Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, gave a commencement speech in 1990. @Dylan0A4 tweeted this excerpt (emphasis mine):
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery—it recharges by running. You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential—as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble. Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.
(h/t Stefan for texting me the tweet)
I had never read that commencement tweet but it’s exactly what I tried to convey in Backsolving Your Ride On Earth. Paul Millerd in his book Good Work recounts being taken aback when I called him “ambitious”. No matter what you do for work there are compromises. Ambition is being ruthlessly intentional about your compromises. “I want a life that looks like this” means saying “no” a lot and bearing the cost of those no’s gracefully.
First of all, why is generally hard to say “no”? Because a lot of things you should say “no” to in order to stay in sync with your desire are hard to say “no” to. They are often things that convey status. They are enviable. It is hard to say no to things that are enviable even if in your heart you know they don’t matter much to you.
And why is hard to be graceful about saying “no”? Because we cope, overcompensate, and cry “sour grapes”. The person who rejects materialism after noticing that its borrowed desires were nothing but empty calories but then sits in judgement of others. They’re trying to have it both ways. They’ve done an admirable job of knowing themselves but don’t realize that freedom from the herd involves some loneliness. They try to build their own herd by taking an adversarial posture against their old team. The reformed financier who hates financiers (cough, Taleb).
It’s pointless to say “just ignore others” because it cuts so strongly against our social nature. A more useful framing is to remember that there are so many cultures, ways of being, and perspectives that whatever you are into, it’s not the first time someone was into it. It’s been decades since your neighbors were just the people on your block. The substack you are reading is a block on a neighborhood you never would discovered before the internet.
There’s a community for everything (my favorite metaphor for that is the ponyplay crowd). You’ll get more strength from a small community than the the toxoplasma of rage. Watterson’s suggestions are worth taking seriously but they are hard. They are deeply ambitious. To pursue them joyfully, without FOMO or overcompensation, you’ll need a culture that organizes its values similarly. A community that gives props for actions that bring you closer to those values. This will align your innate need for acceptance with behavior that reflects your authentic self.
The trick is doing this without inheriting the group’s collective defensiveness or, too often, derangement. Have some self-respect. Pick a counter-culture animated by generative impulses not animosity. Hating your past self is not a productive identity. It’s merely layover as you reweight trade-offs.
We were a a “generic Brooklyn indie band album cover” for Halloween.
