Dear wonderers,
What is your relationship to your life?
I recently read one of the best articles on what it means to reinvent yourself, grit, and hunger (the aspirational kind) - written with honesty and vulnerability.
It reminded me of The imperfectionist, and it made me revisit the pressure I constantly put on myself to “be the best”.
It’s funny because the more I think about it, the more it feels like it’s not perfection that I seek, but this existential no.1.
Because the hunger is strong in me, too.
But, throughout the years, it morphed into one unhealthy mechanism cultivated by growing up in the Romanian school system.
My relationship with error is flawed because to err wasn’t embraced as part of the learning process, but harshly punished in our educational system, as I grew up.
My relationship with competition is flawed, because I didn’t compete with myself, but with all the others - as that was the norm.
Ergo, my relationship with myself is one long, intentional unlearning process combined with recognizing the unhealthy patterns triggered by the discourses abounding in our “bubble” - to be the best version of yourself, to manage your time, to optimise every living, breathing second you have.
I’m so tired and annoyed by it all.
What if I have no greater meaning or don’t do what I love? What happens, then?
What if I am intentional about being collaborative and not being “the best”? (*I had to work hard with myself to trust my team and not be so controlling all the time.)
What if I waste (sic!) time on Netflix and chill? On reading romances. On gaming. Hmm?
Long story short, dear wonderers, I feel we owe ourselves at least the questioning.
So here are some of the hard questions that have been buzzing around in my mind and in my feed lately, and a couple of potential answers. To get you started on finding your own:
Do I have to be a leader?
Here’s what Susan Cain has to say about it.
Do you enjoy leadership roles, in the conventional – or unconventional -- use of the word “leader”? Do you feel pressure to be a leader of one kind or another? Do you wish simply to live your life in peace – “to know the world as poetry,” as Victoria Erickson put it?
Is it my duty to have kids?
I stumbled upon an article a couple of days ago which shared an interesting perspective to counterbalance each individual narrative (from a biologist). Unfortunately, I seem to have lost it (I’ll keep looking), so I’ll share this Psyche resource with you.
What happens if I don’t do what I love?
I think there’s a lot of pressure on everyone today to do what they’re passionate about, to not feel like working… you know all the variations. But that comes from two skewed perspectives — one, that you are only defined by what you do; two, that you only have one passion and you should do something with it.
I think this idea that work somehow makes you a good person is something that is very American to me. There’s this idea that it has something to do with your character as a person. I feel that it’s very ingrained and I don’t completely disavow it, too. Miya Tokumitsu
Will AI take my job?
With every technological revolution, the state of the workforce shifted. I had a great conversation the other day with a good friend, debating how all the hard scifi novels in the 70s and 80s imagined “robots” taking our menial jobs, and here we are today, with a creative machine on our hands.
I uncovered two insightful essays that nuance the whole conversation:
The age of average, which juxtaposes our love of patterns with a culture of sameness, something that can be enhanced by AI usage.
A punchy, controversial metaphor from this New Yorker piece:
So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America. Read it all
Is an unexamined life a wasted life?
But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.
Am I running from agency and responsibility?
I guess sometimes it’s easier to put our agency in a system’s hands - be it religion, fate, science, etc. That’s what the linked-above podcast set out to explore. I know I do it when my anxiety levels reach a certain point. I also try to be aware of it and not take it at face value.
I’ll leave you at that. I have many more, but let’s give ourselves time to think. And waste.
I love this. At times I feel like I am my own tyrant, ruthlessly imposing delusional standards upon myself to somehow be the best version of myself I can be. Sometimes that makes sense. But it's still tiresome.
As a fellow former student of the Romanian school system, I totally get where you're coming from. I get why most of us have an unhealthy relationship with error.
Great piece, I'm staying tuned for more! :)
Thank you! Exactly :) And yes, I know it’s a powerful mechanism and we need it, but maybe with more care on those standards and the balance of it all. I think what is important to remember is that it’s ok to take a break. Or be “less” at times.