Life
Life
ben sayler
September 16 2021
Image credit:
Starry night and fields in Pakistan
by Ibrahim Janjua
I often wonder what the point of writing is in an era where the vast majority of us are so saturated with opinions and perspectives that even the meaningful ones rarely linger in our minds long enough to take root. Of course, when you write you never know if what you’re saying is actually meaningful or insightful or helpful. All you can do is attempt to share your thoughts as honestly as possible and hope they have value. But it seems increasingly self-indulgent to assign any sort of importance to this as anything beyond a mere pastime, something cathartic to help get through the day that may, if only briefly, provide a similar catharsis to the reader.
It certainly doesn’t feel, as I believe it once did, that writing has the potential to produce real change at any great scale.
It is not a novel insight that the internet grants us all a platform to share our thoughts, and in doing so dilutes the significance, or potential impact, of those thoughts. Nor is it novel to point out that the sheer volume of ideas and perspectives and information now accessible to us leaves us feeling an almost compulsive need to prioritize quantity over quality; better to read/view/engage with more ‘content’ and only absorb bits and pieces from each thing we experience than to take the time to really understand all we engage with and as a result, to engage in less. What a waste to have all of this at our fingertips and not maximize our consumption!
This tendency goes beyond writing to the point where I sometimes think that the internet is simultaneously the thing that will bring us closest to liberation and also the thing that will ultimately hold us back. How does one live a life of purpose and meaning when constantly shown every possible permutation their life could theoretically take? How do you decide what to focus on, what to do, when there are seemingly infinite options all of equal import and value and meaning? How do you make ethical choices or live up to your values when the world has become so complex and interconnected that every action seems to have boundless unforeseen ramifications?
I used to want to save the world. Not literally, for the most part, though when you get involved in fighting climate breakdown you can’t help but entertain the occasional grandiose fantasy of knocking over a domino that will eventually lead to ecological salvation. Mostly, however, I imagined myself as someone aspiring to a place of influence, a place I could wield power for good, a place where I could put my conscience and morality into action and steer the world toward something better. This, too, was grandiose, but in a different way. It was the grandiosity we’re all sold living in individualist societies: that we can potentially become Great and that to be Great means to hold power over others - socially, economically, politically, or spiritually. Greatness is, in other words, hierarchical, and the promise of individualism is that by prioritizing and focusing one’s own ambitions and interests, one can transcend and perhaps become one of those unique and Great individuals near the top of the hierarchy.
Whether you see yourself as an aspiring climate savior or aspiring aristocrat, you ultimately still see yourself as the same thing: one above, or separate, from the rest. It’s your knowledge or your power, your wealth or your looks, your charisma or your determination, that will establish you as someone more important or singular than those around you. And thus, implicitly, deserving of different, even elevated, treatment and consideration.
This is especially common in the arts, a field that culturally and socially rewards delusions of grandiosity and self-mythologizing. The largely random and accidental process of creating something that resonates with others becomes a testament to a unique or special genius or ability that deserves praise and respect above less resonant or popular creative work. In this way, the quality or merit of one’s creativity becomes equated with the popularity of one’s work. And if one’s work becomes more meaningful the more popular it is, the logical conclusion is that one should aspire to fame and one who is famous should see themselves as exceptional.
The reality of what art becomes popular and what its actual significance is is, of course, far more fickle and mercurial than simply great art=popular art. Moby Dick was famously derided upon its publication, only to later become one of the most celebrated and respected artistic works in history - 75 years after its author’s death. On the other end of the spectrum, the highest grossing and most popular films on Earth are quite literally designed by a multi-billion dollar corporation to make as much money as possible by crafting stories that necessitate viewing even more films and spending even more money to fully understand or appreciate their narratives. They are works of pure craven greed unconcerned with artistic or spiritual merit except insofar as meeting a bare minimum threshold that allows them to be even moderately compelling. And even then, that threshold decreases each year as the company behind these films controls ever greater amounts of media allowing them to force the bar where they want it and condition audience tastes to corporate interests.
What is “successful” in the world of art, then, rarely has any relationship to critical notions of greatness, ethical notions of meaning, or spiritual notions of profundity. Instead, it is largely down to an amorphous confluence of economic, historical, and cultural factors that say little about the quality of a work, and instead speak to the context – and thus perception – of the work as its received. Again, not a novel sentiment, but how a work of art is perceived often tells us less about the merit of the work itself than it does the baggage and context of its perceiver, which is mostly a product of environmental factors far beyond the control of any individual.
Which is not to say that artistic, creative, and other less materially tangible pursuits are meaningless – I think quite the opposite, in fact – but rather that their meaning does not come from the having the scale of impact we’re told signifies meaning. Say that you write a song that, for whatever reason, resonates deeply with ten people and changes their lives. That’s a profound thing, but as soon as you look at the scale of impact that pop stars have, all of a sudden it feels marginal and insignificant to have only reached ten people in such a way. Dominant narratives tell us our world is a meritocracy, that those with the most “success” are where they are because they are more skilled, talented, capable, or hard working than us. If you never truly touch more than ten people with your music, it’s natural to think that that is because your work is not as valuable or important as whoever is at the top of the charts that week.
The same goes for politics and ethics, for spiritual growth and relationships. How many friends do you have? Who are you voting for in the national election? What life changing epiphanies or wisdom do you have?
Little of the above is ever consciously on our minds as we make our way through each day, but it persists within us nonetheless leaving us with a vague and unsettling sense of emptiness and futility, an awareness that there is a certain impossibility to achieving meaning in our lives through the mechanisms we’re offered but left with no other recourse but to persist regardless. Unfortunately, when these things do rise to the surface of our conscious minds, they’re often in the form of self-doubt and insecurity as our struggles seem to reflect personal inadequacy rather than flawed frameworks and dysfunctional systems.
All of these concerns and worries and issues are just different ways of emphasizing quantity over quality, of equating scale with worth, of viewing the world through a lens where we as individuals are meant to affect things on a scale much greater than that upon which we exist. There aren’t enough hours in the day to have dozens of truly deep, enduring, and resilient relationships with people. Understanding, seeing, and being in community with people takes time and patience, it can’t be optimized or made more efficient – you can’t have dozens of “close” friends without seeing each less deeply, less meaningfully, and with less understanding. Trying to accelerate or skip through the process of relationship building so you can have more relationships is like fast forwarding through songs so you can hear more songs - you’re no longer experiencing or doing the thing you set out to do and all you’re achieving is a hollow illusion of purpose.
In the realm of politics, you have far more power to affect change and build a better world at a community level than you do at the scale of national politics. Yet we’re taught to devalue local efforts at the expense of higher profile national campaigns and events because why focus on changing dozens of lives when you could change millions? We spend time and energy focusing on national elections and politics where ultimately our individual contributions are negligible, all the while remaining disconnected from community politics and the needs of our neighbors where our individual contributions can be life changing. I can spend 10 hours a week learning the needs of my community and working within it to help provide mutual aid and organize for change. Or I can spend 10 hours a week powerlessly tracking national political developments so that I can argue with people on the internet who’ve already made their minds up about their national political allegiances. Within the logic of grandiosity, it’s only rational to think it better to spend your time, money, and effort on big high profile events even if they produce little actual change than to quietly use that same time, money, and effort helping out individual people and families .
We can work on our lives by practicing daily to develop better habits, become better people, and build better lives. But these regular efforts are not treated or seen as being as worthy of our energy and time as chasing sudden epiphanies and hunting for the perfect thought or idea that will allow us a sudden leap-frog breakthrough. In this case, the grandiosity is oriented around internal growth – only big dramatic changes count, while gradual smaller progress is cast aside as too slow, too insignificant, to merit any real praise or support.
Life, however, is not made of singular big events, or exceptional individuals who change the world. History is a highlight reel where single people are picked out from large groups to sculpt a compelling and easy to follow story. No one person has ever changed the world – that’s a narrative sleight of hand that always belies a much more complicated, interconnected, and diverse picture. An honest accounting of history would show entire communities coming together to create change, where even individuals who do manage breakthroughs do so only because they had access to the work, insights, and support of others, and whose breakthroughs only carry meaning and significance because of the efforts of countless people to spread the fruits of those breakthroughs far and wide.
In our own lives, the most meaningful things we achieve concern the people and places we affect directly. You can never know if who you voted for in a national election really made any difference, but you can know for certain that the support you gave to a family in your community who needed help paying a hospital bill or getting groceries or coping with grief made a real difference in their lives. Voting matters, but showing up for the people in your community matters more.
Maybe one night you choose to stay home from a party to be with your friend and keep them company during a hard time and maybe doing means that you miss out on some connection that would snowball into a life changing opportunity. It’s easy to weigh yourself down wondering what serendipitous event might lead to some grand new adventure or possibility. But to the extent that potential ever exists, it is true of every decision you make every minute of every day. You can’t know if you missed out on some miracle opportunity or not - perhaps you should be at the park right now so you can meet that life changing stranger - but you can know that being there with your friend helped ease their burden and was an act of genuine love and kindness, making the world a more compassionate place in a real tangible way.
Even purely from a standpoint of anxiety over your own place in life, you can know that life changing opportunities, if they’re truly good, come most often to those who prioritize cultivating love and kindness over grandiosity and self-interest. The people you show up for and the community you support are far more likely to be there for you when you need it than the miracle stranger at the party, the seductive narrative of the latter betraying the hard won truth of the former. Despite what movies tell us, serendipitous good fortune is a poor substitute for good fortune built through deliberate acts of generosity, humility, and kindness.
It is easy to feel depressed and disheartened looking at your life and realizing you’re not the person you thought you were, that your life isn’t where you thought it would be. You might feel disappointed in yourself for not doing something dramatic like burning it all down and starting fresh, or taking some other similarly drastic action that our culture treats as “taking control of your life.” But each time you make the choice to break old patterns, to be more patient with yourself and others, to act from a place of love instead of a place of fear, to emphasize gratitude over envy, you’re building a better version of yourself and a better life to live in. Most of us have stronger foundations than we think from which to build better lives for ourselves and for others, but we can only do it if we embrace the fact that real growth and change takes time and patience and won’t look like the newsworthy spectacle we’re conditioned to expect.
Maybe the piece I write or the drawing you create or the song your friend composes or the table your cousin builds won’t change the world. But then, that never should have been the goal to begin with. Because to change the world, to have such a large impact, is to wield tremendous power not just over your own life, but the lives of others as well. And no one should have, nor aspire to have, such power or control in a just world. No one person should ever be in the position to create a work of art that changes everything, or to take on a role in a business or politics that grants them life and death authority over others. We shouldn’t strive for lives that can be made or unmade by a single choice we make – we can never know where any single choice will lead us and we can’t build lives living in such precarity with such high stakes.
It’s the individual ways we impact each other, our communities, and ourselves that comprise the meaning in everything we do. It is enough to make our corner of the world a better, more loving place - we can’t carry the world on our shoulders, nor should we try to.
I don’t know if there’s any point to writing in a larger sense. The days where a single author could reach a level of power and influence that could ripple through the culture have seemingly passed. I no longer believe that through writing I’ll be able to effect any change on a national or even regional level. But I know I can affect it on an individual level. I know there are things I’ve written that have helped people, that have improved people’s lives, that have made life better even if only a little bit. I know because I’ve spoken to people directly who’ve told me as such. And I know that that that’s enough of a reason to keep doing it.
I know that when we’re lost for purpose it’s because we’ve turned too much inward and can no longer recognize our ability to better the lives of those around us, or the true value of doing so. We get caught up in grandiose thinking and worries and what ifs, wondering about our ultimate trajectory or whether we’re changing the world or building our dream life, downplaying what it means to show up for a friend or family member or stranger in our community and do something to make life easier to bear or enjoy. You never wonder if your life has meaning when you see firsthand how something you’ve done has helped someone you care about.
If you dedicate your life to abstractions or focus only on the big picture it can be easy to question if what you’re doing has any value. But zoom in and you can see all the immediate material and immaterial ways we can make things better each day, for ourselves by building better habits and practicing living in tune with our values, and for others by giving them our time and attention and love.
And so we return to the questions from the beginning of this piece.
How does one live a life of purpose and meaning when constantly shown every possible permutation their life could theoretically take? How do you decide what to focus on, what to do, when there are seemingly infinite options all of equal import and value and meaning? How do you make ethical choices or live up to your values when the world has become so complex and interconnected that every action seems to have boundless unforeseen ramifications?
The truth is that there are no answers to these questions, not really. Whatever answers any of us can find are conditional and temporary at best, and flat out misguided at worst. But then, at some point, you realize these questions shouldn’t carry the weight that they do because these questions miss the real point. It’s not up to any one of us to save the world, it simply can’t be. We shouldn’t be asking ourselves how to live or build the ideal life or how to be the perfect person or how to live free of any ethical violations. Life by definition isn’t, and can’t be, ideal; there will always be struggles and pain and unforeseen circumstances. We will always fall short of our potential in certain ways. And we will always, no matter how hard we try, find ourselves doing things that hurt others or the world itself, either through ignorance or hubris, selfishness or carelessness, or just plain old human error. The point is not, nor has it ever been, to find the path in life – the actions, the processes, the trajectories – that will lead us to salvation.
The point is simply that we’re not alone in this, and by our actions and choices we can make sure others aren’t either. We can hurt others, and we can repair the hurt. We can feel embarrassed by our creations, and we can learn from the embarrassment. We can try to do better and fall short, and we can try again the next day. Whether it happens on a scale or in a manner that draws attention, or whether it happens quietly and silently behind closed doors, showing up each day and trying our best to do right by our friends, our families, our communities, and ourselves is what gives life meaning. We can’t ask any more than that from ourselves, but nor should we have to. There is nothing more profound, no purpose that could be greater, than our endless capacity to find ways to give love to those around us and receive love all the same.
It is not by saving the world that we will save each other and find meaning, it is by saving each other and creating meaning that we will save the world.