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.
Nietzsche thought you should live your live as a work of art, prioritizing aesthetics as much as you prioritize morality. He admired human greatness. He tried to make his own life into a work of literature, and admired others who had achieved that, through their uniqueness, their style, their accomplishments.
I’m playing around with terminology for the philosophy of living your life as though you were the heroine of a great work of literature. The coinage protagonism seems to work but it is a somewhat ugly sounding word. My working definition:
Protagonism: Living as though you are the main character in an epic story, confronting challenges in order to transform into someone wiser, better, kinder, more human.
The opposite of protagonism, of being a protagonist, would be to be part of the chorus, Greek word khoros, the set of performers in a play who sing and dance and comment as one, often commenting on the main action but not having actual important tasks to take on themselves. To live in khoros is to do what society wants, to hew closely to convention, to avoid challenges.
Let’s dig into the word protagonist. It comes from the Ancient Greek word prōtagōnistēs meaning “actor who plays the chief part” and is built from three distinct Greek elements:
- protos (πρῶτος): Meaning “first” or “chief.”
- agein (ἄγειν): Meaning “to drive,” “to lead,” or “to move.”
- -istes (-ιστής): A suffix denoting an agent or “one who does.”
The noun agōn (struggle/contest) derives from the verb agein (to drive/lead/move). The connection comes from the concept of “driving or bringing people together.” This evolved from meaning a physical gathering or assembly, to a place where people gather to compete, to the competition itself.
Life is full of struggles and contests. Your job, as protagonist of your life, is to meet these challenges as the chief responder.
Life is pain, and that makes for a plot
Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Westley, disguised as the Man in Black, to Buttercup, Princess Bride
Along the same lines, the Buddha said life is dukkha, which some have translated as suffering. It can also be translated from the Pali/Sanskrit as “unsatisfactoriness,” “stress,” “unease,” or “discontent.”
But I like agon best to describe exactly what life entails. It brings pain, it brings suffering, but thinking of the struggle and pain as a challenge, as a struggle, gives you, the protagonist, a job to do.
Some philosophies and psychological approaches seek mainly to regulate your affect — how you feel about the world. Cognitive behavioral therapy does this using disputation and reframing techniques: identify a negative and possibly distorted thought and then talk yourself out of it. Stoicism recommends amor fati, but a curiously passive form of it, a kind of acceptance rather than an attempt to overcome the actual situation and make things better.
Protagonism, on the other hand, doesn’t look to change your thinking or move you towards acceptance. It says, “go out and meet that challenge! That way lies your best chance at becoming a better version of yourself.”
Protagonism says that the bad things that happen to us are all part of the experience, and how we meet them matters.
Note that protagonism doesn’t imply that everything will work out ok. You could be living a tragic story. None of us gets to choose whether we live a tragedy, a drama, a comedy, a surrealist horror.
How this changes my own story
On OkCupid, there is or used to be a matching question:
Would you rather live an interesting life or a happy life?
You don’t have total control over which you get, but you can prioritize actions that lead you one way or another. Living in khoros — following society’s recommendations for you, seeking out a stable and reasonably well-paying job, keeping to conventional morality — will be more likely to bring you a happy life than a very interesting one. Protagonism aims at the interesting life, not the comfortable or happy one.
Struggles — agonies — are required if you want to live an interesting life. They aren’t optional. My divorce, for example, makes my life more interesting than it otherwise would be. Without grief, sadness, mistakes, regrets, challenges, overcomings, there is no good story to tell.
If all someone does is find comfort, financial security, a solid marriage, healthy kids, and a house or two, that is happy. But maybe not interesting.
good characters
I want to write about the series Patriot that ran on Amazon Prime from 2015 to 2018. The main character John Tavner, using the pseudonym John Lakeman, is complicated, sympathetic, and also hard to understand. He is capable of deep love. He desperately wants his father’s approval. He can be brutal, violent, and uncaring. He doesn’t want friends, really, but makes them anyway. He’s ok with getting terribly hurt in the course of the story and keeps moving out on his goals regardless of how his body-self has been hurt.
As the story unfolds, he pursues concrete goals but underlying that, he is pursuing intangibles: his father’s approval, a chance to make meaningful music, good friends. He is the quintessential protagonist.
But I’m not going to get into that right now. I want to turn this material into a newsletter article. That’s my goal for today.
It’s not easy to write about this. It would be easier if I would let Gemini help me structure and write it. But I’ve largely stopped using any large language model to assist me in writing. The chatbots overshadow my own thinking. They come up with ideas that seem insightful but that are not my own.
One thing this philosophy of protagonism has convinced me of is that meeting challenges — facing agonies — makes for a better life than avoiding them or trying to make them less hard.
What challenge are you going to meet today?