Jim Carrey on taking a chance on doing what you love
Jim Carrey was one of my favorite comedians growing up. I watched Bruce Almighty at least 50 times, and always admired his enthusiastic character. It seemed like he radiated happiness and everyone around him were positively affected by his aura. His exaggerated yet calculated level of slapstick comedy is timeless, and I still enjoy his movies to this day.
Though known for his performance on more iconic movies like The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, and Ace Ventura, I saw a different version of him in movies like The Truman Show and saw a more profound character that he may have liked to portray later in his career.
While his movies haven’t been making noise in the box office, he seems to have been relinquishing his character of a “slapstick comedian” (with the exception of Dumb and Dumber 2). Every time I see him in interviews, he seems to be wrestling with something profound. People deem him crazy, but I think he’s been tearing at the protective fabric of society and can see right through us.
I’m not glorifying him in any way, but the media and many people on the Internet have gleefully questioned his mental sanity and poked fun at his “erratic” behavior. While some may watch this video and call him bizarre or that he’s losing his mind, others have pointed out that Jim is masking his message and trying to uncover the veil that the entertainment industry has draped over our eyes.
Personally, I don’t really care about what behaviors he’s exhibiting or the “exposing of the Illuminati” if he is still coherently expressing valuable statements that I can learn from.
I watched Jim Carrey give his commencement address to a class of ’14, and I thought he had some great moments that I’d like to share. I highly recommend it if you ever enjoyed his work, or if you just want to hear some of Jim’s advice on following your dreams.
He has a masterful way of bringing up eye-opening, profound, and philosophical observations of the world and ourselves, only to bring them back down to earth with clever quips or jokes as if to undermine the “seriousness” of it all.
He doesn’t want you to rest on the ideas for too long, and only wants to plant a seed that will lay in your subconscious. While you may not take his message seriously in the present because of his strategy to downplay it, it may germinate in a few years and have a big influence on you in the future.
Comedians have the ability to mask the truth and poke fun at things we all notice but wouldn’t dare say ourselves. They trivialize things that we deem as important and help us realize that there is humor in everything.
The absurdity of our lives is rather humorous, since if you think about it, nothing in the end matters. All this effort and energy we put into “getting somewhere or something” is all for naught.
This perspective may seem dark and nihilistic, but there’s an enlightenment that comes with admitting this truth.
We can fail in anything we do and nothing will matter. All the embarrassment, shame, and disappointment we will inevitably face will cease to exist. If that’s true, why doesn’t everyone indulge in the things they love to do and pursue the things that make them feel happy and fulfilled?
Carl Sagan points out the insignificance of the place we call our world relative to the vast universe which we do not know of:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
We are literally a pale blue dot. A speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. No one cares if you fail or if you choose to do the things you love. No one cares if you fall flat on your face or go bankrupt. At the end of the day, our fates are the same and the things we mindlessly aim for in this world — money, fame, power — will cease to be of any importance in the near future.
I’m not saying that we should all run out on the streets and do whatever we want without consequence. This realization should give you the freedom to remove the shackles that you’ve placed on your creative self. You are free to become whatever and whoever you want, and you should not fear what anyone else tells you in this life.
Jim tells us about his father and his upbringing. His father chose to sacrifice his dreams because he thought it was impractical. He chose the safe route to support his family and became an accountant, a job he hated, instead of fulfilling his dream to become a comedian.
Even when he chose the “safe route”, even when he followed what society told him to, he managed to fail.
My father could have been a great comedian but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him. And so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive.
I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take the chance doing what you love.
Now you might be saying that in the father’s perspective, it might have been obvious what the most logical choice was. I respect Jim’s father for sacrificing his own desires so that he could provide his family with shelter, clothes, and food. His sacrifice was probably one of the biggest reasons why Jim was able to succeed in the entertainment business and achieve his own dream.
However, it still goes to show you that just because we perceive something as “safe” doesn’t mean it is permanent. There are many external factors that can affect your “safe” decision, and ultimately lead to the worst possible outcome. The safety and security of a “safe” job is an illusion.
So if you’re stuck between following the path that society has paved for you and going down your own path of life, and adding on the fact that the chances of failure are quite similar AND that nothing really matters in the end…
You might as well take the chance doing what you love.
There will never be anyone who is like you and you have the power to become anything you want. The burden of responsibility is fully on you.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
If you’d like to watch it, here’s the video:
If you’re interested in an in-depth video explaining his “bizarre” behavior these past few years, take a look at this! I found it to be an insightful and well constructed video analyzing his recent antics.
