Hasten Slowly

That life is fleeting is hardly an original thought.  I attended a repast for a departed friend earlier this week, so the thought was more on the surface than usual, but mortality is always something at the back of our minds. It is why people have bucket lists. It is why we feel guilty about wasting time. Just last week a somewhat younger fellow in my circle of friends was expressing his funk over where he is “at this stage” in life: alone and essentially property-less. One could rephrase that (and I did) as free without burdensome responsibilities though I understand why he didn’t find that reassuring. This is a sentiment we hear expressed by people at all levels of financial and professional success. One woman (whose property I showed back in my broker days) with a seemingly healthy family in an $800,000 house once said to me with a head shake while leaning on her Mercedes, “I can’t believe this is my life.” She meant that in a bad way, not in an “I’ve hit the jackpot” way. Despite material superficialities, she may well have had solid reasons.
 
In a world where there is always someone who outshines us in ability and achievement, most of us feel like underachievers and laggards much of the time. We can feel this way at any stage of life, but the “middle-age crisis” is the classic event and for good reason. Time really is slipping away from us at that point: our range of possible futures constricts. This often leads to rash decisions from the thought “If I don’t do this now [get married, get divorced, quit my job, become an artist, study philosophy, have an affair, start a business, backpack through India, or whatever], I never will.” Sometimes the decision works out through luck or good planning, but more likely it’s a mistake, and a major life mistake made at 45 or 50 is less recoverable than one made at 25. (This is why such blunders are less of a “crisis” at 25 even though the feelings may be just as intense.) I speak from personal experience: time by itself is the wrong reason to do anything. First think twice to determine if it is something you would still want to do if not rushed for time. Then think it over once more. If the answer is still yes it might be the right move. A second, third, or even a fourth thought would have benefited me in my 40s.
 
It took me far too long to stop worrying about life benchmarks. There is something to be said for making peace with underachievement. Don’t get me wrong: if winning those trophies (real or metaphorical) makes you happy then by all means go for them. But if they don’t, don’t. In the end, the needlessly unhappy life is the wasted one. An entertaining little book that makes just this point is The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Dr. Ray Bennett. In it he expresses a fundamentally Epicurean (in the classical sense) world view and advocates a leisurely approach to life: “By now you should be completely confident that underachievement is the key to happiness in your life and for everyone else around you, so stop worrying about not being perfect.” Accomplishment, he tells us, is in the eye of the beholder. He quotes Pablo Picasso of all people: “You must always work not just within, but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way, the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

None of this means we shouldn’t write that novel or record that song or whatever it is we always meant to do but didn’t. Bennett simply reminds us that the point of doing those things is to have fun: something we tend to forget when we drive ourselves to meet some external standard. Unless we really enjoy our work, perhaps being a workaholic is the wasted life… and life is fleeting.

 

Bessie Smith – Wasted Life Blues (1929)