If you’ve been following along with my attempts to write through what I’m working out, you know that I spent my last three weekly letters making the case for creative endurance and offering a reminder of the benefits of abiding in a world that seems to favor the novelty of the new and next (On Creative Endurance, On That Which Abides, and On Being Your Own Beacon).
This week, I want to focus on how the same destructive force referred to in previous posts by its other well-known names, Resistance and Screwtape, uses one of its oldest tactics to get us to voluntarily abandon a life of fulfillment once it arrives. It’s a tactic responsible for the death of more joy than perhaps any other. And that tactic is this: getting us to believe that we need more to have enough. That true happiness and fulfillment is always one more away.
The life we’ve always wanted never in the now; always in the next.
In Jim Carrey’s speech to the 2014 graduating class of Maharishi University of Management (full transcript here and video here), Carrey reflects on this aspect of the human condition, delivering this dagger at the 21:06 mark:
You’re going to look at a person like me and say, “How could we ever hope to reach those kinds of heights, Jim?” … This is the voice of the ego. And if you listen to it, there will always be someone who’s doing better than you. No matter what you gain, ego will not let you rest. He will tell you that you cannot stop until you’ve left an indelible mark on the earth, until you’ve achieved immortality. How tricky is this ego that it would tempt us with a promise of something we already possess?
What Carrey is referencing here is something we all find true in our experience. We arrive to what we thought we wanted only to find we want more. Our ego always finds a way to move the target. We could come into the entire world only to insist on having the universe.
To be fair to our ego, this unfortunate feature that wires us to always want more might partially be blamed on the fact that, in its infancy, our ego was trained in a world of scarcity, where more meant survival and this function was useful. But as a species, we progressed past widespread scarcity (especially in the West) long ago, yet find ourselves stuck with the same paleolithic emotion that drives us to always seek and desire more. It’s a default state that puts the unaware on a hedonic hamster wheel which promises happiness but never delivers.
This sad state of affairs is not new. It’s something we’ve been struggling with as a species for millennia. 2000 years ago, the Roman Stoic, Seneca, advised his friend of this tendency in humans in his Moral Letters to Lucilius. In Letter 4, Seneca observes the tragedy of humans making a fool’s bargain—exchanging their most valuable asset (time) for “superfluous” (or unimportant) things:
Do you know what limits that law of nature ordains for us? Merely to avert hunger, thirst, and cold. In order to banish hunger and thirst, it is not necessary for you to pay court at the doors of the purse-proud, or to submit to the stern frown, or to the kindness that humiliates; nor is it necessary for you to scour the seas, or go campaigning; nature’s needs are easily provided and ready to hand. It is the superfluous things for which men sweat—the superfluous things that wear our togas threadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores. That which is enough is ready to our hands.
Enough. The enemy of More. What the ego tries to convince we don’t have, sending us off to the edge of the world in search of it. Only for us to arrive and realize that it—enough—was with us all along. We sent ourselves away for nothing.
This common tragedy of the human experience is the topic of another of Seneca’s letters (Letter 2):
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour’s property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come? Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second to have what is enough.
This, then, is the antidote to remaining poor the rest of our lives: knowing we have enough. This knowledge disarms our ego when it launches its assault on our contentment. This takes back the wheel when our ego wants to steer us away from our Self and toward whatever more it’s telling us we need.
If ego had its way, we’d be almost arriving the rest of our life. Always after the real thing that will make us happy, never possessing it. Always just about to get to where we can start creating for creation in itself, rather than creating as means to some other end—more fame. More fortune. More recognition. More happiness.
Only the knowledge and awareness of how we have enough can get us off this conveyor belt to the grave and give us what we’re looking for. Only from a place of enough, can we stop chasing what we think will fill us up and start creating from a place that actually will because it needs the approval of nothing outside itself.
Sure, this might mean that you do less, but you will have more. You might look less successful by the world’s standards, but you’ll actually be more successful at what really matters—that is, being true to yourself, keeping your soul, and doing what is within you to share your gifts with the world. Because you won’t be busy chasing more, you’ll have time to release what’s in your core.
That, my friends, is my definition of the good life: living a life true to you and the gifts placed inside you. And knowing that is enough.
P.S. I’m not advocating against ambition; only against its excesses and us aiming it poorly. In fact, a healthy amount of ambition aimed in the right direction is exactly what I think the world needs! I am also not arguing for complacency. There’s a fine line between being content and complacent—one that’s crossed when we use the words “content” as an excuse to remain in a state of passive non-doing. It is at that point all the virtue of contentment grows poisonous and becomes vice. The trick to discerning between the two, it seems to me, lies in the doing. To truly be content is to do what we feel our core calls us to and then be at ease with what we’ve done; to be complacent, on the other hand, is to not do at all—it is a state of inaction where we do not even attempt to bring forth what is within us.
P.P.S. If you haven’t watched or heard Carrey’s full commencement address, it’s worth the (26-minute) watch. Full video below:
It's crazy to me how comedians, of all people are tapping into what seems like the deepest truths. Who would have thought Jim and Seneca would have a through line.
Reminds me of a quote from Rick Rubins book The Creative Act (which, if you haven't read yet, I think could be particularly timely for your situation)
"If you are living in the belief that success will cure your pain, when the treatment comes and doesn’t work, it can lead to hopelessness. A depression can accompany the realization that what you’ve spent most of your life chasing hasn’t fixed your insecurities and vulnerabilities. More likely, with the stakes and consequences now higher, it has only amplified the pressure. And we are never taught how to handle this epic disappointment."