Why You Keep Rearranging Deck Chairs On the Titanic

It’s not your life that needs changing. It’s your relationship to it.

Which of life’s “deck chairs” are you endlessly rearranging?

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Welcome to Beyond Self Improvement issue #128. Every Wednesday, I share an essay with practical ideas on finding personal freedom in an unfree world.

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Dear Friend,

We’ve spent thousands of years perfecting a single strategy:

Control the environment, shape the outside world and hope it fixes how we feel inside. We built tools, stored food, and designed systems. Optimized everything from agriculture to air travel.

And underneath it all was one core belief: If I could get my circumstances right, I would be okay.

That strategy worked—for a while. It got us fire and smartphones. We survived, advanced and thrived materially.

But emotionally? Spiritually? That’s where it starts to fall apart. Because no matter how much we rearrange the contents of our lives, circumstances keep changing.

Still, we keep trying. When something stops working, we start tweaking, adjusting, rearranging, anything to get life back under control so we feel better. Then we move on to the next fix. And the next. And the next. But we rarely pause and seldom inquire.

We’re constantly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

That’s how we live. Something uncomfortable arises—boredom, grief, sadness—and we rush to fix our feelings in the quickest way we know how. We eat a bag of chips, buy something we don’t need, open a new tab, or start a project—anything that gives us a hit of control, however brief.

We numb ourselves, or we distract ourselves, but either way, we’re avoiding the very thing that needs our attention: the feeling itself.

Long ago, when I began listening to books and talks on Buddhist psychology on my iPod, I'd run into obstacles that made it hard to hear—a loud motorcycle, a garbage truck, people, leaf blowers, traffic, construction. I wanted to get away from people because they annoyed me, and I wanted to escape the sound because I couldn't hear the talk or the audiobook.

So I tried outrunning the noise by getting up earlier, running faster, and turning down side streets. I'd shake my fist internally, mutter expletives under my breath, and turn up the volume. However, I eventually realized that nothing ultimately works. At some point, my strategies for avoiding all the noise ran out. Some sounds were so loud I couldn't turn the volume up loud enough to drown them out. The truck, motorcycle, and leaf blower overwhelmed my strategy.

I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, trying to control the entire soundscape of the city so I could have my perfect listening experience. But the city didn't care about my spiritual practice.

The real trouble isn’t just that we use this strategy but that we put our faith in it: the idea that changing our circumstances will finally make us feel okay, not only now but permanently. We convince ourselves that if we land the right job, find the right partner, and stick to the right morning routine, then we’ll arrive.

But you don’t arrive. You wake up, or you keep running.

We live in a constant state of almost, always just shy of “there.” Have you got it completely together? Is everything finally done? Is this it?

We keep hoping the next job, the next city, the next book will be the one that settles us, that this will be the fix that finally makes us feel whole.

But it never is.

Part of the reason this pattern is so hard to break is the way our attention works. The mind doesn’t land on space or stillness. It gloms onto objects—furniture, stacks of books, pants that need to be hemmed.

We fixate on what is pleasing and displeasing. If something is pleasing, we feel a little better. If it isn't, we feel slightly worse, and we try to change it. That’s how we’ve trained ourselves to relate to the world.

Not through witnessing, but through control.

We’ve made the things we notice all day long—our furniture, our inbox, other people—the gatekeepers of our emotional well-being. If something is pleasant, we want more of it. If it's unpleasant, we blame it for how we feel.

We’ve handed over our mood to the contents of our lives.

It’s not that this strategy never works. Sometimes getting the thing—the job, the car, the new apartment—does make us feel better.

But it never lasts. Eventually, the thrill fades. The job becomes a chore. The car gets scratched. The apartment starts to feel small. So we start looking for the next thing. But nothing ever really does it.

Awareness is a radical reversal of everything we’ve been taught.

Instead of manipulating life to feel better, we start observing how we relate to it. Rather than chasing the perfect set of conditions, we begin to see the patterns behind our reactions, and that’s where real freedom begins.

This isn’t giving up. It’s waking up. Peace comes from meeting life, not managing it.

It’s noticing how often the mind narrates, judges, and resists—the constant commentary, an endless stream of thoughts that hijacks our attention. We spend most of our lives looking outward, reacting to the world around us. But what we’re learning is to watch how we react, to see the stories we add on top of what’s happening.

We react out of old habits replaying beliefs, defenses, and patterns we never consciously chose. Over time, they become invisible to us.

Waking up means becoming aware of those patterns. It means catching ourselves in the middle of a reaction and remembering: I don’t have to keep doing this.

But that kind of awareness doesn’t happen once. It’s something we practice repeatedly. The habit of reacting to life is deep and automatic. Therefore, we must train our minds to respond in a different way. And that starts with attention.

The first part of this training is simple but not easy: learning to steady the mind.

Because left on its own, the mind doesn’t stay still but runs around and makes a mess. We call it the puppy mind. Right now, I’m sitting for a German Shepherd mix named Mona who cannot resist digging in the garden. No matter how many times I say, “Mona!”, she looks up sheepishly, trots away, and then five minutes later, she’s back digging in the dirt.

That’s what our attention does. It wanders. It forgets. It starts digging again. So instead of yelling at it, we give it something to do. Something gentle and steady, like following the breath, or listening to sounds, or resting attention on the body.

This is the first layer of practice: calming the mind enough to see clearly.

The second part of practice is learning to observe. Learning to attend to the breath or the body helps us become aware of our reactivity. The grasping. The resisting. The way we grasp at what we like and contract and push away what we don’t.

Instead of getting swept up in what’s happening, we start to notice how we react to it. We begin to recognize our patterns of reactivity, inquire into their origins, and gain a deeper understanding of them. From there, we start our first faltering steps toward responding, rather than reacting.

That’s when insight begins, not from control, but from understanding.

And it only happens with sustained attention. A scattered mind can’t see clearly. But a steady mind becomes a mirror showing us how we move through the world, and why.

A still mind doesn’t change the world. It reveals it.

And the more we look, the more is revealed, not through force, but through witnessing. You don’t have to look for it. Just stay long enough, and the truth begins to reveal itself.

“The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.” — Sogyal Rinpoche

That’s it. That’s our job. Our only job is to look. And to look is to be in the present moment. That’s what it means to look.

One of the greatest gifts of this practice is that, over time, we come to like ourselves. Not in a surface, self-help kind of way, but in the way you come to appreciate a good friend.

The artist Georgia O’Keeffe once said that getting to know yourself takes time, just as it does with a friend. Sometimes you click right away. However, most of the time, it takes showing up again and again to build trust, intimacy, and connection.

That’s what this work is.

Not becoming someone better, but staying with yourself long enough to like and trust who you already are.

Keep steadying & witnessing,

Ryan

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