A lot of people today have forgotten the joy of making things.

The world today is filled with more and more means of consumption.  Social networks allow you to connect with your friends and family, and even meet new people from time to time.  News flows to you in a dozen or more different ways every day, and entertainment comes knocking on your door from hundreds of sources.

A lot of these things require maintenance, as well.  You feel an obligation to respond to posts on Facebook, to clear your email inbox, go through your subscriptions, and answer any text messages you may receive.  You may also be “required” to look at the latest picture, post, or other content from your friends.

All of the consumption of inbound information and entertainment combines with all of the “maintenance” to shadow and conceal one of the things that is most likely to bring true happiness and satisfaction… making something.

Three Kinds Of Energy – Physical, Mental, And Emotional

Emotional energy is the fire inside of you… your drive, your motivation, your passion.  When your emotional energy is high you feel satisfied, maybe even happy… like you can handle anything.  When it is low, you feel stressed, drained, depressed, and overwhelmed.

Emotional energy is different than the other two kinds of energy, physical and mental.  Emotional energy isn’t used directly… it’s consumed or produced as a result of using physical and mental energy, both of which are used directly, and can be used either actively or passively.

• Physical EnergyPhysical energy is the energy that you use to physically do things.  That can be anything from simply being awake to running a marathon.
• Mental Energy
  
  Mental energy is a little less clear cut, but it is what you use to process things mentally.  It is what you use to figure out solutions to problems, learn new things, and any other sort of work that is not directly physical.

Active use of energy is when you are actually focused on output of that energy in order to yield a desired result, whether mental or physical.  Passive use of energy is more like a leak… energy drains away, but there is no real desired result.  Active use of energy yields more emotional energy than you started with, particularly if you achieve your desired result, while passive use of energy ends with less emotional energy than the starting point.

How Using Mental And Physical Energy Affects Your Emotional Energy

There are basically three different “modes” of directly using energy:  consumption, maintenance, and creation.  Each one tends to have a certain profile of physical and mental energy use, active or passive, and therefore affects your emotional energy differently.

• Consumption Consumption is input… when you watch television, or eat, or read the news, you are using energy in the consumption mode.  You are accepting things inward, which uses mostly passive mental energy and mostly passive physical energy.  This passive use has a negative effect on your emotional energy, which in turn has a negative effect on your total limit of physical and mental energy.The drain on emotional energy is directly related to the amount of consumption.  An easy example of this is the difference you feel after eating (consuming) a large meal, versus a light meal… the more you eat, the more “drained” you feel.  This can lead to a particularly vicious circle, too, as many people turn to eating to deal with the feelings that result from low emotional energy, causing an even greater drain, leading to more eating.Life in the developed world today tends to center more and more around consumption, particularly the digital kind, whether it’s news (either traditional or Facebook “news”), entertainment, or something else.   There is a corresponding growing drain on emotional energy, leaving people less and less happy.

  Consumption can turn into an act of creation  if it is done with a specific goal… that may be a chef coming up with a new dish while eating something, a sports player watching television to learn the upcoming opponents tactics and strategy (and use this to come up with a strategy to beat them), or anything else where something comes out of it, rather than just consumption.

• MaintenanceMaintenance is the middle ground between input and output, usually involving a little of each.  Maintenance includes things like exercising to maintain your health (exercising to lose weight or build muscle CAN be creative), sleeping for a normal six to eight hours, or, for someone like me, fixing bugs in programming.  There are a ton of different things that can be maintenance, depending on what you do… if it falls between consuming and creating, it’s maintenance.Maintenance generally uses passive energy of one form, and active of the other.  Exercising to maintain health, for example, uses active physical energy, but passive mental energy.  Fixing bugs uses active mental energy, but passive physical energy.The imbalance of active and passive energy basically cancels out the impact on your emotional energy, but still uses up some of the limited amount of physical and mental energy that you have, meaning that you won’t get ahead.

  Like consumption, maintenance can  become an act of creation when done with a specific goal… reaching a goal in exercising, for instance (losing 10 pounds, increasing the weight you can lift by 20 pounds, etc.) or fixing a bug that is actually keeping things from moving ahead.

• CreationCreation is all about output.  It always uses active mental energy (otherwise it’s maintenance), and nearly certainly uses active mental energy… look at someone when they are making something, and you can see the focus in their body.Creation can be nearly anything… and something can be consumption or maintenance for one person, and creation for someone else (see the chef example above, for instance).  Creation generates emotional energy, and the more closely it aligns with what you love to do, the more energy it creates.For me, for example, creating something out of wood or creating a new program generates a lot of emotional energy.  Creating a new page on an existing web site doesn’t produce the same amount of energy, nor does creating an article produce as much energy as creating a story (I’m still waiting on creating a book… I have to find more free time to finish it).

  Creation can also become maintenance, if you do the same creation over and over, like adding the adding of a page to a website that I mentioned earlier.  When this happens, the act loses its ability to generate emotional energy.

The Joy Of Making Things

The amount of maintenance in the world is not going down, while the amount of consumption is going up.  That leaves less and less time and energy for creating.  The process is so gradual, though, that it’s very hard to notice, even for people who are more self aware than the general population.

As you spend more and more time and energy consuming and maintaining things, your emotional energy keeps dropping further and further.  This has a double impact, because not only do you feel worse, but your level of emotional energy is directly related to what sort of activities you look for, with low emotional energy focusing you on consumption, draining yet more of your energy.

This reminds me of a quote from the Bible:  ”For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

There are two ways that you can turn this around… you can reduce your consumption, and you can increase your creation.  While either one by itself will certainly have an effect, when you do both the effect is not just added, it is multiplied.

And then you will rediscover the joy of making things.

Do you know the biggest cause of unhappiness, regardless of factors such as race, age, sex, or culture?

That’s right… it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from, the biggest cause of unhappiness is always the same, though you likely don’t realize it.  Most people never bring the root cause from the subconscious mind to the conscious mind, so the conscious mind seizes on all sorts of manifestations of the root cause and decides it’s the whole thing.

The root cause, though, is not money.  It’s not relationships, or being stuck in a dead-end job, or any of those other things that pop into your mind.

The root cause of unhappiness, nearly all unhappiness, is mentally giving up your control of your life, your actions.

The other things, that come to mind more easily, are nearly always a manifestation of that perceived loss of control, rather than the actual cause themselves.  Stuck in a dead-end job?  You have the ability to walk away from that job today.  Any feeling that you do not is an illusion, it is you mentally giving up your control… “I can’t leave that job, I need the pay check.”

That is a false argument… you can leave the job any time.  Convincing your conscious mind that you can’t is simply dodging the responsibility.  If you “can’t” do something, then it’s not your fault when you don’t.  You don’t have to deal with choosing whether or not to do it.  There is no risk.

Without risk, though, there is also no opportunity.  Imagine if you refused all risk, and stayed with your first job, maybe working in a fast food restaurant.

And with relationships, too… you can’t get the girl, so you don’t try.  You can’t be an amazing artist, so you never pick up the brush.  You can’t cook, so you only make macaroni and cheese in a box.

That doesn’t sound like a life anyone would choose, does it?  It doesn’t sound happy in the least.  In avoiding the possibility of pain, you have also closed out the possibility of joy.

At the same time, you feel constantly resentful at what the world has done to you.  You see other people succeeding and ask why they got so lucky, while you’re stuck where you are, and have no way to get out.

You still don’t admit the choice, though, and without that choice, you cannot improve.  As long as you consciously deny that you have a choice, you can’t move on to somewhere happier.

And what’s worse… your subconscious knows that you do have that choice.  It knows who is causing all of the unhappiness and frustration, and it holds you responsible.  After long enough, you tend to start hating your life, often without even being able to give objective specifics as to why you hate it.

You don’t, of course, have control over everything in your life.  You can’t choose not to be blind, or choose to be smart… but you do have a life filled with choices every day, and as Rush says “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Choosing not to decide means that you cannot succeed.  You live a passive life, always being pushed along by outside influences, unable to reach any goal, because you will not choose to take action toward it.

It’s simple, but painful (which makes it not easy), to change.  The only way to change, and start erasing the unhappiness, is to admit that you do have control, that you have a choice. That means, though, that you have to face up to the fact that you always have had a choice… and that your current circumstances, that you “couldn’t” change, were something that you chose.

It’s okay to start small.  You can actively choose something small… you can choose to go to the gym to start getting in shape.  You can choose to take a class in something you always wanted to learn (I’ve recently done this myself, with martial arts).  You can choose to start a project of one sort or another at home… something that lies in the direction of your dreams (dreams never truly die… and you’d be amazed at how powerfully they can come back once you take action toward them).

You don’t have to start small, though.  It’s perfectly acceptable to wake up all at once, throw off the shackles that you have chosen by choosing not to decide, and make sweeping changes through all of your life.  Sometimes a drastic change is the only way to keep from going back to where you were.

It doesn’t really matter what it is that you choose to do, it simply matters that you consciously accept that you have a choice, and that you made it.  The fact that something happened as a result of something that you actively chose makes it, in some odd way, easier to accept failure… especially if you continue to make choices and keep moving ahead.

Ask anyone you ever meet that seems at peace with themselves, truly happy or content, how much control other people have over them.  Everyone of them will tell you little or none.  They live by their own choices, and their own actions, and because of that, they live a life that is in keeping with who they truly are… after all, why would you do anything else knowing that everything you do is by your own choice?