#19: Getting schooled by the Stoics
Of building bridges instead of force-closing gaps
"Am I asking for too much when I say I just want to write?"
That's a question I asked on a very open-minded group recently, a question that spun out of hours of feeling hopeless and frustrated. I felt myself being pulled in a direction I didn't want to go in — one that was more capitalistic and way less romantic than I'd want.
For someone who loves writing, there's so much I dislike about the slog. But the nature of the industry I'm in makes it ever so difficult to solely write as a career. There are skeletons in every published writer's closet — skeletons of white papers, technical writing, website copy, all the unglamorous writing that, well, pays the bills. But we hardly ever see the skeletons — we see the glam, and that's enough to throw me back into despair.
For a lot of us, there's a Great Divide between career and creativity. Ironically, at times we don't see this Great Divide and so, we foolishly try to find the perfect job — that 10 on 10 that is simultaneously fulfilling and high-paying. By setting standards so high, we demand a lot from jobs that naturally fall short and feel like we, too, fell short. No job is perfect and, if one so happens to be guided by external motivations instead of an internal lodestar, then the distance to perceived perfection becomes that much more difficult to cover.
But the Stoics have an answer to that.
Imagine your job or career in their many multitudes — it's joyous, but it’s also frustrating, tedious, exhilarating, mundane. This is the rhythm of a career, the ebb and flow of what it takes to occupy that role. The bedrock of being a Stoic at work, I learnt, is to ride the waves in harmony rather than try to paddle away, change the rhythm or straight cut through them. Like a seasoned swimmer, you want to disturb the environment and the medium as little as possible, accept instead of resist, and strengthen yourself while you glide through.
There are two sides to change. One is when you purposefully chafe against your environment; the other is where you attune yourself to it. Your inner lodestar—the "why" of what you're doing, never the "what"—will reveal which side of the coin you'll want to see.
The "why" is almost never something physical, although it might be easy to assign one to it. For me, for example, the (wrongfully assigned) "why" was almost always money. I want to earn money to buy my own house. I want to earn money to protect my future self. But external motivation almost always turns out to be transactional. There's so much that isn't in one's control. Market rates could change. Exchange rates could fall. A sudden windfall might occur that makes my bank balance unlimited. So, what, I don't have a purpose anymore?
I'm still yet to discover the Why with the capital W — and I'm nowhere close to doing that. But I now have an inner lodestar each for the things I dedicate most waking hours to. The "why" of my current job is the stability that supports creative explorations on the side. The "why" of my creative explorations—like this newsletter—is that I want to respect the Great Divide between career and creativity.
It would be foolish for me to try and close the fracture by forcing the two plates together. But to build a bridge that allows me to walk back and forth between the two? That sounds like fun.
Illustration by Supriya Bhonsle
What I’ve been reading
Neil Gaiman on Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
Elisa Gabbert saying seeing and being are not the same
Mekita Rivas on The Devil Wears Prada and the myth of the One and Only "Big Break"