No gifts to bring

Warning: Another highly personal piece in the vein of this one from last February. I always welcome you emailing or using the Contact page to share with me whatever thoughts my own struggles stir up for you. God bless you.

I have arrived at this moment empty-handed, it seems.

Somehow, I managed to make it all this way without getting good at anything.

Many things begun, nothing finished, and nothing noteworthy to show for it all. Abandoned when it got hard, crowded out by something new and interesting, or just died when the community which sustained my passion moved on. The Muses can pick you up, but they won't get you into the heavens. Instead, I've barely managed to avoid crashing back to earth.

How I look on paper mirrors how I look in my mind. I appear as a bricolage of titles and experiences, a narrative becoming increasingly precarious and discontinuous. Who is this person? I wonder as I stare at a list of experiences which I supposedly had, but which now all feel as though I sleepwalked through them. Can I point at any accomplishments? I've "managed" "led" "implemented" and "scaled," but I don't feel that my capacities have expanded in any way.

I'm not sure when it was, but one day I just woke up. Suddenly, my self-consciousness came online. Before that, I was just doing things. After that, I was doing things and thinking about doing things. Standing on the other side of that awakening, perhaps as much as two decades ago, leaves me feeling like I don't have much to show for it. Everything beautiful that happened is a memory. I know it happened to me, but where is the trace of my experiences in my life?

It occurs to me that for at least the past seven years I've just been enduring, numbing myself, hoping to get to the next thing, although this mythical “next thing” seems to only poke its head up in rare ecstatic bursts. Most of the time, I just hope to get away with doing as little work as possible until that paycheck shows up again to pay my rent at the end of the month. Everything has been coasting by on “good enough," crossing my fingers hoping not to lose my job, hoping people won't leave me, hoping my life won't completely fall apart.

In my head, all the while, I’m dreaming about a future where I have a PhD, I own a home of my own, my ideas are valued by people I respect, and I’m able to support myself with work that I find enjoyable. But those are all just the obsessive ruminating fantasies that distract my aching consciousness from the real world where I’m actually just clocking in and clocking out doing work that I do not really think adds any value to the world. Oh, sure, what I’m doing is profitable (for someone else!), but how could I possibly trick myself into being motivated by that? Intrinsic motivation has never been my thing anyways.

Motivation — that’s one of the things I never managed to figure out. My assessment is that while my formation in a parochial environment was uniquely suited to me in certain respects, in other ways it did not prepare me to be the best that I could. I feel victimized by a trap laid by no one in particular wherein I was simultaneously brainier than my peers but only slightly above average when compared with a much larger pool of talent. Consequently, my teachers were too easily impressed by what demanded little effort from me. Ultimately, I wasn’t genuinely challenged or forced to develop good habits, and I ended up with a distorted view of my own abilities.

Case in point — senior year I dropped Trigonometry (it was hard and I’ve never liked math), and proposed doing an independent study reading Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I didn’t need either Trig or this independent study to graduate — I just wanted to not be bored at school. So I spent every math period that year reading Calvin and summarizing what I was reading (I nearly made it through both volumes). Of course, this kept my brain stimulated, but it could hardly have been called a challenge, or even an endeavor which expanded my horizons of thought. I was raised Calvinist — was I really learning anything new or growing by reading Calvin? Shouldn't I have at least tried to read someone with whom I might have disagreed?

But none of the authority figures in my life said anything at all. They supported me. They were lenient with me. To them, it was obvious that a young man who was whip smart in making theological points should be encouraged in his studies. No need to develop holistically as a person by cultivating a variety of different skills and interests. No need to think about possible roles in society other than pastor or theologian (jobs which would make it very difficult to support a family, it turns out). Perhaps I gave off such a strong and confident aura that no one ever considered saying, hey, have you considered this other thing over here? Could I have appeared more approachable? I wonder about that sometimes.

But all of this sounds like I’m more bitter towards the adults in my childhood than I actually am. I think fondly of all of them, and I know that they cared about me. My story is my story, and although they contributed to my childhood, they aren’t really responsible for who I have become or the decisions I've made. Even though I didn’t choose the context in which I learned, dreamed, and grew up, I bear the responsibility for what I did with my circumstances. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So, while it’s painful to reflect, and anger can be a powerful temptation, I see that at every moment it was my choice to embrace the easy path or the hard path, and I consistently chose what felt most natural for me. I was piling more and more of my eggs into a single basket, but since I met no resistance, I just kept going.

This subtly pernicious alignment between what felt most natural for me and the incentives in my highly specific context ended up rewarding decisions that I look back on now as failing to set me up for a happy life. Basically, I poured all of my effort into mastering a certain wing of academic theology, and later branched out into academic philosophy, all to realize that this line of interest I had pursued almost to the exclusion of anything else would not yield a life which I found acceptable. What awaited me beyond my undergraduate education was debt, years of poverty, and long shot odds at a position paying mediocre wages.

I turned away from where it seemed like all of the momentum of my life had been pushing me. I found it debasing and repugnant to continue any further down that path, setting myself up to be manipulated by a system which didn’t care about me, and prostituting my own passion out to an institution which wanted to pin me down and put me in a box. I knew that I wanted to get married and raise a family, but most of all, I had a strong intuition that I would regret the decision to fritter away my 20’s learning to talk and think in ways no one but academics would value.

But there is still a part of me that wonders — perhaps I turned away because I couldn’t bear the emotional pain of not being good enough? Now that I’ve chosen to reject the path of the academic, I can tell myself that it was my heroic decision. I can revel in my own foresight — how I avoided “peak woke,” how I didn’t have to teach or go to school during Covid, how I am paid two or three times what some of my peers in grad school make, how I have a wonderful wife and children, and on and on. All of these things can seem to retroactively justify my good judgment.

What if all this preening masks a nagging sense that I would have been revealed as the fraud that I am? With a 3.49 GPA and no accomplishments to speak of, I never would have been accepted to any program of note. Even if through sheer good fortune, I make it into a good school, it would have been immediately obvious how much smarter and more talented my peers were than me. In fact, this was clear to me even in my time as an undergraduate — my friends who went on to attend schools like UChicago and Princeton had better grades than me, were way more disciplined than me, and were genuinely impressive people. I know the caliber of person who gets into programs like that. I think that somewhere deep inside me I knew I couldn't measure up. I didn’t deserve to go anywhere good. I was going to be left behind. Better to quit while I can and save face as some paradoxical martyr and visionary of the future of learning outside the academy, or whatever.

These are things that I tell myself now, in moments of melancholy, tinged with ugly notes of bitterness and self-pity. Writing on the internet, self-publishing a book, giving online lectures no one shows up to, working in the private sector to pay the bills… maybe it’s all a charade to cope with the fact that I’ve never put in the work to truly get good at anything. The only thing I ever poured myself into was talking about ideas, but even this I stopped pursuing the moment that it would really cost me something. While I didn't put my time or my energy (my life!) on the line for the discipline, I see that the people who did can now produce truly impressive work which furnishes evidence of a depth and clarity that can't be faked. The words "falling further behind" resonate in my mind, stirring up a manic sense of urgency which no amount of activity can assuage.

Rather than mastering a field or honing a craft, I’ve just accelerated my eclecticism, trying desperately to compensate for my lack of breadth and depth with an increasingly bewildering panoply of ideas and influences, becoming confusing and illegible to both myself and others. I show up and speak up in online communities where people are learning and exploring ideas in exciting ways, but I have the feeling that in those spaces I can get away with being sloppy. No one attacks you about how you cite your sources, how airtight your argumentation is, or whether you've read texts in the original language. This open and relaxed intellectual culture produces great things (I've seen them), and the fixation on these practices as essential to scholarship can become a toxic trait in its own right, but what happens when we drop these things which force us to "do the work?" In my case, it provides cover for me to pass as a better thinker than I really am, because I'm not challenged to put in the work behind the scenes.

Many people in the online spaces I frequent have done the work. They've paid the price of sitting in seminars, learning other languages, making barely any money, digesting the literature, producing peer-reviewed work, living with their noses in books for years, and foregoing family formation. I know this because they have the papers to prove it, but, more than that, it's patently obvious that their excellent insights and lively minds issue from this rich well of immersing themselves in the practice of reading, thinking, and writing. While I was sitting at the computer doing a job I hated, glancing at the clock, they were busy challenging themselves and going deeper. I got a bigger paycheck, sure, but the bills still arrived every month like ravens to carry away all the morsels, leaving nothing behind.

So, I’ve arrived at this point in my life where I feel empty-handed. Where is the deep well from which I can bless others? I find myself anxious, self-conscious, unhappy. I feel paralyzed by the competing senses that there are grand opportunities out there, if only I could seize them, but also that I have no skills or imagination to know where to begin finding such opportunities. Jumping between grandiose visions of myself and despair about my prospects, made all the worse by my sense that I'm dragging my family down with me rather than just laying the seeds of my own demise. I ask myself – What problems can I solve for others? What gifts do I have with which to bless others? What skills do I have to offer for the benefit of others? Perhaps only by arriving at this rock-bottom by asking myself these fundamental questions which push me beyond the tiny horizon of my momentary pleasure can I catch a glimpse of how to live a good life.