I love this. For some reason I have always taken the road 'less traveled by', to the bemusement of my peers. They may have worldly wealth, and indeed some of them are running the country (aaargh!), while I am half the world away dancing, poor as a church mouse. But I am happy.
You've spoken to a multitude of people who have squashed their dreams, sabotaged their efforts and settled for less because of fear of the unknown. I've fallen prey to that in some areas, and overcome it in others, so I know what both sides look like.
Taking that first step to realize one's ambition or passion can feel like jumping off a cliff, but the reward of discovering your wings, tumbling awkwardly at first and repeatedly as new heights are reached, you learn to soar, and experience the joy of accomplishment that comes with it. Not everything you try will be successful, but at least you've learned what doesn't work.
I always enjoy your articles focusing on encouraging your readers to live their best lives, and offering concrete ideas for how to do it.
My eldest son took this attitude. He is on the autism spectrum, social life was hard, home was safe. If he stayed home he would never leave. He graduated from college and immediately went to teach English in Russia. ( he had been a Russian language and literature major.) He traveled through Europe, then taught in Korea, and China, where he worked for 7 years and married. He has had a hard and adventurous life, taking absurd chances, getting into drunken fights in foreign countries where he barely spoke the language. He brought his wife back to the US and they have a lovely home and family. We expected to get a message from the state department at any time during those years he spent abroad telling us he had died.
He still challenges himself during the summers by camping in scary places and kayaking dangerous waters. His anxiety remains high but he confronts it head on and conquers his fears. His younger brother has succumbed to the comfort factor and stayed home, but overcame a speech impediment and social anxieties by working in casino table games where constant patter and controlling the environment is part of the job. After college he pursued a career in the military and law enforcement but army physicals revealed a heart lung defect which ruled his lifelong dreams out.
There is a lot to be said for your point of view, especially for men.
His father and I challenged ourselves primarily by marrying and starting a family at 21 with three children by 25, adopting two more later. No money, no family backup, just an embryonic career in IT which provided a paycheck just in advance of the bills and the fearlessness that being young gives you, a fearlessness I see young people today squandering.
Great comment. I went for comfort for many years. Really avoidance. It damned me, although I didn't know how to escape. Then I hit rock bottom. From that point, about 12 years ago, I gradually started confronting anxiety inducing things. Work issues, changing career to become self-employed, public speaking, writing and publishing work, and on and on.
It is a marathon. I am not a natural. And my start was less than stellar. So I lost a lot of time, hiding, being fearful. But everything changes you, even the negatives. I sometimes get embarrassed looking back, knowing I missed out on a lot thanks to fear getting the better of me. Then I realize all experience is experience, even the painful bits. It makes you who you are.
I think this is why I like Jung. He understood we essentially create ourselves, we create the life around us through choices. We can make different choices.
I have seen enormous growth in the younger one (38) this past year. He really was plagued by a series of events beyond his control when he should have been launched. He graduated into the recession of 2008 and couldn’t get a job in his major of technical writing, got a fellowship for marine policy, specializing in piracy , made great contacts, then Obama shut down the piracy initiatives and his mentor, 94, died, leaving him academically orphaned halfway through the program. When he failed his military physical and learned no doctor would sign off he went into a several years long depression from which only our family rule of work or school or both but not neither got him out of the house. Casino security, he had worked for the university police through college and grad school, led to dealing, then managing, now he holds a job with the gaming commission. Still he had never really had personal adult responsibilities outside of work.
Last year he bought a house as an investment property. Paying a mortgage, dealing with painters, carpets, insurance companies, tenants, complaints about tenants, finding out good fences make good neighbors, all have been really good for forcing him to confront reality outside the house he’s lived in since he was 8. It is never too late.
That is great. It really is never too late. We all mature and develop in different ways. And responsibility really is the catalyst in my view. Especially for men. They need responsibility and if they shirk they stagnate.
It sounds like he is becoming himself. I am sure he will make it. And no doubt he will continue to develop and mature.
About the last part of your comment, it is very true. My own introduction to Jung came through Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment about the importance of archetypes in child development. It is one of the central reasons the modern tendency to Disneyfy or worse the often grisly original fairy tales is so damaging. Children need black and white, good and evil, and they need gender stereotypes to mold their character. That Waldorf schools have wandered away from this is critically damaging to their charter.
My husband and I came from broken homes affected by adultery and alcoholism. We decided at 19 that we wanted something very different, the opposite of everything we had known, and a lifestyle that was already beginning to vanish. We were able to accomplish it by inventing ourselves, choosing not to choose the self indulgence of our peers. The children were, and in many ways still are, like a religious vocation, always coming first. It isn’t always easy but it has been rewarding.
You were fortunate to come to that conclusion so early. I envy you that, although I obviously appreciate it would have been hard work and fraught with stress.
My own background was dysfunctional, but I didn't meet anyone who had that kind of damage so I drifted for years. Everyone else seemed to have their act together. I felt like an outsider for a long time.
But I always had a kind of drive. I wanted to be a writer and had a vivid imagination. Over time I got better with discipline and eventually realized you don't need permission to become yourself. You get to decide. That was a revelation to someone like me. I'd never had anyone encourage me in anything I ever did. So encouraging yourself felt fraudulent, but of course it is not.
So here I am. Still reinventing, changing, getting stronger as best I can. And somehow people read the things I put on here. A little miracle really.
I think your positivity is reaching people who are ready to acknowledge that while life is really screwed up in a lot of ways they aren’t going to get a do over. This is it. You can’t save the receipt and try again later. This is your chance and you have to make the most of it, even if that looks different than it would’ve if you were born 40 years earlier.
I’ve felt guilty for years that we had all the good times in the 80’s and 90’s and that our kids have it so hard comparably. Women used to know if they were average looking they could expect an average guy. Houses were affordable. The list is endless. But this is the now we have.
You acknowledge the reality, you aren’t pollyanna-ish, but you put the responsibility back in people’s hands. This isn’t a boot camp blog, you aren’t pushing people to eat better, exercise more, or do anything except show up and take charge of what happens next in their lives. We can’t control everything, in fact recent events have shown us how little we can control. But we still get to control how we spend a lot of hours each day. With people mesmerized by their phones this is something that can’t be said enough.
You are saying something here that can only improve a lot of lives. I’m glad you are reaching a wider audience.
There's an old saying - do what you love, the money will follow. In my life experience, this didn't always hold true. One thing I learned early on was that doing what inspires and fulfills your inner need to accomplish something does not always result in applause and recognition so that can be the driving force. My philosophy has always been - do it anyway. If your desire to do is held hostage to the need to be acclaimed and/or recompensed, you will eventually feel enslaved to your muse and/or the fake/fickle supporters whom you thought were real.
I have always chosen to do for the joy of doing, not the thing done.
This is my view of writing. I love it. I would love to make a living from it. That is challenging, but I do it anyway.
I think the doing what you love helps as it provides an advantage. If you hate writing it would always be a chore so you are disadvantaged against someone who loves to write.
And you write like someone who is not bound up by having to please your readers - which is why I like to read what you write. I write to find out what I think. Sometimes I am totally surprised.
I've been writing since I first learned to read. I couldn't help it. For years I stuffed my stories folded neatly in the bottom drawer under my sox because I didn't need or want input. I knew I needed to get better but I had to do it my way. This set the standard for me. In everything I tried - art, music, sewing, interior design, invention, photography. woodworking.
Most of these endeavors netted me no fame or fortune. I did it anyway and I am none the worse for the doing. The old joke in my tribe when I start something new is that it's my 'last big thing'. My current 'last big thing' is creating music with AI - suddenly my lyrics have a place to launch. No need for fame or fortune though, no plans to do anything with my musical poetry other than make a point - just complete joy for being able to do it. :-) Just posted this one:
Somewhere to sleep, in reasonable comfort and safety.
Something to eat.
And knowing you'll have at least that tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow too.
I doubt Jung ever had to go without any of those. I have, both involuntary and later by choice as a test of self and character.
And the point, as it relates to anxiety and fear: having conquered real fear, real anxiety, makes all the existential and metaphysical fear pale in comparison. They become like the monsters of the silver screen: scary and frightening to look at, but not really real.
There's also something to say about adopting a Norse or Lakonik attitude to fear:
That which you can affect, you need not fear since you may exert power over it;
That which you cannot affect is pointless to fear.
It never ceases to amaze me how much Stoic wisdom appears across the world in various guises. I was unaware of that piece of Nordic wisdom. It is similar to the less impressive Anglo-Saxon version, if you have problem you can do something about, you don't have a problem.
I also agree confronting real fear makes invented fear lose its power to some extent. Life is experience, and I have found out the slow way that avoidance not only does not help but retards real mental development.
I am in a phase where I am actively pursuing a number of activities that make me anxious. A kind of crude exposure therapy. The more you do it the more you change and become stronger I think. Most of it is in our heads of course.
The Sagas are brimming with kennings, hidden within each other. Not unlike old Norse, Teutonic, Celtic and Scythian scroll-work art and jewellry.
And the Greek epics are almost all centered around a Hero overcoming and triumphing, unless the gods strikes him down directly; in other words, it takes the power of a god to stop the man determined to fight.
In Slavic myths they have the Bogatyr and a whole host of heroes of humble origins.
It used to be, up until the 1980s even, that reading the classics or adaptions or works inspired by folktales and legend was the bog standard. Entertainment or education, the Sagas were and remain the Ur-source of wisdom since human nature is the same in the here and now as it was in the days of Utnapishtim or the Epid of Aqhat.
In the interest of whom is it, that we are no longer told to study the shadow cast by those who went before us?
Looking at which cultures/races that are allowed or even encouraged to have a living heritage might yield some clues, as might looking at what elements of myth the powers that be seek to eliminate.
Tangible proof is impossible to put forth, but at some point correlation becomes too strong to deny.
It's apposite that you mentioned social media in passing, as (inevitably it seems) the simple truths you discuss here have even been hijacked in a sense by brag culture, whereby so many people seem to focus on the grand achievement, measurable and highly visible, to be held up as a sort of "life trophy" in front of hundreds of people who hardly know them, as a sort of self-validation.
You know, climbing a big mountain, cycling the length of the country, or even say starting up their own online business which made them tons of money, whatever.
Whereas- as you point out - doing your own meaningful life project, with its unglamorous start/fail/reassess/begin again/partially succeed/ revise/ re-orientate etc etc, is in its essence not Facebook-friendly.
It seems as if many people are sensing the hole in their lives, but addressing it in a manner that is bound to leave them still unsatisfied; either by programming or self-deceit. I suppose what I am driving at is a question for any one of those achievers: did you take this challenge on because of something specific unanswered in you, or was it because you felt pressured by seeing many other people "seeming" to be making "more" of their lives? I hope that makes sense !
There is very definitely a difference between a Facebook-ready project and the kind of thing that is real and satisfying. Sincere projects will often have a great deal of mundane repetition and drudgery, with minimal visible payback. Certainly not much that is photogenic.
Running the marathon and climbing the mountain can of course be genuine goals. But I do think the social media validation people aim for much faster, more accessible pseudo-accomplishments.
None of that will fill the void, which was Jung's observation. They can pretend all they like, but it will haunt them.
Yes, you have it there. It's almost costume-playing of something that cannot be simulated despite the initial dopamine high. Social media has its uses of course, but in so many ways it seems to be Midas in reverse, unfortunately.
I think there is some truth in the notion social media rewires brains. I think many people are caught on a treadmill they don't know how to escape. I feel sorry for them. They are wasting their lives.
I love this. For some reason I have always taken the road 'less traveled by', to the bemusement of my peers. They may have worldly wealth, and indeed some of them are running the country (aaargh!), while I am half the world away dancing, poor as a church mouse. But I am happy.
I know how you feel. I took the road less travelled too. I think Jung was right. You have to at least try otherwise you pay the price.
You are the rich one. 😂
You've spoken to a multitude of people who have squashed their dreams, sabotaged their efforts and settled for less because of fear of the unknown. I've fallen prey to that in some areas, and overcome it in others, so I know what both sides look like.
Taking that first step to realize one's ambition or passion can feel like jumping off a cliff, but the reward of discovering your wings, tumbling awkwardly at first and repeatedly as new heights are reached, you learn to soar, and experience the joy of accomplishment that comes with it. Not everything you try will be successful, but at least you've learned what doesn't work.
I always enjoy your articles focusing on encouraging your readers to live their best lives, and offering concrete ideas for how to do it.
Well it can't all be doom and gloom 😛 I think I write these things to lecture myself, lol. Cheer up! Smile more! Buck up your ideas!
We do all need a little encouragement and a reminder this is our one and only life. Make it happen.
My eldest son took this attitude. He is on the autism spectrum, social life was hard, home was safe. If he stayed home he would never leave. He graduated from college and immediately went to teach English in Russia. ( he had been a Russian language and literature major.) He traveled through Europe, then taught in Korea, and China, where he worked for 7 years and married. He has had a hard and adventurous life, taking absurd chances, getting into drunken fights in foreign countries where he barely spoke the language. He brought his wife back to the US and they have a lovely home and family. We expected to get a message from the state department at any time during those years he spent abroad telling us he had died.
He still challenges himself during the summers by camping in scary places and kayaking dangerous waters. His anxiety remains high but he confronts it head on and conquers his fears. His younger brother has succumbed to the comfort factor and stayed home, but overcame a speech impediment and social anxieties by working in casino table games where constant patter and controlling the environment is part of the job. After college he pursued a career in the military and law enforcement but army physicals revealed a heart lung defect which ruled his lifelong dreams out.
There is a lot to be said for your point of view, especially for men.
His father and I challenged ourselves primarily by marrying and starting a family at 21 with three children by 25, adopting two more later. No money, no family backup, just an embryonic career in IT which provided a paycheck just in advance of the bills and the fearlessness that being young gives you, a fearlessness I see young people today squandering.
Great comment. I went for comfort for many years. Really avoidance. It damned me, although I didn't know how to escape. Then I hit rock bottom. From that point, about 12 years ago, I gradually started confronting anxiety inducing things. Work issues, changing career to become self-employed, public speaking, writing and publishing work, and on and on.
It is a marathon. I am not a natural. And my start was less than stellar. So I lost a lot of time, hiding, being fearful. But everything changes you, even the negatives. I sometimes get embarrassed looking back, knowing I missed out on a lot thanks to fear getting the better of me. Then I realize all experience is experience, even the painful bits. It makes you who you are.
I think this is why I like Jung. He understood we essentially create ourselves, we create the life around us through choices. We can make different choices.
I have seen enormous growth in the younger one (38) this past year. He really was plagued by a series of events beyond his control when he should have been launched. He graduated into the recession of 2008 and couldn’t get a job in his major of technical writing, got a fellowship for marine policy, specializing in piracy , made great contacts, then Obama shut down the piracy initiatives and his mentor, 94, died, leaving him academically orphaned halfway through the program. When he failed his military physical and learned no doctor would sign off he went into a several years long depression from which only our family rule of work or school or both but not neither got him out of the house. Casino security, he had worked for the university police through college and grad school, led to dealing, then managing, now he holds a job with the gaming commission. Still he had never really had personal adult responsibilities outside of work.
Last year he bought a house as an investment property. Paying a mortgage, dealing with painters, carpets, insurance companies, tenants, complaints about tenants, finding out good fences make good neighbors, all have been really good for forcing him to confront reality outside the house he’s lived in since he was 8. It is never too late.
That is great. It really is never too late. We all mature and develop in different ways. And responsibility really is the catalyst in my view. Especially for men. They need responsibility and if they shirk they stagnate.
It sounds like he is becoming himself. I am sure he will make it. And no doubt he will continue to develop and mature.
About the last part of your comment, it is very true. My own introduction to Jung came through Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment about the importance of archetypes in child development. It is one of the central reasons the modern tendency to Disneyfy or worse the often grisly original fairy tales is so damaging. Children need black and white, good and evil, and they need gender stereotypes to mold their character. That Waldorf schools have wandered away from this is critically damaging to their charter.
My husband and I came from broken homes affected by adultery and alcoholism. We decided at 19 that we wanted something very different, the opposite of everything we had known, and a lifestyle that was already beginning to vanish. We were able to accomplish it by inventing ourselves, choosing not to choose the self indulgence of our peers. The children were, and in many ways still are, like a religious vocation, always coming first. It isn’t always easy but it has been rewarding.
You were fortunate to come to that conclusion so early. I envy you that, although I obviously appreciate it would have been hard work and fraught with stress.
My own background was dysfunctional, but I didn't meet anyone who had that kind of damage so I drifted for years. Everyone else seemed to have their act together. I felt like an outsider for a long time.
But I always had a kind of drive. I wanted to be a writer and had a vivid imagination. Over time I got better with discipline and eventually realized you don't need permission to become yourself. You get to decide. That was a revelation to someone like me. I'd never had anyone encourage me in anything I ever did. So encouraging yourself felt fraudulent, but of course it is not.
So here I am. Still reinventing, changing, getting stronger as best I can. And somehow people read the things I put on here. A little miracle really.
I think your positivity is reaching people who are ready to acknowledge that while life is really screwed up in a lot of ways they aren’t going to get a do over. This is it. You can’t save the receipt and try again later. This is your chance and you have to make the most of it, even if that looks different than it would’ve if you were born 40 years earlier.
I’ve felt guilty for years that we had all the good times in the 80’s and 90’s and that our kids have it so hard comparably. Women used to know if they were average looking they could expect an average guy. Houses were affordable. The list is endless. But this is the now we have.
You acknowledge the reality, you aren’t pollyanna-ish, but you put the responsibility back in people’s hands. This isn’t a boot camp blog, you aren’t pushing people to eat better, exercise more, or do anything except show up and take charge of what happens next in their lives. We can’t control everything, in fact recent events have shown us how little we can control. But we still get to control how we spend a lot of hours each day. With people mesmerized by their phones this is something that can’t be said enough.
You are saying something here that can only improve a lot of lives. I’m glad you are reaching a wider audience.
Thank you. I do hope I give some food for thought. And the audience is growing.
And I too worry about how distracted people are. A good life takes real effort. No one has time to get lost on social media.
But I am optimistic about the future. All this is a kind of test and I think we will come through that stronger and better.
There's an old saying - do what you love, the money will follow. In my life experience, this didn't always hold true. One thing I learned early on was that doing what inspires and fulfills your inner need to accomplish something does not always result in applause and recognition so that can be the driving force. My philosophy has always been - do it anyway. If your desire to do is held hostage to the need to be acclaimed and/or recompensed, you will eventually feel enslaved to your muse and/or the fake/fickle supporters whom you thought were real.
I have always chosen to do for the joy of doing, not the thing done.
This is my view of writing. I love it. I would love to make a living from it. That is challenging, but I do it anyway.
I think the doing what you love helps as it provides an advantage. If you hate writing it would always be a chore so you are disadvantaged against someone who loves to write.
And you write like someone who is not bound up by having to please your readers - which is why I like to read what you write. I write to find out what I think. Sometimes I am totally surprised.
I do this too. The act of writing it creates clarity I find.
And scratches an itch. 😂
Yes of course.
I've been writing since I first learned to read. I couldn't help it. For years I stuffed my stories folded neatly in the bottom drawer under my sox because I didn't need or want input. I knew I needed to get better but I had to do it my way. This set the standard for me. In everything I tried - art, music, sewing, interior design, invention, photography. woodworking.
Most of these endeavors netted me no fame or fortune. I did it anyway and I am none the worse for the doing. The old joke in my tribe when I start something new is that it's my 'last big thing'. My current 'last big thing' is creating music with AI - suddenly my lyrics have a place to launch. No need for fame or fortune though, no plans to do anything with my musical poetry other than make a point - just complete joy for being able to do it. :-) Just posted this one:
https://meemanator.substack.com/p/requiem-for-all-things-old
Well said. Time to get back to work.
Would be good to see more content from you.
Somewhere to sleep, in reasonable comfort and safety.
Something to eat.
And knowing you'll have at least that tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow too.
I doubt Jung ever had to go without any of those. I have, both involuntary and later by choice as a test of self and character.
And the point, as it relates to anxiety and fear: having conquered real fear, real anxiety, makes all the existential and metaphysical fear pale in comparison. They become like the monsters of the silver screen: scary and frightening to look at, but not really real.
There's also something to say about adopting a Norse or Lakonik attitude to fear:
That which you can affect, you need not fear since you may exert power over it;
That which you cannot affect is pointless to fear.
It never ceases to amaze me how much Stoic wisdom appears across the world in various guises. I was unaware of that piece of Nordic wisdom. It is similar to the less impressive Anglo-Saxon version, if you have problem you can do something about, you don't have a problem.
I also agree confronting real fear makes invented fear lose its power to some extent. Life is experience, and I have found out the slow way that avoidance not only does not help but retards real mental development.
I am in a phase where I am actively pursuing a number of activities that make me anxious. A kind of crude exposure therapy. The more you do it the more you change and become stronger I think. Most of it is in our heads of course.
The Sagas are brimming with kennings, hidden within each other. Not unlike old Norse, Teutonic, Celtic and Scythian scroll-work art and jewellry.
And the Greek epics are almost all centered around a Hero overcoming and triumphing, unless the gods strikes him down directly; in other words, it takes the power of a god to stop the man determined to fight.
In Slavic myths they have the Bogatyr and a whole host of heroes of humble origins.
It used to be, up until the 1980s even, that reading the classics or adaptions or works inspired by folktales and legend was the bog standard. Entertainment or education, the Sagas were and remain the Ur-source of wisdom since human nature is the same in the here and now as it was in the days of Utnapishtim or the Epid of Aqhat.
In the interest of whom is it, that we are no longer told to study the shadow cast by those who went before us?
Yes, quite. I wonder who benefits from us having no awareness of our heritage and culture? Quite a conundrum.
Looking at which cultures/races that are allowed or even encouraged to have a living heritage might yield some clues, as might looking at what elements of myth the powers that be seek to eliminate.
Tangible proof is impossible to put forth, but at some point correlation becomes too strong to deny.
Yes, I agree. I am not convinced by all I see, but there are suspicious things we can all see ourselves.
It's apposite that you mentioned social media in passing, as (inevitably it seems) the simple truths you discuss here have even been hijacked in a sense by brag culture, whereby so many people seem to focus on the grand achievement, measurable and highly visible, to be held up as a sort of "life trophy" in front of hundreds of people who hardly know them, as a sort of self-validation.
You know, climbing a big mountain, cycling the length of the country, or even say starting up their own online business which made them tons of money, whatever.
Whereas- as you point out - doing your own meaningful life project, with its unglamorous start/fail/reassess/begin again/partially succeed/ revise/ re-orientate etc etc, is in its essence not Facebook-friendly.
It seems as if many people are sensing the hole in their lives, but addressing it in a manner that is bound to leave them still unsatisfied; either by programming or self-deceit. I suppose what I am driving at is a question for any one of those achievers: did you take this challenge on because of something specific unanswered in you, or was it because you felt pressured by seeing many other people "seeming" to be making "more" of their lives? I hope that makes sense !
There is very definitely a difference between a Facebook-ready project and the kind of thing that is real and satisfying. Sincere projects will often have a great deal of mundane repetition and drudgery, with minimal visible payback. Certainly not much that is photogenic.
Running the marathon and climbing the mountain can of course be genuine goals. But I do think the social media validation people aim for much faster, more accessible pseudo-accomplishments.
None of that will fill the void, which was Jung's observation. They can pretend all they like, but it will haunt them.
Yes, you have it there. It's almost costume-playing of something that cannot be simulated despite the initial dopamine high. Social media has its uses of course, but in so many ways it seems to be Midas in reverse, unfortunately.
I think there is some truth in the notion social media rewires brains. I think many people are caught on a treadmill they don't know how to escape. I feel sorry for them. They are wasting their lives.