Life is meaningless. Deal with it!

It is bright, sunny, and warm as I blog about the meaningless life.  That perhaps says something to you. To me, it says nothing. I blog about the meaningless life on sunny days and on dark nights too.  Because, well, life is meaningless. It is absurd!

To me, that is a given. The task is, therefore, to make it worthwhile. It is up to me, up to you, to make life enjoyable. To make us excited to get out of our beds in the morning and let the sunshine in.

The traditional ways of making it worthwhile are rapidly disappearing. Religion. Communities. Children and family. Marriage. Which means, it is increasingly up to individuals to make their lives worth it and enjoyable.  In this, there is only approach--to get out there and do it.  Whatever it is, well, it does not happen by itself.

Two years ago, when my daughter was graduating from college, I asked her if her friends who had not yet found jobs were concerned. “No,” she replied, “they’re not concerned about not having a job, they’re concerned about not having a narrative.”
Here’s the trick. The impressive narratives you see in the lives of the adults you admire emerge only in retrospect. Somehow, each one of them got from twenty, to thirty, to forty, to fifty, to sixty, and whatever the twists and turns of their chosen paths, they, by definition, emerge with a narrative that, looking backwards, connects the dots. More often than not, the narrative has a strong sense of coherence, sometimes, even, an aura of inevitability.

Exactly!  In my teens I had ideas on what would make my life worthwhile. It changed as the years rolled on.  But, I kept doing whatever it was that I did. And, looking back, the dots do connect to a neat narrative. It would be foolish of me to think that where I am today and what I am doing now to make it all worthwhile and enjoyable was exactly what I set out to do when I was in my undergraduate program or even when I joined graduate school.

 So the question is, how do you square the arbitrariness of your first step — or for that matter any given next step you may take along the way — with the goal of finding work over a lifetime that aligns with your deepest interests, brings you joy, and allows you to contribute to purposes larger than yourself?

And the answer is ...?

if you approach whatever work you have chosen with focus and diligence and reflection, you will advance along a path — and it will be one that is authentically yours, not because of the specific steps you have chosen, but because of the way you are making the choices and processing the experiences.

Sincere reflections and conscious decisions. I am confident enough that--and a whole lot of luck--is how I ended up where I am today.  "E.E. Cummings once said, “It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”  Traveling the life of a Tamil Brahmin engineer in America would have been incredibly "safer" path.  But, that would never have been "who you really are."

Work, philosophy, and .... vedantam?

"I like the way you teach" said one.  "I read your blog and was 'wow'" said another.

I am like Ed Koch in asking "how am I doing?"  Though, well, I don't actually walk around asking that question, as much as I am tempted to.  Thus, it is always wonderful when I get answers to that question of "how am I doing?" even when I didn't provide that prompt.

To me, work has never been about a paycheck. Of course, the paycheck is important.  But, there is more to work than a paycheck. Way, way more.

Who better to talk philosophically about work than Vedantam!

Ok, not that vedantam but Shankar Vedantam, who reports on why people agree to work in boring jobs:

VEDANTAM:... There's new psychological research out of Duke University. I spoke with Peter Ubel, along with a colleague, David Comerford. He's looked at people who do boring work. He asked me to imagine applying for a job at a museum where the job was to stand around for several hours a day telling people not to touch the paintings.
GREENE: We've all seen those people.
VEDANTAM: Exactly. Ubel says there's a difference between how you think about the job when you're applying for it, and your actual experience of such a job.
PETER UBEL: At the time, it might sound like a wonderful job - I just stand there and do nothing, and they pay me for it. Wow; that sounds great. But now, imagine standing there all day long while people are walking about the museum enjoying themselves. You're not even allowed to really talk to them much. I cannot imagine a more boring job.
VEDANTAM: So I think the thing that he's talking about here, David, is the idea that when you're anticipating the kind of work that you want to do, how you think about it might be very different than the actual experience of the job, when you're doing it.

My job is, of course, no way a boring one like standing around in a museum.  But, I have paid my dues in boring jobs. Like the first one straight out of the engineering program.  Or the second one. Or the third ... or the fourth .... well, I have had more than my fill of boring jobs. Perhaps that is all the more why I enjoy this one, so much so that every once in a while I feel strange that I get paid for what I like doing.

So, why do people choose to go after those boring jobs anyway?

VEDANTAM: But I think what Ubel and Comerford are basically saying is even when we have a choice, we often end up picking the more boring job. They ran this experiment with business school students. They sat the students in a classroom and said: For the next five minutes, you will do absolutely nothing - no iPhones, no computers - and we'll pay you $2.50.
But they gave them an option. They said: Instead of sitting and doing nothing, you could solve these really difficult word puzzles. How much would you want us to pay you?
UBEL: We found that a large majority of the students said we'd have to pay them more than $2.50 to solve the word puzzles, and yet when we actually finished the five minutes and asked them how much they enjoyed those five minutes, the people solving the word puzzles enjoyed the five minutes significantly more. And yet very few of them said yeah, pay me $2 and I'd be happy to do word puzzles 'cause at least I'll be having fun.
GREENE: So they thought they should be paid more to do these puzzles, thinking it was harder work. But actually, doing something during that time actually turned out to be more interesting for them.

Yep, we are one strange species!

Vedantam links his report to Camus' interpretation of the myth about Sisyphus.  Oh yeah, I have blogged about that, too. (Are you sufficiently impressed, R & S?)  Well, enough about me; how does Vedantam tie it all together?

when you make choices, make them consciously. Make them deliberately. Don't let unconscious biases guide you. Camus would even go a step further and say, even when choices are forced on you, live your life with your eyes open because meaning doesn't lie in the work, it lies in what you bring to the work.

Students, and colleagues too, know what exactly I bring to my work. I think I know the answer to "how am I doing?"  .

On this absurd life!

Decades ago, my best friend from high school proceeded to study physics in the Soviet Union.  Yes, that long ago where there was a big USSR on the maps!  In one of his earlier letters from there, he mentioned something being a Sisyphean struggle.  We went to the same school and here was this guy using words that I didn't know.  It is amazing how we can have forty kids in a classroom and how every one of us can come out with different experiences.  Somewhere, somehow, he had picked up on Sisyphus; what was I doing in school, right?

Anyway, as soon as I finished reading the letter, I was off to discover and understand the word "Sisyphean."

Since then, I have not lost track of that phrase nor that idea.

Perhaps I am reminded of that now because we are into the final stretch of the term.  The Sisyphus me has rolled the boulder almost to the top.  The boulder will start rolling down as the term ends.  And then, I get to do it all over again.  And again.

But, here is where I find Camus' take absolutely refreshing.  It is not a struggle at all.  I look forward to the term ending and then a new one beginning.

In the years past when I used to at least sit in on meaningless faculty meetings and conversations, the chit-chat often included colleagues remarking about how they were looking forward to the term coming to an end, or the academic year ending, and I would feel puzzled.  And, sometimes feel sorry for them feeling so trapped doing a job from which they constantly seem to dream of escaping.  Theirs was truly a Sisyphean struggle.

I almost always feel sad when the term ends because the ending comes just when I am beginning to know the students and understand what gets them and what doesn't. Two days ago, in one of my classes, I quoted Shakespeare's "parting is such sweet sorrow."  

But then, it is a wonderful lesson to remind me of the impermanence that our existence is.  As much as students come and students leave, we are born and we die.  In such a framework, the Sisyphean struggle is not about the boulder rolling down, but about Sisyphus finding happiness and contentment with what he does.  It is about me as the instructor beginning a term and ending it while being happy and content even as I know that I will be repeating this process all over again.

I am perhaps beginning to understand why my mother didn't think she has a raw deal in having to get up everyday thinking about what she was going to cook, and what chores she was going to do.  Not in the conventional thinking, but in a Camus' interpretation, hers is a Sisyphean contentment and happiness in doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out.  She was not cursed nor condemned to that punishment.

Pushing the rock up only to watch it roll down as we near the top is then not as absurd as it might seem.  Life  is what happens between birth and death.  In the initial stages, we learn to push the boulder.  And then we push, it rolls down, we push, it rolls down.  It is up to us to find happiness in this process.  If not, well, we die unhappy and miserable.

I, have no plans to die unhappy or miserable.

The stranger: Not Camus, not Joel, but Theroux

Paul Theroux articulates so well the various jumbled thoughts that run through my head and which I am simply incapable of transforming into meaningful and powerful sentences and paragraphs.  I am, therefore, not at all surprised that Theroux knows exactly how I feel when I travel to any strange place:

It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler may have no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as “the American” or “the Foreigner,” and there is no power in that.

It is quite easy to stay in our respective villages and feel connected and important, and not be a stranger.  "Where everybody knows your name" as Cheers told us.  But, then it is a huge world, and it will be awful not to find out more about it. By ourselves. As strangers.