I grew up in the super-boonie suburbs of Chicago. Actually, it was rural Illinois with more in common with Wisconsin dairyland than Chicago’s hustle and bustle. Everyone who lived around us were salt-of-the-Earth folks. From farmer’s to business people, everybody was a hard worker. The parents of my friends had all lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. They’d seen truly hard times and made sacrifices throughout their lives. While you didn’t see it all the time, there would be flashes of those difficult times in their faces. And as the Vietnam War scaled upwards, these were the folks that looked so distraught over the carnage on TV. They were the faces of concern and concentration in Church on Sunday.
Essentially, these were very serious people, but folks who got on with life despite all the hardships they had seen. No challenge was too great for them to conquer.
Heck, these were faces that mirrored the faces working on the NASA Space Missions…the folks who made the Moon Landing happen. When President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”, they took it to heart. Then lowered their heads, went to work…and helped create a virtual miracle.
Honestly, I’m not sure the people born since have had quite that fortitude. It seems like we’ve gotten softer and softer with each passing generation. I freely admit that I make fun of many of the things millennials concern themselves with. I recently saw a list of the things that cause the most stress to millennials. The list was really depressing…
- 20. Washing dishes
- 19. Choosing what to wear
- 18. Job security
- 17. School loan payments
- 16. Check engine light coming on
- 15. Credit card bills
- 14. Phone screen breaking
- 13. Job interviews
- 12. Paying bills
- 11. Losing or misplacing keys
- 10. Forgetting phone charger
- 9. Credit card fraud
- 8. Forgetting passwords
- 7. Phone battery dying
- 6. Slow WiFi
- 5. Arriving late to work
- 4. Losing phone
- 3. Commute or traffic delays
- 2. Arguing with partner
- 1. Losing wallet or credit card
This is the kind of list that makes folks from The Silent Generation laugh at their younger brethren and mock them mercilessly. These are minor hassles in life. Nothing truly life-threatening, or even life-altering is on that list.
While it’s interesting to ponder the list and worry about kids nowadays (and those “kids“ are actually 22-37 years old), it’s really them as parents of kids that we need to worry about. What the heck are the values they’re passing along to the grade-schoolers of today?
But I didn’t set out to write this post to bash the millennials among us. So don’t fret, I’ve actually got a point to make about something we can learn from them.
Quite recently I was introduced to the personal question “Does this bring me joy”. It was one of those cases of reticular activation. You know, that situation where you’re thinking about buying a yellow car and all of the sudden you see yellow cars all over the place. Where were they before? Why didn’t you see them? Well, they were all in exactly the same place before, you just weren’t attuned to noticing them. But when your brain starts to focus on something, it then notices that thing in all sorts of places. It’s weird but man, oh man, is it effective.
Back to my point, I happened to hear somebody mention they’d heard two millennials in a coffee shop and one had asked the other “but does it bring you joy?”. I immediately thought to myself, “what a stupid question”. Yet within the next week I’d heard or read dozens of instances where that question was posed. And it began to grow on me. The little seed sprouted into something I couldn’t ignore.
Don’t get me wrong, while I’m definitely aged amongst the Baby Boomers (also known as the Me Generation), I don’t feel like I fit in. Most of what I tend to do is in service of my family nowadays, and when I was younger I spent a lot more time doing things for the family and the communitythan I did for myself. Heck, at one point with seven kids playing youth soccer I was coaching eight teams for the local YMCA…and I didn’t even have kids on two of them.
In each instance I had an assistant coach I was tutoring so they could go out and coach teams of their own. I did that for almost 10 years. When I retired from coaching I felt I’d done my part, having taught hundreds of kids the game of soccer and mentored dozens of parents on how to coach the game. Every once in a while I’ll hear one of my catch phrases as a youth soccer game (“kick it to the cookie/cream”, “keep your feet stuck in the mud”, etc.) and I’ll immediately know the impact I had.
So when the seed of “does this bring me joy” started to sprout, it felt weird. Too me-centric. Almost selfish.
But that danged reticular activation kept working on me and I kept hearing and seeing the phrase. And the idea not only took root, but began to grow. Always tempered by my outward focus, but growing nonetheless.
Here’s the germ of the idea…while there are things we have to do in life we don’t want to do, some of those things are simply necessary. Getting your drivers license renewed, for instance. Doing your taxes. Cleaning the toilets. The list goes on and on. You can’t avoid them and some of them are downright miserable. My least favorite, changing the cat’s litter box!
But there are other things we don’t really have to do, yet we engage in them because we think we have to. For example, complaining about something. Think about that for a second. When you’re complaining, does it really give you joy? I’m not judging either way, I’m just recommending you ask yourself that question. If it does bring you joy, then maybe it’s worth continuing. But if complaining just makes you miserable…why do it? There’s no law that says you have to complain, gripe, and whine (or whinge if you’re in the UK).
So this week, as you’re getting ready to do something, think about whether it gives you joy. If it’s something you can avoid, then maybe your should. On the other hand, if it’s something that does give you joy, by all means, forge ahead. I’m not recommending you be totally selfish and avoid your responsibilities. But for those optional things…maybe you ought to consider dropping the ones that don’t give you joy.
