The Fight Club Solution to the Current Economic Slump

It seems like I’m finding more and more occasions to quote Edward Norton’s character at the end of the movie “Fight Club”: after realizing he’s been suffering from a split personality, brawling with the other personality, and, ultimately, shooting himself in the mouth to get rid of his other personality (oh, and did I mention blowing up San Francisco’s financial district?), he turns to his girlfriend and says “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

That’s what I keep wanting to tell the people around me: you met me at a very strange time in my life.  Changing careers, starting new ventures and partnerships, reconsidering long-standing relationships, trying to keep my head above water and reprogramming my unconscious mind has made for a very interesting couple of years, to say the least.  Here’s the thing, though: I know I’m not alone.

If there’s one good thing that’s come out of the economic upheaval of the past year or so, it’s the fact that so many of us are stopping to re-examine what’s truly important in our lives.  Sure, the answers have been pretty startling to some of us, but it’s been a cleansing that’s been a long time coming.  We’ve been so caught up in the material and mundane for the last decade that a lot of us forgot who we really are and what truly matters to us.

I’m not saying that we need to start shaving our heads and pummeling each other in basements and parking lots in the middle of the night.  What we do need, though, is a good healthy dose of temporary insanity, a chance to step back from the routine of life and have a look at the ruts we’re wearing into our souls.

It’s time to start questioning everything: our beliefs, our attitudes, our actions…everything.  Start greeting every day with fresh eyes and ask yourself whether or not you’re going to live it on purpose or on auto-pilot.  And when you come to something that makes you stop and think “Why am I doing this?”, for God’s sake stop doing it!

We’ve all been given a chance to hit the reset button, some more so than others.  The question is, what are you going to do with the new life that will be different from the old one?  How will it be better this time around?  Are you going to keep going to that job you hate, or are you going to figure out a way to do what you love?

Thoreau nailed it all the way back in 1854: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  Maybe it’s time that changed.  Maybe we all need to live a little more deliberately and spend some more of our time and effort sucking the marrow out of life.  Otherwise, when we come to die, we just might discover that we never lived.

**Note: Special thanks to Jim Pelley for suggesting I write a post about this after I told him yesterday, “Jim, you met me at a very strange time in my life.”  Thanks Jim!