There’s a specific neoliberal idea that is very common in online content creation, and it’s one that online gurus tend to repeat one after another as if it were coordinated and they were all given the same script: “Post whatever it is that you want. Nobody is looking, nobody cares. You will get good along the way, so you should build the plane while you are flying it.”
At first glance, this seems like a wonderful idea.
After all, skill is built as a function of experience and multiple failures: It is not the fruit of overconsidered analysis paralysis manifesting itself into projects unfinished.
To thrive, it is said, you must survive each day and put yourself out into the world.
There’s a certain level of truth to that, which is probably why it has been repeated over and over again as if it were sage dogma.
But it seems to me that to believe that, a person participates in a profound act of privilege.
Yes, it is a privilege to not care.
Think about it.
To create for another person is to be judged. It is to be seen by the consciousness of another sentient being, to willingly submit yourself to another person’s gaze.
As human beings, we instinctively seek validation from those around us; for that reason, the act of creation can be viewed as a radical act of bravery.
If a person creates something, they dedicate time, effort, and energy to it.
Flashes of insight are compressed into moments of typing, painting, and writing as inwardly the creator gambles away that part of finite time never to be returned.
In a lifespan of fewer than a million hours—potentially by a difference of an order of magnitude depending on fortune and her acts—all the while wrestling with the possibility that what they may create will not match up to that which the machine could (that it can, that we as humans must reckon with), even as we race against ourselves in order to create something that we feel that other human beings may appreciate, given the estimator that is our own appreciation for it.
It is upon countless attempts on my part that this insight has risen to mind, failure after failure.
It is unlikely that a person will create if they are excessively perfectionist, but there is a caveat to that:
The very idea of excess implies that something is too much, and it provides no indication of what is correct or what is wrong.
If a person is truly an Olympic-class athlete, then would it be perfectionist for them to expect to run a mile in four minutes, given that they have enough training, experience, and the example of Roger Bannister and the hundreds of others who have achieved the same feat after it was once hypothesized that it was physically impossible?
Certainly, it would not be.
In other words, if you feel that something that you’re doing is not good enough, you can always train yourself so that you become better—good enough for your own exacting standards.
Of course, that assumes that you don’t pursue some of the other tantalizing options that are available.
The first of which is that you could just lower your standards, become what people call realistic.
In that sense, either that, or you could naturally gravitate towards that option of all comfortable options: give up. That is the default, the option by which the vast majority of human beings ply themselves.
There is no shame in weakness.
There is, however, a shame that one could say subsists in flying so close to the sun that your wings of wax melt.
But there are always those who are delusional, those who gaslight themselves:
Those who not only gaslight themselves but take in material that facilitates that phenomenal act. Thus the industry of online gurus proceeds, extends, and grows itself into a billion-dollar behemoth upon which the savvy entrepreneurs gorge, not because they are taking part in a deception necessarily, but rather in the interstice of plausible deniability that comes from the interaction between the fact that a person can only gain that which is worth earning through an act of effort:
The guru, however good, can never truly lead the initiate all the way to the finish line.
And so the roller coaster goes forward by a person’s efforts.
Statistically, the grind is harsh – It is a culling of the weak. The chaff is always and ever separated from the weak – but thriving, if a person should be fortunate enough to experience it, is exhilarating.
There is a distinction between thriving and feeling that one is thriving while celebrating in the midst of a delulu party; one never really knows when one has reached the crossing of the terminal point, that which separates the profane world from the sacred.
It is this process that gives rise to the duck syndrome, I suppose, where a person appears calm on the surface but in reality is paddling as fast as possible ahead under the water to move towards a goal of which they have no true concept.
Of course, the decision to participate in this grind is perhaps not entirely a person’s own.
Perhaps it is by dint of destiny or creation of personalities. Some might say that it is fate, self-cultivated or crafted together from random opportunities in a probabilistic universe.
It is hard to disconfirm any one of those things precisely because they are not really subject to experimentation – The science, if it were to be a science, is continually disrupted by the fact that the experimenter is always and ever trying to influence the outcome.
At the end of the day, what can really be said?
Perhaps it is just what I had said at the start.
It is a privilege to not care, to hold low standards for your life, to be able to accept the passing of life as waves over the sandy beach. Inevitable, as we may think, is the passage of time.
But I suppose it is also a privilege to be able to enjoy this. Maybe that is where the next stage of gaslighting exists, though—but perhaps that is a story for another day.
