Near-Earth Object

I have this idea about the relationship between courage and laziness.

Courage, as I define it, is when a person acts out of principle, knowing that the act will cause them suffering. John Lewis knew he faced beatings, imprisonment, and possibly death when he marched. Susan B. Anthony knew she faced scorn, jail, and infamy if she cast a vote. Steve Rogers knew he’d be blown to bits when he leapt on that grenade that turned out to be a dud. (Fictional examples are helpful and illustrative so back off.)

I have lamented on countless occasions my inability to choose a Major Project of some kind and see it through to fruition. (One Major Project I actually did, finally, complete, and I will eagerly share it with you when it comes into full being sometime next year.) I’d like to write a novel. I’d like to start a theatre troupe. I’d like to write nonfiction books on a number of subjects and in a number of styles. I’d like to host a podcast, write and record an album of new songs, play my music live for audiences, get into voice acting, write a newsletter, make a satire news site, and so on.

Rarely do I even begin on these fantasy projects, let alone stick with them long enough for them take flight. Why?

Sometimes, a project just isn’t the right fit. It doesn’t interest me as much as I’d hoped, or it involves commitments I am simply incapable of making. That’s no reason for anyone to beat themselves up. I mean, I will still beat myself up about it, but I shouldn’t.

But more often than not, I think what holds me back is what I’ll call laziness. That might not be an entirely fair word to use, but I want to make a point. When evaluating a Major Project, any number of factors can weigh on my mind and convince me it’s not worth beginning, or not feasible. It could be that I don’t think I have the time, or that I don’t really know how to get started. It could be that I don’t see a market for what I’d offer, or that said market is already flooded. It could be that it would require that I ask for help or collaboration with others, possibly even strangers, and my intense wincing at the thought of being socially entwined with anyone drains my resolve. It could be that I perceive that it would require a financial commitment that I can’t make, or am unwilling to try to fulfill.

All of these are justifications for inaction. Reasons not to start. Reasons not to try. Some of them might be really good reasons! Some of them might be sober and realistic assessments that lead to the reasonable conclusion that something is just not worth taking on.

Some. But not most.

Mostly, they’re about unwillingness. A lack of will, all because of an imaginary cost-benefit calculation that I have made based on a slew of unknowable factors. It’s bad math. And because the result of actually making the effort to see something to its fruition is more likely to be a valuable end in itself, regardless of anything else, it really is, for lack of a better word, laziness.

To take the first step in a new enterprise, and then to take as many additional steps as possible, is an uncomfortable thought. And each step brings with it the possibility of stubbing one’s toe, tripping, or stepping on a rake. One could take a few steps very awkwardly and wind up looking ridiculous for several paces. One could walk for a very, very long time and get very, very tired, or run out of energy entirely and collapse to the ground. One could even reach the ultimate, dreamed-of destination and find that it actually kind of sucks there. All those things could be true, and most of them almost certainly will be true.

Then what is required to do it anyway? Courage. To undertake an action of importance even though we know that a lot of the experience will be negative, even though we might not even finish it, even though what we make in the end might be kind of crappy. To work in spite of those possibilities takes courage. To put aside precious free time and resources that we may never get back takes courage. To allow oneself to be vulnerable and entreat others for help and collaboration is risky and, to me, terrifying, and it takes courage.

I’ve berated myself for being lazy for most of my life. I’ve been ashamed at my lack of courage in other instances as well. I’ve learned a great deal about myself in recent years, and I better understand the roots of my fears and aversions. But only now am I beginning to understand that what I see as my own laziness and my dearth of courage might be the same thing.

Because, in the end, laziness is about being unwilling to endure discomfort. Courage is being willing to heap it on.

I know I can endure discomfort. I believe I can take on even more. And I suspect that it might be worth it.

Using Medium as my primary writing platform often feels like something of a gamble.

Yes, it’s free for me to use, but the only way I can make any money from it is by affirmatively placing my work behind Medium’s paywall. For folks who don’t subscribe to Medium, should they stumble across something I wrote after they’ve already clicked on five other Medium articles, they don’t get to read it. In that scenario I not only lose a potential reader (though not any income because they weren’t subscribing to begin with), but any potential new readers I might have gained from the that person sharing my work. It just stops at the paywall.

If I publish outside the paywall, of course, anyone can read it and share it, and that’s great, except the part where I don’t get paid.

Then the question is just how much I stand to lose by not posting behind the paywall. And the answer is: Usually nothing. Prepare yourself to be shocked, but, alas, I do not command a huge readership. So the vast majority of my articles wind up generating me something between about 20 cents and a buck and a half every month.

That makes it sound like an easy trade-off. Do without the pocket change and potentially get your material in front of far, far more people! That’s the way to go!

Except! Medium isn’t going to highlight material that’s not behind its paywall, suppressing any “organic” discovery of my work by the platform itself. I’m also not going to get picked up by any Medium-based publications with their own followings.

Also! Once in a blue moon, one of my Medium pieces does strike a chord, either with readers or Medium editors, and it catches fire, generating tens of thousands of eyeballs and a little bit of extra cash for me. (Nothing that would ever change my life, but a nice little bonus.) This has happened to me two or three times, ever. I’d like it to happen more.

So I do really think that most of the incentives point toward posting behind the paywall. There’s more potential for Medium to promote the piece, other publications are more likely to pick it up, and a little lightning in a bottle can, once in a long while, bring a little attention and compensation. But I don’t know for sure that it’s the best way to go. I have no way to quantitatively determine what is the most “optimal” route for me, post by post, short term or long term.

For now, I’ll keep favoring the paywall, because I don’t know what else to do. But every time I click that box to make it a premium article, I shudder a little, wondering what I might be losing as a result.

You know the story. A system designed from its inception to favor empty geographical space over actual humans has allowed a minority of provincial, ignorance-celebrating zealots to utterly confound and rend asunder national civic life, their flames fanned by the opulent boor they have anointed as their messiah.

Innocents are murdered by a 17-year-old with an assault rifle, and they cheer him on. An infectious disease kills nearly 200,000 of their fellow citizens, and they deny the pandemic is even happening. Peaceful protesters are gassed, beaten, arrested, and disappeared, and they cry for more. The Postal Service is sabotaged from within in order to rig an election, public health agencies are disfigured into becoming the president’s public relations and propaganda outfits, while corruption and criminality are not only tolerated but boastfully flaunted from the White House.

Those with power who oppose any of this? They are concerned. They express their concerns in tweets. No one does anything.

Or, seeing that they can’t beat the fascists, they join them. I’m not talking about the Republican Party, which has had fascism in its DNA since the civil rights movement scared all the racists into the GOP. I’m talking about people who know better. People I have looked up to. People who think that the existential threat to civilization is not climate change, deadly pandemics, or authoritarianism, but being disagreed with. People who think that making sure a store window is never broken is worth flooding city streets with storm troopers to beat and detain dissenters. Sensing their positions of privilege might be even slightly encroached upon, they clutch their pearls and cry for their demagogue to protect them.

Equality was fine when all the “equal people” stayed down there.

There are so many of us who do not want this. It might even be most of us. There is a nation full of us. But we are knotted up with a wholly separate nation from an alternate reality, two countries existing simultaneously in the same space, as though by some feat of quantum mechanics. But the nation of madness, the one with the guns and the white supremacists and the storm troopers and the fundamentalists and the jealous privileged class, is the one in control.

Bizarro has Superman in an inescapable chokehold. We are trapped.

Don’t think for a moment that the denizens of the nation of maniacs don’t know this. They revel in it. Their hatred of difference, their intolerance of dissent, and their need to feel constantly victimized give them purpose and identity. They would have it no other way. A hostage-taker has no power without hostages.

I have had it with being a hostage. I want out. This isn’t working. And it’s literally killing us.

We need to acknowledge, as a polity, that these two visions of what a society should look like are utterly incompatible, and that those who wish to live in one cannot possibly coexist with those who wish to live in the other. If you believe in the inherent worth and equality of every human being, you cannot find any practicable common ground with someone who believes that people of a different ethnicity are subhuman or intrinsically criminal. If you believe that everyone has the right to their own beliefs about religion and that one’s faith should have no role in the operation of the state, you are not going to have a productive relationship with someone who is entirely certain that the creator of the Universe has commanded us to have one specific form of government dictated by this deity’s wishes. If you accept and rely on the mechanisms of science and evidence in matters of public health and safety, you are not only in conflict, but literally endangered, when trying to collaborate with someone who thinks science is a lie and that pandemics and climate change are hoaxes.

It’s absurd.

David Frum says President Trump’s divisiveness makes him a “secessionist from the top.” Responding to Trump’s convention speech, he writes, “Since we are two countries, we can have two sets of laws and rules: one for friends, another for enemies. … Two countries, two classes of citizen, two systems of law.” Trump’s America, Red America, is (and always has been) at war with Blue America.

Well, not if we walk away. You can’t have a war without someone to fight.

I don’t think Trump is a secessionist from the top, because he needs this civil war. His entire tribe does. But I want to deny them that. I say we leave.

Because a nation-state can’t actually function in a quantum superposition, I suppose some form of defined geography, some kind of political border, is necessary. So we retreat to the blue states with the most welcoming populations and the most room. Maybe it’s New England and the West Coast. Through overwhelming electoral numbers, we make our new nations’ dominant politics untenable for the regressivists still residing, until they decide of their own volition to get enlightened or get out. An authoritarian-loving Trumpist feeling out of place in Cascadia or the Republic of California can pack up and head for the fascist hills whenever he wants. Idaho is right over there.

Assuming they accept immigrants.

We can start over. We can start arguing among ourselves about policy. We’ll have free and fair elections to hammer out our various conflicts, and we’ll probably get really mad at each other about an endless list of things. But we’ll do it in a spirit that at least approaches good faith, based on the same shared set of facts and the same basic understanding that we’re all of equal worth and dignity.

And when we look over our borders, into the great span of land that constitutes our fascist neighbor, we may shudder at their fever dreams of manifest destiny, but then we’ll take a deep breath and feel that enormous sense of relief that comes from knowing that we once were trapped there, but now we are free.

I think one of the most courageous things a person can do is to love one’s enemy. That phrase, “love thy enemy,” can imply a lot of different things, though, so let’s parse out more precisely what I mean.

There’s a version of “love thy enemy” that I think is more like “tolerate thy enemy,” an acceptance that those whose interests are opposed to our own are, at the very least, entitled to have interests and to pursue them. Right off the bat, that’s more than many — if not most — people can manage. For example, I find it very difficult to muster any sympathy for someone who would vote for just about any Republican for public office right now. I recognize that they have every right to support whomever they choose, but I think that choice is so deeply flawed and immoral that “tolerate” is about the best I can do. But “love”?

There’s another version of “love thy enemy” that is more akin to what I see from many religious conservatives, which manifests as a kind of paternalistic condescension. These poor, misguided people, they don’t see how much I love them and their immortal souls, and they don’t understand that all the things I’m doing are so they can get right with God. I suppose a conservative could turn this around and say that secular liberals are doing the same thing to them, pushing them to live under our progressive moral system for what we say is their own good. (They could do that, and they’d be wrong, but that’s another thing.)

Maybe in between these there’s a “love thy enemy” that is more hopeful, a kind of wish that one’s enemy will see how they are wrong (in wronging you, wronging others, wronging themselves), with a sincere desire that said enemy will become what one believes they can be. At best, it’s wanting something better for one’s enemy, but it’s conditional. To truly receive the love one has for one’s enemy, that enemy has to work for it and have something to show. It’s like love in escrow.

In none of these variations is one asking anything of oneself. The onus is always on the enemy.

What got me thinking about this was a recent piece by Alan Jacobs, who I might describe as my cognitive hero. (His book is literally titled How to Think.) There, he addresses white Americans who feel boxed in by the recent awakening for racial justice, anxious that they feel unfairly cast as villains and that, no matter what they do, they just can’t win. His response is to drop some Jesus on them. From Luke:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.

This bore into my heart when I read it. I’ve written before about how love is not a feeling but an act, a process, and this little Jesus-bomb here is just about the most radical expression of that idea. Does someone steal from you? Slander you? Hurt you? Love the shit out of them.

It’s easy to feel love for people who are good to us! It’s much harder to affirmatively act on that love, to engage in the process of loving someone, even those about whom we care most deeply. But this goes much, much further. By these lights, we have to do more than just feel love for our enemies, do more than just have sympathy or empathy with those who seek to do us harm. We have to act out of love for them. We have to engage in the process, the work, of love for the benefit of those who seek to make us suffer — and with no expectation or wish of anything in return.

I mean, holy crap.

That takes courage. A lot. It may well be beyond my capacity, I honestly don’t know. But what a thing to aspire to!

Now, there’s a spot where I get a little hung up. Here’s the end of the quote from Luke:

Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Shit. There’s that word. Reward. Barf.

Now we’re back into transactions. Engage in the utterly selfless act of affirmatively loving your enemy with every particle of your being, because in the end, you’ll get the big payoff from God.

If you truly believe with certainty that there is an afterlife, overseen by the creator of the Universe, that is available to those who meet the behavioral requirements of carrying out one’s earthly existence, then loving one’s enemy ceases to be courageous. It becomes an investment, meant to maximize the value of one’s biological retirement.

I love the idea of an ideal to which we can aspire, even if we can’t reach it. This is one of the things that distinguishes a belief in “making America great again,” which imagines that there is a perfection that has been lost and must be recovered, and the aspiration to form a more perfect union, the unending quest of reaching toward something better than we have yet known.

When we act out of love for our kids, we work to help them become the best versions of themselves they can be, and there is no reward for us as parents. When we love our country, we engage in the work of shaping, tinkering, adjusting, experimenting, and improving so that it gets asymptotically closer to being that more perfect union, long after we’re gone and able to see any of the benefits of that work.

To love our enemy is to work toward their benefit, knowing that they will never reciprocate. It’s remarkably straightforward. As Jacobs writes:

There’s a simplicity about this that’s immensely liberating. Just knowing what I’m supposed to do relieves me of the burden of worrying about other people’s intentions, other people’s morals. It doesn’t matter what their intentions and their morals are: my job is precisely the same whatever the state of their souls.

That’s utterly radical and almost unthinkably courageous. But to do any of these things because we think that after it’s all over we’ll get some sort of divine compensation, well, then it’s something less.

As I write this, the 2020 Republican National Convention is about to get underway. I do not believe I have the capacity to love those who will be responsible for whatever lies, hate, and rage will be broadcast. I expect nothing from them, but nor do I have anything to offer them. I wish I did.

I don’t know if John Lewis loved the men who beat him, imprisoned him, or spat on him. I suspect he might have. I can’t imagine having the courage to do the things he did without the conviction that he was performing an act of love for them, as much as for those who were already on this side. Sure, as a Black man in America, he stood to gain from the advances in equality he doggedly pursued. But what he was truly winning was a new level of enlightenment for all of us, and all that he did and endured will reverberate long after him, long after anyone who is alive today. It wasn’t for him. It was for us, and yes, it was for them.

And I don’t think he did it to secure his place in the great hereafter, either. I can’t know that for sure, of course. But from here, I saw the act of love without expectation of reciprocation. I saw radical courage. I believed.

I have trouble going to see theatre productions, because it reminds me of the work I want to be doing. What I ought to be doing. I want to be on that stage or directing the action, not just watching. Watching is what other people do, what the normals do.

I often feel the same way about music, though to a somewhat lesser extent. Listening to great music too often reminds me of the music I’m not making, the songs I’m not writing or recording or performing. Experiences with the arts that ought to, by all other accounts, be sublime, are all too frequently for me of alienation and regret.

Shit, even listening to podcasts makes me feel like a slug.

The same can also be said for my experience of great writing, particularly novels, though I suppose a part of me. that I’m not cut out to be a fiction writer (I deeply hope this is not so), and am therefore not really failing any kind of personal expectation. Movies and TV rarely bring this kind of anxiety on, as they feel so out of reach as to be akin to wishing to be a professional basketball player as a 5-foot-5 sedentary dude in his 40s. A couple decades ago I harbored illusions of future movie stardom, but now I can watch Avengers: Endgame without that kind of psychological baggage.

And I think this might be why I’ve glommed onto video games at this rather unlikely period of my life. I’m by no means a “gamer,” but lately I’ve found my greatest moments of escape and enthrallment within games such as Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing, Civilization, and Skyrim. And I suspect that this is in large part because of the fact that I know nothing about video game design, nothing about programming or software development, nor even anything about how computers work at all. As far as I’m concerned, they all run on magic.

That utter separation makes video games safe. While slashing with a sword, casting spells, or cultivating my ridiculous fake garden in gamespace, I feel no pangs of remorse for the code I’m not writing. Video games are a place, an experience, I can enter and totally surrender myself to without placing any guilt trip on myself for the video games I never made.

But of course, they do have a lot of voice actors in these games. Why haven’t I gotten a voice acting role in a video game? I’m a total failure.

If there is a point to being alive, a reason for existing as a self-aware organism in the Universe, it is probably to solve problems. I don’t actually think there is a reason for us or anyone else to exist, nor do I think that the Universe itself provides or requires any inherent meaning or purpose. But if there is any purpose, or if we can impose meaning post hoc, sans propter hoc, then I think the whole point is the solving of problems.

Let’s get this out of the way, just for total clarity: There was no “intent” on the part of the Universe or any other entity that a particular species (or any number of species) should emerge and go about the business of fixing things the Universe couldn’t fix on its own. That’s fantasy stuff. The Universe has no will, nor does it perceive that it possesses imperfections to be repaired. It doesn’t perceive anything, except inasmuch that the beings in it, and therefore of it, perceive things. But the fact that they do perceive anything is accidental, not purposeful.

By problem-solving, I mean something far more mundane, localized to the individual organism. One has the will to maintain one’s own existence because of the impulse, built into a being by natural selection, to seek out opportunities to overcome deficiencies, fulfill needs, create novelties, experience pleasures, and relieve suffering. Examples can range from achieving world peace to fixing a leaky faucet. From creating a great work of art to cleaning up a spilled drink. From being elected President of the United States to sending a routine work email. From filling one’s head with the knowledge gained from the reading of a book to filling one’s belly with a nice breakfast.

So what? Good question. “So what” indeed.

I first encountered this simple idea from a rather unscholarly source, Mark Manson’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F✻ck. It was quite revelatory in that it stripped away the various layers of made-up meaning we humans apparently need to heap onto everything. Manson’s point was more specifically about happiness, that rather than being a state, happiness is a process that comes from the solving of problems that a person wants to be solving. The anticipation, planning, and execution of solving those problems are what brings about actual satisfaction with one’s existence. Not glee or joy, per se, but contentment. Purpose.

In Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright writes that the Buddha already knew this. And while On the Origin of Species was still a good two-and-a-half thousand years after the Buddha’s time, his way of understanding human existence squares pretty well with what natural selection has wrought in us.

“Yes, as [the Buddha] said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied,” says Wright. “And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t ‘want’ us to be happy, after all; it just ‘wants’ us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.”

We have evolved to want to solve for x, to take pleasure in attempting to solve for x, and to take more pleasure in having solved x, but not so much pleasure that we feel like we shouldn’t now move on to y and z.

Despair comes from one’s problems being unsolvable or from having no problems that one deems worth solving. It’s always about pursuit of that which we do not yet have, be it material or informational. I was reminded of this again when reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in a passage from when the protagonist, Genry, speaks to a mystic, Faxe.

“The unknown,” Faxe tells Genry, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. … But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. … Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

Genry responds, “That we shall die.”

“Yes,” says Faxe. “There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Purpose, meaning, contentment, all of it comes from the day-to-day, moment-to-moment business of solving for x.

Again: So what? I don’t know. But maybe I can work with that. Maybe you can work with that. At the very least, maybe you can find some purpose in solving for that x.