In this Solo thoughts episode, Peter McGraw introduces the distinction between A-Life and B-Life. A-Life is achievement, optimization, production, and living through goals. B-Life is presence, pleasure, engagement, and doing things for their own sake. Drawing from anxiety, sabbatical planning, retirement, Seneca, and a vintage typewriter, Peter makes the case for shifting the dial from producing a remarkable life to actually living one, Solo or not.
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Listen to Episode #268 here
Solo Thoughts 19: A-Life vs. B-Life
The “A-Life” Engine: Survival, Anxiety, and Achievement Culture
Welcome back. Solo Thoughts 19: A-Live vs. B-Life. This one’s been brewing for a while. My challenges with anxiety are well documented on the show. I characterize him as a nuisance. Not pathology. My anxiety rarely stops me from doing something but it makes the process more difficult than it needs to be. The source is no surprise and adaptation from being vigilant in a chaotic household growing up. One with the mentally ill mother. You didn’t know what to expect when she walked in the door after a hard day’s work.
It shows a challenging and highly evaluative career path. One, I was not exactly suited for academia. As I finally got good at my job, I ramped up the challenge by moving into the public academic sphere on top of my already challenging life on campus. I grew up without a lot. Not destitute, but there was no safety net. I developed a scarcity mindset. How to avoid bad things from happening? I did what a lot of people do in that situation. I got to work and I worked hard relentlessly. I pursued achievement like my life depended on it because for a while, it did. I was in survival mode. You know it and a lot of you have lived it and maybe living it now then something happened.
Something happens to a lot of driven people. Survival turned into ambition. The threat went away, but the engine kept running. I wasn’t working to stay alive anymore. I was working to achieve, to build, to prove, to produce and produce. I landed in a field that rewards exactly that. If you want to design a system that turns humans into productivity machines, you could hardly do better than modern academia.
Tenure clocks, citation counts, impact factors, adding lines to Avita, and yearly evaluations on a 5-point scale that translates into raises and summer salaries. Everyone has an opinion about how “good” your research is. I produced and went further such as books and podcasts, including this one, key notes, media appearances and TED talks. You see it all with the Solo Movement. I turned myself into a machine and the machine worked and achieved. I’m thankful for that.
For a couple of decades now, coinciding with the professional job search I went on and then life as a professor. My sleep has been disrupted. Ruminating in the middle of the night. Vigilant is hell. A mind that is always running some background process, planning, solving, optimizing and anticipating. That’s the price I had to pay. It’s like being sore after working out. There was something else I haven’t talked about that many of my friends don’t even know about. Though, most of my girlfriends of the years have witnessed it.
I occasionally experience what’s called a nocturnal panic attack. It’s not a nightmare. It’s not a night terror. About 30 to 60 minutes after falling asleep, I experienced a sudden jolt of fear that rips me out of sleep, 0 to 100. For me, it happens most often on the first night of a trip. It does happen on occasion when I’m at home. Typically, I realize that everything’s so okay and I go right back to sleep. It’s stress related and I’m tired of being stressed. I’m tired of being exhausted by my lifestyle, rushing around, optimizing, being vigilant and planning.
I’m tired of the to-do list that regenerates overnight. I’m tired of the feeling that every hour, every minute needs to be accounted for and optimized. I’m tired of picking up a book and immediately thinking of how I can use it to produce. I’m tired by the low-grade hum of anxiety that comes from living as if everything is a means to something else. It’s not a crisis. It’s not a breakdown. It’s more like a recognition. A slow dawning like ruminating for the 5,000th time and realizing the problem isn’t the sleep. Maybe the problem is the engine.
For a few years, I’ve been working on lowering my stress and anxiety recognizing that I’m okay. That things have turned out well. I can do things because I want to do that rather than I have to do them. To be more improvisational rather than scheduled. Be more present rather than vigilant. These nocturnal panic attacks have faded as a result. Yet after a particularly stressful travel day, one of these hit and I popped out of bed in a panic. I don’t even know what the panic was about. Maybe my passport, which was safely locked in the hotel safe, had gone missing. Whatever it was.
I jumped out of bed to find it and solve this problem. I got tangled in the sheets and came crashing to the floor. I braced my fall and busted my hand. It was useless. The next day, it was slow to heal and an X-ray and CT scan revealed that I have a broken bone. Now I’m splintered for four plus weeks. In soccer, they called this in-owned goal. It sucks but if I hadn’t hurt myself, I wouldn’t have thought much about it. The brakes have been such a disrupting force that it’s forcing me to realize that I have not made enough progress.
I don’t know if I need to do Ayahuasca, but I need to make a change, more change. With that in mind, I have a sabbatical coming. For those of you outside the academy, sabbatical is a period. Usually, a semester or a year. I’m going to take a year off. You step away from teaching and service obligations to focus on your research, on your scholarship. It typically takes two forms. The first is a chance to produce. Write that book or finish those papers. Frankly, that had been languishing. Collect the data you’ve been putting off. Maybe apply for a grant.
The second is a chance to slow down, breathe, read, think, have conversations, consider and to be curious. Most academics choose the first. That’s what I’ve done largely in my past sabbaticals. What happens is, you produce from a different location. You produce more. I have writing projects, so I’m going to do that. I want to lean into the second and yet, I can still feel my old ways pulling. The sabbatical is approaching and my instinct, my deep automatic survival code at instinct is to plan it, optimize it or turn it into a project with deliverables and milestones. Make a to-do list for the sabbatical, which completely defeats the point.
Defining A-Life vs. B-Life: Achievement vs. Living Beautifully
As demonstrated by these two sabbatical options, I want to highlight two modes of living. I call them A-life and B-life respectively. A-life is A-life of achievement, optimization or production. It means to an end. You do things because of what they lead you to. You read to extract insights. You exercise to hit metrics. You network to build connections. You publish to get cited. The activity is rarely the point. The outcome is the point.
B-life is different. It’s more akin to living beautifully. The activity itself is the point. You do things because doing them is enjoyable, absorbing and delightful. Not because of where it gets you, because it is the ride. Now, this is not hustle culture versus hippie commune. This is not ambition versus laziness. That’s easy misreading but it’s not what I think is the case. Both modes are legitimate. Both have value. The question is, whether you’re choosing or defaulting. Let me put it another way. If you’re familiar with my foundation, the flourishing model of a remarkable life. You know that flourishing has multiple components.
Purpose, meaning and achievement are A-life territory. The model also includes engagement and pleasure. Those are B-life. You’d be sitting there the whole time. I’ve written about them. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to them. What’s interesting is that A-life and B-life are not necessarily about different activities. They are about different orientations towards the same activity. I’ll walk you through it with some examples. Reading. I love to read.
In A-life, I read to extract. I’m highlighting and taking notes. I’m thinking about how this connects to my research, my writing, and my next talk. The book becomes a tool. B-life, I read to satisfy my curiosity. To be delighted by ideas and be entertained. I read because the sentences are beautiful or those ideas are strange. I just want to know what happens next. The book is the destination. It’s the same chair I sit in. It may even be the same book but completely different experiences.
Writing. In A-life, I’d write to publish. Every paragraph and every sentence is aimed at an editor, an audience and a citation. B-life, I write to explore, think on paper, and see what I’m feeling. Not for anyone else and the distinction matters. Walking. In A-life, I walk for the steps for the fitness tracker, the cardiovascular benefit, and the longevity. B-life, I walk for pleasure or flaneur for exploration. I walked because it’s nice out. The street is interesting or I have nowhere to be. Fighting. I box and you probably know this.
In A-life, I fight to win, improve and hit targets. B-life, I fight for flow and mastery. For the feeling of being completely absorbed into something difficult and physical. Not to win, but to be present. The same behavior but different lives. When you start to see the distinction, the dominoes start to fall. If you embrace B-life, even experimentally or even partially, a bunch of things change. To-do list becomes less necessary. Maybe unnecessary because the whole point of it’s to-do list is to track what you haven’t done.
In B-life, the doings the point. There’s nothing to track. Follower counts and lines on Avita and merit raises. They stopped mattering as much. Not because you’re above them, but because the reward system has shifted from external to internal. The definition of a good day changes dramatically. A good A day is one where you check off a lot of boxes. A good B day is one where several things were worth doing, even though nobody knew about them and will never know.
The pace slows and here’s the big one. It no longer matters how long things take. I have a hard time getting my head around that one. In A-life, time is the enemy. Every minute is a resource to be optimized. If you’re not doing something, you’re falling behind. That’s why I spend my whole A-life rushing around. In B-life, time is the median. It’s what the experience is made of. Why would you want to rush through it?
I’m going to stay with this for a moment because for someone like me and maybe for someone like you, slowness doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t feel like a relief. It feels like failure. When you spend decades in A-life, your nervous system equates speed with safety. Rushing feels productive. Stillness feels dangerous. As I said, it’s like I’m falling behind. Everyone else is getting ahead and you’re just sitting there not accomplishing anything.
The Difficulty of Stillness: Resisting the Urgency of Achievement
The first few times I tried to slow down deliberately. Not because I was on vacation but just as a practice. I felt discomfort. I pulled to check my phone. Open my laptop and make a list. My body didn’t know what to do with unstructured time. Here’s what I found. When you stay with it, when you resist the pole and just let the pace be what it is. Something can shift. Your attention changes. Instead of skimming across the surface of everything, you start to settle into one thing. You notice more.
I’d be doing this with my coffee. Now, when I drink my coffee in the morning, I sit with it. Nothing else. I smell it. I noticed the warmth. I see the steam. I look at the color. I look at the crema and I take a sip. I really taste it. At the price of a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, it’s totally worth it. Yet, I still find that to be difficult sometimes. I want to get to my to-do list. I want to crack open the laptop. The focus that comes from slowness is different from the focus that comes from urgency.
Urgency narrows attention to the task, clones this and opens the experience. You can think of one as a spotlight and the other, as a window. Another thing that can happen is that feelings start to matter more. That cup of coffee tastes better. I enjoy it more. In A-life, feelings are noise. They distract you from the work. In B-life, they’re the signal. You know how you’re actually alive. None of this is new, by the way. Seneca said it 2,000 years ago in the slim book, On The Shortness of Life, which you haven’t read. Stop what you’re doing, read it.
It’s short and pretty easy to get. It will rearrange you. He makes the argument that life is not short. It’s just that we waste most of it. The way we waste it according to Seneca is by living instrumentally, by always deferring and by treating today as a means to tomorrow. Being so busy with the machinery of life and we never live it. He wasn’t talking about lazy people. He was talking about ambitious people such as senators, generals and empire builders. People who accomplished enormous things and still somehow missed the point.
They got to the end. While they accomplished a lot, they realize that they’ve been too busy and not alive. That’s the A-life trap. You can be spectacularly successful in A-life and still feel underneath at all that something’s missing because something is. The experience is self. This is why the framework matters beyond just me or just the reader who thinks about slowing down. Consider retirement. Millions of people spend 30 or 40 years in A-life mode, goals, metrics, promotions, quarterly reviews, or performance evaluations. They may build their entire identity on production and achievement and then one day, stop. You retire. The machine shuts off.
Now, you’re supposed to enjoy yourself. Many people can’t. It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s not because they’re ungrateful and they’re bad at leisure. It’s just that they’ve never developed the capacity for B-life. They have no practice at doing things that aren’t for something. The research is sobering. Depression spikes in the first year of retirement. Marriages seemed fine. Suddenly, buckle under the weight of two, people who don’t know how to spend a Tuesday without a to-do list.
People who are admired suddenly feel invisible and lost. The advice they get, “Find a hobby. Volunteer. Stay busy.” Which, in some ways, is just A-life in a cardigan. It’s the same machine with a different paint job. The answer and the heart truth no one tells retirees or tells anyone leading up to retirement. That you need to learn B-life before you need it. You need to practice doing things for their own sake while you still have the structure of A-life to fall back on. Otherwise, it’s a tough transition.
The Solo Advantage: Reclaiming Freedom Beyond the Life Script
Here’s where it gets specific to you, the solos. The default life script marriage, kids, mortgage, career ladder is almost entirely A-life. The pursuit of meaning. You’re always building towards something. The next milestone or the next slice stage. The narrative has a direction. The direction is forward and the metric is progress. When you step off the script as a solo by choice or chance, you lose the built-in A-life architecture.
There’s no one handing you the next goal. No spouse to build a life plan. No kids to optimize for, perhaps. No default trajectory. Most solo people like me have just substituted different A-life metrics. Career becomes an identity or maybe it’s fitness or travel goals or financial goals. Maybe you want to retire early or fire a movement. I swap out the content but keep the operating system. B-life is the radical solo opportunity that a lot of singles overlook.
When you’re solo, you have something that a couple people often don’t have the space and freedom to ask whether achievement is the point at all. No one else’s life depends on your answer. Now, before you send me any emails saying I’ve lost my mind. I already know I’ve lost my mind. I’m not telling you to quit your job and become a monk. I’m not saying A-life is bad. I’m not saying ambition is poison. I’ve built my life on A-life and I’m grateful for what it gave me.
What I’m saying for this is, for most people, it’s a dial and not a switch. You don’t use one or the other. You can have both. You can have a B-life and still have A moments. You’re living beautifully savoring the days, doing things for their own sake and then you decide to train for a marathon. That’s an A moment inside a B-life. You choose it, you finish it and you continue on with your B-life. You can live in A-life and have B moments. You’re in the grind, deadlines, deliverables, and the whole machine running hot.
One evening, you pick up a novel and you read it for two hours. Only because the writing is so wonderful. That’s a B moment inside an A-life. No agenda. No takeaway. Only pleasure and then you go back to work in the morning. The point is not to land on one side of the dial and stay there. The point is to know the dial exists and to know which mode you’re in. To know whether you choose it or it chooses you.
Many of us have been living on the A side of the dial for so long, we forget there’s another side to the dial. We forgot we had a choice. Machines were running on autopilot and didn’t even notice. It’s why I wanted to share this episode with you. one more thing as I wrap this. You might remember not that long ago Solo Thoughts 18: Welcome Rough Seas, where I talked about the idea of a psychologically rich life. One of the authors of this work, Aaron Westgate was a guest on the show. A psychologically rich life is A-life full of variety, novelty and perspective changing. Not just happy and not just meaningful. Interesting, as I say. To be alive and to live passionately. Where does psychological richness and feeling alive fit within the A versus B-life?
I think it’s independent. Forgive the metaphor. It’s more like a volume knob rather than a switch next to the A-life and B-life dial. You can have a psychologically rich A-life. The entrepreneur who builds a company in three different industries travels constantly and accumulates wild stories all in pursuit of the next achievement. You can also have a psychologically rich B-life. A person who wanders through a foreign city flaneuring with no agenda and stumbles into a conversation that rearranges how they see the world. No goal. No output. Only openness and a rich experience, indeed.
You can also have a cycle of either A-life or B-life. The A-life would look like this. The person grinding the same optimization loop year after year merely living. B-life without richness is that person who savors the same pleasant routine every day, comfortable but flat. Now, it’s easier to find richness in the A-life. This challenge produces more novelty when you’re pushing, striving and taking risks. The rule keeps changing on you. Rich just almost comes as a byproduct.
Practicing B-Life: Thinking on Paper and Curated Resources
B-life helps to be a little more attentional about it. Stay curious. Stay open. Say yes to the unfamiliar, even when nothing is pushing you towards it. It’s possible but requires a different effort. Not the effort of production, but the effort of attention. A close with something that happened to me the other night related to my attempt to live a B-life. I’m back in Denver. It’s golden hour and I’m sitting in front of a typewriter. A manual typewriter. A vintage royal forward one. If you know your literary history, Jack Kerouac used the royal to write On The Road, a book that I’ve been reading.
I bought this thing on a whim off eBay to figuring out how to put the ribbon and deal with sticky keys and learn how to hit the keys hard enough with a busted hand to make an imprint on the paper. I sat down. Put on some vinyl. Some Bob Dylan and I started typing. Not for this show. Not for the latest essay I’m working on or a keynote or anything or for anyone at all. I was just typing. Thinking on paper. Punching keys when my index fingers create that satisfying mechanical clackity clack sound. The way the carriage jumps when I hit return.
The fact that there’s no delete key. You have to commit to a sentence, to an idea. I’m not there to be productive or to publish. Not because it was a step towards something. I became engrossed, focused and in flow. I had a slight smile on my face because the act was enjoyable. It was strangely beautiful. At some point, I typed this. “There is no falling behind because there is no destination. The ride is the destination.” Not the most profound set of words but it landed with me. What about this episode landed with you? Do you want to live more of a B-life? How would you do so?
Here’s what’s funny. If you want to live the A-life, there are tons of resources. I feel like I’ve read them all. The productivity books from David Allen’s, Getting Things Done to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. YouTube videos about how to optimize your morning routine. Podcast about how to get more done in less time. The A-life has an entire industry behind it. Resources about how to simply enjoy life, how to do things for their own sake and how to stop optimizing and start being present. There are far fewer and they’re harder to find.
Partly because the person who writes a book about slowing down is less likely to bother publishing it or to have a marketing funnel. They exist and they’re good. As you may know, there’s a solo community you can sign up for PeterMcGraw.org/Solo. I’m going to share a full reading list there on the episode discussion thread but let me give you a few here as I wrap. Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, as I mentioned earlier. It’s short and it will rearrange you.
Remember, life’s not short. We’re just wasting most of it. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks of which there’s a Solo episode book club about it. That’s the book that preceded Oliver’s book, Meditations for Mortals, which I talked to him about on the show. It’s the best contemporary case for accepting our limitations and having more B-life moments. Instead of trying to cram it all in and rushing around. I’ve just started reading Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. This one’s a little academic. It’s a sleeper. No pun intended.
He argues that Leisure isn’t the absence of work. It’s a contemplative state. A way of being receptive to the world rather than extracting from it. Byung-Chul Han has a book called The Burnout Society. He makes the case that we moved from a society that forces discipline on us to one where we exploit it from inside. The achievements subject, his term, drives itself into exhaustion under the guise of freedom. If that doesn’t describe A-life, it doesn’t describe me. I don’t know what to do.
Finally, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is not about laziness. It’s about reclaiming attention from the attention economy. Stepping outside the logic of efficiency. It does a nice job of mapping directly onto the A-life and B-life distinction. As I said, the rest of the list is the episode discussion thread. You can go find it. Thank you as always for tuning in, my good solos. Go live beautifully. Cheers.
Important Links
- On The Shortness of Life
- Solo Thoughts 18: Welcome Rough Seas
- On The Road
- Getting Things Done
- Deep Work
- PeterMcGraw.org/Solo
- Four Thousand Weeks
- Meditations for Mortals
- Leisure: The Basis of Culture
- The Burnout Society
- How to Do Nothing