Synthesizing love and ambition
Freedom necessitates voluntary responsibility
I want to wake up and share my life. Just like summer camp back in the day.
I want to wake up in a house of love, with friends and family all around—most still sleeping at the time, though, so that I get some morning quiet—and I want to do things together.
Because nowadays, we do so many things alone.
If I’m being honest, though, I must first admit that I kind of like it this way, because I’ve got some lofty aspirations and consequently need to be able to focus and “try hard” for a good lot of my time.
It would be great to do all this with other people, but the fact is that most people don’t have the same aspirations as I and therefore walk a path incompatible.
That’s not to speak down; it is quite simply a fact—most prefer to scroll, and be slow, and chit-chat, and eat pastries for breakfast, leaving crumbs on the counter.
Like Europeans.
And all the power to them! Because it’s quite a fine way to go about. Indeed, I envy their contentment, and am working myself progressively towards a slower way of being . . . towards a way of life in which I’d feel, at least every now and then, okay with scarfing down a pastry for breakfast.
But if I chose right now to share my day with most people, I’d most likely struggle to live the way I most deeply wanted to live, and I’d very quickly grow frustrated with myself. Because I don’t really like these things that they like, at least in the morning, at least every morning, at least at this point in my life.
I’ve got shit to do, and I don’t want to partake in messiness—exempting, for the time being, when I’m on vacation.
And so, I’m sort of stuck with this conundrum here, because I want to be with people, but I also want to “achieve my potential,” as it were, and the two aren’t necessarily so compatible. And there is really, I’ve realized, no easy way to go about resolving this other than doing what I’ve gotta do and then doing whatever I can do to be with those people and live that more meaningful and memorable life.
To be fair, both ways are meaningful . . . I’d regret not sharing my life with others, and I’d regret just as much not doing everything I could to be all I could be. So I’ve just gotta do whatever I can, as chaotic and stressful as it may be, to do both.
But I do think it’s important—it’s become apparent—if you want to have a cake of your own, to make sure your people have their cake first. Because becoming this great big thing is only meaningful if you become in order to serve.
If, on your way to greatness, you become the sort of person to self-serve first—if you don’t learn along the way how to move forward without leaving others behind—then you’ve missed the point altogether.
I’ve long known now that a good life is a life shared, a life lived in service of others . . . And I might say that I am pursuing these goals—that I am working to become this “ultimate version” of myself—so I may one day earn enough money and become the sort of man capable of leading and supporting my family . . . And that is in many ways completely true.
But it doesn’t always feel good, this great big pursuit of greatness. It feels lonely, and futile, and stressful. Not just because of how difficult it is, nor how uncertain the future that I’m working so hard for seems, but because of all I must sacrifice here and now.
Here and now, I wake up alone, just as I said, and I don’t always say hi to anyone in the morning, and I don’t really share breakfast with anyone, and I just go and work and grind it out all day. And perhaps I’ll share intermittent conversations with some people, like my mother and brother, in the midst of my day. But the majority of my time, any of our time, is not as shared as it once was back in the day.
Of course, such is the nature of work! Such is the nature of making money, or trying to make money. It’s all on the computer these days, and they don’t make computers for more than one at a time. Because that would be inefficient.
What if I started a farm, a garden that was profitable, so we could all work and be productive without having to be alone?
We very easily could stop being on our own, but we all have different visions, different aspirations. We’re all on separate paths, you see, because we hold highly different things.
Were we not told to aspire?
Sometimes I’ll be lucky enough to spend some time with people who hold highly the same things as myself, but for some reason, that is not so common these days.
I wonder what the world must have been like when everyone held highly the same thing . . . How great a world that must have been!
We are not so united anymore. We have diverged.
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