#185
contentment
I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.
Hubert Selby Jr
—
He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.
Socrates
In American life, lack of ambition is considered tragic, akin to a death of some sort. The ability to find contentment is pathologized; interpreted as a depressive state. Une défaite. I prefer to look at it as a peaceful acceptance of what one has, as clarity rather than distortion.
It is a kind of freedom.
The concept of gratefulness is thrown around a lot lately, but like so many other words, ideas, and theories, it has been stripped of its meaning and warped into a coping mechanism to temporarily treat the discomfort of relentless aspiration and drive. A therapeutic placeholder, something to prevent you from putting a gun in your mouth as you climb the endless and degrading ladder to success. Gratefulness asks you to stand in it, to bask in it, to live in it. To take in how much is already here. Instead, most people force themselves to scribble down a list of half-thoughts in the name of ‘wellness’ and go on with their rampant, unobserved desires for More.
The madness of insatiable aspiration and impossible satisfaction is glaringly obvious, and yet they are continually romanticized. I frequently come back to the disease of ambition in my work. I can’t help it, it’s all around and so, so very fucking loud. Everyone is in progress—almost there but not really—five-year plans and vision boards. They’ll call them their dreams, but they’re more like programmed desires.
The narrative of ambition seduces the Western psyche with its fantasies of triumph over struggle. Capitalism’s empty promises.
I am what we will call a recovered workaholic. People felt more comfortable around me when I was exhausted and sick, working sixty-hour weeks. Now I pose a threat to the overachievers, sitting there with my cigarette and my absence of Plans. With my contentment. I don’t want More, I just want a continuation of what I have now, that is to say Time. Time to be, time to read, time for conversations, time to think, time to feel, time to sleep.
I’ve said it once, and I will continue to say it: I already have everything I need. You probably do too. But the wailing siren of manufactured hunger drowns everything out.
I can’t lie: sometimes it is quite pleasurable to watch them squirm, the bewildered careerists and the go-getters trying to wrap their minds around my decision to get off the ladder and sit in the grass. Mostly, though, it’s just sad. There isn’t much you can say to someone whose entire sense of self hinges on achievement, on the absurd concept of Success.
If personal aspirations took a backseat, I believe we’d see energy being channelled collectively. Individualism, we know, blocks revolutionary potential. I may have little to no interest in people’s individual goals, but I am always curious about our shared dreams, what elevation can be brought to the Whole.
What we can do for each other.
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