(upbeat music) This morning, I wanna put some energy into doing yet another core idea video. Again, we've been racking these up, 10 to 15 minute videos where I'm touching on the big ideas I come back to again and again. So you have something to reference, to save and to share when you're interested in these ideas.

So I wanted to do another one of those today. This is a core idea on a topic that actually was almost born on this podcast. It was born as roughly the same time as this podcast, and that is the deep life. So let's go deep about what we mean when we talk about the deep life.

Now, I wanna start with the background. Where did this come from, this terminology come from? It's all about the beginning of the pandemic. It's all about spring of 2020. This is when I began first on my email newsletter, and then soon after on this podcast, coining the term, the deep life and talking about it.

Now, what was it about that period that made this general type of topic really relevant? There's three things that went on. So when the pandemic hit, and there was those stay at home orders, there was definite disruption in people's routines, which is important when you're in a routine, when you're used to going from this to this to this, I'm in this job, I wanna get this promotion, where do we wanna move?

What's my next vacation gonna be? It's very difficult to get some distance for critical self-reflection when you're just rolling all systems go. So a lot of people, myself included, got interested in notions like the deep life when those routines were disrupted. I think the early pandemic also did a good job for a lot of people of highlighting both the negative and the potential positive of their lives.

It helped highlight, well, what is it that I don't really like, but I've been avoiding? I don't really like this condo I live in, in this sort of annoying neighborhood in this city, and when I'm forced to have to spend all my time here. And I didn't have the normal escapes of, let me go to the movies and a bar and weekend trips.

It really made it clear, I don't really like where I live. Or having to spend all this time on Zoom with your colleagues, you're realizing, there's excitement about commuting into my nice building downtown, but I don't really like these people. So there's negatives that were highlighted by the disruption of the pandemic.

There was also positives. Being home a lot, being around your family more, being outside more, getting separation from having to drive into your office. So people also saw positives they weren't used to before. And I think most importantly, things got very disrupted, especially in the coastal places where we had mitigations that lasted for a very long time.

Schools were closed, jobs had completely different configurations, people moved to completely different locations temporarily. Like, let me go live with my parents in Colorado instead of being in suburban DC. And it showed a lot of people that actually really different stuff is possible. You can do something different than what you have been doing and it's not gonna fall apart.

It's not as risky or scary as you once thought. So we had these forces come together and people were stepping back and saying, I don't know, I wanna rethink my life. I don't know that I wanna just get back to what I was doing before as quickly as possible, and let's just keep rolling.

So that was the context in which we began talking about the deep life. Now, the issue was, once we started talking about it, is that this is a timeless topic and one that is universal. Many, many people have these reflections on what a life well-lived is like and what they want out of their life.

It's one of the oldest, most cliched topics that we have. But it's a difficult topic to actually get good pragmatic advice on. This is what we quickly realized as we scanned the landscape of pragmatic or aspirational literature on this topic, is that there's three things you would come across.

One, purely inspirational information. Like, here is a story of a person who did something and just something about what they did hits me like, ah, that's cool, I wanna do that. You read Will Finnegan's "Barbarian Days", you're like, man, there's just something about him roaming the world, surfing, and just something about that feels interesting and resonant.

We don't know what it is, it's just generic inspiration. The other type of literature that was common addressing this topic would be hyper-focused on one aspect of your life. So we've all seen this, you hyper-focus in on one aspect of your life. It's gonna be self-acceptance, or it's gonna be intense fitness health routine, or it's gonna be a job, I'm gonna get out of this job and run a company and I want advice specifically about doing it.

So there's a lot of very specific advice, but it just shoots like a laser beam on just one topic. Or we get that genre of book where you have someone who says, okay, I'm gonna try to improve my life and write about it. And it's self-deprecating, right? And typically in the genre of books, the person has a child or a wife that's rolling their eyes at his efforts and is kind of bumbling.

And in the end, he learned some good lessons and makes some small changes, but it's basically back to a same normal life he had before. So there's that genre too, like I'm gonna go out there and change my life and they try all these things, it's kind of kooky and they meet kooky characters and the main character's wife rolls their eyes at the bumbling guy.

And in the end, they're like, well, I have a better, in the end, I'm now doing some meditation and I'm a vegan. It's like some changes have been made, but they're basically back to where they were before because you don't wanna stick your head out too much 'cause people might push back.

So we didn't have a lot to draw on. And so the thought I had at this point early in the pandemic is let's get specific. Let's give this aspiration a name, let's give it a definition, let's come up with specific steps you can do to try to achieve it.

Let's be super specific. Let's not just be vaguely inspirational. Let's not just hyper-focus on one aspect of your life and let's not do this sort of weak sauce, self-deprecating memoir type thing. Let's just get after it. Now, of course, this is quixotic. There's nothing more complex and ambiguous in trying to build a life of meeting philosophers and theology have tried to tackle this for centuries.

So of course, what we're going to do is not gonna be comprehensive, but I have found that's often useful to put a stake in the ground. Let's put a stake in the ground and get specific, something you can go towards, see what works, see what doesn't, and let that be a starting point for trying to get where you wanna go.

Specificity is useful even when it's not comprehensive. That is one of the big guiding lights of my advice. So we introduced this term, the deep life. Let's give a name to this generic aspiration a lot of people felt, especially during those early months of the pandemic. Then we gave it a definition.

So what do we mean by the deep life? How about this for a definition? It is a life lived in radical alignment with your values. Let's be specific about it. Radical alignment with your values. All of the parts of this definition matter. So alignment with your values means you're focusing on things that are very important to you and not wasting too much time on things that aren't.

Radical means in at least some of these areas, you have made really big head-turning shifts or transformation in your life to pursue those values. So not just small, but big. You have to have both parts of those if you wanna capture that thing that we intuitively are attracted to, that intuitive notion of the deep life that we know it when we see it.

If you just do the alignment with the values part without the radical, what do you end up with? Nothing bad, but also nothing phenomenal. What you end up with is, you know, hey, I tuned up parts of my life. It's like the character at the end of those sort of weak sauce nonfiction memoirs.

You have like slightly better health habits and you've joined a reading group and you're trying to walk more regularly and you meditate. And it's good, right? Like you've added things in your life to be more in alignment with your values. If you're not doing that as bad, it's better than doing nothing.

But you're not going to watch a documentary about someone who has taken up a meditation habit and tries to walk more and be like, man, that's what I want. That guy's got it all figured out, right? It's not touching you deep. The radical piece is important too, because if you just do the radical without thinking about all the things that are important to you and aligning with things that are important to you, you get this burst of satisfaction because just making disruptive changes is exciting in itself and then it dies off.

Years ago, I read this book that had a great example of that. It was a book that was called "Made by Hand." The author was Mark Frohenfelder. Now, Mark Frohenfelder went on to become the editor or co-editor of "Make" magazine. So he became a big player in the DIY makerspace movement.

But he wrote this memoir. And I remember reading it years ago. And for some reason, I remember being at San Francisco in the airport. So I don't know what trip this was. But they opened that book with him and his wife, and they had some young kids at the time, doing radical without the alignment of values.

Like, we just need to do something different, right? We feel this urge to live a deep life. And what they did was they moved to an island in the South Pacific, just in the middle of nowhere. I think it was like Rotonga or somewhere like this. 'Cause they're like, let's just be bold and do something completely new.

It was miserable. Like, it turns out you can't school your kids. There's all sorts of insects and things that are stinging you. There's very bad medical care. And they felt really weird and guilty about being there year round because it's an impoverished place. And why were you guys coming here from San Francisco?

And they just hated it. And they moved back. That was a radical change that wasn't built upon a very clear understanding of promoting things that are very valuable to you. So you gotta have both the radical and the alignment with values. You do those two things, together you get something like the deep life.

So let me give a concrete case study. This is someone I know. I didn't ask him if I could use them as an example. So I'm gonna try to be a little bit vague about details. And I'm actually changing a few of the details here. But this is roughly a true story, someone I actually know.

All right, so I have a friend, longtime friends, who until recently, they were living in suburban DC out in Virginia, sort of suburbs of DC outside of the Beltway, right? So kind of relatively far out suburbs. Now, it's a husband and wife with two kids, and they had a third kid around this time.

He did video production for hire and some of his own projects, and would do some freelance copywriting. He's a sort of overly educated guy, good writer, would do freelance copywriting for corporate public relations firms. So writing press releases and stuff like that. And then she had a wellness business online, a pretty time consuming.

This wasn't like goop, like it wasn't gonna be a hundred million dollar whatever, but it brought in good money, but it was also complicated and time consuming. And they lived in the suburb out in Virginia where it was like very expensive. They did not particularly like their neighbors, they didn't mind them, but these like creative type people, and the neighbors were all just dual income government employees who were living in that neighborhood because it clipped like a good school district.

And just striving, like we just want our kids to like get good grades. And just a commuter suburb, everyone's commuting in and out. It wasn't that inspiring. He had a WeWork to do his film production. All you could afford was like a WeWork space that was shared and you'd kind of drive into the city to do it.

Like this was their situation. And they were living in the suburb because one of their big interests was alternative education, and there was a particular alternative school that was kind of around there. So they could send their daughter there and he needed to be near a city. And so they were kind of trying to figure this all out.

Okay, pandemic hits, third kid comes along, they're like, all right, enough of this. We want the deep life. Like if not now, when? And here's what they did. They moved to a plot of land, it was 20 plus acres, near the James River outside of Richmond, Virginia. So they bought land, has fields, forest, and riverfront.

Not nice land, right? This is not nice mansions or giant second homes, but there's a modest home there, fields, forest on the river, but also close to Richmond, 20 minute drive. Okay, so they go out there, they buy that land. It's cheap relative to anything in DC. It's cheaper than the starting house they could buy anywhere in DC, which they were also looking at.

So this is not, oh, we have a lot of money. This is actually much cheaper to buy land outside of Virginia than to buy a house in the DC area. They just had their third kid. He stopped doing the copywriting. She put that company on hold because it was causing a lot of headaches.

They're gonna put their energy into their kids. They're gonna homeschool their kids. 'Cause again, they're really interested in alternative education. And they built this whole curriculum surrounding their land. And a lot of their kids' experience was gonna be helping to clear this land and they're building these sort of cool yurt style buildings on the land.

And she got very involved in starting up a homeschooling cooperative. So there's these other families that the kids would be doing things with. And so they were going all in on being able to build that lifestyle. And he rented, because everything's cheap in Richmond compared to DC, this really nice office space in downtown Richmond in the arts district.

It has like a balcony. And he brought someone with him from DC. And now he sort of can work in this new up and coming district of the city. And he does his video production and they live much cheaper here in Richmond. So they can kind of afford to not bring as much money.

And they built this whole different life. That's very intentional and it's deep. There's a radical component to it. They're living in the woods on land and homeschooling their kids. But it's all coming from alignment with things that are really important to them. Slowing down, alternative education, being around their family, outside of like normal rat race, suburban type of living.

But also connection to arts and the cities and creativity, which he has with what he's doing. In the arts district, they shifted towards a deep life. That is that definition in action. So how do you do this yourself? Well, over the months, we worked out some specific strategies you could try.

And most of the strategies that I talk about with the deep life start with, identify the different areas of your life that are important to you. The deep life does not work if you neglect parts of your own existence that are important. You get too myopic. It's all about my work.

It's all about my religion. It's all about my family. You get too myopic, it doesn't work. So you have to identify, let's start with just listing out what the different areas are. For whatever reason, when we began talking about this on the podcast, we began to use the terminology buckets to describe these areas.

We say, what are the deep life buckets? What are the areas of your life that are important to you? This list should be personalized. But as a starting point, we often talk about, for sake of example, we'll talk about craft being one of these buckets. So that's the things you produce, so your work, but also other types of high quality leisure type activities where you literally create things in the world.

Community, it's your family, that's your friends, and that's the people that live around you. Dedication to that. Constitution, that's your health, that's your fitness. Contemplation, that's philosophy, ethics, and theology. So the part of that Aristotelian deep thinking about what makes humans humans and the life well lived, that's a key part for most people.

We sometimes add a fifth bucket in these discussions, which we, to be alliterative, would call celebration, which is that commitment to, with presence and gratitude, just enjoying things about the world. You're really into craft beer and being able to be at that craft brewery, overlooking the valley, enjoying a new brew that you really understand why it's really good, and just having deep appreciation of that.

You're really into music and being at that show and really just being able to appreciate that artist. So celebration is a big part of it for a lot of people as well. So you have your buckets, whatever they are. You have these different buckets, and the deep life has to respect all of them.

That's step one. Step two, as part of our deep life strategy, is let's warm up by developing a keystone habit in each of the buckets. So something you do every day and you write down that you did it, that is relevant to that bucket and signals to yourself, I take this part of my life seriously, and I am willing to do non-required activity on a daily basis to support this piece of my life.

These should not be completely onerous or complicated because you won't do them, but they should also not be trivial. You have to walk that line. It's tractable, but meaningful. They're simple, but you do them every day. Now, this warmup is about teaching yourself that you care about different parts of your life, teaching yourself that you are the type of person who does optional activity on a regular basis in pursuit of a greater good in your life.

A lot of people need that warmup, and it's something I think that is missed in a lot of self-help or advice type writing, that we jump right in to just do this, this, and this. Most people don't even have the practice yet with what does it feel like to say, "Shoot, I gotta go do this, and it's kind of a pain, "but then I get the satisfaction "knowing that I did this thing anyways, "even though it was a pain." And you say, "Wow, I'm willing to do things "that are a pain if I think they're important to me." And I think that's a key first step.

Next, once you have all those keystone habits going, pump is primed, you dedicate four to six weeks to each of your buckets. And when it's the turn of a particular bucket, you spend that time saying, "Now let me do a more significant overhaul "of that part of my life." And this is an alignment overhaul.

So what you're trying to do is clear out of your life stuff that's not that valuable, that's related to that topic or that actively gets in the way of the things you care about in that topic while adding in place more things, a small number of things that are very important or valuable related to that.

So when it comes to constitution, you're going through and really overhauling how you eat, integrating a fitness habit deeply into your daily routine. Maybe you start training for something. So you take each element. So I'm gonna do a real overhaul there. Clear out the distraction, pump up the thing that creates the value, pump up the things that creates the value.

Do this for each of the buckets. Now, at this point, you're really humming because two things have happened. One, you do really think about yourself as someone who can take optional action towards things that are important. And two, you've been doing non-trivial action towards all of these areas of your life that matter.

And it is in that action that you get the real self insight. It's in the fact that you spent a month focusing on just this part of your life. And now I've lived the next four months with that part of your life being emphasized that you begin to gain real insight about what's important to you and what's not in that area.

What matters, what doesn't, what opportunities out there are lurking. You're not just staring blindly at, I don't know, maybe I should live on a farm. Maybe I should move to Rotonga. You're starting to figure out what really matters. You get this nuanced understanding of yourself. Now we're ready for the final step of the transformation towards the deep life, which is engaging the radical.

Now let's make some radical changes. We're leaving that suburb of DC and moving to the James River in Richmond. Now you're primed for that. If you start with that, you end up on the island in the South Pacific, picking lice out of your kid's hair, worried about there being no doctors and say we made a big mistake.

But you do the keystone followed by the overhauls. Now you're coming from a place of confidence and self-awareness. And now you say, okay, what can we do that would be a radical shift that would further align us with these values I now much better understand? And here the best way to do it is lifestyle-centric, work backwards from various visions.

You have to iterate through these various visions of a lifestyle. Lifestyles that are radically changed from where you are now. And you have to evaluate these potential new lifestyles in terms of their impact on all of the buckets. What you're looking for is a lifestyle that has some sort of radical change that gets you there, but it enhances all of your buckets.

Not just we're going to an island in the South Pacific 'cause it seems big, but what's it gonna do to community? What's it gonna do to constitution? What's it gonna do to contemplation? What's it gonna do to celebration? You think about this whole new lifestyle and you try to find one that, okay, this is tractable, we can afford this.

And if we do this right, this change is going to pump up some of these things we really care about very clearly into a big level. And it's not gonna get in the way of the other things. It's not gonna take one of these away. It's not when we move to the South Pacific, mean we never see our friends, we never see our family, we have no connection to our community.

It's not gonna get in the way of any of these. And that is how you make the decision about doing something radical. So it's after a lot of work and practice and training, then you try to make that shift. And then you repeat, and then you do these overhauls again.

This is an annual thing, probably. You go through your buckets. How's it going? What do we need to tune up? Every few years, you might step back and say, do we need another type of radical shift here? You're not afraid of it because now you're not doing it randomly.

Now the radical is not reactionary. It comes from a place of informed self-awareness. It comes from a place of confidence and practice. And so that is my attempt to make this vague, but deeply aspirational idea that I want the type of life that when someone sees it, they say, whoa, I want that.

I want that in my life, and I wanna get there in a way that's systematic. And this is the best strategy that at least on this podcast, we've been able to come up with so far. Fix the word, fix the definition, fix the areas of your life, Keystone Habit Overhaul, lifestyle-centric, evaluation of different radical shifts to find one that might work, and then take that radical shift.

That's how you get to the deep life. It doesn't happen tomorrow, but it doesn't take two years. So if you are feeling that yearning, at least consider setting down this particular path. All right, and that's what we have for today's core idea. (upbeat music)