I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Last week was a significant week in my life. With September starting, I was ready to focus on achievement: setting goals, creating a new daily and weekly routine, and working towards outputting my work into the world so I and it might be recognized.
I stumbled though. Events conspired to make me realize that my participation in a local arts group was no longer serving me. My art group activities were distracting me from what I really wanted to work on and keeping me stuck in old ways of doing things. I decided to quit my board position even though I didn’t fulfill the year-long volunteer term. I still feel guilty.
I had already decided not to continue submitting art to group shows, juried or otherwise. Participating in the shows helped me learn about framing a painting, wiring it for hanging, and pricing my work. I won one award and sold one painting, but I saw that the shows were somewhat vanity affairs. They aren’t a path towards significant art sales for me, right now. Participation took money, time, and energy that I might better spend on writing, painting, or figuring out how to get my writing and painting out in the world in a way that works for me, and for it.
Interesting that the word “participation” keeps coming up. That’s what I was doing: merely participating.
Meanwhile, I found something inspiring in the world: the philosophical work of South Korean German-based Byung-Chul Han, who wrote The Burnout Society, among other interesting short books. On Friday, I wrote about setting down ambition, an idea occasioned by my resignation from my art group board position. I did have various ambitions connected to that position: I thought I might eventually offer publicity services to other art groups or maybe an AI agent for doing publicity; I thought my participation might lead to a job somehow; I thought my connections within the art group might help me someday. I was doing it for instrumental reasons, not because it was an activity authentic or meaningful to myself.
Han suggests that in late modern life, we are all oriented towards achievement, driven from within by a master who commands us to do more and be more and do better and be better. We live in a culture of total positivity that says “you can do it!” and then expects you to devote all your time and energy to doing it, whatever it is.
I began voraciously consuming Han’s ideas, through his book (hard to get through, extremely dense, mentioning many philosophers I wasn’t familiar with), through ChatGPT summaries, and through reviews of his books found online in various places.
I expect this week I will continue to do this, and will as well review ideas from other philosophers around this same topic: how do you live meaningfully and authentically in a world that demands you demonstrate ambition, achievement, and affluence?
I’m interested in exploring Charles Taylor’s idea of horizons of significance and Hartmut Rosa’s related theory of resonance. Taylor wrote extensively about authenticity, suggesting that it must be more than simple preference satisfaction to be meaningful.
One of Han’s most interesting books, to me, is The Agony of Eros, in which he says that love is in agony, because in late modern times we are all the Same and we don’t have a way to experience alterity (otherness, the Other).
He says that to truly love you must be ready to give up and negate yourself in order to experience the Other. He frames this in a kind of Hegelian dialectic. In such a dialectic, a position (a thesis) gives rise to its opposite (an antithesis) because of internal tensions. The tension is resolved through a synthesis, which preserves what is true in both while transcending their opposition. The synthesis then becomes a new starting point, generating further contradictions and development.
The key idea of a dialectic is that progress happens through dynamic contradiction and reconciliation, not linear accumulation.
This, I think, points the way to how I might progress in my life: not through taking on more volunteer positions with art groups, not through continuing to participate in art shows, but rather through focusing instead on the one thing in my life that right now offers a clear experience of the Other: my relationship with Ray.
Han’s theory of love requires that a lover die to herself before she can truly and fully experience the Other. Then, a new self can emerge.
I already wrote about this in Skeleton Woman Chases Me. Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses the story of Skeleton Woman to illustrate how, in a new love relationship, one or the other lover will run away, trying to escape death as it chases them. True love requires a death of who you used to be. You must let Skeleton Woman catch you; you must give up your own ways; you must touch death and what is not-beautiful in yourself and in the other person.
I have read about many people’s experiences of midlife love on the r/datingoverfifty subreddit. A problem that comes up again and again is that many people at midlife aren’t willing to give up the life they have built so that they might make a relationship work. This seems prudent, of course. But it likely means they cannot experience the death and renewal that a love relationship offers to those who are willing to undergo something so dangerous and destructive.
What does such a destructive and reconstitutive love dialectic look like in practice? For me, it means giving up my excessive focus on myself and my achievements; letting go of fantasies of what my life should have or could have been; experiencing not just the Other in the form of my partner Ray but also experiencing the Other I might become.
Now, thinking of the essay I have in progress that I seem unable to finish, where I lived with a man (let’s call him David) and we could not make it work, I see the underlying problem more clearly now. Neither of us were willing to die to ourselves to fully experience the Other. I wonder: if one person is willing and the other is not, what happens? If I had let go of all that mattered to me to experience him fully in his Otherness could we have succeeded? Even if he was not willing to do the same himself? Maybe he would have been, had I done it first?
Romantic relationships are not the only way to escape Han’s achievement society. You can also experience the Other and escape Sameness through things like language and storytelling, friendship and hospitality, and art and literature. Of course, I’m already working on many of these things, in particular storytelling and art.
I’m excited about leaning more into my writing, possibly finding a writing course or critique group to participate in. Dropping the publicity director volunteer position gives me more head space and time to do that sort of thing. Feels bad to quit, but it likely has many benefits for me, as it wasn’t a good match for who I’m becoming.