This Is The Simplest Way To Make Your Life Awesome – Barking Up The Wrong Tree

We love freedom. And so it is with a heavy heart and a full awareness that I am committing a kind of cultural treason that I report the following:

Freedom is ruining everything.

Not political freedom. Political freedom is wonderful. I am, and have always been, in favor of people being allowed to say what they think, go where they please, and make their own terrible decisions about diet, recreation, and spouse selection without interference from the government. What I’m talking about is the other kind of freedom. The freedom that descends upon you when every option is available.

I’m not pining for the days when your marriage was arranged by your family and your dinner was whatever came out of the ground in September. Those constraints were not chosen. I’m talking about the self-imposed constraint. Voluntary limitations.

Everyone does better with constraints. The people who say they don’t are either lying or are aliens who have not yet learned to convincingly imitate human behavior, and honestly at this point I’m not ruling that out, because have you met people who wake up at 5 AM to “seize the day”? That’s not human behavior. That’s infiltration.

Now, people will say, “But constraints are limiting.” Yes. That’s the point. A seatbelt “limits” your relationship with the windshield.

When we dive into the research what we find is that the right voluntary constraints can be superpowers, making us smarter, happier, and more creative.

Pulling up all the evidence to prove this to you would be a Herculean effort… which is why I’m so glad someone else did it for me. The great and powerful David Epstein (author of the fabulous NYT bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene) has an excellent new book coming out that details exactly how we can use constraints to live better lives.

“Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” is currently available for pre-order. I give it my highest recommendation.

Let’s get to it…

 

Problem Solving

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham said, “The brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think.”

Your brain is lazy. I don’t mean this as an insult. Actually, no, I do mean it as an insult, but it’s an insult to the species, not to you personally, so don’t get precious about it.

Your brain treats effortful cognition the way most people treat dental check-ups: as something technically important that should nonetheless be avoided, postponed, and if possible delegated to someone else entirely. Your brain is a corner-cutting little gremlin that would rather recycle a mediocre answer from 2019 than spend a single calorie generating a new one.

And this is precisely why constraints are so valuable. When you constrain a problem, you make it harder. And when you make it harder, your brain can’t be lazy anymore. It can’t just rummage around the drawer labeled Old Stuff That Usually Works. It has to put on pants, metaphorically speaking, and engage.

A quick limitation can get your brain to fire the afterburners:

• “You only have a week.”
• “Only three chords.”
• “The budget is only $100.”

Give someone infinite options and they produce infinite dithering. Give them a tight box and suddenly they’re Houdini.

(To learn more scientific ways to make yourself smarter, click here.)

So what else can constraints help with?

 

Productivity

You believe that you would do your best work if you were free. Free from the deadlines. Free from the job.

Wrong.

I’ll tell you what would happen because it’s happened to you. It’s happened to everyone. Give a person absolutely nothing they have to do and they’ll watch four seasons of something they’ve already seen and develop a complicated relationship with sourdough. We know this because the entire year 2020 was a large-scale, involuntary experiment in what happens when you remove structure from human life, and the results were: sourdough bread, Tik Tok dances, and Tiger King. The prosecution rests.

Think about the last time you were genuinely productive. Productive as in: you made a thing and the thing is done and other people can see it. Now answer these questions:

• Did you have a deadline?
• Was the deadline imposed by someone other than yourself?
• Was there a consequence (real, external, not self-imposed) for not delivering?
• Were you, at some point during the process, uncomfortable?

If you answered yes to most or all of these, congratulations: you have just described a constraint-rich environment. You identified the conditions under which you actually produce work. Every single one involves an external imposition. A requirement you did not choose. Now think about the last time you had total freedom. A week off. A Sunday. And ask yourself: what did you make?

The silence you’re hearing is the answer.

Constraints are not preventing your work. Constraints are producing your work. You know this.

So what can we do? Leverage “commitment devices.” A commitment device is anything that constrains future you so present you can’t sabotage the plan. Deadlines are the classic example, but deadlines are just one species in a whole zoo of constraint tools. Some of the best involve other people:

• Make public commitments about what you’ll finish and when.
• Work alongside someone else who will judge you if you screw around.
• Or go nuclear: give cash to a friend and if you don’t finish by the due date, the money gets donated to a cause you hate.

For the record: I need these things too. I am not a person who does things that aren’t required. I am a person who does things that are due. And those constraints don’t make my writing worse; they make my writing possible.

(To learn how to be more productive using secrets from monks, click here.)

Okay, let’s get creative. And, no, that doesn’t mean being wild and free…

 

Creativity

You probably think freedom improves creativity. In fact, a 2021 study found a majority of people in every country think “total freedom” enhances creativity…

Nope.

Here’s what actually happens when you give people glorious creative freedom: they all converge on the same cliché, predictable ideas. Complete freedom leads to complete conformity.

The answer that actually works, the answer that every great creative mind in history has stumbled upon, whether they articulated it or not, is constraints.

Dr. Seuss wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” using only fifty words. Fifty. Not because he was lazy (though I respect that energy) but because his editor bet him he couldn’t do it. And the result is one of the most beloved children’s books ever written, a book so deranged and so perfect that it has convinced millions of children that a persistent stranger offering you food of a suspicious color is somehow charming rather than a poisoning attempt.

And the research backs this up. A 2010 study gave business students more constraints and they came up with better ideas for an advertising campaign.

Why? Constraints work because they take your brain’s favorite shortcut (that smooth neural highway to Clichéville) and blow it up. They dig a trench in it. They fill it with crocodiles and set the crocodiles on fire. (The crocodiles are fine. They’re metaphorical. Don’t write in.)

Suddenly, your brain can’t do the easy thing. It can’t reach for the obvious. It’s standing at the edge of the demolished highway, looking at the flaming crocodile-filled trench, and for the first time in its glucose-conserving existence, it is forced to think of something new. And what it thinks of, nine times out of ten, is better.

So how do you use this? We employ a technique called “paired constraints.” The first one is the “preclude constraint.” It takes whatever you were going to do (the familiar method, the cliché) and forbids it. Takes it out behind the barn, as my grandfather used to say about things he disapproved of, which was most things. For instance:

• No metaphors you’ve used before.
• No relying on sarcasm as a substitute for insight. (This one hurts me personally.)

Time for the second one. The “promote constraint” doesn’t block the old path; it builds a new one. A weird, unexpected, never-would-have-thought-of-it-yourself one. It’s a positive instruction that channels your creative energy in a specific direction. Like:

• Every paragraph must include a concrete sensory detail.
• You can only use examples from your own life, not generalizations.

This technique initially makes my head hurt and results in copious amounts of swearing but ends up producing lines so sharp they can open a can.

(To learn how to be more creative, click here.)

Okay, enough of this functional stuff. How do constraints make life more enjoyable?

 

Happiness

Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon looked at human decision-making and identified two species.

On one side, you’ve got the Satisficers: people who establish a set of criteria, find something that meets those criteria, and then stop looking.

On the other side, you’ve got the Maximizers. Maximizers don’t want a good toaster. They want The Platonic Ideal of toasters. They’ll read thirty reviews and cross-reference Consumer Reports. After weeks of grinding deliberation that would exhaust a Talmudic scholar, they finally purchase a toaster…

And then wonder if the other one had better crumb tray clearance. They are haunted by the phantom toast of the road not taken. Simon found that Maximizers consistently achieve objectively better outcomes… but are consistently less happy about them. Why?

Say it with me now: constraints. The Maximizer has none. The Maximizer’s definition is a superlative. “The best” is not a place you arrive at. It’s a direction you travel in. You can travel in a direction for your entire life and never get anywhere, which is not a metaphor. It’s how most people now shop for mattresses.

The Satisficer is someone who has looked at the universe of infinite options and said, “No. I’m not doing that. I have a limited lifespan and I’m not spending it comparing chair legs.” They set constraints. They decide what matters and what doesn’t. Then they find something that meets the requirements, and they stop.

Constraints are not the things keeping you from happiness. Constraints are the things that make happiness recognizable. Without them, you don’t know what you want, you can’t tell when you’ve found it, and you certainly can’t stop looking long enough to enjoy it.

(To learn more about how to be happier, from the philosopher Epicurus, click here.)

Time for the biggest challenge of all…

 

Meaning In Life

In 2023, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a report that surveyed young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five and found the following:

• 58% said they experienced little or no meaning or purpose in their lives.
• 50% said not knowing what to do with their lives was damaging their mental health.
• 44% felt like they didn’t matter to other people.
• 34% were lonely.

What the heck is going on? We need to do a little time travel to get an answer…

In 1897 Émile Durkheim published a study of suicide that remains one of the most important and disturbing works of social science ever written. What made Durkheim’s findings so unsettling (and what makes them so relevant to our current predicament) was his discovery that suicide rates don’t merely increase during periods of hardship. They increase during periods of rapid change, regardless of the direction.

Economic crashes produce more suicides. But so do economic booms. Why? Both dissolve the shared expectations and social rules that told people what to want, what constitutes a good life and what “enough” looked like. And when those rules dissolve people are left in a condition Durkheim called anomie: a state of normlessness, of moral free-fall.

The thing Durkheim identified as the antidote to anomie is social obligation. The constraint of other people. The weight of being needed, expected, depended upon. The blessed, infuriating, freedom-destroying fact of being embedded in a web of relationships that limit your autonomy and, in limiting it, give it form, substance and meaning.

Durkheim demonstrated that social integration acts as a buffer against suicide in virtually every context he examined. Marriage was protective. Parenthood was protective. Religious community membership was protective.

Most surprisingly, suicide rates dropped during wars. Think about that for a second: people would rather be bombed with a purpose than comfortable without one. During periods when an entire society was mobilized around a shared purpose, when the constraints on individual behavior were at their most comprehensive and the expectation of self-sacrifice was at its most explicit, fewer people killed themselves.

Constraints can be suffocating. But the absence of constraints can be annihilating.

(To learn how to increase meaning in life with philosophy, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Time to round it up and find out the perspective that will help you implement all these helpful constraints…

 

Sum Up

Here’s the simplest way to make your life awesome…

• Problem Solving: The organ you’ve fed with an expensive education, podcasts, and all those books you bought but definitely haven’t finished, actively avoids doing its job. Constraints force your brain to think.
• Productivity: Without a commitment device, I will spend all day googling “what breed of chicken is friendliest” and reading Wikipedia articles about historical events I will forget within the hour (the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. Look it up, it’s INSANE).
• Creativity: George Lucas made a movie under conditions of constraint: limited budget, limited technology, and a cast that thought the dialogue was terrible. What did we get? Star Wars. Then Lucas got everything he wanted. All the money. All the freedom. What did we get? Jar Jar Binks.
• Happiness: Herbert Simon won a Nobel prize for saying: “Your brain has limits, the world has too many options, and the smartest thing you can do is set boundaries and stop looking once you’ve found something that works.” He won the highest academic honor on earth for telling us to chill out. So we read his research, nodded, and went right back to spending six hours choosing a shower curtain.
• Meaning: If you want meaning, you don’t ask, “How do I get more freedom?” You ask: “What am I willing to be bound to? Who gets to demand something from me?”

When you look back on your life, at the things you’re genuinely proud of, I doubt any of them will have happened in conditions of perfect freedom. They’ll have happened under pressure. So stop waiting for the open field. Stop fantasizing about the day when all constraints are lifted and you can finally, at last, begin. That day is a mirage.

If constraints make us more creative, more productive, make our lives happier and more meaningful, then the appropriate response to them is not resentment but gratitude, which is, I recognize, an almost unbearably earnest thing to say in an essay that has been working hard to maintain its sardonic credentials. But I believe it’s true.

And I suspect you know I’m right. You’ve felt it. That rush when a constraint forced you to think sideways. That unexpected satisfaction of making something work with less than you thought you required.

We don’t need fewer limitations. We need better ones. Limitations we choose deliberately, in alignment with what we claim to care about. A deadline, a daily practice, a rule. These aren’t shackles. They’re vows. And vows are what separate wishful thinking from actual living.

I’d say more but I have a constraint on how long these posts can be.