Happy Motivation
From, "The Option Method: The Myth of Unhappiness, Vol. 1, by Bruce Di Marsico"
We have a phrase in my household: "Every circumstance is workable".
This wonderful essay by Rajeev Ram, on living with an injury, brought that phrase to mind:
What follows is a “guest post” from someone dead since last millennium, Bruce Di Marsico, who was an important figure in my life. I spent years editing his Collected Works from hundreds of hours of rotting cassette tapes that had been stored under a bed for decades, and wrote all the supplementary material to the three volume set “The Option Method: The Myth of Unhappiness”.
To get a flavor of his writing, I’ve inserted an excerpt below. To get a flavor of his speech, I’ve inserted an audio from 1971. Please allow him the use of the word “Happiness” as a symbol to be filled in with meaning, and do not bring too much meaning for that word from other contexts.
Money and love become two symbols in our culture, which stems from the belief that you can’t be happy now, that there’s something lacking, something needed. Lacking in the sense: I’d be unhappy without it, but I won’t be more happy with it. And unhappy people motivate themselves with the belief that, “I’ll be unhappy without it.”
Happy people tend to motivate themselves with the belief that I won’t be more happy unless I have it. But it’s a similar set of rules. It’s an easier game to play because – alright, I won’t be more happy if I don’t have that, but I could be more happy if I have that or that.
There are a lot more things that could make a happy person happier. Maybe it’s the whole universe, maybe the whole world of things. And maybe, if you had the indomitably happy person and he said, “I can’t be more happy unless I have that,” and you say, “You can’t have it.”, then he’d say, “Well, then this,” and you say, “You can’t have it. . ,” he might spend the rest of his life saying, “Well, then this.” And that’d be okay because he wouldn’t lose, he’d be so busy saying, “Well, then this,” because there’d always be another “this”, and it’s not too hard a game to play.
And even when it came down to the end of it, “Okay, well, then the next breath, and that’ll make me more happy”, with a happy person none of it becomes a bad place to be, ever, even though he’s believing or she’s believing that they need it to be more happy, but they don’t need it for their happiness. And if everything else goes away and you absolutely can’t have anything it would seem, you make up something. Like another moment, “If I could have another moment I’ll be happier.”
And if you say, “You can’t have another moment,” then the happy person says, “Well, then – ” and at that moment their life is over.
Di Marsico, Bruce M. . The Option Method: The Myth of Unhappiness , Vol. 1: The Collected Works of Bruce Di Marsico on the Option Method & Attitude (The Option Method: The Myth of Unhappiness, Vol. 1, 2, 3) (pp. 211-212). Dialogues in Self Discovery, LLC. Kindle Edition.
One lineage of the Option Method became new age pablum. As officially as it gets, I hold the Option Method lineage of “Mystic Pragmatism”, a lineage with a spiritual market value of close to nothing.
One of the best posts to find out what the Option Method looks like in practice is this post:
