A friend – one of those you’ve interacted with only a handful of times, but consider more of a friend than people you’ve met much oftener – recently called after more than a couple of years. “My values have changed. I don’t want to do something big anymore, I just want peace and happiness. And freedom and time,” he told me.
The words struck me, as much for the sentiment behind them as for the fact that I’d said the same thing myself to someone recently. And when I look around at the – undeniably few – friends close to me, I don’t think I’m the only one. Admittedly, birds of a feather flock together, and there is a self-selection bias at work.
Perhaps it’s simply a matter of age: of coming to terms with reality. When you’re younger, you have more potential, by virtue of the fact that you’re nothing yet and the sphere of possibilities is much larger. With every passing year, the possibilities diminish, even as a single, or few, actualities emerge. Possibility is, of course, more enticing than a mundane actuality, not simply because it could be anything, but because it is untouched and untarnished by the banalities of concrete existence. There is, obviously, more than a good deal of the Peter Pan syndrome in this view, an escape into fantasy.
The diminishing of possibilities into an actuality, however, is inevitable, and unlikely to really be behind this sentiment. What might be more pertinent, I think, is the nature of that actuality – when one fails to reach the expectations one sets for themselves. Out in the world, one soon learns – particularly those deemed smart or high-performers – just how hyped are the possibilities set out before them, in the face of their realities. People who are smart and ambitious but don’t achieve much tend to become bitter, writes Paul Graham in an essay.
Living with bitterness is not pleasant, I imagine, and, in the absence of achievement, ambition might be proportional to bitterness. Combine the two, and the natural recipe to mitigate the anguish of bitterness is to tone down ambition.
Is there anything wrong with this? Maybe, at a macro level, one can argue that the world suffers when potential goes unrealized. If one in a thousand bitter people’s ambition spurred them on to achievement, then, notwithstanding the suffering of the other 999 per thousand, thousands of achievements go unrealised when millions tone down their ambition. But the macro level doesn’t impose an obligation on us at the micro level, a possible loss to society doesn’t imply an obligation on an individual (notwithstanding Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative). I can (if not must) do what is good for me (which harms no one else), whether or not it is good for the world. Human lives, fortunately, are at least not yet run on the principles of ant colonies with the life of the individual subordinated to the collective good.
Is there then, anything wrong with this at the level of the individual? One can argue along the lines of Nietzsche that there is no greatness without suffering. Or that character comes from suffering, or that to fail to live up to your potential is the cardinal sin, and much more. And yet, there is no mandate or compulsion to pursue greatness or character; on the contrary, perhaps a much more reasonable take is that it is these pursuits, ingrained through a form of indoctrination, that are the cause of much suffering and unhappiness.
What’s wrong with an ordinary life, asks Alain de Botton, and indeed, what is, if you’re fine with that? Being fine with that, is also perhaps the most sensible outlook, given that it is the overwhelmingly probable outcome. One has little sympathy for the child who sulks and refuses any gift but the most expensive iPhone, or the dandy who refuses to sit in any vehicle but a jet; why then, the sophisticated arguments extolling the man unhappy with anything short of extraordinary success?
Conversely, one can put down this thinking to rationalising one’s lack of success, coming to terms with age and declining energy or motivation, failing to do what you had always envisaged, failing even to stand up for and stick to those thoughts you had always considered part of yourself, of giving in to fate and inertia. Just as you can ascribe the counter-view to delusions of grandeur, and indoctrination by slick modern marketing in the form of productivity and self-help.
I have, of late, come to see this same aspect of the ordinary v/s extraordinary not just at the level of a life but in ordinary matters. ‘Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people,’ the saying goes. I can think of few things, however, as pretentious and tedious as discussing abstract ideas for the sake of it – something I’m always reminded of on the rare occasions I meet someone who’s read anything I’ve written, and assumes I talk on the same topics. Talking of only abstract ideas or lofty principles, is, I’ve come to realize, no different than living on only superfoods and nutritional supplements – outstanding, perhaps, in isolation, as a single meal, but a recipe to a sickly, stunted and lopsided mind and body, and life, if that is one’s diet. It also requires an excruciating amount of energy and stubbornness, to reject all other sources of nutrition and insist only on one’s choice of superfood, an effort that perhaps becomes all the more draining as one ages, and also veers toward foolishness when one’s preferences aren’t available. There is, if not anything outstanding, at least something human and possibly endearing in banalities and the humdrum, at least amongst those one might care about, if only for the assurance that one can still care about someone or something. Much the same applies I suppose to different instances of the same principle – reading only productive books or classics, mingling only to network, playing only to exercise or build a skill.
The quintessential smart and ambitious man who doesn’t achieve much and tends to become bitter is Raskolnikov, from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a book I in fact recommended the same friend, as also being about someone who once thought he wanted to do something big. Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted more, Dostoevsky wrote through Raskolnikov, a character, who embodied the mindset Aut Caesar aut nihil (or rather, Napoleon), until, rather late, he turns down his ambition, and thus his bitterness, as he begins to try to learn to cherish existence, howsoever mere and banal.
This arc that dials down ambition with age, then, is I think as much a strategy to stave off bitterness as it is to avert cognitive dissonance, by reconciling one’s expectations with one’s reality and making peace with them. It is also, depending on one’s view, a face-saving tactic to lower one’s ambition to one’s reality through resignation, or a shameful, self-denying manoeuvre through which one chickens out of a harder, riskier, path towards realising their potential, or a sensible, natural and level-headed perspective to go through life with contentment.