We Are Sharks: Lessons from "Up in the Air," Part II

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a loner. Oh, sure, he enjoys the sporadic company of other people and rarely lacks someone to talk to, but he avoids any kind of extended attachment. He has more or less alienated his family, and is unmarried and decidedly transient. And naturally, like many commitment-phobes all over the world, he has rationalized this fear/life choice into a coherent philosophy:

Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

It may surprise some of you when I say that I think he is right. Relationships are the heaviest part of our lives. They are demanding of our attention and resources and they can be very severe stressors. They may wish to prevent you from doing whatever you want to, or they may do this totally without intending to, because you deliberately factor in your relationship with this person or these people when you're making a decision. I can certainly verify from personal experience that this is true. I've made the decision to spend this coming summer in DC, but it wasn't done without giving some considerable and agonizing thought for what I would lose in time with my family and with my friends at home.

Does the weight of the relationships on our lives really make them a bad thing, though, as Ryan implies during his talk in the movie? There are arguments either way, I suppose-- Ryan makes a cogent argument above for why they are a problem. And certainly if you want to live a life like his, traveling almost nonstop, they would be a huge issue. I have to wonder if it would even be possible-- much less desirable-- to have a family and maintain that lifestyle. Probably not.

But for the rest of us, who are a little more anchored down in our lives, I would submit that in this talk, Ryan is wrong to suggest that relationships are inherently bad. On the contrary, relationships of any variety are the only thing that are really worth putting that much effort into. Done right, they can last a lifetime, and the security of knowing someone is there for you no matter what is worth the risks inherent in opening your heart to them. [Although my personal caveat to that is that you should be careful who you really trust, because not everyone deserves something that important.]

In college, balancing relationships and work can be just as tricky as juggling them in the work world. At my university, there are so many things to do-- part-time jobs, internships, homework, clubs-- that making time to build relationships can be hard. Personally, although I do work hard on academic stuff, I try to keep my priorities on the people around me, where I think they really belong. When work really needs to get done, it's going to get done, but it can be well worth it to spend a couple of hours talking to a friend and then stay up writing until 3am. As Tom Petty said, the work never ends, but college does. I've got a little over a year left myself, and some of my closest friends are leaving at the end of this year. I plan to enjoy every second with them that I can, because, as Ryan admits later in the movie, "Life's better with company."

Moving is Living: Lessons from "Up in the Air," Part I

Full disclosure up front: "Up in the Air" was my pick for the Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight. I am aware that it didn't win, but it was my favorite of all the nominated movies that I've seen. (Oh, don't even get me started on "Avatar"...see my other blog for that)

For those who don't know, "Up in the Air" is the story of traveling businessman Ryan Bingham (played brilliantly by George Clooney). Ryan travels all over the US firing people for bosses who don't have the guts to do it themselves. He's happy with his itinerant lifestyle, which affords him considerable freedom, until he meets two women who slowly begin to make him wonder about the true richness that his life offers. I won't give away anything-- just see the movie.

In addition to his job firing people, Ryan brings in money by doing motivational speaking engagements around the country. His main shtick is called, "What's In Your Backpack?" and we see it on several occasions. In the first part, he discusses how much stuff weighs us down, and in the second he discusses how much people weigh us down. In this post and the next one, I'd like to offer my thoughts on what Ryan has to say about these topics.

Here's the first half of his talk:

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack.

To put it briefly, I think Ryan has a point here with all this talk about the stuff in our lives weighing us down. That's why I started on this whole quest for simplicity. I'd been in college for a couple of years, was aware that my life in two places had accumulated a great deal of stuff, and realized that there was less and less room to store all that stuff when it was in one place. So I started to downsize...slowly at first, a couple of unnecessary objects here, a pair of ripped socks there...then huge projects like my drawers of papers. As I have said before, this process is still ongoing-- downsizing 20 years of your life is something that either gets done in a couple of intense weeks or over time. I've opted for the latter.

What I've noticed as I have gradually simplified and decluttered my room at home, though, is that I have enjoyed being in here a lot more as its gotten more spacious and Zen-like. Not to say that I didn't love being in my room before-- it's always been MY space, which I customize to fit my preferences and manage to simply be myself.

Before I started downsizing, though, I was starting to feel that my space was too crowded for me to enjoy. As Ryan implies, having a lot of stuff weighs you down. So while I do not especially advocate his rather extreme perspective on the matter-- "light it all on fire"-- I can readily verify the idea that decluttering can have the general effect of lightening you: providing a more peaceful atmosphere, loosening the mental stranglehold we have on our possessions, refocusing on the things that really matter most.

Digital Purge

Part of the reason I started this blog was to have a place where I could write about my pursuit of an uncluttered life. I started out with my bedroom feeling so crowded with "stuff" that I wasn't really getting to enjoy any of it. So last summer I did a major purge of old papers, clothes, and random acquired objects, as well as doing my annual clean-out and re-shelve of my books. Over my winter break I cleared out old CDs and more random acquired objects. And I gotta say, this process of simplifying feels great. I feel like almost all of the objects I now have in my room (at home; the dorm room is a whole separate beast) have a purpose for being there; they are all things that provide pleasure or some other utility.

However, I realized that I haven't written much about purging digital clutter. In today's highly technological age, it's just as easy to find your computer crammed with unnecessary documents and programs as it is to find a Dunkin' Donuts in New England (for non-New Englanders, pick a business in your area that's on every street corner). Technological data is pervasive.

In some regards, that's terribly convenient for aspiring "unclutterers" like myself-- digitizing data and even memories is an effective way to ditch physical clutter (like my efforts to reduce my CD collection by moving the ones that I want to keep onto my computer in mp3 format). However, all that being said, collecting too much stuff in digital format is also qualifies as clutter.

Oh sure, it may be way less noticeable-- after all, it's still on your hard drive, and even if you have an external drive you probably still only have three physical objects. But have you ever tried to find a particular document that you needed, only to have it take upwards of half an hour because you got bogged down while looking? Or looked for an email but-- even with the help of Gmail's wonderful search capabilities-- gotten lost in the maelstrom that is your inbox?

Don't worry about it-- you're in good company here. My computer's hard drive is incredibly full, and I hardly know where to begin cleaning it out. Last summer I went through my "My Documents" folder and organized everything, deleting the things that were obviously no longer necessary and arranging the remaining documents by topic. That made a big difference in my ability to locate these items. I've also made some strides toward simplifying my email inbox, getting it down to a "baseline-zero" level (more on that later), unsubscribing from most newsletters, and deleting some old and totally unnecessary emails.

However, there's still a long way to go. I expect I will write again soon on the downside of Google and more topics related to technological simplification. In the meantime, let me just leave off on the idea that technological simplification can be just as psychologically rewarding as physical simplification. Same basic principle-- everything's easier to find, and it leaves more space for what you truly enjoy.