I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I’m part of Animal Rescue of the Rockies, an organization that saves homeless dogs and cats who might otherwise be euthanized by finding foster homes for them until they are adopted. Right now I have german shepherd-rottweiler-pitt bull mix Sally living with me. She’s a loving, happy, and smart girl who also has really big feelings to go with her strong body, which makes her difficult on leash sometimes.
Weekly, a volunteer from ARR combs lists from shelters as to dogs that are slated for euthanasia and sends out a list of “dogs in need.” In the email she shares a quote:
Saving one animal won’t change the world, but it will change the world for that one animal.
author unknown
Giving a permanent or temporary home to a dog or cat who otherwise didn’t have one has been one of the most satisfying activities of my life. Any time I think, “I’m a pretty selfish person who doesn’t contribute much,” I remind myself of this. I am contributing on a micro level, on the level of one dog at a time, or one cat at a time (I have adopted two from the local animal shelter).
Reciprocal inspiration and influence
My older daughter made a big career change last week, and she cited my own career path as an inspiration and influence. She says she’s never seen me so happy as I am right now, living a creative life without a corporate job. It’s not the first time I’ve done this. I also stopped out of corporate technology work in the 2000s, when she and her siblings were young. I always had child care help so I was able to spend lots of time writing, which was a great joy.
The cool thing is that now it’s turned around and she’s inspiring and influencing me. Her own choices affirm my path forward. I realize the path I took was not just for my own benefit. I was showing the way one could step out of the achievement society, set down ambition, and instead live from a place of inspiration rather than auto-exploitation.
But not only do her choices and her citation of my inspiration affirm what I’ve done now, they confirm in retrospect that the career choices I made were valuable: not valuable in that they produced a lot of money or social prestige, but valuable in how they lit the way for walking a different path, one that many people would question.
Sometimes I think, “I wish my Substack had millions of subscribers and that I were a best-selling author.” Many people — influencers especially — do measure their contribution in numbers of followers and sales of content.
There is another way to look at why we are here, though. Maybe it is enough to have impact on just a few people (and creatures). Maybe inspiring one person, my daughter, is enough.
And all the better that this influence and inspiration is symmetric and reciproal. The relationship my daughter and I have built together isn’t one where a content creator produces something and the follower consumes it. For a writer or instagrammer with millions of followers, individual audience members have no reality of their own. The content creator doesn’t experience them as fully independent others with thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams of their own.
Creating art for myself, and a few others
My daughter told me she loves being in my house with all the original art — my abstract art — hanging everywhere. I have showed my work in shows, and sold one piece, but recently I’ve let go of the dream of being more than a hobby artist. Maybe it’s enough that just a few people enjoy my art. Maybe it’s enough that my art delights me, and sometimes a couple other people.
I’m interested in the idea of epimeleia heautou, “care of the self,” an Ancient Greek and Roman philosophical concept popularized by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self. This is not millennial-style self-care, taking a bath with a lit candle. It includes philosophical examination, moral development, and making one’s life itself a work of art. Foucault called it an “aesthetics of existence” and proposed that it could serve as an antidote to domination as well as a way to navigate ethical life.
You might think “that sounds narcissistic” but for Foucault it is a necessary prelude to acting in the world and interacting with others. For most of his career, Foucault wrote about structures of power and how institutions such as prisons, hospitals, and schools shape human behavior. In Byung-Chul Han’s lingo, he was writing about the obedience society that preceded the achievement society.
But in either case we are dominated — in the obedience society by institutions and in the achievement society by our internal slave master — and we need a way to instead live from a place of understanding one’s self as a full human with needs and possibilities of her own, a way to live with authenticity and aesthetics. We need to live not from a place of dominating our self but instead fully caring for the self, as a human worthy of care.
Would it be enough to merely make a good life for myself, without contributing to making a good life for others (my children, for example, my dogs and cats)? I think it would be. I am human — I am worthy of care and attention. My flourishing counts.
I’m not saying that’s what I’m going to do: think only of caring for myself. However, understanding that making a good life for myself is a worthy endeavor on its own helps me break out of the achievement-and-influencing society demand that if I’m going to do anything, I better do it in a way that reaches a lot of people.
Instead of the attention economy, an inspiration exchange
Platforms like Substack force you to see how many people are subscribing, are reading, are commenting and liking. These things make me feel like I don’t “count” if I’m not having an impact on at least thousands of people if not millions. But exactly what I don’t need to do is to count up how many people I’m reaching.
Inspiring and influencing one person — my daughter, who reciprocally inspires and influences me — is a worthy contribution to this human life.