If you insist on playing air drums using a leaky pen, just know that after your rousing 4-tom finish you’ll be opening your eyes to Splatterhouse done in a blue period. Frailty, thy name is water-insoluble!
Before polymathy pt I : Callings are for priests and white rappers, right?
This is the first part of a (probably) 2-post essay on life, whether it happens to you
while you’re busy making other plans and if so whether your plans should have outlined contingencies dealing with that eventuality, perhaps using some kind of worm-hole embedded in the cover-sheet.
I went to a very driven school, and at an early age it drilled into us that distinction could and should be ours. Pragmatic and results orientated, their advice was more “reach for the cash” than “reach for the stars”, with the expectations that we should firstly excel in our exam results, then translate that into real capital, status and regard. This unswerving emphasis was tempered by my family; my mum firmly believed that money did not buy you happiness, and that success in whatever domain made us happy was the right kind of success. Once you found your special purpose you were set.
Despite this rosier formulation (and I thank god I had the mother I did) I spent a large part of my school life, and beyond, filled with misgivings about my future. The thing was, I couldn’t find a special purpose. I didn’t have one thing I was good at, or one thing I loved. There was no use in waiting for one to reveal itself either: my problem was not a dearth of options but an excess leaving me with a paradox of choice.
I want to be clear here. I am not saying I was great at everything. Clearly untrue – at school I sucked at languages (embarrassing when you are mixed race from an obstensibly bilingual background), found visual art totally beyond me and was generally clumsy. I’m also not suggesting that the things I was good at I was great at. My ‘problem’ was being pretty good at a number of things, enjoying them all in various ways, without a particular calling to invest myself in one at the expense of the others. This was a pragmatic and a principled aversion. On the one hand, I couldn’t face doing maths for three continual years and then throw the rest of my life into it. On the other, I didn’t see why anyone should have to do so. Why is it such a good thing to specialize, I wondered- why throw away the nuanced perpective afforded by a wider background?
I call it a problem, and problem it is, in many senses. We all know that from school onwards we need to be showing visible and directional progress if we have a hope of doing anything in our lives. I remember being warned before starting my PhD that if I was not to continue in academia, possessing it would actually be a hindrance as it suggests a lack of direction. Doing something productive isn’t good enough – it needs to be the exact right thing. I think you can see a sense of this in the 1/4 life crisis that’s being documented over the last 3-4 years; while some of this is down to free-riding and a lot more to the unattractive shape of the job market (telemarketing or charity street team representing ‘opportunity’ in the 21st C), I’m certain that people who like me are without a calling find themselves firmly on the pointy bits of a dilemma of choice. And stay there.
In a race all about definitions…
…should Kerry be stepping out of the JFK loafers and into FDR’s hush puppies? A thoughtful piece with good follow-up by Ezra at Pandagon linked at the bottom.
The price of happiness
I was having a conversation about politics while in Sweden over the weekend when the topic of citizens salaries came up. I was asked whether this was taken seriously as an issue over in the UK. Not at all, I answered. No, its not considered plausible over here at the moment either, she expanded. I explained that I meant it is not considered plausible, it is not considered, has not entered the zeitgeist in any real way. Citizens salaries are as foreign as sil and saltlakrits.
This is one strand I want to explore over the next couple of months – I certainly don’t have the credentials to claim any authority in matters of macro-economy, but I have some enthusiasm for the topic and I’d like to push the boat out a little bit in terms of what is generally brought to this debate (right wing: large welfare state is intrinsically bad, with reduced independence and freedom; left wing: tendency to drift towards utopianism and rejection of local optima – ‘good enough’ solutions).
Today I just want to link to a beautiful post from a site I’ve never read before, but it hits on one of the key issues more eloquently than I ever could. It touches on themes long noted in the human decision-making literature, about the discrepancy in economic measures of utility and choices about how much things are worth to real people. The clearest example is that the value functions that you can plot to describe the reward got for a reward in resources are not straight but curved – the subjective worth of a resource tails off as the amount becomes greater. More than this, it deals with the battle between two American Dreams, both of which can plausibly be described as Global Dreams on this 21st C ball of mud. Better still, it’s not much longer than this plaudit here. Go check it out.
Where are you when I need you, pithy justification for existence?
I’ve bounced through various sites on the blo-gotohell-sphere for a while now; blogs have replaced Usenet and message-boarding as my preferred mode of venting and inescapable time drain. I’m going to push content of my preferred kind, try and bash this into something of my liking, cut it down to a size that fits me. So far, no comments facilities, and the same tired design, but as I see it style should follow content, while comments utterly depend on it. Hopefully the embryonic beginnings of some essays should pop up in the next week or two, supplemented by links to the hot-shots who could do this in their sleep, and occasional links to those who appear to actually be doing so.
So it begins.