I’m an analytical person, so I see everything as a factory.
Health, finances, jobs, relationships, creative projects.
I set it up, put resources in one end, and a product comes out the other.
My life is one big factory with other factories inside it.
I inspect each one: is it working? Is it making what it’s supposed to make?
I’m kinda good at deciding: “This factory sucks! I tried fixing it. Time to shut it down and build a better one in its place.”*
It could mean quitting a job, giving up on a project, or cutting someone out of my life.
Many of us are running factories we never wanted. Inefficient, chaotic, broken, unprofitable systems that have never worked and never will. Perhaps they’re convoluted money shredders — although the resource they destroy could instead be time, energy, or mental health.
We never decided to run them. This wasn’t our dream. Maybe someone else told us to, it was the first thing we could think of, or we went with the flow. Now we’re stuck.
And we don’t want to pay the price of shutting them down.
That price tends to be:
1 – A story we tell ourselves (ego)
2 – How others feel (pseudo-empathy / codependency)
Here be the thing:
Factories don’t matter — they’re not ends in themselves. What matters is their product/output.
“What a remarkable, complex, and beautiful contraption! But what does it do?”
Possibly nothing, like a disembodied car engine, revving at maximum throttle for decades. Wasting gas and loudly going nowhere.
So, we need the ability to ask: why am I doing this at all?
This is where Lifestyle Design (or Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning) comes in.
I believe all those little factories in my life exist to serve this: “What is my average day?” And not just in the short term. I mean: for the next 5, 10, 20 years. That’s the only product/output I care about.†
Because if I hate my average day, if I spend it with people I don’t like, doing things I don’t like — and that will probably continue forever and only get worse — what is the point?
If that’s true, it’s time to start the process: work towards shutting down those shitty factories and opening good ones.
Unfortunately, the biggest price we pay is TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. That’s the ultimate “Oh, shit” moment.
Because we can no longer complain about and blame others. “Go ahead, Mr. Creative Genius! Start your own factory. Let’s see it. We’re waiting.”
“If you want things to be nice, you have to make them nice for yourself.”
-John Wolf
That’s why it feels easier to stay where we are — in the first waste-of-a-life factory we stumbled into.
Pouring resources into it. Getting nothing in return. (Maybe we believe we don’t deserve better.)
We don’t want to look like a FAILURE. The internal critic says: “You just didn’t work hard enough. You suck!”
No, the FACTORY sucks. Inherently.
Quitting (shutting down an unprofitable factory) isn’t failure.
It actually makes the successful factory possible.
*I say I’m kinda good at it. But I make many mistakes. At the very least, this process is central to my life.
†My average day is mostly thinking, writing, and exercising. If I can keep it like this until I die, I can’t really complain!
It can be very easy to get caught-up in the focus of having the average day satisfying. Occupying it with “treats” and distractions that take us away from the unpleasantries, which are oppressive and omni-present. It seems sometimes that being “productive” might only be the act of not regressing or keeping one’s self from wallowing in the despairs that modern living can create. I’m grateful to have an occupation that allows me to tangibly experience growth and to rack up “achievements” as I go through the years. So many people have never even FOUND what they would LIKE to have as “that thing.”
Even so, I have many improvements to make, and many inefficiencies to cull. But even being able to recognize those facts is a gift that many people don’t have.
Funny how I simultaneously say that “we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to others” AND “look at how bad some others have it by comparison to us!” It’s my own Yin/Yang of measuring self-worth. LOL.