The Art of Going All In

You know that strange state between sleep and wakefulness? When your alarm goes off and you're conscious enough to hit snooze, aware of what time it is and what you need to do – but not yet fully present?

That's how most people live their entire lives.

They're not asleep, but they're not truly awake either. They exist in a peculiar limbo, conscious enough to navigate their days but not engaged enough to truly live them.

They follow careers they stumbled into. They maintain relationships they drifted toward. They pursue goals they inherited rather than chose.

In Henry David Thoreau's now famous essay, Walden, he said: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It's a powerful quote in isolation, but it's become commonly misremembered and, in a spectacular accident of the human capacity to exaggerate, I happen to enjoy the misremembered quote more:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to their graves with the song still in them

My understanding is that the second half was blended over time with Oliver Wendell Holmes' phrase "die with all their music in them".

The philosopher Seneca likewise lamented how many Romans were "busy doing nothing." My mother lamented the same about me on my summer holidays.

What Thoreau, Seneca, and my mother were describing wasn't laziness, but something more subtle and pervasive – a failure to fully inhabit one's own existence.

Most people approach life with a strange hesitancy, as if they're perpetually waiting for permission to begin.

They work because they must. They follow paths because they're there. They reserve their full energy for some hypothetical future that never arrives.

They want the surety of a positive outcome before they dare to commit fully.

You see this with how people approach speculative hobbies that could be ardent crafts; tentative situationships that could be fulfilling relationships; odd jobs that could be a storied career.

Going "all in" sounds like a simple mindset shift when it's actually a skill. It's a disposition and approach to life that you can train until it becomes second nature.

There's a French phrase that comes to mind often – "joie de vivre". Something about it characterises the exuberance that comes from full engagement with life.

Most people lack joie de vivre, not because their circumstances are wrong, but because their engagement is half-hearted.

Life is for living

Life isn't singing because you're not playing any music. You're sitting at the piano but still waiting to hear something. You're waiting for the music that will motivate you to move, instead of bringing the music to life with your movement.

The skill of going all in comes from bringing your complete self to whatever you're doing.

While investigating meditation, I came across a Japanese concept called "ichigyo-zammai" – full concentration on a single act.

Zen master Sunryu Suzuki described it like so:

"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."

Watch children at play. They do not hold back. They don't conserve energy. They throw themselves fully into whatever captures their attention. They're not worried about looking foolish or wasting time. They're not keeping one eye on the clock. They're completely there.

It does not take long to lose this capacity, and many of us eventually do.

We learn to hedge our bets and keep options open. We learn not to keep our fragile eggs of hope and expectation and our small seeds of joy in a single basket. We learn to save some of our spirit in reserve.

But in reserve for what?

Why live your life like a gifted wine, aging in the basement of your inner life because one day, come the right moment, it might taste truly special? And in the meantime you deprive yourself of joy and satiation.

It reminds me, though I won't link to it, of a clip from a popular podcast where the guy shares results of a study like revelation from a mountaintop: "every single [glass of alcohol] that you take is moving you closer to death."

It's the kind of thing that sounds harrowing until you remember that every breath that you take brings you closer to death. Every passing day brings you closer to death.

I wanted to take him by the shoulders and, shaking, say, "Brother, you are already alive. Why devote so much energy toward attaining that which you were born with? All the days of your life yawned before you as a babe. Why chase your inheritance? Claim it instead. Fully and completely. Live!"

To some extent or another, and for varying reasons, we seem to develop, so habitually you would swear you were born that way, the habit of partial commitment – doing just enough to get by but never quite enough to excel or find joy in the doing itself.

Everything becomes a means to an end when there is only one true end and you never really know when you will stumble upon it.

Everything is done in dead moments of waiting and boredom or saved solely for our imagined self to live out in fantasy.

Think of a time when you were last completely absorbed in something... when you lost track of time and felt fully alive. That state, what psychologists call 'flow', is available nearly on-demand in ordinary moments, if you learn to approach them with extraordinary presence.

The tragedy is that most people save full engagement for emergencies and special occasions.

They sleepwalk through the mundane, only to discover that their lives are mostly mundane.

They reserve their best energy for perfect conditions, only to discover that perfect conditions rarely arrive.

Maximum life, maximum energy

Life has the energy you bring to it.

Going all in requires vulnerability. It means risking disappointment. It means abandoning the safety of mediocrity. It means refusing the comfortable numbness of partial engagement.

But what's the alternative? To reach the end of your days and realise you never truly woke up? To have lived in the twilight between sleep and consciousness, hitting snooze on your own existence?

Energy begets energy. Going all in doesn't deplete you – it fills you up. It's the half-hearted efforts that exhaust us because they keep us trapped in that liminal state – not engaged enough to find flow, and not disengaged enough to rest.

The Romans had a phrase: "age quod agis" – do what you are doing. Be where you are.

If you're working, work. If you're resting, rest. If you're with people you care about, be fully with them. But whatever you do, do it completely.

The art of going all in is not defined by what you do, but by how completely you do it. And in bringing the full force of your attention, your creativity, your energy to the task at hand – whether that is in writing code, or making dinner, or having a conversation.

Quality of attention beats quantity of effort.

Look at your life and ask yourself, 'Where am I sleepwalking? Where am I going through the motions? Where am I bringing only a fraction of my energy and attention?'

The answer will tell you exactly where joy has leaked out of your life.

Choose one thing today—just one—and bring your whole self to it. Not because you have to. Not because you should. But because being fully alive, even for a moment, is infinitely better than a lifetime of hitting snooze.