Surely You Can Be Serious

The first lie: seriousness is all or nothing. I often run into people who are like: “Well, I don’t feel like I’m being truly serious and I’m not living up to my values, but I also can’t burn every bridge and change everything about my life, so I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, forever.”

But this is like believing that the only way to get

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Seriousness precludes sincerity.

For the most part, you’d be better served by being sincere rather than serious.

You have two essential tasks in life: to be a good person and to pursue the occupation that you love. Everything else is a waste of energy and a squandering of your potential. How does one do that? OK, that’s a tougher question. But the philosophy we see from the Stoics makes it simple enough: say no to distractions, to destructive emotions, to out

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I encourage you to tune into the experience of seriousness in your day-to-day life. What aspects feel tight, heavy, and constrained? In these areas, see if you can tune into any undercurrents of enjoyment. In the context of games, the way to let go of seriousness is to focus on just having fun. And the same applies in life.