the centre cannot hold

These days, people spend most of their days with blinders on, propelling themselves down the same beaten path, desperate to get somewhere, greedy for something, terrified of what might happen if they stopped and stood still. The “accomplished” and “pedigreed” have been climbing a ladder — any ladder — for so much of their lives that all they can see are the rungs above and below them. Show me a ladder and I’ll show you a man who’ll climb it, just to prove that he can. Maybe he’ll even make it into a competition of who can climb it the fastest, the strongest, the richest.

We’ve lost the chart of our course. We have no particular destination, no dream to dream, not even a hazy happily ever after — our fantasies are filled with the things we already have. Our gospel, the only gospel, is that it has to be up — even if up leads nowhere.

I wonder about enough.
Who’d ever heard of such a thing?
The devil finds you before you find it.
That is what it means to be alive.

Peter Thiel once said:

In a definite world, money is a means to an end. Because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world, you have no idea what to do with money, and so money simply becomes an end in itself. Which seems always a little bit perverse, you just accumulate money, and you have no idea what to do with it, that seems like sort of a crazy thing to do.

While admittedly a melodramatic parallel, I’m reminded of W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, a poem about post-war, post-pandemic Europe in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Isn’t that where we are? Led by those “full of passionate intensity,” our society has seemingly agreed upon the purpose of life: accumulate money, status, wealth. Those who might think otherwise “lack all conviction,” and are, therefore, complicit. We play by someone else’s rules, because we don’t have our own. We may not be racing up the rungs, but we’re a part of the game. We’re standing by, watching, maybe cheering, maybe booing. Occasionally, we’ll waver, kick our foot in the dirt, look around for something else to do. But it’s our bashful participation — whether it’s holding the ladder upright or vaguely toiling in monotonous mediocrity on a lower rung — that sustains the establishment and upkeep of ladder after ladder.

But the centre cannot hold.

There’s an advent of throwing-over the ladder completely — in favor of a farm stand in Vermont; disappearing into the desert of Joshua Tree; a flower shop in Portland, Maine; working at a local bookstore.

There are a lot of things to hate about San Francisco/New York and the cultures that they feed and let fester. The most common critique I’ve heard from the dissidents is of the noise — not the noise of the city itself, but of the people, constantly abuzz with the latest tech-something, constantly posturing their intelligence, their success, constantly bidding to be seen, recognized, celebrated for the phenomenon that they believe they are (Forbes 30 Under 30 or bust).

A friend who defected from San Francisco to Maine laughingly (scornfully?) told me how refreshing it’s been to go to a dive bar and not hear anyone philosophizing about startup unicorns/VCs/IPOs/SPACs/NFTs, or some other “cliche because it’s true” act in the Silicon Valley burlesque. Instead, she explained, “I can just drink a beer and talk about the weather if I want to.”

Imagine that. We’ve created a world for ourselves where luxury now lies in the simplest gestures of what it means to be human — drinking a beverage, looking at the sky, going for a wander among the Joshua trees, and, if the mood strikes, organizing a bookshelf or arranging flowers — the basics of life, of living, before we became consumed by climbing ladder after ladder, the bigger the better!

The repudiation of striving for esteem finds us back at the bottom of the pyramid, learning to build our own homesteads, our own coffee tables; savoring tomatoes from the garden; watching hummingbirds feed; finding fulfillment in rest — in standing still.