The Cheesecake Model Of Life - Understanding Your Problems Easily

Imagine a cheesecake, a really, really tall cheesecake. Then imagine, that the cheesecake has seven different flavor-full sections. But, the sections are actually put vertically in the cheesecake, and not in layers. So, if you would look from straight above, you’d see these seven different slices, like in a pie (or a pie-chart).

In this blogpost, I’m going to explain why it might be extremely useful for you to think about your life like a seven-flavoured cheesecake. This visual model can help you identify areas which are lacking in your life, and also understand the magnitude of the problems you are facing.

By looking at your life from this point of view, you’ll gain perspective, you’ll make better decisions, and you’ll be more understanding and compassionate towards yourself.

Yeees. Let me become a juicy and thicc cheesecake!

The Seven Flavours Of Life

Here are the seven key areas of life. I borrowed heavily from Dr. Jordan Peterson here, but I think he usually sticks with six areas when mapping out someone’s life.

1. Health: first and foremost this is your basic physical health. Daily habits such as eating appropriate amounts, sleeping enough and exercising go here.
2. Friends: these are the people you have chosen - more or less - voluntarily in your life. Hopefully, your relationships with them are reciprocal and productive somehow.
3. Love and family: this area is about your familial bonds and your romantic partner. Often times these relationships are characterised by more duties and responsibilities that friendships.
4. Education: everybody feels better, when they have been educated enough to the extent that matches their potential. It also gives them the tools to enhance other areas of life.
5. Work and career: some people want simple jobs, some people want fulfilling careers, some people just want passive income and get bored. In any case, you need to “make dem monies” somehow.
6. Hobbies: most people have free time. This time can be used in various ways, and several of them are fun, helpful, engaging and meaningful. These are your hobbies.
7. Drugs, alcohol and addiction: there is no shortage of powerful, addictive and mind-altering substances. They are intimidating, exciting, fun and dangerous. If you don’t have a plan for them, you might get ruined completely.

Alright, so those are the flavour of the cake. But why is the cake so tall?

The way I look at is, that it’s useful think about your whole life history, when looking at these areas. So, the tallness of the cake represents the time you’ve been alive. This helps us a lot, when we are trying to identify problems, and understand if they are big or small problems.

Little Problem, Big Problem

Let me give a couple of examples.

Suppose you are walking down the street to work, drinking a takeaway coffee. You bump into someone, the coffee falls and spills on your 70 € white Converse shoes. This is a problem because brown stains on white shoes don’t look professional. This is a mini-level social and financial problem, and you need to solve it somehow. In the cheesecake of your life - provided other things are kinda stable - this is something that screws up only a tiny layer in the cake, and you can quickly fix it by buying new shoes.

But, suppose you are a guy walking down the street with your girlfriend whom you’ve been dating for six years. Then, you bump into another guy. Your girlfriend's facial expression changes to panic, shame and anger, and the other guy stops in his tracks. This meeting starts a cascade of events, where you find out that during the past six years your girlfriend has had three other relationships with three other guys, two of whom you have regarded as good acquaintances.

This ain’t good for your cheesecake, I’m telling you. (Prepare for some simple math.)

Let’s say your life always in the present moment is 100% of the cheesecake. Then, one of the seven areas is 1/7th of that, which is about 14.3%. As the information about your misguided beliefs about your partner's fidelity flood your consciousness, your cake gets screwed up.

First of all, the six years you’ve been together are immediately transformed into a very bad tasting cheesecake. Suppose you are 30 years old. Six years is 20% of that. This means that 20% of the “Love and family” gets blown off and chocolate turns into dingleberries. This represents then about 3% of your total life getting completely fucked right on the spot.

But, what exactly led you in this situation? While later on it’s useful to narrow down and direct your attention to practical issues, we are not there yet. You need to ask yourself, how did I live my life in such a way that 3% got walloped in a single moment like that, without warning.

So now the whole pillar of “Love and family” comes under question. 1/7th of your life is in disarray. It requires massive efforts to organise this big of a chunk of your life - mentally, practically and socially.

But, it doesn’t end there. Remember how two of the “other guys” were your acquaintances? What kind of a person are you to know people like that? So, there goes another 1/7th of your understanding of your life.

Do you start to see how the cheesecake model can help you put a number on the severity of the problem?

By identifying the seven areas, and by thinking about them in terms of time and percentages, you can ballpark the magnitude of the issues you are working with.

Then, if you for example are recovering from a long addiction, money problems, a long-lasting familial trauma, or anything else major, you can run through this little thought game in your head.

Summary

It can take a lot of time to reorganize your worldview - which is the basis for every action and thought you take - after you’ve experienced a massive problem. It is a miserable experience, when your world gets blown apart by ignorance, chance or malevolence.

Your brain can simply work only so fast, in trying to make sense of what is going on. After all, its job is to keep on predicting what’s going to happen, and big problems mean that the brain’s idea of how the world is, was severely wrong.

It’s a huge task for your mental structures to reorganise themselves during and after a crisis. And after that there’s still the actual world to contend with, where you need to take action, instead of just thinking about what just happened.

All in all, I hope the cheesecake-model can help you understand better, that the problems you face can actually be very big. They spread in the system of your life quickly, infecting areas you wouldn’t even think about (...eating and sleeping like crap during a family or work crisis, anyone?)

At the same time, I believe that this way of thinking about your life can help you in remaining calmer and more reasonable in the face of serious issues. I’d say that’s a better outcome, than just eating a whole cheesecake in a single sitting because life is tough, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading!