I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Earlier this week I was thinking about the self-help authors I’ve enjoyed in the past, because I wanted to do some copywork to help me figure out how to write advice that is approachable not arrogant. I browsed through my Kindle library and found a book by Martha Beck that I enjoyed recently, Beyond Anxiety. I had borrowed it from the library, and it wasn’t available, so I checked out another of her books Finding Your Own North Star.
Reading the introduction was a revelation in two ways: first, she did an enchanting job of using Dante’s Divine Comedy to illustrate her point that people of all times and all ages face uncertainty around what to do with their lives. And second, her prescription was the exact opposite of what I’m writing in my own series of books.
The premise of Beck’s book is that we each have our own North Star, “the ultimate manifestation of our potential for good and happiness.” This is something that exists within us unchanging, I guess since we’ve been born:
Explorers and mariners can depend on Polaris when there are no other landmarks in sight. The same relationship exists between you and your right life, the ultimate realization of your potential for happiness. I believe that a knowledge of that perfect life sits inside you just as the North Star sits in its unalterable spot. You may think you’re utterly lost, that you’re going to die a bewildered death in the Dark Wood of Error. But brush away the leaves, wait for the clouds to clear, and you’ll see your destiny shining as brightly as ever: the fixed point in the constantly changing constellations of your life.
I’ve been privileged to watch many people discover their own North Stars–and it always is a discovery, an “uncovering,” rather than a creation ex nihilo.
Now I imagine later in the book Beck discusses that people change and she must somehow allow for the fact that as we act, we are bringing different possibilities into being, as well as different versions of ourselves.
But just taking that quote from the introduction to her book serves as a good foil for the actual thinker and idea I want to talk about today: the idea that we are becomings rather than beings.
I could ask ChatGPT to provide a little summary of Sartre’s existentialist ideas, and of course I already shared with you the Kierkegaardian foreshadowing of such. I’m intent on keeping and developing my own voice however, so I’m going to struggle through and produce this myself.
Sartre distinguished between facticity–the circumstances of our lives–and transcendence–the nothingness at the center of our consciousness, from which we exercise our freedom. To Sartre we both are what we are, facticiously (is that a word?), and we are what we are not yet, transcendently. In Being and Nothingness, he writes, “We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.” I read that first part as we are not our facticity and the second part we are our transcendence.
In Sartre’s philosophy, we in fact do not live according to our “North Stars” (our essences, the facticity of our selves). We are not completely constrained by the facticity of our lives; to Sartre, we are “condemned to be free”:
From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free. [Being and Nothingess]
Sartre says this is nauseating, and maybe it is. I also find it exhilarating to think I’m not condemned to be me, rather I am condemned to become who I might be through exercising my freedom.
For Sartre, there is no predrawn map or planned itinerary for our lives. It is up to us at each point to decide where to go next, and to meet ourselves along that journey.
I confess I have never really understood Nietzsche’s exhortation, ‘Become who you are!” (From Thus Spake Zarathustra).
Except maybe I am starting to understand it, now that I’m skiing down the icy slopes of existentialism.
You are not who you might become. You only become who you are through exercise of your freedom and your will. This is not a matter of discovery or uncovering as Beck proposes. It is a matter of what happens when you take certain actions in the world.
This makes me think of philosopher Ruth Chang’s ideas about making hard choices. She suggests that when you are making a hard choice — choosing between two options which are roughly on par, meaning one is not better than the other and yet they are not equal in any sense either — you should create reasons that will bring the identity you want for yourself into being.
Let me give an example.
I am not actively deciding whether to move in with Ray or not, but it is something we’ve talked about as a possibility down the road.
If I were actively considering it, let’s think about how I would choose between continuing to live in my own house separately from Ray versus selling or renting my house out and moving in with him.
I consider these two options “on a par” — I can’t rank one and put it above another. They each have pros and cons in their favor.
Martha Beck would say that to decide I would need to “find my North Star” — discover my true essence, and my unique and authentic way of living in the world. I need to quiet down the Social Self and listen to the Essential Self, who encodes by innate inclinations, passions, and authentic drives. She suggests using bodily reactions, following natural excitement, visualizing my ideal day, and paying attention to synchronicity and feedback from the universe.
Chang would say, create will-based reasons to choose. Since I’ve already acknowledged that neither option is better than the other, she would advise that I ask myself, “Which option will I commit to, and what does that say about who I want to become?”
I can ask, “Who do I want to be?” and “What do I want to stand for?”
And then that breaks the logjam a little, without any dependence on assuming I have a fixed, essential, authentic self.
I can see what values I would be expressing in each case.
Living in my own large house, by myself, but creating space for my family and friends to stay here, for short and long-term visits, or even living here with me (as my daughter may do next year after she finishes her master’s degree):
- Autonomy and independence
- Luxury, affluence
- Stability and security, of a sort
- Being a provider for my children
- Daily solo time
Moving in with Ray and either selling or renting out my house:
- Romantic love and commitment
- Financial partnership
- Daily companionship
- Frugality and minimalism — Ray has a very small, beautifully done house
- Risk and danger — I would be relying on someone else in a very important way
- Independence and autonomy… from my family especially my children
Am I actually choosing between the two options right now? No, I’m not. I have a friend coming to live with me over the holidays to be near an ill relative and I want to keep the house as an option for my daughter to move in next June. But this is an example of how I might compare the two possibilities, using a Sartrean/Nietzschean/Changean existentialist approach instead of Beckian North Star.
For now I’ll keep living here, tending to my house, painting, writing, cooking dinner, spending nights over at Ray’s and inviting him to spend the occasional night here. I’m not doing that because it’s truer to my “essential self” than moving immediately in might be. I’m doing it because it’s the life I’m choosing for right now, bringing into being a woman who is both in love with her partner and in love with the way she is living her life right now. If freedom means anything, it means we get to author our lives one page at a time, without knowing exactly where the story will lead.