Becoming

This film touched me. Watch it. It's very short. It's about an artist, in his 90s, who still paints and exercises daily. He says he gets as fifth as much done in five times the time, but while he wants to do things, it's all worth it.

This is the point. We have to have things that we want to do for life to be meaningful.

I guess we could want to drink wine and watch Netflix, and that could well be sufficient.

Philosophers have grappled with this for centuries. Epicurus did aver that pleasure is the point of it all - but for him pleasure was a husk of bread when you're hungry and a glass of cool water when you're thirsty, the conversation of like-minded friends and the pursuit of Truth and Beauty through philosophy. He was probably the first to bring up the concept of hedonic adaptation: once you get used to a certain pleasure, it ceases to give you pleasure and becomes the norm. You have to chase after the next bright sparkly thing on offer to get the same rush of happiness. So, it was thus important to eat when hungry, and only until satisfied, thereby retaining the value of food.

Aristotle took a harder lined approach. Happiness was not about pleasure, or money or fame, it came as the knowledge of a life-well lived. That, taken to the extreme - which he did - meant you couldn't tell if someone had lived a good life until after their death. So, imagine if all your life you'd worked to wipe out FGM and along the way, various communities had outlawed it, you'd won the Nobel Peace Prize and women around the world sent you letters of thanks. But after your death, some devastating change took place and all of a sudden the tradition reappeared and spread. According to Aristotle, as I understand it, your life's work was wasted. Ouch. Seems a bit harsh. Nonetheless, you would experience, in the course of your life, the positive experience of eudaemonia, a joy from acting well, because you manifested the virtues of a rational social animal. So that's something.

Bentham's utilitarianism focuses on maximising pleasure - so an action is moral when it gives rise to the maximum pleasure. Mill, who'd been brought up by his father and Bentham in a utilitarian educational system devised specifically for him, developed the idea. Well he might: the kid started learning Greek at three and when he'd read through all the classic texts proceeded to Latin at seven. Or something like that. So, he questioned the concept of pleasure. But perhaps in a counter-intuitive way. Mill distinguished between the lower pleasures (food, sex and the like) and the higher ones (learning Greek). Seems he was eager that everyone should share the joy. Indeed, he took on the baton with dedication and wrote an influential utilitarian text by the time he was 21. Then he had a nervous breakdown, which might seem unsurprising. But his great fear was, in a way, Aristotelian. He imagined what would happen in Bentham's ideal society was established on earth. No, Mill wasn't worried about toddlers quoting Plato. His concern was, 'But what could I do then? My life would be meaningless.' After that he made tweaks to Bentham's original thesis - and is one of the most influential political philosophers of all time. He kept on forging new ideas, grateful not to live in a perfect world.

Yes, what would be the point if there were nothing to create, nothing to improve, nothing to fight for? Wine and Netflix? Seriously, though, this is the question: could a person live happily with nothing to do? Odysseus thought not. An immortal paradise with Calypso just doesn't bear comparison with returning home to his aging wife. The life of the Lotus-Eaters - kind of ancient Greek opium fiends - is appalling to him.

It does make you wonder how the idea of heaven or nirvana got to be so alluring.

Well, maybe not. Throughout most of the course of human history, certainly since the transition to agriculture, the vast majority of the species has been involved in back-breaking and mind-numbing labour. It got no better with the industrial revolution. And now, from the precariat in the gig economy to the cogs of the big corporations, work must feel like a 24/7 pursuit. If you're not chasing the next job, you're making sure you're the best in your team, the best prepared, on the email from dawn til next dawn. Maybe wine and Netflix really is the best solution in the few hours of inactivity.

I'm sure there are people, I know there are people, for whom their work is their passion. It is intrinsically meaningful. I have heard this from friends in the police and in medicine, from colleagues in my industry, from my brother and sister-in-law. You'd expect that some - say, therapists and academics - might be more likely to find more meaning, but it depends on the institution they work for as well as on their own sense of efficacy. I remember, when in hospital, the woman who cleaned the ward telling me how much she loved her job: she didn't have the same pressures as the medical staff, but she was able to speak to the patients, have a chat and feel that she was helping make them feel better through that kindness and contact. It worked. I remember her more clearly than most of the medical staff - who were, on the whole, exceptionally good.

So work need not be an evil, but I think that for most it is not an intrinsic good. It is the means to an end. Giving us the money for a settee on which to drink wine and watch Netflix.

Is this a meaningful life? I suppose it could be pleasurable enough. And if that's what rocks your boat and you can do it, then, great. No need to read on.

But I wonder how many people feel a residual sense of dissatisfaction? We are creatures with big brains who found our particular evolutionary niche through our cognitive, not physical abilities. We were primed to explore, to find solutions, to change the world for our benefit. Yeah, I know, we've fucked that up, but every tool can be used for good and for ill. The point is that we have this tool. This brain... and it's like, well, you stop a cheetah from running or a Thompson's gazelle from stotting or a beaver from making dams or a bee from doing its dance and you have destroyed the very thing that is its thing.

The desire to reach new horizons, to resolve problems, to match our curiosity with our competence, that is what we are.

Now that, in theory, governments and institutions are meant to do the bulk of the problem-solving at a national and societal level, with managers taking the brunt of the action in production and distribution - as well as in medicine, exploration, policy-making, and so on and so forth for all the things that matter on a life and death, standard of living and general welfare front, we, most of us, have no real purpose... except to contribute our labour and consume. They don't really need - or perhaps want - our brains to be too active.

Consider: we can take some minutes to choose which breakfast cereal; some hours to choose which film or series; some days to choose which washing machine; some weeks to choose which car. It's exhausting! But when precisely did we choose to line in a world where factory farms destroy the atmosphere and the water supply? Where expenditure on arms is far greater than on education? In addition, it is part of our biological nature to conserve energy. We have to overcome, all of us, a tendency toward passivity or laziness because our natural inborn inclination is to act only when necessary for survival. And few activities in Western societies are necessary for survival. I can reach from my chair in the kitchen to get a ready-meal out of the fridge and pop it into the oven. I hardly need legs. All in all, it's not hard to keep us infantilised. We do it ourselves.

This explains why the likes of Carl Cederström and Laurie Penny, who both have a strong political drive, see the well-being industry as so pernicious. To them, this directs all dissatisfaction toward the self. We are persuaded that the first task is to perfect the self, thus inhibiting the propensity for people to strive to make society better.

That is a valid point. But many people do contribute in their spare time. Various of my friends volunteer, for example. It might not lead to the collapse of capitalism, but it certainly serves an ethical purpose.

Others, like my father and the guy doing up the next-door house whom I met over the fence, do feel driven to explore outside their psyche and physical being. They follow their passions - reading about polar exploration in my Dad's case, researching the history of pike fishing in Jez's. My Dad, were he to advertise it, is probably one of the world's authorities by now - he certainly has more books on the subject than the Polar Research Society, or whatever it's called. Though, when I mentioned this to him, said he'd be the world authority only if he could actually remember all he's read. Some false modesty there as he remembers far, far more than I care to hear and I'm actually both impressed (greatly) and interested (moderately). Jez is a national authority, and people get him to check the validity of paintings and records.

Look, neither will change the world, I know, and maybe they'd be just as useful (useless?) doing sun salutations and eating quinoa on kale with cashew-parmesan sprinkles, but at least they've defined their quest themselves, give them that. And both pursue these self-defined quests in addition to full-time work.

So... what? I don't know.

I know that I have that sense of dissatisfaction and unease, one that isn't resolved by wine and Netflix, though both (especially taken together) give me a great deal of pleasure. I guess, for me, pleasure just isn't enough. I want to explore. I don't want to volunteer, though I am disappointed in my lack of volition there. My friend Dan said, 'Darling, you and I, we're just not naturally nurturing.' This is true. He is Epicurean: good conversation with like-minded friends, especially while watching cricket, fulfils him. Not so much the bread and water though; rather a gin and tonic or four - but the Greeks weren't infinitely wise.

Me? That's what this is all about, I guess, this blog. Digging into the ideas, seeing what sticks. I'd like to be useful, in terms of thinking and problem-solving, really I would. Yet even if I cannot play any role in toppling a tyrant, I do not feel that I have a focus on my self. It's not about me. It's about them, the ideas. Ideas, to me, are social constructions. Considering ideas is being in conversation. It is not solitary, not solipsistic. It is about addressing the questions posed, the solutions suggested by those then and now, near and far.

My brain's drive is to chase this curiosity about what people think and why - and to ask, how does that serve? What can those ideas do?