Note: In September 2019 the creator of As If You Were Listening published his first non-fiction title – The Pointless Revolution! The Economics Of Doing Whatever You Want – through Adelaide based, bespoke publisher Everytime Press. Part philosophy, part economics, part self-help, the book outlines a set of practical steps and principles (a process) for bringing sustainable happiness into the present; and all without promising utopia, airbrushing ambiguities or pressuring you to conform to someone else’s view of the world.
Read sample paragraphs and buy the book in either paperback or electronic form here.
Since Paul began working on The Pointless Revolution! people have been asking him to encapsulate it in a sentence or two. Of course, this has proven problematic, as the ideas in the book do not easily translate into the standard elevator pitch.
However, as the publication date drew near, Paul managed to condense years of work into that most modern of literary forms: the listicle. Despite harbouring a distaste for such reductions, he eventually included the list in the book. It was always his intention to keep the volume slender but – since wafer thin is the new obese and the listicle is the social media equivalent of long form journalism – he decided that ‘there may well be mileage’ in boiling everything down to a few feed friendly lifestyle tips. (After all, why bother reading an entire book when you can ingest it all in fifteen seconds?)
Thus, without further ado, here’s the basic run down of Paul’s happiness process, which we might loosely call …
Existential Economics in 8 (maybe 5) snack size morsels.
Embrace your mortality with deep gratitude
Transform death from source of ultimate terror into license to truly live, as opposed to merely staying alive
Revel in your infinitesimal and ultimately inconsequential role in the overall scheme of things
Live like no one’s watching – because life is not a test and the universe is neither a judge nor a hero drama
Embrace the futility & emptiness of all striving and, consequently, disempower all success & status imperatives and the pass/fail judgements that go with them
Liberate yourself from the pressure of ‘must’ and license yourself to pursue genuinely rewarding, self-authored objectives
Resist the lure of Essentialist meaning tropes and the linear, reductionist simplicities of destiny narratives, higher purposes & grand cosmic/moral dramas
Throw off the shackles of standard, command & control, pass/fail meaning stories and author your own meaning-proxies in the here & now without the sword of judgement & punishment hanging over your head
Locate the source of joy & reward in process and present feeling state, as opposed to future dated outcomes, trophies, cool cred & other forms of external approval
Delete the bucket list, throw out the must-haves, free yourself from dependence on either/or outcomes and, of course, disobey the lifestyle police
Embrace uncertainty, admit ambiguity and always allow space for nuance, rule bending & incompleteness
Accept with equanimity that you do not, and will not know everything, and that ‘perfection’ is not possible
Use a topical risk/reward prism rather than a rigid ideological filter when assessing life choices
Accept with equanimity that all choices involve potential costs and benefits; and don’t allow seeming imperfection to stymie decision, hold back progress or supress experiment
+
Regard your remaining time (what’s left of your life) as your most valuable asset and, using the ‘time as money’ metaphor, invest only in what you believe will deliver ‘value for money’
Become an existential economist
Or, if you want it even simpler:
Surrender
Be grateful
Be humble
Be accountable
Embrace the liberty of pointless being
(And remember, time spent will not be refunded)
PS: Buy the book in either paperback or electronic form here.
PPS: Follow The Pointless Revolution! on Facebook right here.
As If You Were Listening 