Hi all,
This article is a throwback from earlier this year, but I’m deciding to re-post it for my new readers who have joined in the last few weeks. Welcome!
But first, one quick random thought: don’t you love when you discover a new word or phrase for something? “There’s a word for that!”, and my brain lights up in a way similar to when I find a lost sock.
A thought-terminating cliché is a phrase used to end an argument or discussion via the path of least resistance.
A few examples (from Wikipedia):
"Stop thinking so much." — Redirects attention from the topic, idea, or argument at hand to the alleged overuse of thought itself
"It's all good." — Nullifies, without evidence, any possible debate by asserting the issue is already settled
"Here we go again." — Implies that the redundant, cyclical nature of a given disagreement means it will never be resolved
My personal favorite from work?
“Let’s take this one offline.”
Have a good weekend,
—Brendan
Be Somebody
I’ve been wrestling with an idea this week that was first introduced to me by Anne Lamott. She is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, and her book Bird by Bird is a classic on writing well, approaching the creative process, and laughing at some of the absurdities of life.
She writes,
“Most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy.”
One side of me agrees with this thesis. If you’re always striving to be a somebody on someone else’s terms, then you’re essentially signing yourself up for an endless comparison game that you can’t possibly win.
Another part of me, though, is tempted to empathize with what the rapper Logic said in his song “Fade Away”:
“This life, yeah, it done ate away, hard times never stayed away // But one thing I know day to day, I'mma do somethin' 'fore I fade away // Fade away (Fade away) fade away (Fade away) // They gon' know my name until it fade away”
Logic is making a simple argument here: life is short and one day I’m going to die, so I want to “be somebody” so that I can make the most of it while it lasts. My reputation and brilliance can even live on in the minds of others, even when my own heart stops beating.
In the The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker made a similar point. Put simply, he argued that the urge to “be somebody” is one of the fundamental drives of human behavior. Because humans are aware of their own mortality and their finite time available on Earth, they feel a need to construct a meaningful symbolic life that can extend beyond their limited physical lifetime. It’s exactly aligned to Logic’s words.
As Becker implied, successful people gravitate towards erecting monuments and university buildings with their names stamped on the front; powerful tyrants pick battles to seal their deified reputations; artists and entrepreneurs create as much as they can before they “fade away”; parents want to have children, who will also have children. One’s life is finite, but one’s ideas, reputation, and creations can, in theory, live forever. Everyone wants to be somebody partly because to aim for anything less would mean admitting something terrifying: this whole song and dance is meaningless.
Now, here’s where Lamott’s idea comes back into play. I think we’ve established that the urge to “be somebody” is a fundamental one that can’t easily be ignored or repressed. But even if this urge should be the engine for life’s vehicle doesn’t necessarily mean we also let it steer the car. You can’t just want to be anybody. I think you have to be the right somebody, by the terms you define for yourself.
If you define your “somebodyness” solely relative to another person’s “somebodyness”, you’ll always feel inadequate because, as Lamott puts it, “a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you.”
There is an old story that Norman Mailer always wanted to be like Ernest Hemingway, and Hemingway always wanted to be like James Joyce.
Mailer especially wanted to be a somebody, but again, only relative others and not as he himself defined it. He dreamed to write “a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read.”
Though Mailer was a substantial literary figure in his own right, apparently he never wrote what some people call a Great American novel, something on the level of The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. I’m sure he was more than aware of this “shortcoming”, which from everyone else's perspective, was not a shortcoming at all. I mean, I'm over here still making microwave nachos.
I think what I’m synthesizing comes down to what Jordan Peterson wrote in 12 Rules for Life,
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
You can aim to “be someone”, but on your terms. You incorporate that fundamental human drive to make an impact while alive, without driving yourself crazy by always measuring yourself against others.
Further Reading
(1) Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott