Essay 4 for 1,400 words typed based on James Lasdun’s It’s Beginning to Hurt is due November 10:
Option One
Comparing at least 3 stories from Lasdun’s collection, develop an analytical thesis that shows how Joseph Epstein’s online essay “The Perpetual Adolescent” supports the assertion that Lasdun’s characters self-destruct under the weight of their adolescent fixation.
By perpetual adolescence, we mean the following:
Chasing Eros instead of chasing wisdom and achieving maturity.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of serving an ideal larger than oneself.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning the wisdom of maturity.
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Pursuing Dionysian impulses instead of Apollonian inclinations. Some say that all literature is about the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Be sure your essay has a minimum of 3 sources.
Sample Outline:
Paragraph 1: Write a summary of Epstein's essay "The Perpetual Adolescent."
Paragraph 2: Write a thesis. For example:
The characters in Lasdun's fiction are afflicted with the disease of perpetual adolescence evidenced by ________________, __________________, __________________, ____________________and _____________________.
Paragraphs 3-8 would be your body paragraphs.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, would restate your thesis in dramatic form.
Option Two
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? How does this demonic state impede free will? How are Lasdun's characters victims of their own psychological determinism? (cause and effect thesis)
Are Lasdun's characters so absent of free will that Lasdun's fiction is lacking complexity and moral value as a result?
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad as they become disconnected from others and living inside their head, the condition known as solipsism.
They become irrational so that they are incapable of maturity, which means having the faculties of love and reason.
They have no boundaries with others, so that they are “clingers,” as we discussed last class, people capable of symbiotic relationships, which render both people emotional cripples.
They become blind to their own self-destruction so that they have no self-awareness or metacognition.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a cheap dream. They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay has a minimum of 3 sources.
Suggested Outline
Paragraph One: Summarize your favorite story featuring a character who succumbs to the demonic state.
Paragraph Two. Summarize your second favorite story featuring a character who falls prey to the demonic state.
Paragraph Three. Your thesis would compare two characters. For example:
Character X and Character Y succumb to the demonic state evidenced by _________________, _____________________, ____________________, __________________, and _________________.
Paragraphs 4-8 would support your mapping components.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, would restate your thesis in dramatic form.
Option Three
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man"). Be sure your essay at least 3 sources.
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph One: Summarize the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure."
Paragraph Two. Summarize the story "An Anxious Man."
Paragraph Three. Write a thesis that shows how "Love People, Not Pleasure" explains the Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil) that Joseph Nagel makes in the story. For example,
Joseph Nagel makes a Faustian Bargain as described in "Love People, Not Pleasure," as evidenced by ______________, _______________, ____________________, _____________________, and _______________________.
Paragraphs 4-8 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Literary Present Verb Tense
Remember to use literary present verb tense.
“The Incalculable Life Gesture” (50)
Theme
When We Are Wronged, We Must Respond with Proper Proportion Or Else Be Our Own Worst Enemy
Richard’s moral flaw: He can't let go of the fact that life is unfair--especially TO HIM. While he is "right" that his sister has been unfair to him, he is wrong in his overreaction to the unfairness. His overreaction creates a virulent form of resentment that is consuming him.
In other words, Richard's resentment is a spiritual disease that is eating him from the inside out. In this sense, he is very, very wrong.
In addition to resentment is Richard's self-righteous indignation rooted in part that life is supposed to be fair and just and that we shouldn’t let narcissistic parasites (such as Richard’s sister) have their way.
We learn in examining Richard's moral flaw--the self-destructive resentment he harbors against his sister who he rightly sees as a cipher--that the more we rationalize our flaws the more we become irrational; the more we are technically right about an issue, the more we can be morally and spiritually wrong and as such we live an irrational life and evidence the demonic mind, a person whose irrational impulses have taken over metacognition. The result: The person becomes a dumpster fire, a car crash.
Richard's demonic state is his obsession with blaming his sister for all his woes. She is partly to blame for his life's problems, but he is the greater force of self-destruction. His sister is a convenient scapegoat.
Another Theme of the Demonic Mind: We're Right But We're Even MORE Wrong
Categories of Being Right But Being More Wrong
One. We see the trees but not the forest: some law or doctrine that causes destruction even as we obey it. We have an "A" clean rating at our restaurant because our cooks all wait hairnets, but one cook has an Old Testament beard that droops into the soup pot and little crabs and other creatures.
We have amassed thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook and enjoy lots of stars and "likes," but we are socially and emotionally infantile fragile creatures dependent on the dopamine rush of another "like." We have lost the forest, the bigger picture of what has become of us.
We are "Master Yelp Reviewers," but we languish in our mother's basement in a robe while eating Hot Pockets. We have lost the forest, the picture picture of what has become of us.
We have the Trophy Girl Whom Every Man Wants, but our lives are miserable, we're jumping through hoops, and living in debt to appease the Trophy Girl's Insatiable Consumer Appetites. We are lost in the woods and cannot see the forest, the picture picture of what has become of us.
Two. We make a bad situation worse: We report a bully who's beating our child and the bully retaliates. We "get even" with a stupid driver only to get shot at. We cheat "because everyone else is cheating" and compromise our education, our values, and our identity.
Three. We hurt people's feelings by telling the truth. Not all situations merit the truth. White lies are permissible when we have to preserve feelings or the safety of people.
Four. We choose victory over humanity. Study group keeps dead weight and loses the contest. But they gave kindness to the "dead weight" student.
Five. We rationalize our selfish behavior by saying, "we're right." The guy on the bus who won't give up his seat to old lady because "I was first" is selfish.
Six. We lie to give hope and spare feelings.
Seven. We have bad intentions. A teacher says, "It's your obligation to come to class prepared" even as he humiliates a student.
Eight. Not knowing whole story. You get a waitress fired from her job because of her horrible service, but you don’t know she’s a single mother whose boss harassed her in the back office and her three children are sick and she can’t afford a babysitter.
Nine. Gloating. "I told you so." You may have been right about your friend not buying that condo in a so-and-so city as the property value declines, but you're acting like a jackass.
Ten. You bring up a truth but you don't have a purpose or an end game. A guy tells his girlfriend for example that she doesn't love him, that she uses him for all the presents he gives her and her response is, "Yes, so what do you plan to do about it?" The guy is speechless because he doesn’t have an end game.
Questions for “The Incalculable Life Gesture”
One. What’s the psychological profile of Ellen on page 50?
A leech, a cipher, an indulgent, narcissistic ne’er-do-well. She represents the Dionysian spirit, one of chaos, while Richard embodies the Apollonian spirit, one of order. But is Richard any better, wanting his share of a small house when his sister and child need shelter? I find myself siding with Richard. Am I as petty as he is?
Two. How is Ellen unfair to her brother Richard regarding the inheritance of the house and how does Richard respond to this injustice?
He’s in a dilemma: Be a victim or a bully. Like Joseph in "An Anxious Man," he appears to lack convictions or a core self as he worries hiring an attorney to kick his sister out of the house might compromise his appearance with others. See page 51. Further, Richard can't see himself as selfish or petty because he identifies himself, rightly or not, as an intellectual helper of others, a spiritual guide, yet if we're honest Richard seems rather lost in his life.
Further, we could argue that the swelling he has ignored is a metaphor for some spiritual disease that is eating him and this disease may be rooted in Richard's existential vacuum.
Three. How does Ellen pour salt into the wounds she has inflicted upon Richard? See 51.
She has contempt for her brother and doesn’t see her brother’s capitulation to handing over the property to her as a good deed; she’s entitled to it from her point of view. She is the hostile victim who has been wronged from her standpoint.
She is icy and envious that her brother can afford organic groceries while she slogs for food at Walmart.
Four. What bothers Richard about the possibility of death on page 54?
Death makes a mockery of his life but his real death is that he has no place, identity, or belonging in society. That is Richard’s “death.” His personal frustration compels him to find a scapegoat, his sister, for whom to blame all his problems.
Five. Why did Richard decide to become a teacher? See page 57.
He wanted to teach others but also himself, find a way to be his own healer, so to speak, but in the tradition of Lasdun’s fictional characters Richard proves to be little more than a feeble cipher. Rather than have a core identity, he seems vain and at the mercy of others' opinion of him to base his self-image. As we read on page 54, he was worried that a diagnosis of cancer would change his image to others: one a healthy robust man, he would not be seen as a sick, moribund loser.
Six. Is the malady a metaphor for unrealistic expectations regarding justice and charity? Explain.
No, the malady is the disease that is Richard’s unrealized existence, his absence of meaning and core identity. Frustrated, he uses his hatred for his sister as his escape; therefore, he “needs” to hate her.
Seven. How does Richard’s self-image as a life-priest alienate him from modern life? See 57 and 58.
We see Richard is so vain that he never committed to any real vocation or calling for all the choices he considered in the end lacked "radiance" worthy of his exceptional being. Perhaps he is simply vain and slothful and lacking the rigor to take on a true profession lives in the delusion that he is of a rarefied breed, an "educator."
Eight. What does the story’s acrimonious ending seem to be telling us about empathy?
That empathy does not exist in self-centered, narcissistic ciphers like Richard, those waifs who are too full of self-regard to notice the struggles of others. See page 62 in which Richard wants his sister to share his glee for not having cancer when in fact his sister doesn't have time: She has pressing errands to run.
Nine. What is Richard's delusion or moral flaw?
That he has the right to fume and stew over his sister's injustice when in fact his resentment is killing him more than the injustice itself. His resentment is a cancer that is growing like the tumor on his face.
The spirit of Richard curdles as he contemplates his sister's parasitic ways. Likewise, Abel curdles with envy as he watches his friend Stewart live the life of a lascivious Billy Goat.
Comparing Richard and Abel (good mapping points for essay)
One. Overreacting to a crisis: Envy, resentment, and self-contempt become the crisis for both Richard and Abel, but it is their overreaction to the crisis that puts them in their demonic state. We all have envy, resentment, and self-loathing when we see ourselves being weak, but not all of us overreact to our failings. It is the overreaction that sparks the demonic.
Two. Crisis of irrelevance: Have I squandered my existence? Why am I alive? Who cares about me? Did I go down a wrong path? Am I a joke? Have I lost all my dignity? Have I lost my youth, my moxie, my creative spark that I saw inside myself during my younger years?
Three. Need for a scapegoat. Is Person X or Group Y the culprit of my torment? Has my obedience to society's rigid script resulted in my betraying myself? Am I a victim of blind convention?
Four. Self-pity. I've followed the rules and look at me--nobody loves me. I'm not appreciated. I feel hollow. I am the empty shell of my former self. I wan more in life, but I'm too stupid to even know what to look for.
You can go down a rabbit hole of self-pity for which there is no return. I knew a rich doctor who never recovered after his wife left him for another doctor.
Themes in the "The Natural Order"
The existential vacuum and ennui (a sense of stagnation and boredom) push us toward a moral crisis or struggle in many ways as we must confront:
self-delusion: our infinite capacity to fool ourselves into believing in fantasies or in our ability to deny reality. (football comeback)
feeling worthless and irrelevant (like a cog in the machine; man comes home and sits in his car drinking while waiting to go inside the house; when he does, everyone in his family ignores him)
The Causes of Self-Delusion (taking us away from metacognition)
1. The unconscious: forces we cannot see that spring from unknown needs and desires and fears. Often these desires and fears project into delusions such as a compulsion to collect brief cases (organization from chaos) or search for the perfect bed (search for lost mother).
Sometimes we suffer from unconscious bias such as recently reported about science professors in their bias against female science majors.
2. Vanity is another cause of our self-delusions based on its very definition: excessive and exaggerated esteem and estimation of our powers, skills, talents, "good looks," etc.
3. Chimera, as we said in the first lesson, is a mirage that we chase because we are in love with the chase, but not the acquisition. We are too often in love with an idea about life but not life itself. Chimeras are always unconsious manifestations. The most common chimera is the "velvet trap"; it appears like paradise from the outside but offers hell within.
Another form of the Velvet Trap is the myth of Hakuna Matata, the land of no worries.
Often a chimera is a symbol of our broken dreams. For example, in the short story "The Half Sister" the lonely Charmian is the Priestess of Broken Dreams, a chimera who draws Martin into her lonely world where his guitar playing will be subsidized by Charmian's rich father.
HomeTown Buffet is a place of Broken Dreams, the dream of getting full. It is a feeding hut where metacognition doesn't exist. All the blood is out of the brain and in the belly.
Patrick Malloy's or some other night club is the Dream of Connection and Eros. Let's put it this way: Do good things happen to people who are in bars drinking at 3 A.M.?
And yet the people at HomeTown Buffet and Patrick Malloy's are emtpy and depressed.
When we pursue the chimera, we commit a Faustian Bargain, a deal with the devil, that demands every fiber of our being but gives little.
4. Lust or concupiscence makes people use other people but the user wants to feel good about himself so he rationalizes his behavior.
5. Stewart from "The Natural Order" represents the chimera of Eternal Youth, Unlimited Possibilities, and Hedonistic Paradise.
Sample Thesis Statements
James Lasdun's stories show us that the tragedy of the Faustian Bargain is that once we are seduced by a false paradise, we submit our will to that sacrifice resulting in _____________, ____________, _______________, and _______________.
Ennui or the existential vacuum makes us vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain in four ways, not the least of which is ____________, _______________, _____________, and ________________.
The characters in Lasdun's short story collection are woefully lacking in free will evidenced by ________________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Richard from "The Incalculable Gesture" and Abel from "The Natural Order" are both victims of the demonic, which is the result of overreacting to a crisis, feeling a sense of existential irrelevance, demanding a scapegoat to hide their personal responsibility, and wallowing in self-pity.
“The Natural Order” Lexicon
One. Devil Spreads Seeds of Discontent. See page 24 in which Stewart says a wedding ring announces that a person is someone else's property. Stewert stirs the pang of envy and regret in Abel's heart.
On page 28 we see that Abel feels the need to justify his oppressive existence, that being a married man, a parent, was to choose a "freakish and bizarre approach to life."
He now wondered, on page 29, if his married life was that of a deliberate choice, a good thing, or "passive acquiescence," a bad thing.
Feeling inferior, he begans to dress up and groom, emulating Stewart and we wonder if all the grooming and fashion from the advertising world is to stimulate our Dionysian lusts and impulses.
Abel will wear a crimson disco shirt, which I would call meretricious, cheap and garish in its allure.
Two. Ubridled, Radical Individualism and Masculinity, an untamed beast who is possessed with a "ceaseless and exclusive preoccupation with sex" (25).
Three. Family life vs. satyr (Pan or Billy Goat) life represents the war between Apollonian and Dionysian Forces. See this other link about Apollonian and Dionysian Forces.
Stewart embodies the Dionysian spirit as we read on page 31: "under the man's crassness a fine, bright flame seemed to burn in him. One was almost physically aware of it: a steady incandescence of sexual interest in the world, the lively brightness of which was its own irrefutable argument."
In contrast, Abel feels disabled, like his life is "domestic contentment," not present with joy but absent of pain (31).
See the Satyr's Tool Kit on page 30: jars, tubes, bottles, vials, oils, lotions, etc. (my favorite passage)
At the story's end, when Abel crosses the line and commits adultery, he is full of "unfamiliar savage jubiliation," part of the Dionysian spirit.
In a marriage based on love, not dynasty, as we read in Tim Parks' essay "Adultery," marriage is afflicted with the "collision of sacred and profance, the scenes of domestic bliss undermined by evident allusions to more disturbing emotions: serpents and harpies warning rapturous newly-weds of obscure calamaties to come."
In other words, the marriage of dynasty, business, family, is an older, stronger form of marriage. Marriage of love is a newer type that is more vulnerable to the need for passion and ecstasy.
This hunger for ecstasy comes from the god Dionysus who "loosens and unties," creating chaos. "Dionysus is the river," we read in Parks' essay, "we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; the one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant." In other words, passion is a tsunami that destroys the nest we've spent years building.
Four. Lies of omission: On page 33, Stewart flirts with a woman and tells her he lives in Connecticut, a truth, but doesn't tell her he's a husband and a father.
Five. Moral Inversion: to justify wrong behavior by turning the tables, as it were. Look on page 36 where Abel says to not have an affair, to not betray his wife would be a sin because he would be wasting a golden opportunity. Life doesn't offer many incredible moments to have great sex with another human being; what a waste to squander such an opportunity, he tells himself. He's BSing himself now.
Six. Like Martin from "The Half Sister," we see that Abel suffers from squandered dreams, lowered expectations, recurring futility, self-pity, and self-loathing (failed playwright) and wants to medicate himself with something: a sexual affair perhaps. See page 37.
Seven. The One-Armed Man. He represents hyper-masculinity (war prisoner and sniper who had his trigger finger smashed and we see him chopping goat; there must be a rich metaphor in there somewhere) on one hand and crippled limitations on the other. Is he an image of Stewart the Satyr?
Eight. Slippery Slope and the Moral Abyss. On page 47 we read "it was impossible to get a sense of the scale of what he was confronting," which is a life of denial, lies, of living an outright, perpetual lie. This is the gorge or the abyss. This is nihilism, the death of meaning.
- Stewart, who is hostile to marriage, represents what chimera to Abel? The chimera of unlimited opportunities and possibilities (more tech, more misery); all windows are open (ironically when you try to get through all the windows you fail at passing all of them). In fact, Stewart is a man-child beholden to concupiscence, desires that get worse when we try to feed them.
- Most guys are familiar with a Stewart type. We both hate and admire the Stewarts of the world. Women despise them and justifiably so, for should we not hate that which can make us helpless and destroy us? Explain men’s ambivalence toward the Stewart. We want to be like him; at the same time, we know he’s evil and selfish, what we might call a sexual conquistador. We'd never want the Stewarts of the world to date our daughters, our sisters, and our mothers. See page 26. Abel is in shock and anger at Stewart's blunt arrogance and need to show off about his conquests, but he envies Stewart at the same time.
- On page 29, we see Abel go down the slippery slope of self-delusion. Explain. We begin by watching Abel emulate Stewart’s dress code, that of a lascivious satyr. Abel claims to reject Stewart’s philandering while wanting to salvage Stewart’s good qualities, but in reality Abel is becoming the very image of the man he despises. And that is the beginning of descending into the abyss. Evil knows no compromise. Once we start down that road . . . In fact, by page 31, we see that Abel admires the flame of robust vitality that roils beneath Stewart’s exterior. He is a man of vitality who embraces life; indeed, Stewart has an appetite for life and lives life fully. He has now been idealized, put on a pedestal. Putting undeserving creatures on a pedestal is very dangerous and self-destructive.
- On page 31, what doubt haunts Abel about his marriage? That domestic life was a way of hiding from life, from being a member of the walking dead, a fake life. Abel is a charlatan and an impostor, a sort of eunuch. Stewart in contrast is an adventurous Billy Goat. In Abel’s newfound perverted “wisdom,” having affairs is a sign of moral superiority evidencing a man overflowing with life. Living in a marriage is being a slave inside a prison, a castrated man pretending to be happy. He begins to believe in his own B.S. Very dangerous.
- Does Abel cheat on his wife in a state of frenzied intoxication or calm acceptance? Explain. See page 35 top. Worse, than cheating on his wife, he realizes he no longer loves her. Now this happens BEFORE he cheats on her. Abel lives in two parallel universes: The universe he really lives in and the universe he WANTS to live in. That is his chimera.
- On page 46, how does the scene evidence that Abel’s cheating temptations are more about vanity than lust?
- Explain the metaphor of wilderness and dizzying heights in the story? They are about the loss of a moral foundation and the vertigo and self-loss that results.
Option 2
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Some Major Comparison Points
Fashion choices rebel against conformity and age: men choose to dress like teenagers as a sign that they're in denial of their age.
Peter Pan Syndrome: fighting life's natural narrative, what Aristotle called a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Jung's Four Stages of Life Vs. Teenage Stagnation
Athlete
Warrior
Statesperson
Spirit
Teenage stagnation glorified by novels (Catcher in the Rye), music, movies (Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow), sports, cult of self-esteem.
We've become a culture of narcissism under the veil of "staying young."
Concupiscence, infantile desire: Stewart never grows out of the stage (a toddler's stage); Abel regresses to it.
There are toddler foods in America: Hot Pockets, pizza, HomeTown Buffet
Sample Thesis Statements
James Lasdun's stories show us that the tragedy of the Faustian Bargain is that once we are seduced by a false paradise, we submit our will to that sacrifice resulting in _____________, ____________, _______________, and _______________.
Ennui or the existential vacuum makes us vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain in four ways, not the least of which is ____________, _______________, _____________, and ________________.
The characters in Lasdun's short story collection are woefully lacking in free will evidenced by ________________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Richard from "The Incalculable Life Gesture" and Abel from "The Natural Order" are both victims of the demonic, which is the result of overreacting to a crisis, feeling a sense of existential irrelevance, demanding a scapegoat to hide their personal responsibility, and wallowing in self-pity.
In-Class Bluebook Exam:
In a 500-word essay, show how a character from one of the stories suffers a moral failing in the context of Arthur C. Brooks' essay "Love People, Not Pleasure."
An Analysis of “Love People, Not Pleasure” by Arthur C. Brooks (not only is this essay applicable to your analysis of Lasdun's stories, it's a good research source for your Man's Search for Meaning Final Essay.)
Brooks introduces his essay by explaining the mostly unhappy life of Abd-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, Spain, during the 10th Century. One of the richest and most powerful men in the world, feared by his enemies and respected by his allies, he said he was happy only for “fourteen days of his life.”
Brooks is compelled to ask the question: How could the richest, most powerful man in the world make such a discouraging proclamation? Brooks points out that the greater our capacity for happiness, the greater our understanding of its absence. Therefore, the happiest of us have the greatest capacity for unhappiness. Once we’ve tasted the nectar, we are more prone to unhappiness when we know we’re not getting the nectar.
We can conclude that happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive propositions but can feed the other.
Brooks further compares the quest for happiness to addiction:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Brooks is saying that we mask our misery with alcohol, pleasure, materialism, fame, or some other fool’s errand, but in masking our misery we are merely prolonging it and allowing it to fester until it overtakes us.
Brooks then presents a study that shows a link between another fool’s errand, the quest for fame, and how fame results in misery, even insanity:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
It’s clear that those who worship the God of Ambition are disconnected, stressed, and afflicted with physical ailments, yet they stubbornly pursue their false gods, not just in the pursuit of money but for attention and adulation.
It appears that people who go down the rabbit hole of the fame and money quest are blind to their endeavor. Worse, in our social media age there are more and more unsavory opportunities for finding ways to becoming pathologically addicted to fame and attention. As Brooks writes:
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
This “fake life” described by Brooks becomes, in essence, a drug and an addiction that allows us to prolong our misery. All those “likes” on Facebook spike our dopamine levels and over time we need more and more dopamine and more and more Facebook “likes” to feed it until we hit a wall.
We can infer therefore that the happiest Facebook “friends,” those who post compulsively throughout the day, may not be happy at all but addicts to the process of creating a parallel universe that offers more spice to their own dreary, futile, miserable existence.
In addition to fame, adulation, and attention, there is the craving for money. Brooks points out that the quest for money is more normal than the desire for fame, but that of course in its excessive form, greed, new pathologies are born:
Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.
For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
Dismissing fame and money as possible causes of happiness, Brooks then looks at the success rate of the pleasures of sensuality. As he writes:
So fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better. . . .
Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
Brooks is saying, in other words, that we are hard-wired to pursue fame, money, and carnal hedonism. It’s in our DNA to pursue these things as part of our reproductive success. Wanting reproductive success is a normal impulse.
But this drive more often than not overtakes us so that we become pathologically selfish and as a result we burn bridges with others, resulting in our loneliness and isolation. Therefore, we can infer we are hard-wired to be miserable.
Brooks points out that there is yet another ingredient that makes us miserable. He observes we are afflicted with the restless, nagging impulse to find fulfillment “from the beyond.” As Brook writes:
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.
Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.
Brooks is asking us to be honest with ourselves, to ask ourselves the question: Do we love things over people? And if we do, how far the rabbit hole of self-destruction have we gone? To give you an example, I had a neighbor, a successful back surgeon, whose wife left him and rather than rebuild his life he obsessed over the cost of the furniture his wife took with her when she left him for another doctor. His obsession over the furniture had rendered him a lifeless automaton.
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