3 Tension Duos: Attention Or Intention, Price Or Worth, Happiness Or Joy?
You Can Have It All, Yet Not All At The Same Time.
As we enter the second lockdown in France to try to flatten the curve of COVID-19, this is the first time in my life where I feel a little bit anxious about the future of us.
Despite all the challenges life has thrown at me so far, I have always been able to see the bright side in life.
Yet, with the unknown number of waves of COVID-19 coming, I am struggling to make sense of what is important or not while locked away from other sources of positive energy like social interactions with family, friends, colleagues, and the rest of the world.
I figured out this is the best time to reflect on some tense duos that are tearing me apart in life right now.
Indeed, for the first lockdown, we were 3 in a small apartment downtown in Toulouse, France. Keeping our son Noah sane in a closed environment was a challenge.
As this new lockdown is coming, we are fortunate to have moved into a house outside Toulouse. Even though I am aware of my blessings, I sometimes struggle to choose between attention and intention, focus on my price or worth, and seek happiness or joy.
If you have been there, then you know what I am feeling.
Of the billions of choices we must make in life, I find that these 3 duos create most of the tensions in my life.
1. Attention vs. Intension
When we are young, seeking our parents’ attention is a way to show that we are here and that we matter. We get instant feedback and gratification. So, we build our existence around that loop of attention-seeking to validate our presence in this world.
And with social media, where influencers are the warriors in attention-seeking, we are eager to spend all our time mimicking them in the search for instant attention.
Yet, like the notifications buzzing in our phones, attention is doomed to disappear once we click on it, emptying our perforated bucket.
Attention is tied to other people’s willingness to give it to us. It is an external currency over which we have no control over.
Intention is, on the opposite, an internal currency into which we can tap forever. Most of the things we do in life to improve ourselves, with the intention to pay it forward, are what last longer.
Our intention is the belief from within that our actions are not tied to other people’s approval.
I am seeking attention when I interrupt a colleague during a meeting to “correct” her. When I let her finish what she was saying and then provide my feedback from my perspective, I am doing it intending to improve myself and add value to the conversation.
We spend all of our lives seeking other people’s attention: our parents, bosses, and peers. We end up with a lot of frustration because attention is a limited resource.
Conversely, we can share our intention in all our actions and move on with our lives.
With attention comes stagnation. With intention comes action.
2. Price vs. Worth
With the pandemic, we have seen how much the essential workers are worth more than the small tag price society put on them. We can put a price tag on everything in life if we want.
That price is arbitrary and depends on who is doing the pricing. Once again, price is an external assessment of an individual. One hour for a nurse is 1 million times less expensive than for a footballer like Cristiano Ronaldo or Jeff Bezos.
We constantly seek ways to increase our price tag at work or in our communities.
Just because a colleague is paid more than me does not mean that person is with more than me.
So why am I constantly trying to get more money?
Why do I think that my worth is tied to how many material things I possess? Or possess me?
My worth is my real wealth. It is something within my grasp. I can learn more and provide more value to people to increase my worth. I can be just a small employee in a big corporation. Yet, I can create more worth for me than the CEO of that same company could give me.
Because, once again, price is tied to money, which is a limited and scarce resource. Worth is a resource from within. And we have more means to increase our worth than the price tag people will put on us.
Educating ourselves, increasing our network, and adding value to our community and people are just ways to increase our worth without any external input.
Because in the end, when we die, if we only have money, people will share it between themselves.
Our worth is what people will really miss. It is what makes us unique and what will die with us.
3. Happiness vs. Joy
We spend our whole time seeking happiness, more precisely, looking for things that will make us happy. Yet happiness is the most scarce resource in this world. So few things or events can make us happy in our lives.
For some, it is to be a millionaire or a billionaire. For others, it is their favorite football/soccer or basketball team winning the World Series. For some, it is that big promotion at work with all the attention that comes with it.
If we look closer, most things that we think can bring us happiness are either very scarce or rarely within our control. Happiness is the most overrated nectar in our world today.
On top of that, once we are millionaires and get that promotion, the feeling of happiness will fade away like a candle in the wind. And we are back to square zero, starting for the next happiness source that might never happen.
Between those long periods of happiness seeking, we are overwhelmed by frustration and anxiety. And most importantly, we are being depleted of our most valuable resource: our time.
If happiness is the extraordinary thing that might happen to us, joy is the ordinary thing that will happen to us every single day of our lives. Joy is like breathing if cultivated properly. We can seek and find joy every day in what we do.
I find joy every day in small things like standing up on my feet and seeing my son laugh and run around.
I find joy in going to work and listening to the music I love in my car.
I find joy in having lunch with a colleague who is as crazy as me.
I find joy in seeing other people find their own joy, day in and day out.
We may find happiness sometimes in our lives if we are lucky enough. We definitely can harvest joy in our lives multiple times, every day of our lives.
Final Thoughts
If we choose to go from attention to intention, price to worth, and happiness to joy, we are taking back the reins of our lives.
We are not outsourcing our actions, our true wealth, or our source of positive energy to external sources.
We are really being in charge and ensuring that the tension in those duos is, if not annihilated, reduced to its minimum.
Are you more attention or intention?
Do you look for a price tag or a worth flag?
Are you extraordinarily happy or ordinarily joyful?
Leave a comment below.
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