You Are Not Yet Who You Imagined
On becoming
When a bitter dream, cracks through your grinning mask:
Look beyond the shattered pieces
And clear the wreckage
Personal ruin happens slowly, then all at once. Some failures occur in seconds, but most happen after years of subpar decisions. The felt immediacy of the experience is just the recognition that one’s life is cemented mediocrity.
TLP would say you went wrong by thinking too much about the future. You had the feeling that you could have been someone – well why weren’t you? Because you were busy withdrawing value from an imaginary future when you could have been becoming.
What did Narcissus do when he saw something beautiful in that pool? He fantasized and dreamed all the different possibilities of that person, all the things that person could be to him. He didn't stay there for years because the reflection had pretty hair. He stayed because daydreaming takes a lot of time.
The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus
This isn’t a TLP piece, but there’s always something to his thinking. When one feels like one is choosing between worse paths and becomes worried about what this choice says about you – stop. Narcissus must leave the pool, you must cease worrying about whether you are a failure, if you want to live. Who cares? What bearing does that have on the decisions that face you now?
But we’re worried because Narcissus never quits staring at his own reflection. The determinist Schopenhauer captures this worry best. Where some say you went wrong in the past – if you hadn’t done that you could have been someone – Schopenhauer says no, this life was inevitable. Given where you are now, you just aren’t that person. That person is someone and somewhere else right now.
As a botanist can recognize the whole plant from one leaf, as Cuvier can construct the whole animal from one bone, so an accurate knowledge of a man's character can be arrived at from a single characteristic action; and that is true even when this action involves some trifle – indeed this is often better for the purpose, for with important things people are on their guard, while with trifles they follow their own nature without much reflection.
Essays
This isn’t a Schopenhauer piece either. But there’s always something in his thinking too. It’s more realistic to see others and yourself as concrete people with immutable natures. Our job is to come to terms with who we are and live out our story as we must. Remember the Stoic maxim: Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling. Life is about discovering who we are and coming to terms with it.
Though the Schopenhauer point is ontologically correct, we must allow for uncertainty. We won’t fully know who we are until the story is over. And, perhaps even then, questions will remain. Chesterton was right when he said:
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Orthodoxy
The temptation then is to take that uncertainty and define yourself by the best (or in a depressed mood, worst) possibilities. That’s what TLP warns against. Stop living in futures that are not and face the present. The ancient Stoics (of course, who else) gave us the best motivation.
Here’s Marcus Aurelius:
You are an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer pulled by the strings like a puppet to selfish movements, no longer dissatisfied with your present lot or shrinking from the future.
Meditations, 2.2
And Seneca:
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Moral Letters 13
Why should we be at such desperate haste to succeed?
And in such desperate enterprises?
Look beyond the shattered pieces
And clear the wreckage