People don’t want to bow to fate. But if you can float in an ocean of anesthesia and still look like you’re trying — well, maybe that’s fine too. We can’t all just quit, can we? And surely a life lived wrong is still truer than a life you’ve given up on? I don’t know. I honestly wouldn’t dare say.
If everyone in this society saw the world clearly — really lived with their eyes open — the economy would stop working. Perfectly rational people don’t shop much, because most things, it turns out, don’t need replacing or upgrading nearly as often as we buy them. A few pieces of clothing are enough; nobody needs a new haul every few days. Consumption, quite simply, would fall off a cliff.
And if everyone were clear-headed enough to see that success comes down to luck rather than effort (effort being, in the end, just another form of luck), far fewer people would start companies. The world of venture capital and fundraising would go strangely quiet. If everyone had the wisdom to draw their sense of inner superiority from restraint — from reading, from exercise — then junk food, gaming, entertainment, gambling would all wither away. Society would lose its engine.
Then again, who says the Earth needs to develop? Who says society does? That’s a decision humans made for themselves. We can never leave nature alone. Never mind developing society — we’ve already drawn up development plans for the Moon and Mars. Yet suggest that a person could simply live out a quiet, honest life — thinking about nothing, content to eat well and drink well — and someone will jump up and accuse you of dragging humanity down to the level of pigs and dogs. That’s how complicated people are. I can’t untangle it either.
So the best outcome, I think, is this: 99% of people let human nature run exactly as it is, and the remaining 1% earn their wisdom through restraint. That’s simply how the world works — fools are the majority. But the foolish are only foolish. Strip it all back, and everyone is equal.
There’s no such thing as right or wrong in this world. Your nights of drinking and clubbing are no different from my evenings of books and the gym. Each of us is just one distinct smear of pigment on God’s palette. Splashed across the cloth, it makes what we call the world.
You’ll cross that bridge when you come to it — what bridge, my ass. Failure is the mother of more failure. In every book there’s a bullshit house of gold (an emperor said that, and you believed him).
Why do these self-soothing sayings spread so far and wide? Because people still don’t want to hear the truth. When you come to the bridge and there is no bridge, there is no bridge — what are you going to do, ram your way across? Failure just sets you up to fail again; it’s your attitude afterward, the honest post-mortem, that keeps you from failing the next time. And if books really held houses of gold, we’d all do nothing but read — besides, reading was never meant to be that mercenary in the first place.