is just the DNA's way of making more DNA. Sure we try to find meaning through mythical gods, family relationships, the burning of resources and a variety of distracting activities but sooner or later we are forced to face our fragile mortality.

The end point for all is sickness and death, unless you are lucky enough to die suddenly and unexpectedly. Either way, you can give-up and stop worrying about almost everything. It doesn't matter if you don't achieve anything in your life. The vast majority don't. Most can't. Their lives are a never-ending quest for survival. They work every day to feed, cloth, and shelter, entertain and maintain themselves and their loved ones.

Each day is another laborious cycle of wake, eat, commute, work, eat, work, commute, watch TV, eat and sleep. It's an effort, filled with boredom, frustration, stress and more eating. The eating world is becoming obese while the non-eating world can only dream of killing themselves with more calories. Starving or bloated, the result is the same - as it is for the fit and healthy - we all die.

Got the picture? You're born one day and die another and in between, you can either worry yourself to death or enjoy yourself to death. For most people, enjoying themselves means watching others perform. In the stadium, at the theatre, on the TV--it doesn't matter.  We're great spectators. Most of us cantdoit but we can watch it - often with a hotdog in our hands.

Depressed yet? Well you shouldn't be because giving-up is liberating. Accepting that your life is meaningless and irresolvable frees you to take more risks, work fewer hours, eat more ice cream and play more with your friends. It frees you to challenge conventions, to critically analyze dogmas and to ignore the mindless rantings of your boss, TV hosts, politicians, your spouse and yourself.

Giving-up frees you from unnecessary expectations. It offers a simple life of play. The late runner-cardiologist George Sheehan believed that we start off playing as children, then we go through our lives making all kinds of mistake and then, as we get older, we realize it was all play to begin with and it should have been play throughout our lives.

Play is a state unburdened with expectation. It's a flow state where the whole world falls away from you. It is not related to winning and achieving. It's an intrinsic state of enjoying the moment and giving-up the pretense that anything at all - except feeling good for your short journey - really matters.

Pseudo academics and professional fools should not read any hedonistic or narcissistic thought into a giving-up philosophy. Think realistic and you might be closer to what a give up recommendation in an icantdoit context actually entails. 

Enjoy yourself. Good wishes. 

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the MEANING DOMAIN under the skill area of applied wellness. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

 Send e-mail to Don Ardell