Past
I read something beautiful on a LinkedIn post sometime back. Yes, miracles do happen.
उन्हें कामयाबी में सुकून नजर आया तो वो दौड़ते गए,
हमें सुकून में कामयाबी दिखी तो हम ठहर गए !
Not that I had scaled some Himalayan peak of success, but the first line fits my 30s, and the second, my 40s. The underlying mindsets are different, and so are the journeys that give me joy. But it took the larger life journey and the choices of my past self to get here.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue (via James Clear)
Barring exactly a couple, I have made peace with the choices I have made. That’s a lot of luck, things could have played out very differently.
The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.
The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.
Carl Jung
Present
The journey continues. Thanks to something else I read, I realised that even now, there is delicate drama being played out when I am making choices, mostly subconsciously.
One must, in one’s life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.” ~ Germaine de Staël
You can suffer through pursuing something that matters: the uncertainty, the sacrifice, the possibility of failure. Or you can suffer through avoiding it: the quiet knowledge that you’re capable of more, the need for increasingly elaborate distractions.
The New Yorker cartoonist, Saul Steinberg, nailed this idea: “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meager, in terms of self-entertainment. In the end, working is good because it is the last refuge of the man who wants to be amused. Not everything that amused me in the past amuses me so much any more.
Future
Arguably, choices exist because of scarcity. The positive outlook is that if science and technology (and ‘humanity’) really progress, both health and wealth will be abundant. And then, when you really dig deep on it, as Kevin Kelly does, you’d realise that time is finally the only real scarcity – because we cannot manufacture it. For now. We will take a while to get to full immortality, I’d think.
But as he points out, the way AI is developing, even in the short term, it can become our proxy in many things, and thereby, in a sense, ‘manufacture time’. And herein lies, IMO, an irony. Is that abundance utopia, or dystopia? More time to ponder ‘what is the point of all this?’, with no escape hatch of serving other people because everything is abundant (for them too). Making life both boring and full of suffering? Will that be the cess imposed by a life in which you don’t have to make choices?
P.S. A version I published on LinkedIn
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