Becoming Stupid: Finding Joy and Meaning in Life and Work
“All happiness this mortal life affords is joy experienced through creative efforts.” — Bo Yin Ra, The Book on Happiness.
“I perceive in the behavior of the great spiritual leaders a singular concordance, an exemplification of truth and wholeness which even a child can grasp.” — Henry Miller, The World of Sex.
“If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.” — The Gospel of Thomas (part of the Gnostic Apocrypha)
One way to look at life’s essential goal is to repay a debt of gratitude. Much of that repayment (although far from all) happens through our work. The need to work, I believe, is deeply connected with our need to create. We all have a native impulse to bring forth a gift, an offering, to the world that has given us so much.
We came into this world naked and penniless, without the slightest capacity to fend for ourselves. Even if we had the most negligent parents imaginable (or they abandoned us entirely), some adult or adults put forth enormous effort to care for us. Even if our mother drank and did heroin while we were in utero, beat us mercilessly, half-starved us, and disregarded us in every way relative to the standards of modern culture. Still, the support we, all of us, received in order to stay alive was incalculable.
And we all know the very fact of our birth occurred in the face of infinitesimal odds. No matter how you crunch the numbers (from 1 in 400 trillion to 1 in 10⁴⁵⁰⁰⁰), it rounds to zero. It’s a cliche, but it bears repeating: our lives are astoundingly, incomprehensibly miraculous.
There was a time in late adolescence when this fact annoyed me tremendously. Why me? I asked, many times over, in one of several lengthy depressed states. Life felt much more like a burden than a gift. I remember the story of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the garden, forced to work the land just to stay alive. Why even bother then? Was death not, in fact, preferable to a life filled with a pain far worse than feeling nothing at all?
Thankfully, the question of whether it is better to die than to live no longer plagues me, although I know for a fact it haunts far more people than we as a culture care to admit. 700,000 people kill themselves every year globally, and nearly 4 million Americans made a plan for suicide in 2022.
Suicides are, of course, the extreme outpost of psycho-spiritual malcontent. But they serve as a prominent smoke signal rising above the fire of discontent raging beneath the surface. The “great mass of men living lives of quiet desperation,” in Thoreau’s words.
Just as run-of-the-mill annoyance at traffic is on the same “anger” spectrum as murderous rage, so day-to-day discontent at the state of our lives comes from the same myopic and unhelpful viewpoint that a suicidal person wholly capitulates to.
I have found that this discontent stems from a secret knowledge of our heart, often hidden from our minds, that we are not doing all we can to repay what we have been given. To bring forth the gift we know is within us and offer it to a world whose very basis is the creative act.
Depression is often characterized as a “disease of disconnection.” I agree. But I see the root of the problem as an inability to be with ourselves, and therefore with those around us. As Henry Miller says, “Real life begins when we are alone, face to face with our unknown self.”
Many of us go through life feeling that the ultimate end of our existence is to forever secure our material needs, insulating ourselves and our families from want. As if a lifetime guarantee of shelter and food was enough to engender the profound joy and happiness that is our birthright.
Reflecting on my own life, the greatest miseries came in my early 20s, when I had taken my first firm step on a path that promised to make me very rich.
There were many deep questions that arose in my life when the shock of disillusionment hit me. Or, more accurately, slowly ate away at me like a degenerative disease.
Partly, it was a recognition that money does not augment a person in any way to allow them to feel more love, joy, connection, or aliveness; in fact, it is far more effective as an insulator, as psycho-emotional bubble wrap.
I realized then that I could not rely on wealth as a proxy for well-being and that I was, in fact, faced with a much more difficult path, one that was not antagonistic to money but agnostic to it.
Examining my life, I found (and continue to find) myself in the situation of being totally spoiled. I, and millions like me, have been given so much and take it for granted. I spend my days working on a laptop and get paid enough to live in a comfortable home that I did not lift a finger to build. I flip a switch on my thermostat, and warm air pours out. I get in a car, which once again I did not move one muscle to construct, and it takes me to a vast, well-lit building overflowing with food which I can take at will by tapping a piece of plastic. I have a phone which, at the slightest impulse, I can use to order cuisine from any culture in the world.
This is not to say that I don’t “work hard,” but in the grand scheme of things, what I am able to get for my “work” vastly exceeds any precedent in human history. And a part of me, like any spoiled person, becomes disgusted and baleful towards my benefactor and, ultimately, towards myself. I grumble in my head or even out loud (on a bad day) at the smallest inconveniences. The rate of complaining seems to rise almost in direct proportion to the amount I am given.
This relationship of spoiled disgust is broken the moment I come alive in a true act of concentrated appreciation and creativity. The second I begin to access and externalize the gift within me and around me. Joy is my reward and is all of our rewards for the creative act: for work well done.
I don’t want to limit the definition of creativity. It is boundlessly broad, but it must be a genuine act and not an attempt to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, especially ourselves.
The secret is that it actually doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it wholeheartedly. If we look close enough at anything, in other words, if we concentrate, we pierce the veil of scattered thoughts that separate us from the world and are so overcome with awe and inspiration that we can’t help but create. This is what it is to see past logic, to work from the heart, and it is from that place we find the meaning of life. This is what I mean when I say “becoming stupid.”
Think of all the people you know who jump out of bed every morning, eyes blazing, plunging directly into their life and work without fear or hesitation. In my life, I know of only very few. None are writers or artists (although I hear they exist). One is a tech entrepreneur, solving hard, multi-varied problems and working with people they respect. Another is a spiritual seeker, a Zen practitioner, who spends their days meditating and working as a groundskeeper. A third works at a homeless shelter, managing volunteers and constantly finding better ways to heal the lives of the most wounded.
Why is it so rare?
Partly it is because our jobs, as our lives, are meticulously constructed to separate us from actual responsibility and self-authorship. We live in a micro-tasked, highly abstracted economy that uses complex coordination systems to manage human labor as one useful input into a vast apparatus of scaled efficiency. Many of us are disconnected, physically and emotionally, from the direct, closed-looped outputs of our efforts. We live in a society that is constantly trying to outsmart the universe. To get something for nothing, and on one level, the material plane, we have managed to succeed, at least in the short term.
Of course, we have drawn from an environmental and economic credit line (see the national debt recently?) that is increasingly coming due, but the prevailing attitude is that we can continue to expand the credit line with ever-greater innovation.
But nothing in life is free, especially happiness. It is earned. We cannot try to get something for nothing, to try to outsmart the universe. It’s actually incredibly obvious, so simple it’s stupid.
