which mindset is driving your life?
Do you ever wonder what drives your life and causes you to make the decisions that you do? We often think that the choices we make around how to spend our time, talents, and money are all one-off decisions. In reality, though, they all spring out of whatever mindset we take towards life.
Mindset? If you’ve never considered your mindset before, I hope you keep reading! A mindset is:
An underlying frame that you use to view life and make sense of the world around us.
It’s like a pair of contact lenses: they shape how you see everything around you, even though you’ve forgotten that you’re wearing them.
The mindset we use to frame our lives is crucial and impacts every decision that we make. That’s why I want to help you understand the two dominant mindsets in our culture and show how they impact your life.
the first mindset: living for the present
The first dominant mindset that exists in our culture is: to live for the present. If you have this mindset, everything you do revolves around whether and how it will help you in the present.
You can tell when someone is framing their life through living for the present because their primary value becomes the pursuit of pleasure. They are always asking themselves:
How can I use my time, talents, and money to experience the most pleasure right now?
Most young adults start their lives with this “live for the moment” mindset. They gear their lives around living in the present and enjoying life as much as possible. Sure, they might do things they don’t enjoy, like going to work or exercising, but only because it will help them get the things that allow them to maximize pleasure.
When you’re living for the present, you’ll follow your passions and use your resources to pursue what feels good right now, often binging on whatever gives you the most pleasure. You’ll spend your life on:
Scrolling your phones and enjoying the high of getting likes.
Watching TV for hours and hours on end.
Using your money to eat out, buy new things, and feel the high of consumption.
Drinking, partying, and casual sexual encounters, searching for a bigger buzz.
Traveling as much as your money and vacation days will allow.
This present-oriented mindset rules youth culture today. And while you may not push this mindset to its extremes like some of your peers, we can all think of the many times we’ve lived to maximize our pleasure in the current moment.
As young people start to get older, though, and begin to feel the destructive side effects, like debt, unhealthiness, and exhaustion, they begin to see some problems with their all-out pursuit of pleasure. And so they age out of their present-oriented thinking and become captivated by a new mindset.
the second mindset: living for the future
The second mindset that can drive your life is: living for the future. If you have this mindset, you’ll always be thinking about how your current actions impact your future.
You can tell when someone is driven by a future-oriented mindset because their primary value is no longer pleasure, but rather the pursuit of discipline. They are always asking themselves:
How can I be more disciplined with my time, talents, and money to be better prepared for my future?
This future-oriented mindset encourages you to use discipline to delay gratification now so that you can ensure a safe and stable future for yourself. Most people adopt this mindset somewhere between their late 20s and mid-30s (usually when they get married), as they get tired of pleasure and start thinking about things like retirement and old age.
When you’re living for the future, you’re always trying to figure out ways to become more and more disciplined so that your future life is more stable, secure, and comfortable. And so you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how to be more secure in your:
Eating, so that you are only eating the best and healthiest foods.
Exercising, so that you are staying in great shape.
Work, so that you can make as much progress in your career as possible.
Spending, so that you can cut back on silly purchases and save more.
Investing, so that you can become as wealthy as possible for when you retire.
Discipline and delayed gratification become the themes of future-oriented lives, and they are always checking to make sure that they have adequately planned and prepared for the future. Retirement becomes the key concern for future-oriented people, and they are always trying to figure out if they are on track (read: disciplined enough) to hit their financial and lifestyle goals.
Many people live the rest of their lives in this future-oriented mindset, using their abilities to be disciplined to provide them with a comfortable and secure life. Future-oriented people aren’t against pleasure per se, but only if it comes after they max out their 401k.
At first glance, there are a lot of great things about the discipline of a future-oriented mindset. The problem, though, is when we allow the future-oriented mindset to frame our lives, we will become people who only care about our future selves: if it doesn’t help me and my future then I am not going to do anything to help out. It only accelerates the radical individualization that’s growing in our communities and culture.
On top of this, the future-oriented mindset won’t work anyway. Why? Because eventually every person’s future will be affected by uncertainty, loss, sickness, and ultimately death. No matter how much you save up or how healthy you are, you can’t escape the limits of humanity.
so what’s wrong here?
I hope you can see by now how neither of the two most popular mindsets in our culture will satisfy you. Your search for pleasure in the present or security for the future won’t ever fulfill what you’re looking for in life.
The answer, then, is not to double down and work harder at one of the first two mindsets, like most people, but rather to adopt a completely different mindset.
the third mindset: living for eternity
The mindset that the human heart is ultimately hungry for is: to live for eternity. If you’re following Jesus, this is the mindset that God calls you to have; not to live for the present or the future, but to instead form your life around what is best for eternity.
When you start to live for eternity, the chief motivation in your life will no longer be the pursuit of pleasure or discipline, but rather the pursuit of service. An eternal mindset will cause you to follow a radically different path in life, as the pursuit of pleasure or security fades away and you begin to think about how you can use your life to serve those around you for eternal good.
If you are living out of the eternity mindset, your key question now will become:
How can I use my time, gifts, and money to serve my neighbors, glorify God, and prepare myself for eternity?
No verse makes this point more clear than Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Jesus is asking his followers: which mindset are you living out of? Are you trying to store up treasures on earth, whether through pleasurable experiences or abundant possessions or are you living to store up treasure in heaven? Pleasure will fade, possession will fall apart, and riches will go away, but treasure laid up in heaven will never be lost.
The Apostle Peter builds off of this theme in his first epistle, showing how a life lived for eternity both glorifies God in the present and bears eternal fruit:
Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day that he visits us.
Peter makes it clear: when you forgo living for yourself the people around you, your friends, family, and coworkers, will think you are strange.
The pleasure-seekers won’t understand why you do things that don’t look fun, like spending time serving others or becoming friends with difficult people who won’t help your social status.
The security-seekers won’t understand why you do things that make your future less secure, like giving your money away, moving to a struggling neighborhood, or taking a job because God called you to it and not because it pays well.
Remember, though, that you’re called not to follow the world, but Jesus. When Jesus came to earth and died on the cross he wasn’t asking himself, “What would be most pleasurable right now?” or “How will this help me get ready for a comfortable retirement?” Instead, when Jesus gave himself up so that we could be saved, his chief concern was: How do I serve these people so that they’ll be in eternity with me?
so which one are you?
As you consider these thoughts on mindset, I hope you’ll take some time to reflect on the mindset you’re using to approach life. Remember, like Peter mentioned, one day Jesus will come back to earth to judge and reward us based on what we’ve spent our lives working on.
None of us will ever get it perfect in this life, but we can rebel against the dominant mindsets of our culture as we seek to serve Jesus and follow him. After all, what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
