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Underachieving

Ryan Norbauer at 43 Folders considers whether life is all about achievement, or whether we can be more human, and in a sense more effective, by living our lives as underachievers. He's influenced by a book called The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which espouses these principles:

• Life’s too short.
• Control is an illustion.
• Expectations lead to misery.
• Great expectations lead to great misery.
• Achievement creates expectations.
• The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
• Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

Albert Camus was but one of many philosophers and poets seriously to tackle the question of how we are to fill up the time that we have while we are here on earth, but I like many of his answers best. He saw the futilely struggling Sisyphus as a strangely sympathetic figure. Camus—who was in fact one of the more accomplished and ethically upright individuals with which the caprices of the genetic blender have gifted our species—embraced the absurd futility and overwhelming insignificance of our individual lives as a counterintuitive source of hope and empowerment. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Camus believes that it is not the activity of work that leads us to despair, but the hope for some sort of grand success that will never come. Insofar as we can resist the temptation to view our lives as goal-driven in this way, we have at least the prospect of happiness. As The Underachiever’s Manifesto has it: “striving is suffering.” It is only by accepting the illusory nature of achievement that we can hope to transcend it. Would it be mawkish of me to invoke Steve Jobs?: “our time is limited, so don’t waste time living someone else’s life.”

I find that by trying to achieve much, I spread myself too thin and begin to lose focus. In that sense, I suspect that one can do more by doing less, or do more effectively, at least. Living and working in a more limited and focused way is more sustainable, as well. I was already giving this a lot of thought.

This reminds me of Suzuki-Roshi's talk about life as one continuous mistake.

jon posted this at 8:08 AM
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