Welcome to episode 231 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us.

If you feel like the world is moving a whole lot faster these days, you're not alone.

We're consuming information at an unprecedented rate and we're staying connected 24-7. And it's no secret

that that's taking a toll on our health, our relationships, and our overall well-being.

Today's guest, Jeff Bethke, looks at how this fast pace is zapping our sense of purpose and meaning.

His new book, To Hell With the Hustle, Reclaiming Your Life in an

overworked, overspent, and overconnected world, looks at how we can shift our focus from our online

life to our inward life and find greater purpose and meaning. Jeff, welcome to Live Happy Now.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Well, you talk about a book for our times. I know that your new book is written for millennials, but it really applies to anyone who's overextended in today's world. And I think that's just about all of us. It is. It is. I mean, I think, yeah, definitely, the core is definitely to more kind of my peers, I would say, you know, generationally millennials at the peak of this problem. But at the end of the day, because I get pretty heavy in the book actually on some deep dives, on some research and the industrial revolution and the light bulb and our concept of time. And when you really dig into it, a lot of this is actually not a millennial problem. It's a Western problem. There's a lot, like we kind of have created this moment. This is the logical conclusion of about a 100 or 200 year build. But yeah, that's the essence of the book, is that this pain point that we're all feeling for sure right now. Well, it inspired you to write it. There had to be some sort of trigger, I'm guessing, that made you think, all right, I got to address this. Yeah, I mean, just, yeah, my own life, that same thing. I talked about this, you know, I think that's the first paragraph of the book of just, you know, kind of basically our narrative became basically what everyone's narrative was that, what I kind of say is the trajectory of the American dream puts you on is actually a deeply toxic, corrosive, and problematic one because it only exacerbates this, right? You're supposed

to get a bigger and bigger house the more you get older, a bigger and bigger mortgage. You're supposed to get a bigger and bigger job and climb the ladder so that you're going to get busier and busier. You're supposed to have kids and then more and more kids. And then as those kids get older and older, then they're going to have more and more activities. So the literal trajectory of our ideal Western selves is one that actually kind of only

puts you on this treadmill of exhaustion, burnout, and basically frying yourselves to death and kind of

totally commodifying yourself and kind of killing your humanness. So when did you realize that

and realized you also had a solution that you wanted to present? I think, yeah,

for me, you know, as a follower of Jesus, that's where I first came back to and kind of just said,

man, what is, you know, does Jesus show us something here that's antithetical? Because when you do,

whether you know, believe in Jesus or don't, obviously historical figure, 2,000 years ago had a massive

impact more than almost anyone else in human history. And it's clear from the text that we have of him, historically speaking, that he seemed to be a non-anxious presence. There seemed to be a way in which he went about his life that was non-hurried, that was non-hustled, and that that actually led to the flourishing of his own humanness and then blessed all

those around him. So going back to that, is there something in him that he can teach us? And that's

basically the essence of the book. And I say yes. And I think there's kind of this reclaiming or this

recalling of, you can call them spiritual disciplines, you can call them kind of practices for life,

but recalling ourselves to things like silence and Sabbath and solitude and obscurity and all these different things that actually we kind of now see as a curse, but historically actually have been a blessing to some people and actually are the things that kind of fill you up to be able to resist against those pressures I just mentioned.

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