Download Episode Here – right click link and select “Save Link As…”
In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about “the deferred life program” that people often find themselves living.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Amazing things are happening around us every day, but all we can think of is the thing we need to be doing instead of being present.
- Are you deferring the moments in your child’s life assuming you will have another chance in the future?
- Everything is temporary. If you spend your life deferring everything, what will you regret when your life is ending?
- Some of us have deeply embedded programming that encourages us to defer life
- Society sees nobility in the deferred life program. There’s nothing noble about designing life the way you want it.
- People who create the lives they want are seen as lucky or selfish.
- We have more control over our day to day lives than we think.
- “Real life will begin sometime in the future. I need to suck it up now, but things will be much better in the future.”
- People will tell you to stay present with your children because they grow up so fast. That is considered a noble occupation.
- There is less messaging in society that you should quit a job that makes you feel miserable.
- People see nobility in the struggle of working a job that supports the family even if you are miserable.
- “Life begins at retirement.”
- Deferred life propaganda can rob you of your life and add needless stress
- It’s not whether you are allowing indulgences in your life, it is whether you are in your life right now.
- Are you living the life you want to be living?
- “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”
- This life is real. Stay present instead of waiting for life to begin.
- Some paradigms teach that this life isn’t the real life. That believers need to spend their time today preparing for a future paradise.
- It is a skill to take your circumstances and make the best of them, which is something we can learn from these paradigms.
- But some paradigms teach that nothing is good, so there’s no point in changing things for the better.
- We settle into unhappy situations because we don’t think we have the permission to change.
- We believe that making meaningful choices to suit ourselves is somehow bad, so we become more and more under-resourced until we can’t function.
- “I’m supposed to be living this.”
- “If I’m going to be a good person, this is what people do.”
- We can architect our life, but changing direction and architecting something different is difficult and time-consuming.
- “I don’t like my life! Who is responsible for me not liking my life today?” You are responsible
- Wanting something different means architecting something different which requires permitting yourself to want something different
- Stop kicking the can down the road
- The deferred life program involves a lot of waiting. Waiting for someone or something to come along and rescue you.
- We are actually waiting on ourselves.
- There’s no board of directors for our life that is planning the next phase for us.
- Maybe it is selfish to allow yourself to become so unhappy that you can’t be present with your children
- Suck the marrow out of life!
- We aren’t talking about delayed gratification: work hard now and get a better return in the future
- Deferred life is a different mentality: it is a lack of permission to live the life you want
- The first step is the awareness that you tend to think this way
- We wait for the movie moment that kicks off the life we want: wedding day, 21st birthday, the birth of our first child, etc.
- We keep waiting for the epic scene where we are the hero of our own story.
- “If it is to be it is up to me.”
- It is hard to design the lifestyle you want.
- Sometimes when we honestly look at our lives, we see that we live an enviable life, but we are still kicking the can down the road
- We get addicted to the future paced viewpoint
- Some types may struggle with the tendency to defer to the future more than others.
- What are the things you are deferring in your life?
- Slow everything down and take the time to get present in your life
- What would happen if you didn’t fulfill your promises? What is it you want to do? What is the ROI?
- There is a lot of work to make sure you are truly in your life.
- If you don’t want to live a deferred life you are going to have to go down to the wiring of your life and ask yourself the questions you don’t want to ask
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Subscribe with iTunes
Non-iTunes Link
Download The Android App
Subscribe on Soundcloud
Subscribe with Stitcher
Subscribe on Google Play
Subscribe with Facebook Messenger
If you like the podcast and want to help us out in return, please leave an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking in iTunes immensely! We would be eternally grateful!
Want to learn more?
Discover Your Personal Genius
We want to hear from you. Leave your comments below…
Share:
Podcast - Episode 0239 - Gods In Everyman — The Ambivalent Son God Archetype
Podcast - Episode 0241 - Your Personality Type Fixation (FIRM Model)
35 comments
This is my favorite Podcast by far, and the first I have commented on (INFJ)! It seems to me the heart of this Podcast is the search for contentment. There are times I have forced myself to “be present” while somehow simultaneously disconnecting due to a larger current of dissatisfaction with life, relationships, finances, etc. I remember a definition of contentment as whether or not our expectations for our lives match the reality of our lives. If there is a disconnect there is discontentment, so we have two choices: 1. lower our expectations or 2. change our situation to better match our expectations. I do believe this takes that “deep dive” on our mental wiring to understand how we got the expectations on what life should be. As Joel talked about his expectations for movie like moments, I similarly believe my life to only be meaningful if it makes a global impact with an epic story along the way. I can easily negate the simple or mundane things of life. Strangely, the moments I have been most content with life were in the midst of the simplest times where I was saturated with deep relationships and surrounded by a strong community (where my role was clear and important). I say all of that to say, I hear you Antonia, and I’m actually moving to Oregon next summer. I honor your vulnerability…it drew me in…I was hanging on your every word. So, thank you!
So much to talk about here. I’m an INFJ, and have always been very sensitive to how my life “feels” and very thoughtful about what ought to be done about it. At age 48, I’m basically in the position Joel articulated, very much feeling the pressure of making my life what I want it to be, and that trying to balance this with loyalty to my relationships and basic necessities is an overwhelming responsibility. I sometimes find myself in a state of near panic about this, as I don’t feel that I am realizing the potential of my greatest gifts at all, for although I am busily constructing the architecture for enabling that, I also feel that I may have started too late and may well have missed the boat, which is depressingly frustrating. (I have lately decided that writing, philosophy and education are my dream occupations, but I have education & job experiences mostly unrelated to these, and to retool at this time would conflict substantially with my present relationships.)
But I also wanted to blurt out some connections I’m making between this podcast and my philosophy that I find very interesting. When you talk about the difference between the “things in one’s life” and one’s “life itself”, you are articulating the practical version of what Heidegger calls “beings” and “Being itself” respectively. “Beings” are what he called “ontic” (and almost always disparaged them as “merely” ontic). The ontic is whatever thing or things seem to be “present” to us. For him, the real deal was “Being”: the “ontological”. Ontology isn’t about “what exists”, but “Existence itself”: ontic beings are just what seem to be there. Ontological Being is NEVER what seems to be, because it recedes from view behind the smoke-screen of the “merely” ontic, and can only be accessed by human beings, and only under very specific circumstances. Now the philosophy I belong to (Object Oriented Ontology, or OOO) doesn’t agree with Heidegger about everything, but he is quite influential on us: in fact we want to expand his theories beyond his own use of them. Very briefly, OOO tends to think that the value we and others experience in our lives depends on the relations we build with the objects of our love (or allure, desire, respect, investment, feelings of involevement, appreciation, etc.), which returns importance to ontic beings
(who are as much or as little capable of accessing Being/the Real as we are, which is hardly at all and only indirectly through the sensual/aesthetic realm…which is also the ethical and metaphysical realm, for us). In the book “Dante’s Broken Hammer”, Graham Harman (a brilliant and unusually accessible philosophy writer & INTP) talks about the poem “The Divine Comedy” (commonly known as Dante’s Inferno), in which Dante basically says that Love is the highest ideal, and that the way God judges us is the same way an art or wine or literary critic judges artworks etc.: according to our sincerity in the pursuit of our Love-objects. Fraud (pretending sincere Love for something/someone with an ulterior motive) is the cardinal sin, for which you go to the Inferno. But there are also three ways that Love can be done improperly: 1) Love for a “perverse” (inappropriate, unsuited, unworthy) object—which may not be the wrong object for everyone, but only this person in particular; 2) Loving a fitting object too little (slothfully or lazily, not acting enough in relation to it); and 3) Loving a fitting object too ardently or excessively, to an unhealthy degree. For any of these minor sins, you basically go to Purgatorio and get purged for a short eternity before they let you go to Paradiso. Harman goes on to talk about the implications of this idea for philosophy, especially metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethical concerns. I find this to be all very compelling, and it has inspired my own life and my fiction writing intensely.
Another Heideggerian point relevant to this podcast is the difference between two kinds of time: chronological (time as objectively measured by clocks, etc.) and kairological (time as experienced by us in a real way). I mention this only to reflect that since Heidegger’s time, chronology has become even more excessively emphasized now, to the point where it is very difficult to find the sweet kernel of kairology in our lives. This is a real public health crisis, in my opinion. With so much data-dumping about the dire situation we’re in going on (“the end of the world is nigh!”), I think we should react to this by emphasizing kairology in how we train ourselves and teach our children ever more than before. It is obsession with chronology that brings about “ends” in the first place (one could argue that it has impelled a lot of ecological destruction). If we had been more concerned with the quality of our kairological experience of time and the love-objects we place in it, we might not have gotten ourselves into so much trouble. Regardless, our experience of the time we have left is surely no less important now than it ever has been.
Thanks for your wonderful podcast. You’re both awesome!
Whoa. What are the chances that I would decide to open this email today, and then listen to this podcast today, when I have never listened to one before today — and this is exactly the message I needed to hear. I wonder, how many me’s are in the exact same space today?
It was a pleasure to find and listen to this today, thank you so much for sharing. And for the insight and the thought-provoking words. And for the much needed reminder that only I am directing this life, and that is what I have chosen to do, and I MUST do what I have set out to do. Very thankful and I will listen again, and probably again.
me: INFJ – 49 yr old single mother of 2 adult children; grew up and lived in KC, MO most of my life. Always wanted “more”, always searching; oftentimes unconventional, but towing the line. I’m a “rule-follower” and a fixer and a giver. And of course, much more, but those are the basics.
9 months ago I did something big (for me) and brave (so people say) and moved to Dallas, Tx, transitioned out of my secure decent-paying career, and left friends and family behind to pursue something….else. I didn’t know what that was exactly, and I still do not know. My grown kids (24. 26) were extremely supportive, most friends were supportive even if they didn’t understand, and it was pretty low-risk for me, no aging parents to leave behind, no grandchildren, my kids are thriving, this was “my time”. and so here I am. I can be proud of this! It is time to dig deep, direct this life of mine, and keep moving forward. I literally have no idea (well, I have some ideas) what is next but this dialogue, this confirmation that this is OK! this is what we do, this is living, this is exactly what I needed to hear today. Time to dig deeper and be present. Architect my life. Such a help on this day. Thank you.
I’m an INFP and struggle with living and being in the moment rather than reflecting on what could be, and this is especially relevant now because I have big plans for next year. And of course, I have to suck it up until then, when my life actually starts! :P Although I feel that is true to some extent, there are definitely ways I can start better appreciating my current life, even if it’s not the situation I want to be in for the long term. And, even once my plans are set in motion, I need to be conscious about remembering to stop and smell the roses, and to reap the joys of my current circumstances.
Thanks Joel and Antonia for the much needed podcast and reminder.
Thank you for this episode and thank you for your candidness. I’m an INFP in my early 30s, and although I’ve made progress, I often return to periods of relative stagnation. It can be easy to be stuck in the mundane and to contemplate on the past and future. Being in the present moment can sometimes be especially tough for me, but today, I feel proud for taking steps to build my future. Since Effectiveness is my 3-year old process, I struggle with being very accomplished yet I aspire to have my life in order.
I look forward to more of your content.