Downclimbing

Brugmansia

The inability to get what you want is the third most unsexy thing imaginable. Second place is openly resenting that fact instead of trying to change it. First place is the same as second, except that the things you want are all fantastical delusions. Anyway, Monday afternoon. Typing this on my phone at the climbing gym; fourth consecutive day of climbing, fingers aching, odd twinges in my shoulder, each strained motion animated by pure defiance.

“The only real measure of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.” I’ve seen this witticism bouncing around the “just a young professional making sense of life :)” blogs for a while, and the buck stops here. This, my dear readers, is what we call bullshit. Boltzmann killed himself. Turing killed himself. Ehrenfest killed himself and his disabled son. Oppenheimer was politically sidelined and consumed by guilt over his role in creating the bomb; he died a defeated man. Grothendieck spent the second half of his life in deepening isolation, estranged from the mathematical community and from society. Nietzsche, well, we all know what happened to Nietzsche. Now look me in the eye and tell me again that your romantic status and your healthy savings constitute evidence of your superior intellect.

The real issue, the reason a phrase like that is mindlessly repeated over and over again, is simple. It’s possible to make more money. It’s possible to become somewhat more physically attractive. It is seemingly impossible to become significantly more intelligent. The mythology of our society holds that the correct response to desire is honest effort, but shrugs its shoulders in situations where effort is not enough to produce results. The only way to maintain the validity of the social narrative is to redefine “intelligence” entirely, this time as something readily susceptible to improvement.

The sinister aspect of this process is not that the concept of intelligence is being stripped of meaning. I don’t think the concept was all that useful in the first place. The sinister thing is the proliferation of work. You can fix your appearance, increase your intelligence, improve your conditions, become more interesting, if you just work a little harder. Under every rock a new opportunity for optimization. Normal desires, thus given repeated attention, become cancerous fixations and consume their hosts. Life itself is coerced into the margins as leisure is replaced by the productive and the instrumental.

All of these perverse conditions are likely essential traits of any society organized by capitalism, but, personally, I don’t care about the economics of the situation. I just want to say: I often don’t get what I want. Whenever this happens I feel irritated, pathetic, infuriated, resentful, or just plain sad. And in these situations I reserve the right to refuse to transmute my pain into productive effort, to be ugly in my misery, to regress and decay, to call off the perpetual forward march and decide that this stupid little hill is where this stupid little human will die, no matter what glittering wonders wait just a bit, forever a bit further along the road.