This will be the first installment in a series of articles seeking to draw out and criticize a common approach to our mental and emotional lives: an approach that portrays us as bystanders, as optimizers, and, at its worst, as puppeteers.
This idea is complex and, for me, fleeting. I hope to, in this piece, put it on the table. It is controversial, and far from obvious. I welcome disagreement!
Clarifying and drawing it out will be the work of later writing—or, hopefully, comment section discussion!
The phrase “I’m finding myself,” is not usually seen as particularly problematic. We imagine that people go on trips to do it, defer relationships, try out new ways of living — sort of like trying on different clothes for size — in hopes that by doing so, by exploring the world or new people or new things, they will in turn be exploring themselves.
While there are many ways to find ourselves, all such journeys tend to have a similar start: confusion about what to do. Suddenly, for instance, an area of life is not as interesting as it once was, or as we expected it to be. We explore new areas—of the world, of people, of things, and so on, thus, in hopes that we will stumble upon the thing we really like, the thing we mistakenly overlooked in the first place.
In this short piece, I don’t want to argue against exploration. Trying new things is absolutely important, and gives us an insight into an activity or place that we wouldn’t have been able to imagine before. The idea of New York City may seem perfect to me at first, but it is only after visiting a few times — hell, maybe even living there for a month or two — that I will know whether it is really a place worth living in.
In this short essay, I will take this move as my starting point. Not the exploration or investigation of the objects of one’s wants: trying to figure out whether NYC is all it’s talked up to be, or whether the pros of this job really outweigh the cons—that’s fine. Rather, I want to take issue with viewing that process as focused on learning what it is we really desire.
This focus will not stay confined to the phrase ‘I’m finding myself,’ as the way of speaking I will take issue with is actually quite common. We ask questions like, “Hmm, do I really want to live there?” All the time, we say, “Ah, I don’t know if I want to do this.” Once, someone, wanting to tell me that they’d chosen a different life path, said, “I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I’ve realized that X isn’t what I really want, in reality, it is Y. I’ll just have to make myself want Y from now on.”
I worry that this language, which casts us as always investigating ourselves — figuring out what we really think, what we really believe — paints quite a sad picture of what we are, and ultimately leaves us more like puppets than human beings.
To draw out the way of speaking I take issue with, consider two possible ways I might express my confusion about whether I should move to New York City.
I might, quite familiarly, say:
“It is only after visiting…maybe even living there for a month or two that I will know whether it is really a place worth living in,”
Yet, I might also say:
“It is only after visiting…maybe even living there for a month or two that I will know whether it is really a place I want to live in.”
This may seem like a small difference, but it is not. In the first sentence, my focus of exploring New York was to figure out whether it is really the place I imagined it to be. Does it really have the energy it does in Casey Neistat’s videos? Is the food really that good? Are the prices that high? Are the people really that much more interesting?
Yet, in the second, the focus of my investigation changes. I am no longer curious, when I ask whether it is really a place I want to live in, whether the city lives up to my expectations. Rather than asking a question about the city, I am asking a question about my desire. I am asking whether I really want to live there.
In focusing on whether I really have the desire in the first place, rather than whether the city is all it is cracked up to be, I avoid actually making a decision or an evaluation. I am able to defer the question of what job would be best or which city is better, and instead focus on something much more easily acquired: my state of mind.
Yet this is exactly the problem.
Once I have ascertained my state of mind, the question of what I should do — which city is best to move to, whether I should continue to have one calling or another, whether one job or another is better — remains.
However, because I began the investigation by looking at myself rather than at the world, by looking into my own wants and feelings, viewing them as independent objects of investigation, I am forced to view them as disconnected from the world. In other words, that the question of which emotion or want is best to have remains after figuring out which emotion I have, puts me in quite an odd position.
To see this, return to the example of New York City. Suppose I answer my first and second questions in opposite ways: after a great deal of thinking, I realize that while I want to move to NYC, it really isn’t that great a city.
Now I am set with a problem. I want something that I, at the same time, take to be not-worth-wanting. What am I to do?
It seems there is only one thing to do. The desire I have discovered is out of touch with what is best: I want to go to New York, but it would not be good for me to do so. Thus, I must now adjust my desire — I must bring it in line with what is worth wanting.
This could be done in a few different ways. For instance, maybe every time I catch myself dreaming of the city skyline, I shock myself. Good Ol’ Pavlovian conditioning! But, more plausibly, I might choose to surround myself with people who I know will talk me out of my hunger for New York. Or, take a job in my rural town because I know, once I get started working, the dream I have of that skyline will slowly fade.
No matter which I choose, responses of that sort are welcomed by the way I asked the initial question. By asking about what I want, by looking to ‘find myself’ I imagine my desires or life goals to be detached from, or at least, independent of, what is best for me.
And, in so doing, I force myself to become a puppeteer or self-manipulator. It is only rational, after all, to try my best in order to alter my want — my dream for the city — to pull it back into line with reality.
There are times when I have no choice but to engage with such strategies towards myself. After all, sometimes I really do desire things that are not worth desiring: thirst for the bottle or excitement for the slot machine. Yet, it is exactly because my desires exist independently from my evaluation of the good that such times are bad ones, ones to be escaped. They cannot be the normal.