On the peculiar freedom of discovering that much of what we were taught to want was never particularly worth wanting
By Joe Cozart
I have begun to suspect that civilization has perpetrated one of its more successful practical jokes upon us by convincing us that life is principally an exercise in accumulation. We are instructed almost from infancy to acquire, and because the instruction comes from parents, schools, churches, governments, employers, banks, advertisers, universities, marriage counselors, real-estate agents, and assorted other custodians of human improvement, we naturally assume there must be something to it. We acquire education, employment, houses, automobiles, spouses, children, titles, memberships, investments, acquaintances, obligations, opinions, reputations, grievances, and eventually an entire administrative apparatus devoted to maintaining the person we have spent decades constructing. The curious thing is that somewhere rather late in the proceedings, when one has accumulated enough evidence to become suspicious of the original proposition, one discovers that freedom may have considerably less to do with acquisition than with subtraction.
Nobody tells the young this because the young would quite sensibly refuse to believe it. At twenty-five, subtraction sounds like failure. At sixty-five, it can begin to resemble intelligence. Civilization celebrates the man who acquires another house but has very little ceremonial language for the man who discovers that he does not want one. There are magazines devoted to acquisition and almost none devoted to indifference. No university awards an honorary degree for having ceased to care what tedious people think. Wall Street has never successfully securitized contentment. Gross domestic product would collapse altogether if enough people woke one morning and announced that they already had sufficient quantities of everything. Consequently, society has an understandable commercial interest in keeping us dissatisfied, and we have been wonderfully cooperative customers.
Recently I encountered three of those small philosophical declarations that circulate through social media, usually printed over photographs of oceans, mountains, attractive people, or dolphins, as though wisdom had finally solved its longstanding distribution problem by hiring a travel photographer. Ordinarily I regard philosophy delivered over marine mammals with the suspicion it deserves. Yet these three observations stayed with me. The first suggested that death is considerably more certain than one’s wedding day and that instead of searching endlessly for the love of one’s life, one might begin living one’s life with love. The second declared that overcommunicating is a form of begging: they heard you; they simply don’t care; stop. The third proposed that all roads eventually lead back to the interests we had as children. Separately they belong to the great democratic warehouse of modern aphorism. Together, however, they suggest something considerably more interesting. They suggest that the great project of maturity may not be becoming someone new at all. It may be recovering the person who existed before the world became so industrious in its instructions.
The observation about death sounds severe only because modern culture has managed the extraordinary feat of treating the only universal human event as though mentioning it were in poor taste. Death is not particularly interested in our discomfort. It remains the one appointment for which no one needs a calendar invitation. The date is merely withheld, which introduces a certain administrative awkwardness into long-range planning. Yet the useful thing about mortality is not that it frightens us but that it clarifies the arithmetic. Whatever else may be said about life, indefinitely postponing it would seem an imprudent strategy.
And postpone it we do. We wait for the relationship, the promotion, the money, the house, the retirement, the apology, the recognition, the proper weight, the appropriate season, the children’s graduation, the favorable market, the completed project, the moment when everything finally settles down. We live provisionally, as though the present were temporary accommodation and our real life were being prepared somewhere beyond the lobby. The trouble is that the hotel keeps charging us for the room.
This is why the distinction between finding the love of one’s life and living one’s life with love is more consequential than its sentimental packaging suggests. The former treats love as acquisition. Somewhere in the vast population of humanity there is allegedly another person carrying the missing portion of our existence, and our task is to locate this individual before closing time. The proposition has sold an impressive number of novels, films, songs, flowers, diamonds, dinners, divorces, and second marriages, so one hesitates to interfere with so productive an industry. But perhaps love is not principally something another person delivers. Perhaps it is a capacity one develops.
One can love children, friends, places, books, ideas, music, mornings, conversations, baseball, architecture, dogs, solitude, memory, curiosity, beauty, absurdity, and occasionally another human being despite overwhelming documentary evidence that doing so is inconvenient. Love becomes far more interesting once it ceases to be contractual. It becomes a manner of inhabiting existence rather than compensation received for having selected the correct companion.
This does not diminish romantic love. It rescues it from an impossible job description. No other human being should be expected to provide the entire meaning of one’s existence while simultaneously remembering where the car keys were left. That is an unreasonable division of labor.
The second observation is less tender and therefore perhaps more useful. Stop explaining yourself.
I would not go quite so far as to say that overcommunication is always begging. Language is imprecise, human beings are imperfect, and misunderstanding is one of our species’ most renewable resources. There are occasions when explanation is generous and clarification necessary. But there is a point—and most of us know precisely when we have crossed it—at which explanation changes its nature.
You explained yourself. Then you explained the explanation. You supplied context. You adjusted the wording. You softened the offending phrase. You produced examples. You clarified your intention. You sent another message because perhaps the previous five had somehow failed to transmit a concept that was perfectly intelligible the first time. Eventually one encounters an unsettling possibility: the other person understood you perfectly well.
They simply disagree.
This is intolerable to a surprising number of intelligent adults because we have confused understanding with agreement. We imagine that if only our argument were sufficiently lucid, the other person would inevitably arrive at our conclusion. This is flattering to our logic and rather insulting to everyone else’s sovereignty. People can understand us perfectly and still reject the proposition. They can understand our motives and dislike them. They can understand our choices and make different ones. They can even understand who we are and decide that they would prefer someone else.
One survives.
There is enormous freedom in permitting another person to misunderstand you after you have made a reasonable effort to be understood. There is even greater freedom in allowing someone to understand you completely and disagree anyway. Much of human misery is generated by conducting endless appellate proceedings before people who were never appointed judges.
At some point another paragraph ceases to be communication. It becomes petition. We are no longer explaining what we think. We are asking permission to think it.
This habit is difficult to surrender because the desire to be understood is connected to the ancient desire to remain inside the tribe. Human beings are social animals who acquired sophisticated language and promptly used it to invent more elaborate ways of asking not to be expelled. We explain ourselves to lovers, employers, families, friends, strangers, and increasingly to enormous invisible audiences who did not request testimony in the first place. The internet has democratized the courtroom. Everyone is now simultaneously defendant, prosecutor, judge, jury, court reporter, and an unusually ill-informed member of the gallery.
The mature response may occasionally be silence.
Not the wounded silence of manipulation, nor the theatrical silence designed to make everyone notice how magnificently silent one has become. Simply the quiet recognition that the argument has been made. The other person possesses the necessary information. Civilization will continue without another text message.
Then there is the child.
The proposition that all roads eventually return us to our childhood interests initially sounds nostalgic, but nostalgia is too soft a word for what interests me. I regard childhood interests almost as archaeological evidence. They tell us something about the original architecture before the renovations began.
Children become fascinated before they become strategic. One child takes apart radios. Another draws. Another organizes elaborate games. Another reads everything within reach. Another watches airplanes. Another stares at stars. Another wants to know why the moon appears to follow the automobile. Another invents worlds. Another sits quietly among adults and notices, with dangerous accuracy, that what grown people say bears only an occasional relationship to what they actually do.
The child has no résumé. He has no personal brand. He has not optimized his professional network. He has not yet attended a seminar explaining how to monetize curiosity. He is simply interested.
Then the world arrives.
The world is extremely helpful.
It explains which interests are practical, which occupations respectable, which ambitions realistic, which neighborhoods desirable, which universities impressive, which people important, which clothes appropriate, which opinions acceptable, how much money constitutes success, what age constitutes youth, what age constitutes decline, when one should marry, when one should retire, what one should own, where one should vacation, and approximately how pleased one ought to appear while complying with the entire arrangement.
Eventually the child becomes a résumé.
This is not entirely sinister. Civilization requires accommodation. Electricity companies have displayed remarkably little interest in anyone’s journey toward self-actualization. Children require food. Houses require maintenance. Taxes have survived every philosophical objection ever made against them. Responsibility is real, and anyone who imagines otherwise will eventually receive correspondence from a government agency.
But accommodation has a way of becoming identity. We become good at what circumstances required us to do and eventually confuse competence with selfhood. The successful executive concludes that he was born to manage corporations because he became proficient at managing one. The lawyer forgets that before law school she painted. The businessman who spent forty years negotiating begins to imagine that negotiation was the purpose rather than the occupation. The machinery becomes so efficient that we mistake it for the person operating it.
Then, if one is fortunate, age begins dismantling the machinery.
The career becomes less impressive. Money loses some of its theatrical authority. Invitations become easier to decline. People whose approval once seemed essential become, upon mature examination, surprisingly ordinary. Status reveals itself as a game in which the principal prize is admission to rooms filled with other people playing the same game. Solitude ceases to look like evidence of social failure and begins to resemble private property.
And then the old interests return.
Not necessarily the old activities. That distinction matters. The child fascinated by airplanes need not become a pilot. The child who dismantled radios need not become an engineer. The child who watched adults may become a writer. The child who organized neighborhood games may build companies. The child who asked impossible questions may eventually discover that impossible questions were the only questions worth asking.
The manifestation changes. The impulse survives.
This is why I increasingly suspect that becoming oneself is less an act of construction than excavation.
Remove the need to impress. Remove the obligation to attend. Remove the relationship maintained entirely because it has existed for a long time. Remove the argument already made. Remove the explanation nobody requested. Remove the ambition inherited from another person’s definition of success. Remove the guilt attached to enjoying one’s own life. Remove the peculiar modern superstition that productivity is a moral virtue and leisure requires an affidavit.
Remove enough and eventually someone familiar appears.
There is a delicious irony in this because youth is largely an audition. We audition for schools, employers, lovers, friends, institutions, professions, communities, clubs, neighborhoods, families, and strangers whose names we do not know but whose imagined opinions nevertheless possess the power to ruin an otherwise perfectly good afternoon. Modern technology has merely industrialized the audition. We now carry the theater in our pockets. Everyone has an audience; everyone is an audience; everyone performs a version of life while privately wondering whether everyone else’s performance is somehow more authentic.
It is exhausting.
One of the unexpected privileges of getting older is discovering that the audience is shrinking and finding oneself relieved rather than alarmed.
Perhaps we were performing for far too many people.
There is no need to announce one’s withdrawal from the audition. That would merely be another performance. No manifesto is required. One simply becomes increasingly selective about which opinions are permitted entry. One discovers that not every invitation deserves acceptance, not every criticism deserves rebuttal, not every misunderstanding deserves correction, not every relationship deserves indefinite maintenance, and not every opportunity deserves pursuit.
The word no, used intelligently, becomes one of the great instruments of personal sovereignty.
So does indifference.
Indifference has acquired an undeservedly bad reputation because we confuse it with cruelty. But intelligent indifference is simply discrimination applied to attention. It is the recognition that one’s attention is finite even if the world’s demands upon it are not. To care about everything is ultimately to care seriously about nothing.
Attention, more than time, may be the actual currency of existence. Time passes whether we authorize the transaction or not. Attention is the portion we allocate. Give attention repeatedly to resentment and resentment becomes part of one’s biography. Give it to approval and one becomes dependent upon an electorate one cannot control. Give it to curiosity and the world expands. Give it to love and existence acquires a texture unavailable through mere acquisition.
Children understand attention instinctively. Watch a child genuinely fascinated by something and the surrounding universe disappears. There is no optimization, no multitasking, no concern about whether the activity contributes to the five-year plan. There is absorption.
Perhaps that is what we are really trying to recover.
Not innocence. Innocence is charming largely because it has not yet received sufficient information.
Absorption.
The capacity to become so interested in something that the audience disappears.
That may be the precise opposite of auditioning.
Mortality, viewed from this perspective, is not morbid at all. Death merely introduces editorial discipline. It reminds us that the manuscript is not infinitely long and that perhaps some passages should be cut. There are arguments not worth continuing, ambitions not worth achieving, possessions not worth acquiring, people not worth impressing, and performances not worth giving.
The tragedy is not that life ends.
The more subtle tragedy would be reaching the end having spent most of it waiting for permission to begin.
And perhaps this is the final joke civilization plays upon us. We spend the first half of life desperately trying to become somebody. We collect evidence. We accumulate credentials. We construct the identity, polish it, defend it, explain it, and display it. Then, somewhere in the later chapters, we discover that the more interesting achievement is not becoming somebody at all.
It is becoming ourselves.
Not the advertised self. Not the approved self. Not the self defended before committees, families, institutions, lovers, critics, or strangers. Not the self whose value depends upon applause.
The quieter self beneath the paperwork.
I have therefore come to regard maturity not as the completion of identity but as its editing. The question becomes not what else can I add, but what can finally be removed? Which ambitions were mine? Which were inherited? Which obligations remain honorable and which merely habitual? Which relationships contain affection and which contain only history? Which opinions belong to me and which were deposited there so early that I mistook them for original thought?
The world spent decades telling us what to want.
Age finally gives us enough evidence to ask whether any of it was worth wanting.
That is a much more interesting question.
Perhaps the great luxury of later life is not having finally acquired everything we once wanted. Perhaps it is reaching the point at which we can distinguish what we genuinely wanted from what we were taught to want, and then possessing sufficient independence to act upon the distinction.
Something rather beautiful happens after that.
Life becomes quieter without becoming smaller.
The unnecessary voices recede. The explanations shorten. The audience thins. Curiosity returns. Love becomes less contractual. Solitude becomes less threatening. Attention becomes more deliberate. And somewhere beneath decades of accumulated instruction, one begins to recognize the original architecture.
The person was there all along.
We simply spent an astonishing amount of time auditioning to play somebody else.
Life becomes considerably more interesting when you stop auditioning for it.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.™
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Joe Cozart is an author and founder of GMJoe™ Consulting, where he works with companies, institutions, and emerging technologies confronting complex problems that resist conventional solutions. His work focuses on systems analysis, pattern recognition, strategic framing, and the architecture of clarity—the discipline of identifying the question beneath the question before conventional execution begins.