More Margin, for less stress.

Good morning,

 

Life can get too busy if you jam too many things into it. For demonstration purposes, imagine you were putting skittles into a box. Eventually, you would fill the box and not be able to fit any more in. If you then proceeded to force more sweets into the box, you would start to mush all the skittles together until all the individual sweets were pressed into a mangled mess. Eventually, the pressure in the box would become too great, it would break at the hinges and you would be left with a gross gooey meld of all the sweets you pressed inside.

 

You wouldn’t be able to taste any specific flavours,  each individual sweet will be ruined and the overload of sugar would make you need to take a nap for a crazy long time.

 

 

Like the skittle analogy,  we as humans can sometimes get into the habit of adding more and more things into our daily schedules. When we reach our saturation points, like the ruined sugary snacks above, we can destroy the fun found in individual activities by filling our free time with additional things that give us no joy or time for introspection.

 

Look, I understand the problem. Who doesn’t want it all? Take those extra hours of overtime for some extra dosh? Sounds good.  Want to join that boxing gym so you can get shredded? Cool! Decide to sort your house out by tidying up every room? Good goal. Get the pony your parents promised you as a child? Heck yeah! Etc etc.

 

 

Fun and positive things in your schedule can help put you on your path to where you want to be. Unfortunately, like the British summer, we are not perfect and can often suffer from weaknesses and heavy rain showers. With the mass variety of options available to us, we have access to an almost endless supply of activities we can fill our time with. Your dear author sometimes enjoys playing video games after a long, hard day of town management. This would be fine in short doses, unfortunately,  these tricky games are as addictive as a new scientifically engineered strain of meth.

 

In short, I was spending an outrageous amount of time playing these games and found that I was successfully plugging large amounts of my free time using this strategy. The detrimental effects of this are two-fold:

 

1.  These time-wasting behaviours steal your opportunity to do positive activities and improve your life.
2. Free time that can be actively used to do ‘non-activities’ like meditation or quiet introspection is filled with mind-numbing things that neither brings us joy or closer to where we want to be.

 

 

A secret about life that is often not talked about is that we need these quieter times and ‘non-activities’ to be able to appreciate the things we actually want to do and enjoy. As we have discussed in previous letters, your town is made up of many different buildings and structures. These places are important because it allows us as Mayors and town planners to structure and compartmentalise our lives into manageable blocks. What do you get if you jam two many buildings into your town? A big mushy skittley mess that’s what!

 

I am going to write more letters on this subject soon. The ability to harness Margin will not turn you into a zen master overnight but it may help you detach from the hectic pace of life and reconnect you to your inner thoughts and feelings.

 

Yours sincerely,

Ryan Rose-Blanc

Rose-Blanc Town management