Not only is Joe Pack a good laugh but he’s also a pretty handy if you need some help unravelling the mysteries of marketing and social media thanks to his company nativve. He’s also there for you if you need some help sorting your head out via his mindfulness orientated blog and newsletter too. If you don’t know him imagine if you can a cross between Gandhi and Don Draper but with a winning smile and wearing loads of Patagonia and Fjallraven. As we’re currently planning world domination with the nativve posse we decided to make Joe step away from the year planner for 2022 and tell us all about his favourite five, here are our findings…
Clothing: Grenfell Golf Jacket
I probably spend too much money on clothes. But it’s a positive vice. There was a time when I couldn’t afford good stuff so I just used torture myself, staring at them for large parts of my evening. I picked one of these up after we did that crazy golf shoot up in Formby with Oi Polloi. It just seems to go with everything, even though it probably shouldn’t.
Music: Karma Police by Radiohead
Every time I listen to this track it puts me into this sort of borderline paralysed type state, where the only thing I can do is listen, without interruption, until the song is finished and then I carry on with me day.
Book: The Daily Stoic
It’s hard to describe how much this book has changed my life – and I mean that with little exaggeration. This book is one year worth of Stoic quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus all translated into modern day scenarios and examples. My personal favourite – The Enemy of Happiness: “It is quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for what we don’t have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be hunger or thirst”. – Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.17
I’ll be happy when I graduate, we tell ourselves. I’ll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off when I have the money that my parents never had. Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you can walk for miles and miles and never reach it. You won’t even get any closer. Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario – as pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chance at happiness here and now. Locate that yearning for more, better, someday and see it for what it is: the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible.
Art: Sagrada Familia
To be honest, normal pieces of art don’t really interest me at all. Architecture on the other hand blows my mind. I find it fascinating. Aside from the incredible beauty, I love a buildings practicality and functionality, plus it serves a purpose other than sitting on a wall whilst people attempt to derive some nebulous meaning from it.
My favourite building is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It’s truly majestic as it dominates the Catalan skyline. Sure, it’s covered in beautiful sculptures (“art”), but there’s no one forcing into a hole it doesn’t exist in. It’s just there, doing its thing and that’s great.
Something else: Rugby (probably to the absolute dismay of Proper Mag’s fanatical football clan.)
When I was really young, like 7, I used to go watch Forest with my Dad. Yeah, they were shit then too. About 4 years later I went to big school. The school despised football. So Rugby it was! Then I started going to Rugby matches with my mates and was like “what the fuck are the away fans doing in our end”? I quickly learnt that the fighting was all on the pitch, and I quite like that, so Rugby became the sport I really love, and still is today.
