As a psychology major, I'm sure there's an answer to that question. But I'll figure that out at some later date, probably once I've cognitively restructured myself into favoring movie watching/writing over throwing myself into distractions. The hindsight will tell me what my current immersion in aimlessness can't. This does remind me of a discussion I ambled through with a friend recently, about mindful and mindless hedonism. It seems very mindlessly hedonistic to just "do whatever" as opposed to scheduling and working through a pleasurable experience. Perhaps I still buy the liberal individualist myth that anything I want to do is valid, and what I want to do is do nothing? Deep down, I suspect so. So maybe all I need is to create a system where I limit my small daily indulgences to filling space between the larger time blocks of doing what I want to do. And then maybe eventually I won't even need to backslide into mindless hedonism at all because mindful hedonism is so much more gratifying. I suspect that's how "Type A personalities" feel, and I think a variation on that could work for me too.
I put "Type A personalities" in quotes because I'm not so sure there's an innate drive to succeed, or at least not to the extent that it's a salient trait in the complex ecosystem of a person's brain. What seems more likely to me is that people who could be described as "Type A" truly feel there is value in the rewards of hard work, and so they feel that it is the most satisfying way to utilize their time. To them, distractions would feel like exactly what they are: distractions. And why not? The successful, the driven, the hard workers are hyper-visible in American culture. Steve Jobs is a national hero. Barack Obama was the child of a single mother. YouTube celebrities regularly build a nationwide following on nothing but creativity and relentless personal branding. Success is everywhere. It's becoming more and more democratic. All you need to do is be "you," as long as the "you" you are is okay with throwing most aspects of your personal life under the bus chasing that success. And there's a lot to be said about how people whose lives revolve around success and dedication to goals have a uniquely vehement hatred of the less certain and less successful, but I don't particularly want to look into that right now. I'm more interested in why, if success is so readily available, most people aren't all that successful.
The first answer is simple: luck. For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand Silicon Valley aspirants with game-changing ideas who never attend the right meeting or meet the right sponsors. For every Barack Obama, there are hundreds of thousands of aspiring politicians building grassroots campaigns that, for one reason or another, will not win them the presidency. And for every Laci Green, every Kevin Wu, every Shane Dawson, there are millions of kids in their basements recording videos for audiences of close friends and parents (and the occasional classmate). Success is elusive, more elusive than we can even realize when we look back on how our icons acquired their cultural capital. We see the steps that led them to where they are, but we don't see all the moments when they almost became another nobody.
"Another nobody" is also a phrase that probably deserves scare quotes, because what really is so bad about being nobody? The phrase has a negative connotation, but it's a fate most people are destined for. I, too, was ambitious once. I have wanted to be all kinds of famous and famously successful at various points in my life: a famous chef, famous paleontologist, astronaut, author, journalist, filmmaker, beatmaker, etc. Every now and then I still want to be famous. But I know I can't be, at least not the way I am now. I don't have the inspiration, the work ethic, or the delusional self-confidence to push through repeated failure. Blogging here is just about right for me: low stakes enough to not feel like I depend on each blog post to sustain fickle and precarious fame (or living standards), but also challenging enough to force me to improve as a writer. And that's something I care about, even if I don't plan to marketize it. That's my individualized ambition. Tied into it are vague aspirations to craft visual media experiments or run musical sideprojects, but I'm not in a huge hurry to realize those. If one day I feel an urgent need to film/photograph something or to program a beat, maybe it will happen. Maybe some people will like it. That would be nice, and I would appreciate that. The endeavor is enough for me, though. This is a private space, made public only because I like to share with other people. I don't rely on success-based approval to keep me going, and I think that might be a big part of why I am not a globally ambitious person.
This too is worth exploring, because there are all kinds of reasons a person may not be ambitious. In my case, I always felt sheepish asking for attention and approval. I doubted my own creations, even when other people praised them. You can read all kinds of psychoanalytics into that if you'd like. But mostly I never felt success in and of itself was something valuable. I never saw it as a self-generating engine of happiness (maybe I absorbed too many rise-and-fall narratives of disillusioned artists?). The American understanding of success presupposes the moral correctness of those who attain it, and that's something I always found rather creepy. Not just because there are so many obvious examples of people undeserving of success, but more because I worried about how much of yourself you have to sacrifice in chasing success. Success is a very conditional thing in most cases, reliant on your ability to adapt to the standards of your chosen goal. Which is why I imagine Amanda Palmer and Lou Reed and others like them are so widely revered. They get the best of both worlds, success without self-annihilation. The idea of annihilating the self has become increasingly intolerable to Americans, which is why things like pop music and church-going have slowly fallen out of fashion. It's also why we praise the ordinariness of Jennifer Lawrence tripping on stairs or Obama cracking jokes with Zach Galifianakis. It's the facade we don't like, the mask we have to wear in order to appeal to everyone. Of course we want everyone to like us, but not if it involves being "fake." If everyone can learn to like us just the way we are, that then is a fame worth pursuing. You, too, can have it all.
Again, though, we run into the idea that success is antithetical to the commonplace. Better to be Shlomo than another anonymous beatmaker, better to be Anne Rice than another local YA paranormal romance writer. And again: why? This is what really bothers me, and what I find almost scary in a way. Is it not enough to be liked by our friends? To have our parents be proud of us? To do good work in a community? Do we need to be in total control of our own public persona at all times, and by extension our own destiny? Do we need to move ever upward, garnering ever more fans and followers? Is there any room for error or uncertainty if we have a position of influence to defend against irrelevance and scorn? I mainly want to be loved by my loved ones, with maybe a dab of respect here and there from fellow artists who like my art. That, to me, is success, and it's a success fairly out of step with a country that insists your success must be continuous and worldwide.
American success is individualistic, hierarchical, and capitalistic. Competitions and personal showcases of talent are the treadmills on which we train muscles that will one day power us to unqualified success. We encourage children to practice achievement through sports, student councils, religious advocacy, military enlistment, musical instruments, entrepreneurship. I have never liked any of those things, even as I unconsciously endorsed the value behind them in my younger years. So for years I felt that the culture was right and that I was wrong, that the success I deserved was out of reach due to my need (and preference) for love and acceptance, for quiet times and lazy times, and for time to figure myself out as a confused, fearful child. I feel now that I better understand my aversion to this dominant model of success, though not without considerable harm to myself along the way as I pursued the reactionary route of deliberate underachievement. It's something I'm going to have a hard time breaking out of, as I suspect it will be for many other slackers vaguely dissatisfied with the economic logic that extracts market value from our daily lives. Performance is everything in capitalism, and even those who cannot or do not want to perform feel that they should. As such, "doing whatever" seems radical in a culture that valorizes "doing something," and doing nothing feels appropriately dismissive of the constant exhortation to do anything and everything. Because if anything and everything can make you successful, then doing nothing is the only way to keep you safe from success you don't want or can't reach.
