How to Help Your Friend, the Writer
On the perils of “the life of the mind.”
You know this person: he’s a self-proclaimed intellectual, though he might just as well call himself an ineffectual. He’s very well-read and has a very large vocabulary but he’s also, let’s face it, a bit of an idiot. He introduces himself as a writer, but you’ve never read anything he’s written, and you suspect that his writing style, were you ever to glimpse it, would exhibit some highly-distracting congenital defect — cleft sentences, say, or hysterical semicolons, or an acute overuse of italics.
For all his familiarity with quantum mechanics and ancient Sumerian marriage rites and the reservations of philosopher X about the theories of philosopher Y, he seems to be lacking a certain fundamental knowledge about how life actually works on a day-to-day basis. Call it street-smarts, or EQ, or basic competence — whatever. The simple fact is he doesn’t seem to “get it,” whatever “it” might be.
This isn’t meant to be a pile-on. After all, this person may very well be a dear friend of yours, someone very close to you. We all want the best for this person, even if “the best,” realistically, equates to a cozy hometown librarianship, or an adjunct teaching position at a community college in Missouri. We want him to figure his shit out, simmer down a bit, maybe get laid once or twice, maybe stop using the word “plethora” so often. There are, after all, a plethora of other words he might opt to use instead.
Above all, we want this person to realize that, whatever lustrous pleasures the mind may offer, the mind is a dangerous place to dwell on a permanent basis. The mind is not the sort of basket to be putting all your eggs into. For one thing, your friend could get a concussion. It happens all the time, by sheer happenstance. Someone might open the door on his face. An overlarge pinecone might fall from a tree branch. His lover might knee him in the head.
Clearly, the mind is an unstable element, not the sort of foundation responsible people should be constructing their livelihoods upon. The mind is best seen as a surplus value: frosting, not the cake itself. The cake must consist of the body and the brain, in proportion to the qualities of the…well, I’ve lost track of the metaphor, but I guess your friend in this case is either the cake, the baker of the cake, or both simultaneously.
So which will it be, then? Brain or body?
The only people who can afford to live entirely off of their brains are people who have effectively turned their brains into computers. Input, output, input, output. Alas, your friend the “ineffectual” is probably too unreliable for this route. Instead, he really ought to seek out a career that depends first and foremost on the fact of his having a body. Try as he might, your friend is not going to be able to “mind-body-problem” his way out of that one. He’s flesh and blood, whether he likes it or not, which indeed qualifies him for the librarianship or adjunct teaching position (plus or minus a couple graduate degrees). He can occupy a desk, just as he can print out course readers, or write words on the chalkboard and then circle or underline them.
And yet, in his heart of hearts, your friend probably looks down upon adjunct professors, even though they, through grit and grind, have achieved a station in life that he himself is unlikely ever to sniff. See, the problem with your friend is he fancies himself a writer, and a legit one at that: a forcefield of influence, a last-name-only type, an as-yet-unrecognized member of the canon.
It cannot be overstated just how disastrous this situation is. Your friend is not only delusional, he is actively imperiling himself. The problem is that your friend doesn’t understand what being a writer actually entails. Your friend thinks that writing means sitting down and elucidating complex nuances that only he understands, or opening his heart to tell stories that only he knows how to tell.
Your friend could not be more wrong. Writing is a heartless endeavor, a whoring of the intellect that leaves all but the luckiest or most preternaturally gifted writers utterly bereft of life’s comforts. Our poor intellectual imagines that the publishing world will soon be knocking his door down trying to strike a deal, just as soon as the right reader strikes the vein of his genius. But in truth, your friend is the one who will always do the knocking, at least until he lucks into a pimp (agent). Whoring, I said, and that’s putting it generously. He will spend his days selling his precious mind wholesale, to all and sundry.
O what a lowly figure this writer is. Dependent to a fantastic degree on the sympathy of strangers, he is not far from a panhandler, albeit an unusually presentable and odorless one. By buying his book, or clicking his link, or — god forbid — patronizing his Patreon, you throw a few nickels in his coffee cup, sustain him, give him just enough to carry on.
This must stop. The fact is, if you really want to help your friend, you must cease supporting his fever dream of being a writer.
But don’t try to warn him off it — heavens no. That will only embolden him. He is convinced that his path is the right one precisely because others insist that it isn’t. Nor should you berate him for his failure to work hard, to pull himself up by the proverbial bootstraps. He is the most overworked man on earth. For him, everything is work. He recognizes no real distinction between, say, work versus reading, work versus drinking, work versus getting high, work versus sleeping, work versus reading while drunk and high and asleep.
You may occasionally wonder what inspired him to paint himself so far into this dingy corner of existence. Why didn’t he just get a real job? Why not do something, I don’t know, useful? But these questions have no answers. They are blind alleys, just like the eternal questions to which the ineffectual has devoted himself. There is only one thing to do. Withdraw all support at once. Abandon him to the putter of his typing, the echoey quiet of his “study.” With any luck, the quiet will speak louder than words ever could.
