The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.
— Jordan B. Peterson
Life is full of burdens worth bearing. To lift such loads is to lead a life of meaning. The more we bear worthy weights, the more meaningful our lives become and feel. And the more we feel our lives are meaningful, the more peace and joy we experience.
There are three ways to lift more worthy burdens:
Get stronger. We can build up our strength of will in much the same way that resistance training can build up our bodily strength: by pushing ourselves to lift progressively heavier responsibilities while also avoiding overstrain by allowing our spirits time for rest and recovery.
Drop unworthy burdens. We can conserve our strength for worthy weights if we let go of the baggage we’re carrying for bad reasons: our addictions, our toxic relationships, our vanity projects, etc.
Improve your form. Like an Olympic weightlifter, we can lift up greater weights if we improve how we bear our responsibilities.
Everybody has room to grow on all three of these margins. But the last one is less understood than the first two.
Students of Jordan Peterson are likely to understand the importance of getting stronger by bearing greater responsibility.
Listeners of The Minimalists Podcast and readers of *Essentialism* by Greg McKeown are apt to appreciate the wisdom of dropping unworthy burdens.
But there seems to be less awareness and understanding of the overarching issue of improving your form as a bearer of responsibility.
Even those who are highly responsible and largely baggage-free may still feel unnecessarily overloaded. This is largely due to poor form. We are unevenly distributing the weight of our responsibilities. Like an inexperienced mover lifting with his back instead of his legs, we are underutilizing some of our resources and overtaxing others. Improper form can lead to both blown out tendons and burned out psyches.
The part of our minds we seem to be overtaxing most is what psychologists call our “working memory.” Psychology Today defines working memory as, “a form of memory that allows a person to temporarily hold a limited amount of information at the ready for immediate mental use.”
As implied above, our working memories have a finite amount of resources. The amount of working memory resources used up is what psychologists call “cognitive load.”
When we feel overwhelmed, it is often because our cognitive load is so large that our working memory is bursting at the seams. In addition to feeling wretched, excessive cognitive load can impair decision-making, problem-solving, learning, and emotional regulation.
Most of us are suffering such impairments to an unnecessary degree, because we are underutilizing readily available natural methods for reducing cognitive load and relieving our working memories.
One such method is to externalize your burdens. Capture your commitments in writing and organize them with analogue or digital self-management tools like notebooks, calendars, inboxes, to-do lists, checklists, etc. The more you integrate these tools into a system, the more they make up what has been called an “external mind.” If you externalize your burdens into a trustworthy system of reminders and reference materials, your psyche will have the assurance it needs to release that bit of cognitive load from your working memory. The best approach I know for externalizing your burdens is the one formulated by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done.
Another way to relieve your working memory of cognitive load is habit formation. The more a behavior becomes habitual, the lighter will be its cognitive load on your working memory because it requires less conscious thought, deliberation, and willpower. The best approach I know for habit formation is the one formulated by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits.
Concentration techniques offer a third way to reduce cognitive load. If you focus on a single task (as opposed to multitasking), your working memory will be spared the cognitive costs of constant “context-switching.” Sustained focused attention can also lead to a “flow state.” And once you’re in a flow state, concentration becomes largely effortless. This means your working memory is spared the cognitive load that comes with consciously regulating your own attention. A great book on concentration techniques is Deep Work by Cal Newport.
By relieving your working memory of unnecessary cognitive load, all three of these methods free up mental and spiritual capacity for lifting more worthy burdens and thus leading a more meaningful life.