What does PFH stand for?

– Plan to make more money

– Fitness goals

– Holiday

What does that mean in practice?

Plan to make money. People talk to me about some plan to get a promotion, a small pay raise, some project they hope can get them money. They sometimes get the promotion or the pay raise. If their idea involves making money without an employer it almost always fails. They don’t even start. It’s just a reverie. If they do get the pay raise or promotion it takes them only a few months, sometimes mere weeks, to start talking about how they want another promotion or pay raise.

Fitness goals. They all want to lose weight. They all spend quite a bit of time ‘learning’ about weight loss and fitness and they all come up with practices, routines and rules that they have picked up somewhere that suit them and that they treat as the gospel on fitness and weight loss. Some lose weight  for a while. It always returns. They change their habits for a few weeks. Barely. Then they slip back. Nothing changes. For years and years they delude themselves that they have found THE trick that will make them lose weight and get them a body they are proud to show at the beach. It’s sad, tragic and frankly boring. When they are on a ‘high’, meaning when they’ve hit upon a new strategy, they will get angry if you even try to gently show them that their new strategy will not work.

Holiday. They either talk about plans to go on a holiday or they have just returned from one.

A clear pattern emerges. Before the holiday they are excited, but also have some stress from prepping themselves, from packing, from jumping over some bureaucratic hurdles to make the trip possible. They usually have only vague ideas of what they want to do once they reach their destination. The fact they are going on holiday they tend to take as a sign that they are doing well in life, though they will not openly say so. It explains part of the excitement, because they almost never have any kind of real interest in their destination and rarely any real plan to do something there that would actually matter to their identity. The traveling itself is what it’s all about. As long as the destination is exotic enough.

When they come back you can expect the following. They are tired. They need a new holiday. It wasn’t what they expected. The food wasn’t that good or it was hard to find good food. Some complaint about the locals. They almost never interact with the locals. Again and again they manage to go to a country without showing ANY KIND OF INTEREST in the people who live in that country. They claim to go there for the nature, the food and the culture. But not culture involving people… So I guess by culture they mean taking a picture with an iconic building in the background. They could have this experience in a studio in their hometown on a street with lots of restaurants. Throw in some bacteria in the drinking water so they can get the runs, and they could basically stay home and save a lot of money. Ah, money. BEFORE the trip money isn’t mentioned. AFTER the trip they tell me how much it cost. Why? Because their system has registered this: the cost wasn’t worth it. BEFORE the trip there is all the excitement and anticipation, so then the money spent on the trip still feels totally worth it.

If they have kids they will talk a little about that, but not that much. They will of course also complain about work. I isolate Plan for money, Fitness goals and Holidays because they all share one thing: delusion, escape from reality, a strange unwavering trust in the capabilities of their future self and inevitable dissapointment that NEVER changes them. The loop almost never breaks. New weight loss plans emerge, new flight tickets get booked and the brain never really stops thinking about how to secure more money.

These people are anxious, not really seen by the people around them or even by themselves, can’t seem to focus on anything for long unless forced by their job, can’t seem to hold on to money even though they make more than enough, do not remember their past plans and past experiences. Almost nothing matters to them, their friends and colleagues kind of have the same lives and same goals, as if they copy each other’s life style, they all think life is about COMFORT and what they can TAKE from life and the world, not what they can GIVE to the world (the idea that they could be giving is ridiculous and stupid to them) and meaning is reduced to something like ‘my family’. Which often means they show up for their family members, but with no long term plans. Families don’t have any clear strategy about how to be a family. They just show up for birthdays, funerals, weddings and will probably visit hospitalized family members. They might even travel with them or occassionally commit to going to the gym three times a week with a cousin or their brother in law. Which they then do twice and never mentioned again.

Do these people have a chance to break out of these patterns? No, because they can get comfort easily, apart from employers there is no real authority in their lives, on social media they gobble up whatever is deemed ‘the good life’, they are worn down by their jobs that drain them, friendships that are escapes, but not soul nurturing or character building, and their parents never gave them a real passion for anything. Most people are lucky if they had parents that put food on the table and clothes on their backs and didn’t terrorize them too much. So they see beach bodies on Instagram, holidays and wealth. They want all that too, but they can’t commit to anything long enough to find real fulfilment. Instead of intimately getting to know ONE country and build a real connection with it, they fly twice or even three times  a year to some poster destination they take in visually, and almost only visually. Instead of achieving mastery in one domain to create so much value for other people that they do become rich, they are stuck dreaming or fighting for pay raises that change little in the end. Instead of redesigning their lives so more movement and less calories become part of their identity they chase novelty strategies and quick fixes which NEVER pay off longterm.

And so this crazy cycle continues. They swing between whipping themselves with self-discipline fantasies and treating themselves to endless streams of small dopamine hits.

In the process they become dreadfully boring and hollow people who run life as a project where you have to acquire money, fly to places and have to bugger yourself constantly about how to lose weight.

Is it any wonder then that the world today feels so lifeless?