I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Today I’m one-third of the way through my 1000-day reinvention project. I’ve recently started questioning whether “reinvention” is the right word for what I’m attempting — or for what I’m undergoing. It’s more like a transformation. Or, as Dabrowski termed it, a disintegration.
Reinvention implies an intentional process of completely updating or remaking something — a person, a career, an organization, a product — so that it appears radically different and perhaps functions differently too.
What feels wrong with reinvention as a description for what I’m doing (what I’m undergoing) is that this process (1) isn’t totally under my control and (2) this process isn’t primarily about how I appear in the world.
What other words serve? Transformation, perhaps. Evolution? Metamorphosis? Becoming, to use an existentialist term?
Maybe this project need not name any process. It’s just 1000 days of my life, one blog post after another, like beads on a necklace. Or maybe it’s more like an acrylic painting created over time, with marks and shapes and textures of many colors, each adding up to some composition, the outcome of which I can’t imagine when I start.
The water we swim in
It seems to me that the ideas and ideals of the achievement society — this can-do society of self-optimization and constant ambition we live in — are so pervasive that they are the water we, as fish, swim in.
From David Foster Wallace’s This is Water graduation speech at Kenyon College in 2005:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Later, Wallace says that “there is no such thing as atheism” because we all worship something:
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you….
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
I have worshipped intellect and the rewards that accrue to the ambitious, well-resourced intellectual for most of my life. Now I’m using my intellect to craft a new way of living and a new way of approaching the world. I question the need for ever-more ambition, ever-more achievement, and ever-more consumption based on what I’ve earned via my ambition and achievement.
And now as I try to reinvent myself I find I almost cannot breathe when I leave the water of the achievement society. It feels so foreign to leave the atmosphere that I’ve known. I cannot imagine a reason to create abstract acrylic paintings if it is not to win awards and make money from them and raise my profile so that I am admired for my artistic vision and skill. I cannot imagine a reason to learn about wartime and the macroeconomy if it is not to improve upon my investment portfolio management. I cannot imagine why I would spend time learning to better manage my foster dog Sally’s leash reactivity unless it is to create a business helping other dog owners and foster parents to manage their own dogs’ behavior.
I study philosophy mainly as part of the via contemplativa not to get somewhere with it — so there is that.
Foster Wallace continues:
[The] so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. [emphasis mine]
Indeed I live with extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. I am queen of my tiny skull-sized queendom, but also queen of my rather large suburban golf course house. It’s not the skull-sized queendom that is so intoxicating. Nevertheless, living in relative affluence is not entirely satisfying, and more wealth and comfort and personal freedom will not make it so (as Schopenhauer saw).
Am I just retired? Or am I becoming a communist?
I think I might be becoming a communist, but more on that later.
I’ll leave you with this tweet.