The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, September 27th. It is the eleventh of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Friday Night Lights, Symbiosis, and Perfection
One of the many frustrating consequences of our collective American decision to play out all cultural conflict in the political arena is that our more regrettable tendencies have seeped into the process. Distrust and condescension towards those different from ourselves. A competitive urge to win, lesser only than the urge to see our opponents lose. Somewhat pertinently, our craving for instant gratification.
We, as a culture, aren’t good at waiting. We demand things quickly. Some of these demands are good: rapid medical advancements, rapid technological advancements, rapid communication in emergencies. Many, though, are of mixed virtue, and some are not mixed at all, but instead cries for short-term balms that only soothe the wound while preventing what’s necessary for its healing. Short-term benefits outweighed by long-term costs.
Take, for example, the hypocrisies surrounding the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Members of the Republican tribe have shamelessly flipped on words younger than five years old. Members of the Democratic tribe are threatening drastic, destabilizing retaliatory action. Members of the Republican tribe are citing unnecessary necessities regarding an election they are trying to illegitimize. Members of the Democratic tribe are demonstrating their tolerance for religious liberty only extends to those demonized by their foes. The result? A political, and therefore cultural (because again, we’ve decided this is our arena) game of chicken based entirely upon the premise that the judicial branch of our federal government—the one designed to interpret law in accord with our constitution—is a partisan body, to be used as a political sledgehammer. There is no long view. There is no examination of what’s best for our nation’s future. There is only a short-term scoreboard and a fanatical, cultish belief that our tribe, and ours alone, is good and just and right.
So we cheer this slapfight on from the sidelines, using the misdeeds of the other tribe to justify our own’s, clinging to simple, flawed arguments and repeating them to ourselves until we believe them, because God forbid we do the hard thing of looking at an issue as objectively as we can, of seeking understanding of our others, of undergoing the agonizing indignity of admitting (even just to ourselves) that we might have been at least a little bit wrong. Give a man a sentence and tell him it justifies what he wants to believe and he will hold onto that sentence no matter what winds may come. This, too, is instant gratification. Because seeking truth, seeking objectivity, seeking the right—these things take time.
I’ve been thinking about the long game outside of politics lately as well. On the phone two years ago, a man I’d been put in touch with for the sake of networking told me, “If you’re 24 and driving Uber while you try to get a business off the ground, you’re scrappy. If you’re doing that when you’re 25, people start looking at your résumé and thinking you’re a failure.” Yesterday was my 26th birthday. I spent it delivering food and trying to get two businesses off the ground. Neither is closer than two or three years from making enough money for me to not drive Uber. I’m not unhappy. I’m not a failure. But I do sometimes fear that I will be.
It’s easy to proclaim the virtues of the long game. But what happens if you don’t win it? What happens if something changes and it becomes unwinnable? What happens if it takes so long to win it that you’d rather have lost years ago? I suppose this is the justification for political short-sightedness. Shocks come to the system. Crises happen. So gather ye rosebuds, and pack ye courts, and sacrifice ye country for the sake of ye pitiful tribal pride. It’s fair, though, to an extent. At least outside of politics. I do not know if I will win this long game. And I do not know what will happen if I lose.
When I started this game—two years ago, when I stepped out of conventional employment—I hit the ground hard. I lost a lot of money. I made bad business decisions. I made bad personal decisions. I panicked and stalled and rushed and retreated. I dug myself quite the hole.
As the year ended and I moved to Texas and I began to assess where my life stood, I took to reminding myself about rivers. Rivers did not find the sea in a day. They worked at it, pushing onward, pushing forward, carving and curling and snarling and digging from the moment they trickled forth from their headwaters to the moment they burst triumphantly through that final delta, reuniting with Mother Ocean in the great vast arms of the sea. Rivers were not built in a day. They grew slowly, reacting to the land around them—sometimes pooling, sometimes falling—always moving towards the sea.
The same forces that create rivers, however, also create puddles. Both are the product of water rolling downhill. The waters that become rivers don’t do so because of any choice they make. They’re water. All they did was roll downhill.
But we, unlike water, have a choice. And that choice regards the destination to which we orient ourselves. We can look at just the ground around us. We can find the easiest immediate path, the one that gives us the sensation of progress and victory. Or we can look to the sea.
I don’t know where I will end this journey—this attempted evasion of societal normalcy in employment. It may well be waist-deep in a cold puddle of my own creation. I don’t know if the steps I’m taking are the ones that will get me to where I want to go. It is more than just two businesses I’m testing. But though I may one day indeed prove myself a failure (at least in this endeavor), my 26th birthday was not that day. Because, at least for now, I can still see the sea.
Next week’s essay: On Time, Which Is Not Running Out
