I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Lacking any inspiration for today’s Monday Musings, I pulled a card from my Rider-Waite Tarot deck. I drew the Two of Wands.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes of this card:
Again a card of success, even greater than the Three, for here a man stands in a castle and holds the world in his hands. Yet the card does not carry the same contentment as the Three. He is bored; his accomplishments have only served to wall him in (a situation very unpleasant to Fire), and the world he holds is a very small one. Waite compares his weariness to that of Alexander, who supposedly wept after he had conquered the known world because he then could think of nothing else to do with his life (his death shortly afterwards no doubt gave this legend an extra boost.)
Waite’s comment suggests that the Wands love of battle and challenge can leave one with no real satisfaction in actual accomplishments when the fight has been won. Comparison with the Four (as well as the Ten) is obvious. There several people dance together, out from a walled city. Here one person stands alone, walled in by his own success.
This makes me think of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of pursuing success. He saw life as a cycle of endless striving driven by Will, where achieving a goal brings temporary relief followed by boredom and new desires. Thus we seesaw between want and boredom. Schopenhauer saw ambitious goals as traps. He suggested that you can find true peace not by acheiving your goals but by transcending the Will through aesthetic contemplation, asceticism, and finding contentment in the present moment. You might recognize his philosophy as Buddhist, which says that suffering is at the core of existence and desire is the source of that suffering.
Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han goes further than Schopenhauer in critiquing a culture of goal-setting and achievement. In The Burnount Society he writes that we have enslaved ourselves as we cultivate ambition, aim for maximum productivity, and set out societally-approved objectives for ourselves. This leads to narcissism, burnout, and depression, says Han.
Existentialists from Sartre to Rollo May critique goal fixation as a defense against anxiety and a way to avoid confronting both our finitude and our freedom. To them, goals substitute structure for meaning. As comforting narratives goals protect us from the terror of openness and possibility. When the narrative collapses, then boredom emerges.
Goals promise relief from suffering but don’t deliver long term. Achieving those goals delivers a moment of peace. But in the quiet and calmness of the peace, we find only emptiness. The solution is usually to set a new, possibly bigger goal. But that just keeps you locked in the cycle of going after what never fully satisfies.
As I was thinking about topics for more Reckless Daybook entries, I thought I might write about working based on inspiration rather than perspiration, based on intrinsic motivation rather than a drive for external success, based on presence rather than looking to the future.
Last September, I wrote about setting down ambition. But I still feel its pull. I want to set goals and make plans to achieve them. However, when I do that I almost never make good on the goals. So I don’t reach Schopenhauer’s place of goal fulfillment leading to inevitable feelings of dissatisfaction. I just discard the goals, as my internal motivation leads me elsewhere.
There are the makings for multiple daybook entries here I think, but I will leave it for now, as this is just a musing day.