#80 - Existentialism in Action: Shaping Who You Are & How You Live

In this episode, we are getting philosophical. Through the lens of existentialism and with respect for semantic subjectivity we ask two BIG BIG questions: 

Who are we committed to being?

What life are we committed to living?   

Cry (Just a Little) by Bingo Players, A-Trak, and Phantoms

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Transcript

Hello Everyone! Welcome to The Game of Life Podcast; I am Alexandria Burek and I am your host.

Thank you for picking my show; you will find this show is a blend of personal stories and life lessons covering a wide range of topics that are designed to help you live life, a little better everyday; my goal in sharing these personal stories, wins, whatever it may be is always to inspire you–my life is so radically different now even I am a bit amazed at the transformation that's taken place over the last 3 years. With that, no better time to get into it than the present. 

Today we are continuing with the unconventional style from last week–in today’s episode I am going to deep dive into those three questions I left you with in episode 79. Because these ideas are SO BIG, it has been taking me some time to digest them. With that, I will give a refresh on the questions and share some of the ways I am going about exploring these questions in my own mind. 

-Who are we committed to being? 

-What life are we committed to living?

-What is our relationship to being in a relationship?

Before we get into it, I will give you guys the standard style personal update: 

Personal Update:

My goal with the personal update is to put my money where my mouth is and lead by example. I’ll share three personal wins, weave in some gratitude, hit you with a new original thought and drop in the song of the week (link will be in the show notes). 

Wins: 

First, my place is fully listed as an STR, and I in the first 5 days on the market I have achieved 23% of the revenue I was hoping to get by the EOY. This is a complete VOTE OF CONFIDENCE. I could not be more happy, thankful, or excited about the kickoff of my place as a vacation rental!       

Second, I put some time, energy, and effort into deep thinking, reflecting, and visualizing what I want for my life. This year seems to have thrown some curve balls, taken some unexpected turns, and seems like it is very busy in the best way possible–becuase of that I feel like I have gone into hyper tactical mode in the last 3 months or so–basically wake up, make a to do list, execute, and repeat–without much time to reflect on the actions I am taking and how they line up with the life I want for myself. After the reflection I did this morning, I feel pretty good overall, and that is a W in my book.       

Third, I am sincerely grateful and proud of the ways I have become so resilient–I have pushed past so many challenges. The old me would not have made it–the old me would have shut down. It just goes to show you how much mindset matters–if I leave you with any single bit of advice that sticks, work on your mindset, make sure your inputs are good. 

Gratitude: I am so grateful that by keeping an open, calm mind in the midst of these challenges I’ve come across, I have uncovered incredible opportunities that I was not aware existed. These opportunities could very well be the answer I have been searching for. I can only believe this is again, God’s doing–and that he clearly had a much bigger plan for me than I could even fathom. I could not be more grateful to Him for this recent discovery.     

Original Thought: Mastering delegation is a game-changer. By honing your ability to delegate effectively, you can build and scale an empire. Be the kind of person you would want to take direction from. 

Feature song of the week. This week’s song is Cry (Just a Little) by Bingo Players, A-Trak, and Phantoms. This is the leadoff song on my running playlist–I have been a bit inconsistent with running due to all of the bnb work, but I am so excited about the idea of getting some great runs in over the next week and throughout the summer–I hope you enjoy. 

Now that the personal update is done, let's bring it back to these BIG BIG questions posed by my Landmark Seminar Leader. So for anyone who doesn’t know, Landmark is an educational system deeply rooted in the existentialism philosophy. 

Existentialism focuses on individual existence, freedom, and the meaning of life, with a strong emphasis on personal responsibility and the subjective experience of being. The godfathers of existentialism are Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. 

Throughout the landmark program I was enlightened and transformed in the best ways possible–it was at the same time I discovered, I actually LOVED philosophy–isn’t that a little bit funny? I didn’t know I loved philosophy until March of this year–33 years old and just found this out. Anyway. There are many amazing takeaways from my time in Landmark, and my involvement is far from done. 

For now though, I want to share these three BIG BIG questions with you all, and encourage you to play around with these ideas in your mind. I encourage you to let these ideas bounce off the walls a bit, so you can have a deeper understanding of who you are, who you want to be, and where you are headed in this short time we have as humans. I am far from done with a finished product or complete answer–maybe I will never have one–maybe this is a question I let tumble in my mind regularly to see how it shapes up. Maybe this gets added to the yearly or quarterly review. Maybe I revisit it every 5 years. Time will tell what's right. As you do this exercise, consider the time horizon of these questions as much as the questions themselves. Is it the span of your life, or is it this month? 

First: Who are you committed to being? What does being even mean? 

When I first thought about this question, I looked through the lens of other people, I thought, how do I want to BE towards other people. The answer I came up with was to make others feel good after having been in my presence; I want the people I encounter to feel good about having interacted with me. I also knew that I wanted to be a source of light and inspiration for anyone who is watching–whether I know it or not. 

The second time I came back to this question, I thought more about how do I want to experience myself. How do I want to describe myself? I came up with resilient, optimistic, relentless, and fearless. 

When I say those words I mean, I want to be resilient, I want to keep getting back up, I want to find a way, I want to keep going UNTIL I succeed.  

When I think about being optimistic, I mean I want to believe that I can rather than I can’t. I want to believe that the world is a good place–and I do, there has never been a better time to be alive. I want to believe that people are good. Being optimistic means, I am committed to the belief that most dogs aren’t out to fight with me and my dogs, that instead, their default nature is friendly, loving and playful–and the same is true for my dogs. 

To me, relentless means once I decide that I am going after something, I do not stop until I get it. I do not give up. This is a bit different from resilience, because to me, relentless means I crank up the volume, I turn on the after burners, and I just absolutely go for it. Relentless means, I am not allowed to make excuses. Relentless means, I find a way to execute on tight timelines, against the odds, despite any challenges that may pop up. 

If you asked for my definition of fearless, I would tell you being fearless is objectifying your fear. I would say it's acting despite the fear you’re feeling. So my choice in life, is to be fearless. To send the text. To take the leap of faith. To go for it, even though I am scared. Even though I don’t know how it will turn out.  

So as you think about who you are committed to being, you might want to think about it from both the internal and the external perspective. Then once you come up with some words that feel right, you’re going to want to define that–based on the idea of semantic subjectivity the words I chose might mean completely different things to you based on your lived and perceived experiences. It's critical you have a clear vision and definition of the way you want to BE; without a clear vision and definition it will be near impossible to hit it. 

Now that we have a framework for deciding how we want to BE, we can now apply this same concept to the life we want to LIVE. 

Second. What life are you committed to living? I have a few words I came up with: vibrant, authentic, loving, intentional, and successful. 

When I envision a vibrant life, I see lots of travel, unique experiences, literally a variety of everything–a variety of interests, a variety of food, a variety of people, a variety of careers, and a variety of hobbies.  

When I talk about living an authentic life I mean, a life that is true to my soul and me and no one else. An authentic life means I am fully expressed. Being authentic and living an authentic life means I show up as me, and trust that the right people will fall away and the right ones will wholeheartedly embrace me without asking me to be different than I am. 

A loving life is one that I can’t quite define yet. All I can think of, is a life where love is freely and often given and received. But I guess if I think about it one layer deeper, I don’t really know what it means to be loved. I can refer back to the idea of unconditional love from “Don’t believe everything you think” where the author learned that love is not a list of qualities or reasons, its just a feeling. I can think about LOVING others, but I have a real hard time saying and believing that I have been LOVED very much at all in my life–its actually kind of sad to say that. I say this because there are a very small group of people I can honestly say love me without caveats, or conditions, or expectations, or exchanges–they just love me for me, and they actually see all of me. More to explore here for sure–perhaps a future update or more research or an entire episode on love is in order. 

To live an intentional life is far easier to define. In my mind, an intentional life is being hypervigilant, ensuring your actions and behaviors support your goals and visions.  I distinctly remember telling my therapist in April 2023 that I am committed to living an intentional life from here out. For me it is the opposite of a life on autopilot; I despise autopilot lives–I find them to be completely wasteful and unfulfilling. 

Success is something I have defined clearly, hit, leveled up, hit, leveled up, and so on because I am a hedonic little creature. I also believe part of this is that I set the bar low enough to hit–which I think is neutral to good. I think it would be a pretty miserable existence to say I am only successful if I become a billionaire–because I am not even a millionaire yet. I would have no little milestones to celebrate. I like the little milestones. Recently I have come to a place that has prompted me to reevaluate success (again–hence the intentional life piece). In doing this episode, I am interested in the idea of success and I wonder, what would an episode on success look like? Stay tuned. It is coming. 

The third question, what is your relationship to being in a relationship? We don’t have time for this and I believe it would be best served as a stand alone episode. Think on that over the next week. We will pickup here, where we left off. 

Closeout

You guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope this prompted some reflection and encouraged you to think about who you are being and how you are living. I hope you are able to think about it from both an internal and personal perspective as well as from the perspective of those you interact with. 

Thank you so much for spending this time with me—I hope it’s making your day, and maybe your life, a little better. I’d love your thoughts on what I shared today—leave a comment, shoot me a text via the fanmail link in the show notes, either way I would love to hear what’s sticking with you! If you loved this, or even just liked it, please share the show and or give it a 5 star rating! 

Get out in the world. Do good. Be good. Byeeeee.