So, What Do You Do?
In response to a previous letter, somebody emailed me this Wendell Berry poem:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
The first line sounds like what I was going through before COVID came online, I did not have a clue what I was supposed to be doing anymore.
All my thumos was not being put to good use, which was painful, because I have so much fucking thumos. The daemon was telling me to do cool things, but in a scattered way. Like run a secret underground debate club, host a Stoic conference, write articles about the culture war from a meta-perspective, or host a podcast exploring ideas with people smarter than me.
None of them were going to support a livelihood though, and none of them felt like they were my ikigai. Your ikigai means “a reason for being.” I sense whatever this project is, it is my ikigai, or if it is not, my ikigai will be revealed if I keep tugging on this daemonic thread.
I have not been socializing with normies lately, these are the sort of folk who start conversations with: So, what do you do?
There is this comic I saw in CrimethInc book Days of War, Nights of Love, and it is based on that awful question:
Margaret: It's good to see you again, Beatrice. What do you do?
Beatrice: I write stories.
Margaret: A writer!? That's great! Where do you work?
Beatrice: I work at a restaurant.
Margaret: But... you said you write stories.
Beatrice: I do. I also sew clothes, make necklaces for friends, and grow flowers in my garden, and I play with my beautiful puppy Bartholomew.
Margaret: Oh, I see! Those are your hobbies…
Beatrice: No. That's what I do.
*Silence*
Beatrice: What do you do Margaret?
I recommend looking at the comic, so you can see the absolute existential terror on Margaret’s face after Beatrice’s question sinks in.
There is a term I like called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which was introduced by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. This describes what they see as the unexamined belief schema of young people they researched, which is like a mix of Cafeteria Christianity and New Thought stuff like “The Secret.”
Some beliefs: God wants people to be good, the goal to life is happiness, God is only needed when you want something. All this is unexamined, path-of-least-resistance thinking stuff. It may give you a quick philosophical high, but it is ultimately blind to the brutal hardships of reality, and will eventually make things worse, both individually and collectively.
Relatedly, I think we can coin another unexamined belief schema: moralistic therapeutic neoliberalism. These are the beliefs that help you feel good about unexaminedly attempting to live the neoliberal dream. This may consist of the following beliefs: you should find your self-worth at “work,” all your self-help activities should be in service towards work, you need to bifurcate work and life with “work-life balance” initiatives.
When people like Margaret jump in with the “what do you do” question, they do so with an assumption—what you do can be boiled down to what makes you money. People who identify with their jobs and careers love asking this question, because it gives them an opportunity to talk about what they identify with. This is a terrible thing to reduce a person to though.
There is also a sense of judgement, positive or negative, that surrounds this question, both for the person asking and the person answering. In fairness, I sense some people ask that question because they get nervous when meeting new people, and that is the default question to ask in our society.
I do think there is existential violence that occurs with this question, and questions like it. If you capitulate to the frame, and answer the question in the expected way, you are tacitly submitting to a certain view of the world.
It is easy to submit to the frame, people normally do not like awkward social situations, and not everybody has a zero fucks given approach like our girl Beatrice does. I have been reflecting on this lately, how we are trapped in these “intersubjective prisons,” with unexamined pacifying beliefs, that prevent us from listening to the daemon, and from finding our ikigai.
I want to resist the temptation to come up with some snappy solution here: free yourself fam, from this normie intersubjective prison, and just follow the daemon. Yasss!
No. That is not what this is about. There are structural forces at play as well, and doing some constructivist judo moves is not a panacea. These journals are my adventure in bespoke sensemaking, not yours. We all need to figure this out for ourselves.
We do not have to bespoke sensemake alone though. That is what The Stoa is for, and I hope seeing my wild reasoning will encourage you to be wild with yours. Maybe this will help us escape together.
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