Dedication For the little girl—rapidly becoming young woman—who has taught me how to love. I am so, so proud of you. My daughter, Isabella Conlin Beavan Epigraph Likewise, helping oneself and helping others Are like the two wings of a bird. —ZEN MASTER WON HYO Contents Dedication Epigraph Introduction: What Kind of Life Do You Want? PART I: THE NEW FACTS OF LIFE 1 The Awful Stories We Tell Ourselves to Make Ourselves Small 2 Understanding the Truth of Your Relationship to the World 3 The Lifequester’s Mind Hacks 4 The Unifying Theory of Changing Your Life and Your World PART II: HOW TO WANT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT 5 The Coolest Part of Being a Lifequester 6 What Are People For? 7 How to Know How Many Regrets You Will Have on Your Deathbed 8 What Science Says About Where You Will Actually Find Purpose and Meaning 9 Why Most of Humanity Seems to Be Headed Straight Toward Those Deathbed Regrets and How to Change Course 10 A Last Word on Why the World Would Be Safer and Happier If We Wanted What We Really Want PART III: THE GENTLE PATH 11 A Journey of a Thousand Miles, Etc., Etc. 12 Identifying the Easy Parts 13 Eat How You Want to Live 14 Own What Really Makes You Happy 15 How to Get Around and Where to Stay Put 16 How to Become a True Citizen PART IV: FINDING YOUR PEOPLE 17 The “Real” Thing in Relationships 18 When the Black Sheep Finds Its Flock 19 Success in Everything That Matters 20 Build It as You Like It PART V: WHO TO PARENT 21 The Many Ways of Parenting (Including Not Having Kids) 22 Some Reasons People Do and Don’t Have Children 23 Parenting Other People’s Children (and Letting Others Parent Yours) 24 Deciding Whether to Be a Bio Parent PART VI: WALK YOUR PATH 25 Learn to Discern 26 How Can I Help? 27 The Life of Your Time 28 Thriving in Your Corral 29 Building a Corral Where You Live PART VII: RISE ABOVE THE NOISE 30 What It’s Like to Be Human 31 The Freedom of No Escape 32 The Science of Truth Epilogue: The Last Word Resources: How to Join the Ongoing Conversation and Get the How to Be Alive Workbook Acknowledgments About the Author Praise Also by Colin Beavan Copyright About the Publisher Introduction WHAT KIND OF LIFE DO YOU WANT? The End of the World as We Know It and the Amazing Opportunities That Follow Climate-change-induced superstorms that have killed many thousands and put tens of thousands out of their homes. An economy that seems permanently too weak and stingy to offer dependable jobs. Social and racial inequality filling the news and making us feel we are going backwards. A world political system that is too broken, deadlocked and corrupted by money to deal with any of it. Everything seems so suddenly unstable. We can all choose to live in fear about that. Or, we can look to a new set of aspirations and life choices that many people are already finding exciting and inspiring. I don’t mean the problems and the suffering are exciting, of course. I mean the opportunities are. Because as things shift, you (and I and everyone else) have the opportunity to make new choices and build new lives where you not only get to feel secure and enjoy your life but also get the chance to contribute to solutions that help other people, and feel like your life really means something in the process. That’s what this book is about—the quest for a joyous and meaningful life while living in a frightening, confusing world that needs our help. I know such a life is possible because, as I’ll explain shortly, I’ve somewhat famously begun to experience it myself, and I’ve seen it in many thousands of others. But first, listen: It used to be that you had to follow a very specific path to get what you were supposed to want. Now, a college education no longer guarantees a corporate job, and a corporate job no longer guarantees health care. Even “securing” your retirement may seem like a pipe dream. Meanwhile, a lot of us who do manage to “get ahead” can’t stop feeling a sense of futility. We sit in our cubicles all day tapping at our keyboards while not using the talents we prize in ourselves. Not only do we not believe in the missions of the companies we work for, but we often find ourselves willfully ignoring the harm our employers cause. We can’t escape the nagging feeling that our “success” comes at the expense of the rest of the world. The standard approaches to life no longer lead where so many of us actually want to go—not when it comes to feeling as though we’re helping with world problems and not when it comes to having secure and meaningful lives of our own. Which leads us back to the exciting parts—the opportunities. The first exciting part is this: since fitting into societal molds no longer pays off in the ways it traditionally did, we are freer to stop forcing ourselves into those molds. With fewer so-called rewards to supposedly miss out on, we have less to lose if we break away from the societal directions people traditionally follow and much to gain by experimenting with life choices that are actually truer to our values, our passions, and our world concerns. The second exciting part is that in this time of numerous crises, how we choose to live can truly make a difference in the world. Back when the world was stable, it felt unchangeable. What impact could one person have? Now the world is a changing and fluid place. Each of us is like a butterfly whose wing flaps could start a hurricane. A world with many ills needs many different kinds of doctors—many different kinds of people with many different kinds of talents and passions and personalities. We all have the chance to matter in an entirely new way. The third exciting part is that we don’t have to embark on this quest for the happy, impactful, values-based life alone, nor do we have to figure out the quest entirely for ourselves. It is true that our culture constantly nudges us toward the work-to-spend treadmill that so many of us want to escape. There is still no societal pathway to the authentic, meaningful, service-and passion-oriented life. But it is also true that there is already a growing national and international movement of people breaking away from those old broken paths and laying down new ones. They are questing for and finding new ways of making life choices—in careers, in what they do with their money, in their living situations and lifestyles, in how they eat and travel, and in all the many other ways we relate to each other. As fate would have it, I became a well-known figure in this movement of seekers back in 2007, when I launched a one-year lifestyle experiment in environmental living. It was in many ways the climax of my lifelong quest to find a fulfilling, meaningful, happy life that helped others and was in line with my values. This year-long project became the subject of an autobiographical book and a documentary film, both titled No Impact Man. The book has been translated into thirteen languages and is required reading on hundreds of college campuses. The Sundance-selected film has been screened in cinemas and broadcast by television networks around the world. Most important, this project, book, film, and the work that has evolved from my experience since have put me in touch with literally tens of thousands of seekers who are on the quest for a better way of life. I’ve met and given talks to thousands of people who are creating their own new ways of relating to the society we live in. They are making lives that are better for themselves, better for their communities, and better for the world. You’ll find some of their stories and much of their wisdom in the pages of this book. The world needs entrepreneurs who use business as a tool for increasing happiness. It needs activists who speak with love instead of fear and anger. It needs gardeners and local farmers who care for the land. It needs a whole different kind of bankers and politicians who care more about communities than corporations. It also needs more musicians on the subway platforms and artists on the streets to bring us joy in these difficult times. The world needs so much. It needs all of us. Which is not to say this is a job or career book, because it’s not. Thinking that careers and jobs are the only way to security and meaning and helping the world is another of those standard life approaches we need to move away from. How we work matters, yes, but so do how we make friends, have families, think about possessions, run our homes, live in our communities, engage as citizens, have sex, relate to children, and on and on. In this book, we are going to discuss the choices that will help us build great lives—not just great careers—based on who each of us really is, what we really care about, and what we most want to help with in the world. It is a book about asking the questions that will nudge you along a path to your own personal version of the Good Life. A life where your happiness and safety come not at the expense of the world but as the result of doing good for the world. That idea, by the way, is what distinguishes this book from most other self- help books and why, as we will discuss later, I actually think of it less as a self- help book and more as an each-other help book. There is a multitude of books about the world’s problems. And there is a multitude of books about how to try to extract a happy life from that world. What’s missing are the books about fixing our lives in ways that fix the world and fixing the world in ways that fix our lives. That’s what this book is about. More About How I Came to Write This Book and How You Can Use It to Claim Your Own Version of a Cool, Fun, Meaningful Twenty-First-Century Life On the door to the dressing room is a big star with my name on it, something I thought only happened in movies. Inside, I’m sitting on a couch. Now standing up. Now sitting. Now standing. I’m so nervous. I’ve already been on Good Morning America and many other shows, but the host of this show is one of the fastest wits on television. Going on camera with him is like throwing yourself under a rhetorical bulldozer—in front of a few million people. I’ve already been to hair and makeup, where they found a way to eliminate the circles under my eyes. Now a woman with a clipboard arrives. She suddenly freezes as she listens to something in her headset. “Yes . . . Yes . . . I’m with him.” She looks at me. “Come this way please, Mr. Beavan.” We walk down a hallway and a door opens to the studio. We pass what look like bleachers, where the studio audience is sitting. A comedian is warming them up and they are all laughing. I step up onto the stage and suddenly I am seated across a desk from Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. This makes the first of what would ultimately be two appearances on the show. Apparently, despite Colbert’s false conservative persona, he is a fan of No Impact Man and my work in lifestyle redesign. I’m sitting up there onstage when, suddenly, the comedian who has been warming up Colbert’s audience finishes and exits. The APPLAUSE sign is blinking over the audience. The little light above the camera lens has turned green. Colbert is introducing me. He jokes in his deadpan way, “By not poisoning the earth, he is poisoning our capitalist society.” God help me. Before the No Impact Man project, I had tried so hard to get happiness in all the ways we are told will bring it: job searches, career “hacks,” romantic relationships, following gurus, “attracting my vision,” living in this city, living in that city, traveling, working full-time, working part-time, and so on.