Choosing frustration
(for reflection) on self-actualisation
5-10 mins reading time | Reflective questions at the end
I have no patience for platitudes that flatten the landscape of experience.
Things people say like, “all work sucks”. Or, “anything worthwhile is hard and frustrating”. Or “life is supposed to be difficult”.
I think these are classic responses to the implied, perennial question: “Life is unsatisfying and I am suffering. Is that normal?”, for which all of us at some point or another have meekly turned to an adult for reassurance.
There is one answer that is more detailed than it looks: “Yes, and that doesn’t mean you need to.”
From that falls out three assertions which are connected but should not be confused with each other: 1) Suffering is to be expected, 2) There’s nothing wrong with you if it’s happening, 3) That doesn’t mean you need to accept it.”
I think it is pretty easy to pick up on one or two of these at any given time, but very difficult to hold all three.
I think more people can spend most of their time doing things that feel good, more so than they think. Let’s focus on work, or the idea of life purpose, which are generally merged in our world.
Valorizing struggle
A quick water sample of the tepid cesspool that is LinkedIn might tell you that great things are accomplished through great pain, sacrifice, and even misery. I’m thinking of cheesy charts like this which, while comforting when in the trenches, perhaps stop some from making eye contact with the question “no, but really, why am I finding this so difficult?”:
It’s not entirely wrong. I don’t disagree that worthwhile things entail frustration and disappointment. But I worry about ideas that insist we set our bar for flourishing at the level of struggle. Daniel Caesar: “Pain is inevitable, misery is a choice.”
The problem is that the constellation of things we might put under the category of frustration is very very large. So there’s the prickly bit: I don’t think that people who are successful at something are using the word ‘frustration’ in the same way that people who struggle at the beginning do.
The way I feel frustrated about writing is not the way I feel frustrated about calling up my bank, or disagreeing with someone on a fundamental worldview. It’s a little closer to how I’d feel about trying make my niece eat her food, but still not quite.
Writing is frustrating in the sense that I’m impatient to solve, but not avoid, all the problems on the way to the end, so I can see what good might shake out the other end. And even if I don’t know what exactly it looks like, I can sort of sense its contours, and the life that it wants to live, the way that sculptors say their work is in freeing the sculpture from the rock, not in shaping or carving it or anything like that. The practice itself contains a will of its own, to which only a skillful actor knows how to listen and trust.
Hiroyuki Doi, who created an exceptional artistic career drawing obsessive circles while grieving his younger brother said: “I started to feel that something other than myself allowed me to draw these works.”
The self-deception of your potential
There is a very sweet optimism in the idea that we can all be good at anything that we want to, and it feels related to how John Steinbeck said that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Some people want things because they like the idea of it. Some people tell me they’d like to write more but can’t bring themselves to do it. I honestly have no concept of this as applied to writing. I don’t feel passionate or aspirational about writing so much as I feel it is a means of digestion. It feels wrong when it’s not done and it feels inevitable I’ll do more of it. I’ll be clear that with this example, I mean that I know I’m good enough to write things that are useful and beautiful for people, to keep going for a long time, and have outcomes that are rewarding to me, rather than implying that I’m on an inevitable trajectory to success.
Sometimes when people say “If you cared about doing this thing, you would make time”, and we might fix on ‘making time’ more than actually caring, taking it on like dare, rather than an insight. I’m often tempted to see proficiency as a matter of sheer domination of will, which is true for starting things, and just not at all for keeping them. If you’ve ever tried to imagine doing something you sort of but don’t really want to do for five years, you can really feel this sinking sensation in your chest, and a feeling of barreling down an increasingly narrow, gray tunnel.
I have instances of this self-deception in other facets of my life. I like the idea of painting, and I like the idea of discipline, and I can do it for long enough to seem a bit impressive at it. Some things are tools that you pick up and employ, and it’s fine to acknowledge that: “I don’t resonate with the way my art friends do art. They love the process of it.”
Other things are part of your spirit, not in a grand cosmic way, but in a matter-of-fact way. I think this is what points to why it feels very uncomfortable when others have a consensus over a supposed core trait of yours: you cannot feel what is simply part of your fabric; you can only feel that which is separate to you. You don’t feel caring, it’s simply wrong that other people should feel sick, unimportant and lonely. You don’t feel logical, it simply is that most things don’t really make sense.
Tech land describes this inherent passion sort of like, “Founding a start-up is about finding a problem that makes you unbelievably angry”, because founding a start-up is too hard to do if you only kind of care. I think it is more about feeling confused and incredulous about something obvious to you and invisible to others than it is about being angry.
It is about finding a hole in reality you can’t help but to poke your fingers through.
And yes, these things can feel rewarding, but more importantly, they just feel right.
The tug of a deep ‘why’
I resonate with A’s idea that people are born into this world with their existence governed (perhaps haunted) by a certain question, and the task of self-actualization is a matter of attacking that question from as many angles as possible.
Lincoln asked: “Is slavery a good or a bad thing?”, and A says you can clearly see him turning it over for his entire life, like trying to take in every facet of a diamond. Others ask: “what’s going on here, with this human?”. My question feels like it might be: “How did this thing come to be the way it is, and not something else?”
David Lynch said: “We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.”
I like this idea because it gives a sense that we are all tugged along by our own very specific flavour of curiosity. It seems accurate when you look at children play and discover, they don’t need to be told what is interesting, and in fact they seem to resent being told altogether. Most will grow into adults that forget how to sense the tug and spend a great deal of adulthood searching for it.
The famous therapy quest of re-connecting with ones inner child is a reframing of the question: “What is it that I truly want to do if I were naive enough to believe my questions were answerable and my desire would be fulfilled?”
Those of us seeking the luxury of self-actualization often try to answer their own “Why?” question like it’s a Five-Whys root-cause-analysis business school question. It usually ends up landing in one of two generic buckets like, “I want to do something that’s good for the world”, or “I want to take care of my family”, and both are fine. But you must also ask what are the things you are already doing, and the questions you already tend to ask, that give you clues about which way the current is already flowing.
Beauty is in specificity: Is your ‘good for the world’ about expanding the frontier of knowledge; is it about existential nourishment for lost souls; is it about practical solutions to material problems?
The other key part of this One Great Question idea is that a lot of the value of pursuit is in the generative side effects, as in, brilliance from the bright sparks that fly out as you hit the metal again and again with dogged persistence. The looming of a constant, haunting question makes one creative in their approaches, all of which, by the way, will not answer the question, but will be useful.
The statistician George Box: “All models are wrong, some are useful.”
You can’t create a unified theory of everything without answering a million other questions about the nature of reality itself. You can’t create a movement without changing the hearts of hundreds or thousands of people in some deeply stirring way. You can’t figure out what on Earth people exist to do without developing a foundational theory of psychology.
The tinkering is everything.
A few questions to chew over:
In what situation do I often have unshakeable faith that things mostly work out, where others don’t?
What is ordinary, obvious and matter-of-fact to me that is not to others?
What is full of awe-inspiring detail to me that is tedious to others? (Or even: in what way am I tedious to others?)
(One of my favourites from A) What is unique about my current situation?
Think carefully about what you want,
Marlene
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