What I learned from going through the US immigration system
And where to eat out tonight..
Dear reader and friend, I hope the spring flowers are smiling at you wherever you go..
Here’s music that sounds like spring.
My coworker Ashley was talking about how her husband was relaxed at what comes his way through life and how “chill” he was. She mentioned a specific word, and said “he has an abundance mentality”, and I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I felt that I understood what she meant.
Her husband and I share something: we’re both immigrants who had to go through the American immigration system. It is one of most consequential and possibly life-changing experience, not from an outward looking perspective, but deeply in how one perceives life… If you keep an open hear, that is..
In a Corner.
Deep in the “substack comments”-verse, I remember reminding myself and
that our attempts to control our lives is a futile effort.. I wanted to save the comment to come back to it and build on it, but I’ve lost it somewhere..It’s a feature of the Western mindset of domination over one’s circumstances that I find myself fall into every now and then.
It’s mindset that I have to pull myself from, recognizing that a person - any person - attempting to grab his/her own life by the horns is not only gonna fail, but also will render us hurt, damaged, tired, and failing. This rigidity of approach towards life reflects a lack of understanding, and in fact a level of individualism, that is at a certain level, exposes sheer ignorance, and in some instances it manifests as completely devoid of any logic..
The Process, or lack thereof.
We all have gone through situations in life when life has thrown us a “curveball” so hard that we felt helpless towards it, and somewhat angry at it too. A situation that is so hard that we just froze in facing it. This is exactly the type of situation in which I found myself facing (and possibly millions of immigrants) find themselves facing when going through the legal madness of the American immigration system. You’re told to “wait” for further instructions. My “waiting” period was a little over a year. For other people it was more, and for some people I know, it’s been 10 years now. It’s a major unsettling event in someone’s life when they’re not able to contribute in any meaningful way within a legal system that treats them as people “under suspicion” until it decides otherwise, whenever that may be. Maybe I’ll get to write about the actual process itself (I had to send the US government 300 pages of ‘proof’). But how did this get here?
Going back through Western philosophy, the concept of Man’s control over his own circumstances was a major contributor to many of our dominant ethos and senses of identity that we see and interact with in our daily lives. We are told to ‘try as hard as we can’ and ‘never give up’ and ‘if you don’t succeed, try harder’ and so on. But this quest to dominate one’s life and all its aspects has led us to be more miserable through our advancements. We want to ‘utilize every minute of the day’ and ‘fill our days with productivity’ and ‘control the narrative of our lives’ and all these phrases that we become indoctrinated with. It’s a constant quest for ‘refinement’ and ‘improvement’ that started with the ‘enlightenment’. This also can be manifested in the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ and Man’s attempt to put an economic value to every second of his life, and tie it to wealth/success.
We can return to the Latin proverb that both Freud and Hobbes agreed and derived from: “Man is a wolf to Man” to see where this aggressiveness and desire for domination comes from, because naturally, if you don’t want to be eaten by the wolves, you have to be stronger than them, according to the Darwinian worldview..
You’re not in control, now go on and breathe a little..
I usually keep asking myself this question: how much of this life that I’m living is in fact due to my own decision-making or planning? A usual answer would be: actually very little. Upon close examination, even the very house or apartment we live in - one of our most intimate and deliberate decisions in our lives - depends on other people making a decision that allows us to live somewhere. Similar examination can be extended to our jobs, the people we marry, the cities we live in, etc. This fascination with control not only has made us miserable, but it has made us swim against tides much larger than us, that we generally tend to drown ourselves with blame, shame, and regret over things that if we look carefully at, we will recognize that we have minimal input/power over.
I spent around 2 years without a full-time job, and in this process I applied to over 100 jobs1, and in the process, I almost made it into TED (yes, that TED), and when I was asked about it, my response was always “it is not meant to be, no matter how hard I tried or however better I performed at these interviews, nothing probably would’ve changed that outcome.” and I always approached that difficult time of job searching with a bit of detachment from me relying on my own efforts. In fact, the job I am currently working in was sent to me by a friend. So, I might have been in a completely different place had that friend didn’t send me a LinkedIn link. wild!
In our muslim tradition (and I’m sure it resonates with many philosophies and faiths), we always carry this maxim:
“And know that what has passed you by [and you have failed to attain] was not going to befall you, and what has befallen you was not going to pass you by.” - Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between both aspects, and mastering this balance stems from two main ideas:
I do my best, knowing that things are way harder if I start to believe that I am in control, which I am not.
Nothing in this life can prevent something from happening to me, if it happened already, so dwelling on the regret is not necessarily productive.
Where to go out?
This ethic of maximization, and the need to improve and control every experience of our lives, extends in some cases where going out to eat becomes a competition of “where can I get the maximum benefit for the meal I want to eat?”.
In a city like New York, this easily becomes a paralyzing question. The choices are endless! I usually tend to agree with the first suggestion because I know for a fact that doing a ‘comparative study’ every time someone suggest a place to eat is definitely not a healthy approach to eating, let alone hanging out with friends and loved ones, because this not only pulls away from the fact your reduced number of choices makes you happier, but your social interaction will be heavily influenced by “maybe we should’ve gone to the other place..”
I might have digressed, but technically I didn’t. This comes back to my friend Ashley, and her husband’s “mentality of abundance”.
Dr. Anna Lembke, in her fantastic book “Dopamine Nation”2, talks about this and says:
The question is, why do so many of us living in rich nations with abundant material resources nonetheless operate in our daily lives with a scarcity mindset?
As we have seen, having too much material wealth can be as bad as having too little. Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification. Social media exaggeration and “post-truth” politics (let’s call it what it is, lying) amplify our sense of scarcity. The result is that even amidst plenty, we feel impoverished.
Off the rails..
Maybe this train of thought has gone a little bit off the rails, but I think these 2 things tie together. Our desire to express and convey control over our own lives forces is to have a mentality of scarcity of life, which leads us to adopting a mentality of domination over our circumstances, realizing - or not - how impossible of a task this is.
I believe that loosening our tight grip on our lives not only leads us to lead a slightly happier lives, but it also leaves room for self forgiveness in a way. I (and I would argue you, friend behind a screen) will not lose much of my life if I didn’t go to this place instead of that, or if I start thinking about life not as a formula one race, where you have to be hyper-vigilant on every turn otherwise ‘you’ll crash’, because no matter how hard you try, that pigeon on the track will make you crash.
I urge myself, and you too, to not forget that at the end of the day, as much success or growth we would like to achieve, we might not be able to. Maybe because someone didn’t pick your CV instead of someone else’s, or maybe because a teacher in some class didn’t give you enough grades, or maybe because you literally slipped on some black ice which made you stop running for over 5 years. This last one happened to me.
So, give yourself some grace.. Know that you’re not alone in your attempts to be the captain of your own ship, but sometimes, the wind may not blow in your favor.. And that’s ok..
There’s nothing you can do to change the direction of the wind..
Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
Other things:
- 100 years of solitude looks like something.
- "Losing my hair made me miserable. Now I’m as bald as an egg, I couldn’t be happier." This is a hilarious article about a situation I need to come to peace with myself, hah. I still have some time though..
- There’s also this wonderful podcast episode with MIT professor Kieran Setiya on how philosophical inquiry has a very practical and applicable purpose outside of the classroom — to help guide us through life’s most challenging circumstances. He talks about self-help, FOMO, and midlife crises.
- Coming through this post a thought flashed in my head: “You don’t have to write something that is a 19 minutes read in order to qualify it as meaningful..” I still wrote for 8 minutes, thinking it would be three..
- I still don’t want to re-read extensively, and filter though my thought process, and all that ‘refining’ that I admit needs to be done, because it is not the point. ok I need to go to sleep..
Apparently, the average response rate for job applications is something in the range of 5-10% of the positions one applies for. It’s mad, but it’s also another reason to believe none of us is in control.
It’s a fantastic and easy read book that I highly recommend!
I really enjoyed reading this. Especially pondering on the question: "how much of this life that I’m living is in fact due to my own decision-making or planning?" I will try and find that comment somewhere but I also trust the thought will pop back into both of our minds somehow, someway. I cannot wait to watch 100 Years of Solitude!