Living the Upgrade Life

How to break out of your upgrade prison

Our ancestors were obsessed with upgrading their quality of life. From the earliest inventions of fire and stone tools, to industrialized agriculture, electricity and plumbing - the evolutionary compulsion to improve our wellbeing has resulted in untold advances in our quality of life. Today even the financially poor live with a higher standard than the wealthy of merely 200 years ago.

At a party by a billionaire, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its entire history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

We are of course the descendants of those most zealous in improvement, so it makes sense that we are obsessed with upgrading our lives. I’m here to tell you it’s a trap! Yes it has paved the path to the wealth and prosperity of today’s world. But it has also shackled us with feelings of extreme anxiety and inadequacy. It impedes gratitude and robs us of our attention.

To explore this, we must distinguish between different types of improvement. There is improvement that substantively improves the quality of humanity’s wellbeing - medicine, electricity, health, computers, heating/cooling, plumbing, etc. All good with that. But then there is this other kind of improvement, an improvement gremlin of sorts - the thing that grabs hold of your mind and compels you to seek upgrades amongst every aspect of your existence.

I want a better house.

I want a better car.

I want more luxurious vacations.

I want a swimming pool.

We are playing a rigged game. A game we cannot win. Every time we get something that we’ve desired, it becomes our baseline. After some time, we are no longer satisfied with it. We want more. This perpetual desire creates an artificial lacking - a void in our lives that occupies our mind toward no good end.

Our economic system is fundamentally based on consumption. Advertisers spend ungodly amounts of cash to get you to buy the latest thing that you don’t need. Without consumer demand, the economy would crash. Here’s the good news though, I’m not worried about it. People say there are two guarantees in life - death and taxes. I propose a third - humans’ endless pursuit of more. So even if you are able to supress the urge to improve everything all the time, Im not worried about our consumption economy since those of us able to eschew the upgrade life will be mere grains amongst endless shores of sand.

Getting off the upgrade treadmill will make you happier. It will make you calmer. It will make you more present. Able to enjoy the gift of the moment. It will reduce your anxiety.

Here’s some tactics:

1. Practice negative visualization. Think of the things in your life that you are grateful for. Then picture yourself lose one or any of these. Close your eyes and imagine you’ve lost your eyesight, then open them and experience wonder of light and colour. This kind of joy and gratitude is available to you at any moment. For me it’s my family, their health, freedom, and safety to name a few. A helpful tool toward this practice is a meditation called “The Last Time”. I highly encourage you to take 4 minutes and give a listen.

2. Swap possessions with skills - develop hobbies that upgrade your skills. For me its tennis, music, writing, meditation, physical fitness. I can spend hours consumed with these activities. Every minute spent with these friends is one less spent pining over acquiring a supposed life improvement.

3. Make a list of what you possess and ask yourself - is it enough?

So if you prefer to enjoy the life that you have instead of the life you don’t, wake up and say no to the upgrade life.