When your best isn’t good enough
I’m not a theoretical physicist but maybe if I were I’d have a more fulfilling life. I say this because I have been recently wondering whether our inability to grasp the modalities of time has the potential to ruin the enjoyment of our working lives. If that sounds “heavy” then let me say this: how you spend your time is the most important decision you will ever make, and you continue to make it anew with every passing moment. This scares me, which is why I have devoted so much of my own time to trying to understand it. You have been warned.
An experimental thought
Consider this: there will be something that you do in your life that will be the best thing you ever do. Now it may not be one single thing, it may be several things. And it’s reasonably likely that what you consider to be your best won’t be what others remember as your best. Either way, there will be such a point in every life.
This isn’t exactly a thought experiment because it’s actually true, but it’s a thought I don’t think many of us entertain at any point in our lives so it is experimental in that sense.
You could say that it would be better if this moment occurred at some point near the beginning of your life so that you could enjoy the reliving of it and benefit from any external recognition for as long as possible (i.e. the rest of your life). But most of us imagine the opposite — that our best work or biggest achievement or fame and glory will come near the end of our lives.
This is because we are simply not wired to accept the idea that the best might be behind us, at least not while we’re relatively young (I’m 32 so I can’t really speak for older perspectives. If you’re coming at this with more years under your belt I’d love to hear what your take is). We strive for constant improvement. If we get one award, we want another. We get a nice house, we want to decorate, we want to remodel, redecorate, upgrade, upsize. We get a good job and then we want a promotion. We acclimate to the new success and want something shinier and newer and better.
I can’t claim to know the evolutionary biology behind it, but it seems that this urge to constantly improve would be very useful to us as a species. But it’s also clear that it can be wholly destructive to the individual. The advantage of our lack of perspective is that we don’t know when our best has already happened. The disadvantage is that because we don’t know, we keep pushing. We set ourselves ever more unachievable goals. We set ourselves up to fail. It’s possible to push yourself so hard that you don’t get any further but rather you just grind yourself into the ground.
Living Science Fiction
In her excellent TED talk on the creative process Elizabeth Gilbert contemplated exactly this experimental thought: that her greatest success may already be behind her in the form of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Does it matter, if this is the case? Does it diminish the one success in any way that there may not be any more?
She was at that time writing the follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love and she returned to the TED stage 5 years later to report that the follow-up book had bombed. But then, she said, she wrote another book that was well received. And she intends to write many more books. Would it change things if it turns out that Eat, Pray, Love was actually the “best”? And by whose standards? Each of those times, each of those books, are different moments, different states. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether you are in a moment of failure or success, they are all part of a continuum and the only thing that matters is you are alive and able to experience it.
Now let’s get really experimental. Imagine you could experience time in the same way you experience the other three dimensions, like the advanced humans from the future in Interstellar or the aliens in Slaughterhouse Five. If that were the case then we could step through time as we traverse a landscape and go to any moment in time we wished. We could revisit a moment of happiness and not just remember it but relive it. If it chanced to be followed by a moment of sadness well that’s not to be regretted, it is merely a different moment. It gives context to the moment that preceded it. It has its own value and can also be revisited.
In a sense I think we already intuitively feel what it might be like to experience time like this. For example, we do not tend to regret or mourn the time before our birth when we didn’t yet exist, even though we are generally terrified at the prospect of not existing where that state comes after the duration of our life (i.e. death).
I have a son. He was born in 2015. In 2013 I didn’t know that I would have a son in 2015. I now have the privilege of watching his story unfold, possibly with brothers and sisters, and it makes it so much more interesting not knowing what will happen. But it’s a trick of perspective. At some point I will not be here to see him, but he also wasn’t here any earlier than when he was born. Those are just different moments when either he wasn’t here or I won’t be here. So we better enjoy each other’s company while we both can.
Everything is Awesome
To be clear, I’m not saying we should live our lives thinking as fictional aliens do. As I said, I am not a theoretical physicist. I do not understand time.
But what can we do with this different perspective? How can we move forward in life without constantly pushing for something better? It’s something that I have struggled with for a long time. Self-improvement is valuable, but not if it makes you feel substandard in some way. This is the sentiment at the heart of the “imposter syndrome” and it’s easy to see how destructive it can be.
The difference comes, I think, from finding motivation in the things you want to do, the things that bring you joy, rather than seeking glory in order to compensate for the secret suspicion that you might not be good enough just as you currently are.
If you want to improve because you don’t love yourself as you are then all I can say is, from experience, further accomplishments and acclaim will not square that circle.
Instead we can work hard and get better and spread joy and make other people’s lives better not because our self-worth depends on it but rather because it’s much more fun doing things you love than not. That’s it. That’s the reason to make great things happen — because we can.
Let our best be good enough and let everything that comes after it be awesome too.
Show this post some ❤. It truly makes my day and it’s how stories spread on Medium.
