@January 27, 2018
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I’ve been thinking a lot about content and ambition. Content and malaise are Janus. Ambition and greed are that too.
I am considering an alternative way of thinking about why we do what we do. Elon Musk is not trying to go to Mars because he’s ambitious or greedy. Joe the plumber isn’t going home, cracking a beer, watching the game, sleeping with his girl, eating dinner because he's content or lazy. They are both doing what they must to be able to sit quietly alone in that room and go to bed.
I think we are all trying to do the same thing: quiet the noise in our head. The noise tells you who you must be or what you must do. It is a neutral beast, it doesn’t abuse or sooth. It’s merely, and grandly, the sum of your momentous histories and future fictions. It is the holder of narratives, often conflicting ones. The noise does not quiet till it’s fed. It doesn’t troll you. It is your good and bad. Your red and white shouldering angels. It is your inter-voice. Not your friend or enemy. Not in hate or love with you. The noise is always measuring you. Assessing you. Finding you. Ejecting you. Grounding you. Igniting you. Denying you. Affirming you. Permanently staring you in the mind, ever piercing your heart, binding and unwinding your soul. It is who you think you ultimately should, or shouldn't, be.
But we do what we do to sleep at night. Great works are not motivated by externalities but by our internal realities. And those are fundamentally efforts to quiet the noise in our heads and sleep, one night at a time. And so, external impact and effect aside, we are all internally the same: trying to go quietly into the night. I think this is why I find myself, more often than not, not judging people's life choices anymore; however strangely they compare to mine.
Of course, mavericks that achieve humanity-wide progress are to be celebrated and those delivering us into the counter equivalent are to be vilified. But I think that’s an external byproduct of their noise quieting efforts.I cannot wish you quiet heads because I hope to experience your novels, companies, and theories; your beauty, not your ugly. I hope I have beauty inducing noise too. I'm trying my best.