I received dozens of replies, many long and thoughtful, to my last note – about ten times more than usual. Wow! Thank you!
I wrote about the quest to live a good life, how difficult it is to do within the reality of workdays and career ambitions. Reading your replies it seems like we are all thinking similar thoughts, silently facing the same dilemma. But we rarely, or never, get the chance to discuss these very personal considerations about how to live.
Since the note resonated with so many of you, I started to wonder: is there a bigger idea here? An idea about more than just our personal lives?
This might be a stretch, I know... but perhaps we share a reaction more generally to the frenetic, fragmented, unravelling modern world; perhaps in this moment of pandemic and climate change and mass migration and anger we share a kind of posture, an embryonic idea about how to be.
If we can find the right words for it, perhaps this idea can give us some resolve to embrace our unspoken intuitions about how to live, how we ought to act in our work, our culture, even our politics.
This is an attempt to find some words for this bigger idea. I hope you will tell me with your replies, comments, or shares if I’m onto something here.
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We are tired of living in the future
School and work these days are premised on delayed gratification. This is the way that modern meritocracy works: spend your time studying, cramming for the test, so that you can live a good life later. Devote yourself entirely to this startup so that you can finally be free when it sells for millions. Focus intensely on this project, this script, this deal, endure the stress, because it will open doors to the life you want to lead, tomorrow or next year or when you finally retire.
Of course this race up the pyramid is doomed to failure for nearly everyone because it is, after all, a pyramid. And in the meantime we’re missing it, this life, these days, we’re missing the chance to live out our ideas about what makes life fulfilling.
Our solution to society’s biggest problems takes the same shape. The climate is descending into hell-like weather patterns, and the business and political elite say: if we invest now, we can be carbon neutral by 2050. Later. Make the investment now, believe in the technology R&D, and we will live in a safe, clean world in a few decades. For now, fires and floods and hurricanes.
Our culture seems to have internalized this expectation of deus ex machina, the wait for an improbable savior to get us out of this mess. I do not know if the mythology of Silicon Valley is the cause or consequence of this broader cultural expectation, but it seems like a clear case of something that is now widespread. We live in expectation of the new product that revolutionizes everything, the breakthrough innovation, the cure. We put our faith in the big investments in the future.
Our movie theatres are dominated alternatingly by superhero movies and apocalypse scenarios. Our political parties have become machines to rally around leaders who promise to fix everything if only they would be elected, and we are all haunted by these demagogues-in-waiting.
We live elsewhere: in the future, at the end of the project, in the next election year or in 2050, on Netflix and Instagram and the never-ending feeds. And living elsewhere feels empty, feels unreal, feels like we’re missing the chance to live this one life. No wonder we all flock to meditation, to the 4-hour workweek, to living a minimalist life in a van: we are desperate to get back in touch with the present.
I love the cliché, trite quote from Henry James, the 19th-century novelist, “It's time to start living the life you've imagined.” The line is usually reprinted in self-help literature and motivational posters, but maybe that’s fitting. Here we are in 2021 and no one is coming to save us, not our employers, not our religion, not our government. If ever there was a time for self-help, it is now.
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There is nowhere else to go
Here’s the thing that makes this moment different: we are not ready to reject it all, the studies and the work and the political system, to throw it away and live off the grid or to start a new society. That was the reaction of a previous generation, that was the reaction of the 20th century, the century of “isms”: communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, all these absolute systems that promised a better society based on a new set of ideas. All those systems went to war, cold and hot, and it ended thirty years ago with the End of History, the victory of capitalism and democracy.
And here we are, a generation later, and the world is still a mess, the end has not arrived, the postscript is full of new conflicts and reprises of old ones. Small groups continue on advocating for a new system, the anarchists and the fundamentalists, but they seem like anachronisms, relics of an older time.
Perhaps we are finally too disillusioned for any big idea to seduce us, we have become allergic to absolutes. Perhaps now in our hyper-connected world, where every ideology is nurtured by a filter-bubble and instant networking and very quickly taken to its logical and extreme conclusion, we are starting to realize that none of these ideologies has an answer, that actually they all become ridiculous in their full realization.
So it doesn’t make sense to opt out of society and start over, it wouldn’t lead anywhere. We live in this hodgepodge of digital and analog, consumer capitalism and nonprofits and political parties, social security and privatization, environmentalism and industrial growth, democracy and oligarchy, corrupt elite and mega-philanthropists, multicultural integration and segregated ethnic communities. It all coexists and is in constant flux. There is no system to throw away because the system has absorbed it all.
So instead of searching for the big solution, we choose harmony: many notes played at the same time in a beautiful, melodic ensemble. We choose to take the system and move some pieces around, more of this and less of that, make some room over here and quiet down that note.
Fifty years ago, Robert Pirsig wrote about this idea and the word “harmony” in the best-selling philosophy book of all time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he tried to combine the romantic hippie ideals of the ‘60s with rational, practical, scientific life. Today, after each strand has played itself out to exhaustion and no path has led to utopia, the combination seems like the only way forward.
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We have enough good ideas
In this chaotic, contradictory system, maybe we already have all the good ideas and great technologies we need.
We know that personal fulfillment comes from our relationships, from good health, from balancing altruism with self-care. We know that local food, and localism in general, is a great idea for our communities. Living wages, human rights, investments in early childhood education, renewable energy and bike lanes and preventative care and a hundred other ideas out there clearly work, are clearly good ones.
What is infuriating to me when I think about climate change, or widening inequality, or systematic racism, is that good ideas to fight against these problems are widely known! They are already here in front of us! They are not easy, of course, and certainly not comprehensive. The challenge of fitting them all together into a harmony now, today, is daunting. It requires some clear thinking, some experimentation, and real effort. No one note can dominate, which of course means compromises.
But this is not the message we hear from Silicon Valley influencers or from the demagogue leaders on the right or the left. They continue to pitch the big ideas that will come in the future, the new investment fund, the next election cycle. But the problem with waiting for success and breakthroughs in the future is that we neglect to do the hard work of creating harmony now, with all of the good ideas we already have.
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Harmony Now
There is no solution here, but maybe an animating idea for how to move forward.
Instead of looking for the big idea, the success over the horizon, or the new era, we can ask: how can we live a good life today? How can we use the tools we already have?
A new resolve to create harmony now can start in our own daily life, as I wrote about in my last note. We choose to study, to work, to make money, but at the same time to enjoy each day, to live for the immaterial. We choose to stay connected, to network and create and like, but at the same time to turn off the screen and retrain our eyes to the natural world. We choose to spend time and energy in our local communities, but at the same time to travel and explore and seek inspiration elsewhere.
If we find that personal harmony – which is really about embracing the fullness of our humanity – then we will better recognize the humanity of others. Harmony that starts inside each of us naturally, inevitably radiates outwards. In this era when marginalized people are fighting to have their voices heard, this recognition of our common humanity seems like the only way forward.
Then there is climate change. The solutions we hear in the media tend to be extreme: either we need to stop growth and industry altogether, or we need to accelerate investments in a new technology to save us. My intuition, which I think is shared by many, is that a middle path is the best way forward and it is possible today, with the ideas we already have. Yes to lifestyle changes today that reduce our impact, yes to stricter regulations on industry, yes to a carbon tax. Yes to continued investment in sustainable business. Turn off the coal plants right now (!) but yes, keep investing in carbon capture. Carbon neutrality in 2025, not 2050. It is possible without turning off industry or nationalizing private sectors.
We can keep working on great new ideas and new technologies, but we don’t have to wait for them to arrive. The urgency of the situation demands action now, action to create harmony.
The challenge of fitting the right pieces together, the pieces we already have, seems to me like the most worthy problem to solve today, where I want to devote my creative energy. It is urgent, it is possible, and it will require all of our efforts.
Ce billet me rappelle la citation d'Albert Camus "La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent."
J'aimerais que nos pensées utopiques car potentiellement complexes à mettre en œuvre deviennent réalité !