Last week,
just after finishing my 4th set of squats (8 reps each, with 105 kg,
slowly inching towards 110, nothing earth shattering, but demanding a lot of
focus at my current shape), legs still trembling and heart pounding like an out
of whack sledgehammer within my chest, I pondered for a while on how unusual
what I had just done was in our age. Think about it for a moment: I had just
put me through a lot of discomfort (specially in the last reps, when lactic acid
has accumulated so moving the legs against the resistance of the barbell on the
back causes pangs of pain to shoot through the quads, and the lack of enough air
in the lungs makes you feel like a fish out of water), and would have to live
with the dire consequences (for the following two to three days I would be so
sore as to make simple things as standing up, or walking from my office to the
coffee machine, a real chore), and for what reason? So the next week I could
stand to put me through still a bit more (107,5, here I come!), and the next
one even a bit more, and so on, with no discernible end in sight. Knowing that
I won’t be getting any kind of reward or recognition for it, as I’m far enough
from competitive numbers (and at an old enough age) as to not going to win any
accolade or trophy for doing this. I guess I do it for the internal satisfaction
of knowing I’m doing truly my best, I’m consistently putting the effort to be
the best lifter I can be, irrespective of how that compares with all the other
lifters in the world that strive after a similar pursuit. For the internal
recognition that comes from having set for myself a goal that is difficult to
achieve, and completing all the intermediate steps I’ve carefully defined as
necessary to achieve that goal.
But it gets
worse (much worse, actually!). After showering and changing clothes I got home,
put the kids to sleep and settled in bed with the book
I was in the midst of: Empirisme et
Subjectivité, by Gilles Deleuze. I was reading it not because I found it
enjoyable (it most definitely is not! Although at times dazzling in a highly
refined, highly abstract sense it is also annoyingly abstruse, and somewhat
pedantic, and overgeneralizing, but what would you expect from a French
philosopher of the 70s…) or because I got a kick out of it, or to unwind, or to
relax, or to amuse myself. And I’m not sharing it because I’m a snob (which by
the way I am) and want to impress my two or three readers with how cultured and
sophisticated I am. I read it because it deals with Hume’s philosophy, and Hume
being one of the subjects of my dissertation I have made it incumbent upon me
to become one of the most knowledgeable guys about his life and his thought on
planet Earth. Even if that requires reading Deleuze, and to better understand
him, some of his ilk so I’m more familiar with his impact in French philosophy
in the 60s and 70s in general (the other books I’ve been reading this month,
just in French: L’anti-oedipe by the
same Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Surveiller
et Punir by Foucault, and L’Ancien
Régime et la Révolution by Tocqueville, which is from a different era but I
found relevant all the same). Why I’m writing a dissertation in the first place
would take us too far away from the subject of this post, I’ll declare that it
is not definitely to be more successful with the ladies or to improve my
standing at work and earn more money...
Now you may
wonder, what does reading Deleuze (in French, I feel the need to punctiliously
add) and going through an excruciating training program that requires repeating
hundreds of times the same basic movements with a loaded barbell have in
common? Well, they both may be considered to be pure instances of a kind of “pleasure”
that our distinctly pleasure-seeking epoch doesn’t seem to be able to
countenance, or even understand: that derived from doing difficult things,
achieving challenging goals, or attaining distinctive skills. This seems
somewhat counter-intuitive, because economically we can all see that society
honors inordinately people that do clearly difficult things: to play basketball
at Michael Jordan’s level, or golf at Tiger Woods’ (before he messed up his
life and, arguably, his game); to drive an F1 car like Lewis Hamilton; to sing
like Adele, or Rhianna or Taylor Swift (hhmmm… maybe wrong examples, we’ll get to
famous performers again in a minute); to lead a company like Steve Jobs or Mark
Zuckerberg… they are all socially
recognized high, difficult achievements, and the few that can perform them are
celebrated and thus set a positive example for the rest of the citizenry.
However,
before we discard as false my contention that current society (you probably
have by now an inkling of where I intend to lead the argument) looks at the
performance of difficult feats with scorns, and actively discourages people
from pursuing complex, challenging endeavors, let’s look under the hood of the
phenomena I’ve mentioned, and see how those outliers are pictured, and where
the vast sums of money they receive come from. All the examples of successful
individuals I’ve given (the ones society seems to bestow most rewords on) can
be grouped under three categories: pure performers (actors and singers), sport
performers (athletes) and businessmen. What are the key factors that ultimately
determine success in each category? I propose the following, in order of
importance:
·
Pure
performers: luck + stunningly good looks + talent (which in turn is, on average, roughly 80%
genetics and 20% learned)
·
Sport
performers: genetics + discipline + luck (finding the right coach, being in the
right environment to express one’s genetic potential)
·
Businessmen:
luck + psychopathic personality traits + discipline (which could also be
construed as one of the most salient psychopathic personality traits, hence “train
like a psycho”, or “devote yourself to the company like a psycho”)
Now you may
disagree with my portrayal of success in each category as being first and
foremost due to luck, and other traits being both secondary and similarly
unearned (you do not “earn” your genetics or most of your looks in any
meaningful sense, as much as some people whose only merit is “choosing the
right parents” would like you to think otherwise), but I don’t think it’s
really up for debate. For every talented, dedicated, disciplined performer/
athlete/ entrepreneur you can present as an example I could point to hundreds
(thousands?) of similarly talented, dedicated and disciplined ones that nobody
has ever heard about, that are either struggling or broke just because they
were less… lucky, not being in the right place at the right time to be noticed
by a big team scout, a big manager, a big market surge. And if you think that all
those that keep at it long enough and just keep trying end up “making it” and
reaching similar levels of success… well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you may be
interested in.
And of course
“society” knows it too. It “knows” that trying hard enough is not (by far) “enough”
to guarantee any kind of success. And that’s why it doesn’t try to convince
anybody to really spend that much effort in the first place. Let’s now turn our
attention to how those “successful” individuals make their money: performers
convince enough people to pay a little bit to look at them (it used to be to
hear them, but these days “hearing” is just an excuse to just watch them twerk,
or dance, or strut their stuff, or cavort, or canoodle, or act, or act out…);
athletes are mostly paid by sport apparel brands in the belief that a lot of
people will want to wear what their idols wear (also, in some sports,
spectators are willing to pay to see them more or less live, and a tiny
fraction of that money actually reaches them); superstar businessmen are just
good in taking lots of money from “investors” (that’s almost everybody else,
from you and me through 401 (K) and similar instruments to Warren Buffett) convincing
them that they can do what they can’t (coordinate vast legions of employees to generate
more profits than similar legions employed by their competitors, something an orangutan
chosen at random in any given zoo has as much chances of achieving as Wall
Street most celebrated tycoon). So what is society really telling every young
person when it celebrates these “top performers” and showers them with money
and recognition? Is it telling them to be more like those “role models”, when
being so means mainly having more luck, or better genetics, something no human
being is able to effect? Of course not, as pointing people towards something at
which they could not but fail is a sure recipe for disaster and commercial
oblivion. What is telling them is to partake of their glow without putting the
effort, to obtain part of the gratification without the discipline, to bask in
the warm feeling of achievement without the hassle and the sacrifice demanded by
it. So what it really recommends is to download the YouTube video of the
performer (that has to be accessible enough and “easy” enough not to require
much previous training to enjoy), to buy the same shirt, or sneakers as the
star athlete, and to buy the self-congratulatory books of the businessman (or
just to buy the products manufactured by his company).
We can find a
superb example of such social tendency towards easy satisfaction and mediocre
pleasures in the demise of Playboy,
as recounted by the always interesting AntiDem: Playboy after dark.
A couple decades ago you needed a certain education to participate in the
charade of buying certain erotic (probably it would be more accurate to
describe it, regarding the mores of the times, as pornographic) magazine “for
the articles”. It was the centerfold babe who made you disburse your hard
earned money, but at least you had not to be put off by the likes of Norman
Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut or Jack Kerouac. Today there is no risk of any difficult
art form interfering with your more or less instant gratification, as you can
go to pornhub and dally with nothing but unadulterated porn, neatly arranged by
categories so you can select the one that better caters to your peculiar tastes,
wholly instinctual, as uneducated as you may wish.
Told in a
language any regular reader of this blog will recognize, the dominant reason of
our age (desiderative reason, for those too lazy or too distracted to recall)
trains everybody, from the most tender ages, to seek for the most instant, less
costly (in terms of requiring a previous continued effort) gratifications. It
has perfected such training to the extent that we are witnessing the most protected,
most spoiled generation in recorded history continuously complaining that they
have not “enough”: not enough security and safety, when crime, aggression and
even war (with the well publicized exceptions we all know about) are at
historic lows; not enough labor opportunity when economic regulations are also
at historic lows, and a case can be made that most companies find it difficult
to add skilled workers for lack of supply (I do recognize that the situation
for unskilled workers is pretty dire, thanks to that very same deregulation);
not enough partners to enter in a committed relationship when ubiquitous
communication networks make It easier than ever to meet and know people with
similar interests and similar outlooks; not enough meaning when the
digitization of most of our past has enabled untold amounts of information to
be attainable at almost no cost (ah! But turning information into knowledge,
and even more knowledge into wisdom, which is required for it to have meaning,
is not something that can be done easily or without devoting vast amounts of
time to it). They have enough, however, to keep the rat race operating at full
speed. To keep producing immense quantities of mostly useless gewgaws that are
rendered obsolete in ever shorter periods. To keep going daily to the same
soulless work, and even to the same commercial gym where they spin their wheels
in the vain hope that without really exerting themselves they will somewhat
magically acquire the body of their dreams (which are as secondhand as the “house
of their dreams” or the “car of their dreams” they were sold, and which had the
ability to make them happy for exactly three seconds after their acquisition,
and miserable for the three decades required to paid the corresponding dues).
So I’ll
rather keep doing my squats, and reading my boring philosophers. If not for
other reason, because they keep me from watching TV and babbling about last
Sunday’s match and secretly assaying my colleagues’ suits, or cars or homes and
comparing them with mine. I’d rather compare the pounds I lift, or the ideas I’ve
thought (and written) or the miles I’ve run or the sceneries I’ve enjoyed in
the wild. The tough things I’ve done to prove myself better, that have not
detracted a iota of the ability of anybody else to lift or think or run or
watch similarly, that can not be converted in positional goods because they are
a) absolutely good, regardless of what everybody else does and b) non fungible,
so what I read and lift and run and see can be equally read, lifted and run and
seen by whoever takes the time to prepare himself for doing so. And I’ll teach
to my kids about the old, worn out Greek concept of Areté, which can be loosely translated as excellence, of becoming
who you are through struggle and effort end yes, sometimes even pain, and not
to give a damn about suits and cars and homes. I just hope that prepares them
to better resist the barrage of conformist, commercialist messages society
daily throws their way…
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