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 found myself feeling upset yesterday, seemingly because I wasn’t living the life some part of me thought I should be living.
I thought: I don’t socialize enough, and a rich social life has been shown to be the happiest and healthiest way to live. I should be partnered, probably remarried if not still married to my first husband. I should have a job; at 58 it’s a little early to be retired! Famous investors like Warren Buffett work into their 90s. I should probably be in a book club. I should have a monetized Substack; I’ve certainly written enough in my lifetime to have turned it into a capitalist hustle.
Then I wondered: what metaphor is in operation here? Why should I do anything?
It seems I’ve created an extensive adult life operating manual for myself to follow. It tells me what I should do with my hair (probably cut it and get it highlighted), how often I should socialize (a lot more than I do), what weight my body should be (under 145 lbs), and generally what an admirable life looks like for a late fifties empty nester like me.
Life coach Brooke Castillo warns against creating operating manuals for other people — and for yourself — in her podcast #11: The Manual. She says:
[One] of the first things that I think is really important to remember is that adult people have the ability and freedom to behave however they would like. That includes you.
There is nothing that you really have to ever do, and there is nothing that anyone else has to do for you.
Creating a manual for yourself, even unconsciously, can make you feel vaguely uncomfortable with yourself a lot of the time, especially if you’ve created a very extensive manual based on society’s dictates rather than who you want to be. There are definitely times of life to prioritize adherence to cultural convention over developing an internal strength and coherence. But you can take that too far, turning yourself into a shell of a person who is purely created defined and developed by common ideas of how to live a good life.
I’m not going to say there are no shoulds in life. You should not hurt another person (or any creature at all) just for the fun of it. You should not lie or steal, in most cases (I add that caveat because there are times when maybe you must or you should lie or steal). You should generally take responsibility for your own life, whether that is financially, emotionally, or physically. And so forth.
Many people go way too far with their manuals though, getting very explicit about things that don’t matter to living a good life.
And girls and women often add to their manual expectations that distract them from what is truly important by putting their focus onto being the kind of feminine presence the world wants: “I must be skinny and pretty,” “I must always be pleasant even when other people are not,” “I must not be too vocal or strong in my opinions,” and so on.
An adult life operating manual could be useful if it specifies a few key things, perhaps along the line of the five precepts of Buddhism:
- Abstain from taking life
- Abstain from taking what is not given
- Abstain from sexual misconduct
- Abstain from false speech
- Abstain from intoxicants
Life as an artwork instead
What is an alternative to thinking there is a set of rules I must follow to live a good life? How about life as an artistic composition? A manual demands adherence; an artwork demands coherence, among other things.
Nietzsche suggests this in his work The Gay Science:
One thing is needful. — To “give style” to one’s character– a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed — both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
“If only it was a single taste” — that describes coherence.
Seeking to “give style” to one’s character is not simply opposed to living life according to a manual that incorporates cultural convention. This is the case with metaphors: often they are not simply opposites of one another but bundles of meaning and direction that represent, perhaps, entirely different dimensions or frames of significance.
Nietzsche thought one should look upon one’s self and one’s life as a work of art that requires ongoing sculpting, pruning, and refinement.
And this goes beyond coherence doesn’t it? Perhaps an all-white canvas would show coherence. But a great artwork has more to it: contrast, composition, surprise, detail, color and shape perhaps.
How is my life like an artwork right now? It is spare — minimalist — not crowded with excessive relationships or social events. It is routinized — I have a daily routine that plays out almost every day in similar ways — which gives the composition rhythm. It is punctuated by care — my care for others, their care for me, providing bits of interest, like a painting that is mostly cool blue but has warm rust-colored accents.
And how does thinking my life is like an artwork guide me as this life unfolds, as I move from late middle age into what I think of as young old age (my sixties, coming up in less than two years)? What should I add or take away or refine to make this ever-evolving artwork more stunning? What is beautiful in this life, even if it doesn’t look like the life that I think I should be living?