The Unique Pain of Debt

All right, and welcome back. So in the spring of 2000, during the second semester of my first year of college, I took a photography class.

Back then, digital cameras were definitely on the scene, but still very low resolution and clunky. So my class was of the old school kind, right? We used actual film, chemicals, time in the darkroom to pay for the supplies I needed for that course. You know, paper, chemicals, film, non digital photography is quite expensive. I got my first credit card. I don't even remember if it was like an offer I was mailed or if I went online to seek one out.

But that decision at 19, began a journey that took me many, many years and cycles to complete. After that year, I started signing up for more and more cards, using them to pay for school supplies, a post college trip to Europe, food, pretty much everything. In the years since then, I spent a lot of time really only paying my minimum monthly payments, with a few stints here and there of paying down some big chunks of that debt, only to rack it back up when money was tight, sometimes because I was just overspending, sometimes because I was working jobs that I really loved and meant something to me, but they did not pay well.

So really, you know, for the majority of my adult life, my total credit card debt never really dropped below $6,000 and at different times peaked between 21 and honestly, $43,000. Now, twice in my life I've been lucky enough to pay that off. Once in my kind of mid-30s and again in my early 40s. And I learned some things in that process which I'm going to create a parallel to right here with another story.

So in the spring of 2007, the spring of 2014, might get a pattern here. And around late 2020, I got Dexa scans, right? These are a type of scanner you can lay in. They basically shoot X rays through your body and they get a sense of how much of your body is muscle, fat, bone. And my peak at different times was about 35%. So 35% body fat, just over the line into genuine obesity.

In 2007, first time in my life, I dropped about half of that. Kept it off for a good while, moved to Los Angeles in my late 20s and early 30s, lost my exercise routine, put it all back on again. 2014 and 2015, went through another cycle, lost all that. Had a kid in my late 30s, gained a lot of it back, and just in the last couple years, have really started shedding that again. One more story actually, too.

This was, you know, probably about five years ago, but I spent about six days back at my home where I grew up from about 11 years old until my dad moved out when I was in my late 30s and everyone in my family had moved out but my dad. But there had been about 25 years worth of stuff from everyone that had accumulated and never really been taken care of.

And it was one of those things that was so wild as I grew up and moved away. The epitome of this was this tool. Toolkit or tool shelf, tool rack. There we go. That my dad had in the garage, right? And it just had all these tools dumped on it. It was such a mess. And I always in my consciousness knew, one day I'm gonna have to handle that. I'm gonna have to go through and sort all that. And lo and behold, you know, he eventually sold the house.

And so I had to go out there and spent days going to Goodwill, going through a dumpster, kind of paying off the debt in that house of accumulated stuff. Now, I share about these three vignettes, right? Because they all have something in common. They're forms of debt, meaning they were areas in my life I owed something. Money, exercise, cleaning, really, which are basically just expressions of owed energy and consciousness.

Something I've talked about in this podcast before. What's challenging about debt, and what I would say is the unique pain of debt is that it can rarely be eliminated instantly, right? So whether I was at my peak weight in my deepest financial debt or walking into that garage and just seeing a wall of clutter, there was nothing I could do to instantly remove that, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

It takes dedication of will and discipline over time to lose weight, pay off credit cards, or honestly, right? To simply clean a house that I'd been avoiding. And that place of being stuck in, knowing there's nothing I can do right now to change this can be a really challenging one emotionally. And it was one that often left me incredibly paralyzed, kind of with this crippling feeling that I would just numb out to, right?

I used to stare at a balance sheet and calculate, well, if I work so many hours at this many dollars an hour, it will take me this many years to pay everything off. Or if I kind of do the healthy thing and lose one pound a week, of body fat. It's going to take me half a year to get to a place where I feel really solid and healthy in my body. There were many times that I got stuck in that overwhelm, that kind of paralysis, which then would be so intense.

I would take, I would make choices that actually made it worse, right? I'd eat crappy junk food, didn't I'm out. I would avoid checking my bank account or paying bills. I wouldn't go home to deal with my house, my dad's house, and clean it. And that would actually just accentuate these problems. Now, as someone who's worked all three of these types of debt and there's countless mores and in many ways have come out of them, you know, not perfect, but sure as hell.

And the most healthy place I've been in my life right now. It really makes me realize that this is often the scenario that plays out in the transformational world, be it through a meditative or psychedelic experience, you know, reading a new book or podcast or going to a cool workshop or, you know, even this kind of, wow, I know my purpose in life. This particular dynamic plays out that I really want to dissect here today.

So one of my teachers who I've talked about here on the show before, Ken Wilbur, he describes it as the difference between waking up and growing up. Talked about this in some previous episodes. You know, waking up is really just an awareness of what is, whereas growing up is actually change over time. It's a structural kind of investment in a sense. Another way we often talk about this is it's the difference between states which can be instant and stages which develop over time.

So if we think of like an acorn, right, you and I can look at the acorn and know it's going to become an oak tree eventually. But there is nothing we can do, nothing we can do to accelerate that and make it a hundred year oak tree. Right now it actually has to go through certain stages, developmental milestones. It needs a certain amount of sunlight and CO2 over time to keep growing.

Now think about this in, in this sense again. So it's awareness, our awareness can change instantly. I have to lose weight. I have to stop smoking. I can't treat people like this anymore. I can't live like this anymore. But change takes time. Working out three times a week, skipping the carbs today, paying myself first with every check, not going to Starbucks, making these little attempts to keep my house clean on a daily basis, right?

Whether it's career goal, whether it's career Goals, Financial goals, relational goals, health goals. Really. There's so many areas of life in which we all seek change that are subject to. To this unavoidable tension. Anywhere this tension exists, markets and solutions spring up. Trying to offer shortcuts, really. Right. Promising instant results without the commitment of time or energy.

Get rich quick. The lottery. Fat loss pills, Electronic ab simulators. Right. Build an online business overnight transformational trauma weekend workshop. You'll all be fixed instantly. Right? This stuff is everywhere because it's so alluring and so much more attractive than the alternative, which is I gotta keep doing something. I have to hold my awareness, my consciousness with intention and matched with action over time with consistency to change.

It's, you know, this dichotomy between awareness and change is what makes debt of whatever kind quite humbling. Definitely, in my experience. And because really, right. It's like I can know what change needs to occur in any moment, but it's often the case I can't actually change it in that moment. Instead, I have to trust myself to make a series of right actions repeatedly over time while also tolerating the discomfort of not being able to change the situation instantly.

Right. A good chunk of my time in my life, I couldn't tolerate that discomfort, which caused me to respond the only way I could at the time. Numbing out to avoid feeling right. Through food, through porn, sometimes through spending. This stuff is real. Now, the other really interesting thing, the paradox here is that the change we seek can only ever actually happen in the moment.

Right? So if I want to lose weight, how that works is in each individual moment, I have to do that extra rep, exert myself, refrain from that extra calorie, whatever that might be. The change I want can't happen in the moment, but the only action I can take is in the moment. Right? This is the great kind of paradox that can make transformation so intense.

We have to make a choice in the moment and then keep doing that over time for our structure for an actual stage of development to take root and to transform. This is a pain I've become so intimate with in my life. And I see a lot of men often getting completely overwhelmed with. And it can show up in a lot of different areas. Career debt, relational debt. Right. This is something I experienced in my marriage sometimes.

Wow. The pain we're feeling right now, that comes from a series of choices I made to not engage over time. And there's nothing I can do to reignite that in the moment. I have to keep coming back to connection repeatedly with my wife to Rebuild a type of trust and. And change the culture of my relationship. If you've ever experienced this pain, I'm putting this all out there, just so you know, I get it.

I know how challenging it can be. And what really changed things for me was support in community. Willpower is a pretty awful solution to transformation. It's a gas tank that's basically this big, so it can get depleted like that. It can get spilled like that. Community connection. Healthy accountability is a much more resilient way to transform.

When we have people around us, they can help keep connecting us to and reminding us of that really important feeling and awareness we had of why we want to change, why what we're experiencing in the moment is no longer okay, I can't live this way anymore, right? Oh, it hurts so much. So uncomfortable in my body or looking at my bank account is so brutal. Others can help bring us back, actually guide us back to that feeling.

So we have that intense, intense awareness that then demands action. And then as we change, as we keep committing to that awareness, as we hold that consciousness over time, making certain choices over and over and over again, they can also reflect to us the change they're seeing. And for whatever reason, the way it works in the world is oftentimes other people can see our change faster than we can, and they can help us stay on course.

Don't try to do these changes alone. I know I couldn't, and it just caused me more pain, because when I couldn't, it would be another reason to beat myself up, get really down on myself, and then turn to the very things that actually helped me dig these debt holes in the first place. The pain of debt is intense. You are being asked to hold discomfort over time and to trust yourself to keep in every individual moment, anchoring into a certain awareness and taking a certain action.

And it's only by doing that in the moment, over and over and over again, that your life will transform. All right, let me know how this lands for you, what kind of debt you have in your life, how you're dealing with it. And until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships, or your masculine presence in the world, just go to evolutionary men. Apply.