New York Times Op-Ed: A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible, by David Brooks:
We sometimes think humans operate by a hedonic or utilitarian logic. We seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We seek activities with low costs and high rewards. Effort is hard, so we try to reduce the amount of effort we have to put into things — including, often enough, the effort of thinking things through.
And I think we do operate by that kind of logic a lot of the time — just not when it comes to the most important things in our lives. When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.
Let me put it another way: We use cost-benefit analysis when we are operating in a prosaic frame of mind. But I don’t think anything great was ever accomplished in a prosaic frame of mind. People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges, because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.
The moment of enchantment can be so subtle and soft. … But, unbidden, almost involuntarily, a commitment has been made — to some activity or ideal — a quiet passion has been inflamed. Some arduous journey has begun.
It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them.
They are able to hear that still, soft voice inside: “Maybe I could write a novel.” They are sensitive, impressionable, enthusiastic, absorbent, hospitable. They are open to being surprised, and when that constructive disorientation happens, they stop and contemplate: What am I being called upon to do here? Most of our great journeys begin with a surprise. Wonder, Descartes observed, “is a sudden surprise of the soul.” …
We surround these moments with commencement address clichés — follow your passion, follow your heart. But those phrases are so vague that they don’t mean anything. I want to understand more precisely what happens when one is gripped by a controlling desire. How exactly does some fervent commitment grow, take over your life and induce you to take on voluntary pain?
I guess the process starts in mystery. Like falling in love, these ignition moments happen at the deepest layer of our unconsciousness — that dark region where interests ignite, desires form, the motivational core of our being. This is the part of myself I can’t see easily into. Why am I interested in astronomy but not geology? I don’t know. Why am I entranced by Rembrandt and left cold by El Greco? I don’t know. Why do I love her but not her? I don’t know. We can decide what we’ll order off life’s menu, but we can’t decide what we like. …
The next stage of any calling or vocation is curiosity. When you’re in love with someone, you can’t stop thinking about her. You want to learn all there is to know. Curiosity is the eros of the mind, a propulsive force. It can seem so childish. Throughout history people have been nervous around curiosity. You never know where it will take you. One of Vladimir Nabokov’s characters called it the purest form of insubordination. Curiosity drives you to explore that dark cave despite your fears of going down there. Curiosity is leaping ahead of the comfortable place you’ve settled and dragging you into the unknown. …
The self-esteem movement failed because it tried to persuade people that they were great by flattering them and offering words of affirmation. People are not idiots; we need to see ourselves actually accomplishing real things, learning real things, living up to real standards. …
[S]ure, on a shallow level we lead our lives on the axis of pleasure and pain. But at the deeper level, we live on the axis between intensity and drift. Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.
We want to be in love — with callings, projects and people. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference, and indifference is an absolutely terrible state to endure. I guess there are some people who have earned the right to want contentment above all, to sit back and enjoy whatever prosperity they’ve achieved. But I rarely meet such people, even people in retirement. …
We want to see our life as a drama, and the essence of drama is one person’s ferocious desire to confront an enormous obstacle, and the struggle to overcome that obstacle. If you want to understand any character, in a drama or in life, ask, “What pains is he willing to endure?” Some choose the pains of medical school or the priesthood or police work, but through the struggle at least we are acting, improving our skills. …
People tend to get melodramatic when they talk about the kind of enchantment I’m describing here, but they are not altogether wrong. The sculptor Henry Moore exaggerated but still captured the essential point: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
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