I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
You must change your life
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo
In his book You Must Change Your Life, covered recently by Stephen West in his Philosophize This! podcast, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that human beings are fundamentally practicing animals, continuously producing ourselves through the activities we repeat day after day. Whatever you do repeatedly is training you to become someone.
So, my daily blogging is turning me into a particular kind of someone day by day: someone who is more learned about philosophy, someone who is a quicker writer, someone who is eager to write every morning once she has fed the animals and poured herself a first cup of coffee.
To Sloterdijk, practice isn’t limited to virtuous activities like writing every day, going to the gym, doing your work each day whatever that is (social work, software engineering, emergency medicine?) Even ordinary habits are practice: arguing with your roommate, scrolling TikTok endlessly, having a glass of wine or two in the evening. And they each contribute to who you are becoming.
Sloterdijk calls these ways we form ourselves anthropotechnics. They are the techniques by which you shape, train, discipline, and transform yourself.
“You must change your life”
This line comes from a poem by Rilke “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Rilke encounters a damaged classical sculpture that seems to judge him. Its excellence says to him: you must change your life.
This is a pervasive aspect of human experience, Sloterdijk proposes. You encounter someone or something embodying a possibility that exists on a higher level than where you are. It might be a great artwork, or an extraordinary athlete, or simply the imagined person you could become. This encounter creates vertical tension, the distance between where you are and where you sense you could or should be.
This reminds me of Agnes Callard’s work on aspiration, in which she has suggested that you can aspire to change your values, but before the values change you have no rational, fully-informed basis for choosing to change them. You can’t fully understand the new value set you’ll have once you change. But you fumble forward regardless, pulled by the sense that there is something more beautiful or satisfying out there for you.
The comfort of the basecamp
Sloterdijk thinks that you construct your ordinary life as a kind of basecamp, a place where you have an established identity, familiar habits, social connections, and reasonable comfort. It’s where you do the things you already know how to do. It’s also where you take on the training and practice that could make you into someone new.
But he thinks people sometimes get stuck at basecamp, even though it should be for temporary staging and preparing, not permanent settling in. Sometimes your ordinary, comfortable life becomes not a point of departure but a place to stay and relax long term.
If you get stuck at basecamp you might think:
- This is simply who I am
- People like me don’t do things like that (when you are confronted with other people doing the things you might like to do, or when you get an idea for a big change)
- I’m too old to become anything different
- My history constrains me
- I’ve already arrived at the person I’m going to be for the rest of my life
You can aspire towards something else, something higher, though. And when that activity or achievement becomes familiar to you, you’ll have constructed a new basecamp where you can regroup. “A summit is always a new basecamp, a new basecamp merely an old summit,” writes Adam Robbert of Sloterdijk’s work on the art of philosophy.
Of course this constant striving is not necessarily a good thing, is it? It sounds perilously close to South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s idea of the achievement society which exhorts you to constantly drive yourself towards improvement.
When you want to descend
I’ve found myself recently contemplating a return to technology work. I’ve started building a web app to support my options trading. It’s fun, and I think I’m good at it. I built and architected data-intensive software systems for many years. Being able to do it without struggling with code or data structures — because Codex does that for me — makes it so much easier.
So I had this thought: “I could go get a job building software again, doing data science, figuring out machine learning systems.”
But I wonder if returning to corporate employment, especially in data science or software engineering, represents a turning around and a heading down the mountain, back to a previously constructed basecamp.
Sloterdijk’s idea of anthropotechnics suggests I might ask:
What am I training myself to become? And do I want to continue?
And:
What life encourages or even requires the practices I want to be changed by now?
Getting a new job in tech could mean I have an opportunity to grow myself in ways I haven’t before. It could also mean a return to the burnout society, a bowing down to a culture that thinks that a fancy job title and big salary and stock options makes a person more worthy, a giving up on aspiring towards becoming who I might be — a successful options trader, a conceptual artist, a writer who brings important philosophical ideas to light.