Tough People & Regrets

Tough people

This insight is not unique to Malawi, but nonetheless I first had it here.

I see people living lives filled with what we back at home would call hardship. Activities we engage in where our exertion is capped at the push of a button, here, are FAR more difficult than the gym workouts we elect to do.

People collecting their water in buckets from a communal well to carry back to their homes, hauling laundry down to a river or lake to do it all by hand, or collecting wood from the side of a cliff to cooker their food.

This would normally be the part where I say how grateful we should be that our lives aren’t as difficult (we should be) - but while we live off clicks and buttons of convenience, we are missing something.

The never ending search for comfort and ease has distorted our people into sickly creatures, both physically and mentally.

If you take every opportunity to exercise the easiest, most convenient route, you wind up feeling gross and lost in some way or another. Michael Easter wrote a good book on this, The Comfort Crisis.

Remember that the next time you don’t feel like doing laundry.

Will it be a regret?

Often times in the world of life advice the focus centers around “doing” or “starting” the thing. The attention is predominantly on the obstacles, real or imagined, to the beginning.

But what about those times where it’s not enough?

What about when someone still hasn’t got it in them to move forward even after all those obstacles to starting are undone?

Well, it might then be time to consider the total opposite end of the spectrum - the cost of inaction.

Whether it be unique to my life circumstances or personal disposition, this was a significantly bigger driving factor for me than any obstacles to beginning.

Generally, people are quite bad at making decisions in the now for what they will produce in the future. It is the opposite of instant gratification. We all remember the projections for life success of that experiment where the little kids had the option between one marshmallow now, or two if they waited a few minutes.

With that in mind, the choice is clear. Obstacles undone, there is something out there for you. It could be a new career, a hobby, asking that girl out, or booking a flight. The framework for doing it on the basis of whether you’ll regret it is simple:

If you truly want to do it, and don’t - you will 100% regret inaction.

Proceed with courage.

Sincerely,

Jacob

P.S. I write this on my last night in Malawi. Time to revisit the first country I traveled to in Africa ten years ago - Tanzania. But this time, I’ll enter via the land border and travel across the whole country to Arusha in the north. There’s a mountain there that needs climbing.