Once you've worked hard to learn the right skills,
there's some incredible fun to be had on this planet.
Leo Houlding, Professional Climber
Guilt.
Your secret, your friend, your convenient everyday hell. Guilt when you're slow to get up in the morning, guilt when you run late for work, guilt when you finally give in and eat that cookie, guilt when you skip the gym. Guilt when you underperform, when you overreact, talking too much, talking too little. Guilt when you lie, when you tell the truth, when you get carried away with emotion. Guilt! As if your very existence needs to be justified. The standard of living you enjoy, the love of your friends, the luck, the sun, the cappuccino, the hope that keeps you going, the occasional fluke of happiness, the price for it all an endless supplication. At heart, guilt is what gets you out of bed every morning.
A pity you are not a genius. Geniuses don't need to apologise for their existence. `Be good, get good, or give up` in the eternal words of House. Is it hubris? Maybe. Whatever it is - it is a wicked pointless curse. There is no godly agenda for the proper conduct of human existence. We evolved to be, like a tree, like a bee, and like just about every other living thing on this planet. We exist for the sake of existence. Everything else is entirely made-up.
And I mean you in the plural. We are a cluster of "us". Mondays you're the earnest kid who wants to do well in school, on soft Summer nights you're a lover and a hedonist and you want to travel the world with a scruffy Jack Kerouac and a pack of cigarettes on a shoestring. In February you need a soul and the healing velvet of compassion and you need to learn and understand the unlearnable and the unknowable. Tuesdays you go back to reading The Economist. And in middle age you want to live beyond yourself and grow value for the world around you.
Your secret, your friend, your convenient everyday hell. Guilt when you're slow to get up in the morning, guilt when you run late for work, guilt when you finally give in and eat that cookie, guilt when you skip the gym. Guilt when you underperform, when you overreact, talking too much, talking too little. Guilt when you lie, when you tell the truth, when you get carried away with emotion. Guilt! As if your very existence needs to be justified. The standard of living you enjoy, the love of your friends, the luck, the sun, the cappuccino, the hope that keeps you going, the occasional fluke of happiness, the price for it all an endless supplication. At heart, guilt is what gets you out of bed every morning.
A pity you are not a genius. Geniuses don't need to apologise for their existence. `Be good, get good, or give up` in the eternal words of House. Is it hubris? Maybe. Whatever it is - it is a wicked pointless curse. There is no godly agenda for the proper conduct of human existence. We evolved to be, like a tree, like a bee, and like just about every other living thing on this planet. We exist for the sake of existence. Everything else is entirely made-up.
And I mean you in the plural. We are a cluster of "us". Mondays you're the earnest kid who wants to do well in school, on soft Summer nights you're a lover and a hedonist and you want to travel the world with a scruffy Jack Kerouac and a pack of cigarettes on a shoestring. In February you need a soul and the healing velvet of compassion and you need to learn and understand the unlearnable and the unknowable. Tuesdays you go back to reading The Economist. And in middle age you want to live beyond yourself and grow value for the world around you.
So what can you do? Perhaps one of the most perplexing paradoxes of the human condition is this dialectic of what makes us do the worst and the best of the things we do: petty, selfish need alongside this improbable but urgent desire to live selflessly - through love, through charity, through hard work, through compassion. So they say - find something in the world that needs doing and do it. Even if it's small and inglorious and might fail to make a difference, do it anyway.
Don't believe what other people tell you about yourself. So you lack talent. And you lack discipline. And you lack determination. But it does not matter. Just committing to something and giving it 10 years of your life means you will be better than most people at it and that's enough. Find a niche and make yourself just a little bit useful. Find something that needs doing and do it. Because you don't have to be a genius to turn a profession into a calling.
Don't believe what other people tell you about yourself. So you lack talent. And you lack discipline. And you lack determination. But it does not matter. Just committing to something and giving it 10 years of your life means you will be better than most people at it and that's enough. Find a niche and make yourself just a little bit useful. Find something that needs doing and do it. Because you don't have to be a genius to turn a profession into a calling.
Then again, what hollow optimism. Sometimes ideas take a long time to mature into fully-fledged sentences. Sometimes articulating thoughts is about as prone to success as laying a silicon chip with transistors using chopsticks. Sometimes the drive just isn't there. You wake up, you get up, you try to do the living thing - and nothing happens. January is always the hardest month.
Some people get these things for free - the "passion", the "calling". Some never do. Instead they have to put conscious, dedicated energy towards things that might otherwise "just happen" - what gets them up in the morning? what keeps them entertained? what sustains interest? what staves off depression? It's a brain thing. It's a hardware failure. And it's guilt. That stuff that makes people love to play squash, or make music, or play 1300 hours of Dota in the space of 18 months? Yeah. Sometimes you wake up, you get up, try to do the living thing - and nothing happens.
What then? Try again the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
Eventually sufficient guilt will accumulate to get you going.
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