Fluent Essays

I want you to imagine an audience who has not read what you have read.  Rather, imagine a peer who is at the same juncture of life as you are, or a parent who may be wondering what youre learning at college, or someone who is generally skeptical of a broad liberal arts education where youre asked to read writers like William James, perhaps someone who thinks that education should focus narrowly on career training. Write a letter to any of these people.  Make a case to them for the value of reading and thinking about the ideas discussed by James, Csikszentmihalyi, Wallace, or Hardy.  Make this case by sharing the most compelling ideas and how they have been important to your thinking. (The best letters will be able to integrate ideas from multiple writers.) If We Are So Rich, Why Arent We Happy? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Claremont Graduate University Ever since systematic thought has been recorded, the ques- tion of what makes men and women happy has been of central concern. Answers to this question have ranged from the materialist extreme of searching for happiness in ex- ternal conditions to the spiritual extreme claiming that happiness is the result of a mental attitude. Psychologists have recently rediscovered this topic. Research supports both the materialist and the mentalist positions, although the latter produces the stronger findings. The article fo- cuses in particular on one dimension of happiness: the flow experience, or the state of total involvement in an activity that requires complete concentration. Psychology is the heir to those sciences of manenvisioned by Enlightenment thinkers such as Gi-anbattista Vico, David Hume, and the baron de Montesquieu. One of their fundamental conclusions was that the pursuit of happiness constituted the basis of both individual motivation and social well-being. This insight into the human condition was condensed by John Locke (1690/1975) in his famous statement, That we call Good which is apt to. cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain (p. 2), whereas evil is the reverse—it is what causes or increases pain and diminishes pleasure. The generation of utilitarian philosophers that fol- lowed Locke, including David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Jeremy Bentham, construed a good society as that which allows the greatest happiness for the greatest number (Bentham, 1789/1970, pp. 64-65). This focus on pleasure or happiness as the touchstone of private and public life is by no means a brainchild of post-Reformation Europe. It was already present in the writings of the Greeks—for instance, Aristotle noted that although humankind values a great many things, such as health, fame, and possessions, because we think that they will make us happy, we value happiness for itself. Thus, happiness is the only intrinsic goal that people seek for its own sake, the bottom line of all desire. The idea that furthering the pursuit of happiness should be one of the responsibilities of a just government was of course enshrined later in the Declaration of Inde- pendence of the United States. Despite this recognition on the part of the human sciences that happiness is the fundamental goal of life, there has been slow progress in understanding what hap- piness itself consists of. Perhaps because the heyday of utilitarian philosophy coincided with the start of the enor- mous forward strides in public health and in the manufac- turing and distribution of goods, the majority of those who thought about such things assumed that increases in plea- sure and happiness would come from increased affluence, from greater control over the material environment. The great self-confidence of the Western technological nations, and especially of the United States, was in large part because of the belief that materialism—the prolongation of a healthy life, the acquisition of wealth, the ownership of consumer goods—would be the royal road to a happy life. However, the virtual monopoly of materialism as the dominant ideology has come at the price of a trivialization that has robbed it of much of the truth it once contained. In current use, it amounts to little more than a thoughtless hedonism, a call to do ones thing regardless of conse- quences, a belief that whatever feels good at the moment must be worth doing. This is a far cry from the original view of materialists, such as John Locke, who were aware of the futility of pursuing happiness without qualifications and who advo- cated the pursuit of happiness through prudence—making sure that people do not mistake imaginary happiness for real happiness. What does it mean to pursue happiness through pru- dence? Locke must have derived his inspiration from the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who 2,300 years ago already saw clearly that to enjoy a happy life, one must develop self-discipline. The materialism of Epicurus was solidly based on the ability to defer gratification. He claimed that although all pain was evil, this did not mean one should always avoid pain—for instance, it made sense to put up with pain now if one was sure to avoid thereby a greater pain later. He wrote to his friend Menoeceus The beginning and the greatest good . . . is prudence. For this reason prudence is more valuable even than philosophy: from it derive all the other virtues. Prudence teaches us how impossible Editors note. The January 2000 issue of this journal is a special issue devoted to articles on optimal human functioning, happiness, and positive psychology. The issue was guest edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin E. P. Seligman. Authors note. This research was funded in part by the Spencer Foun- dation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. However, none of my conclusions are neces- sarily endorsed by these foundations. I also thank Jeremy P. Hunter and Rustin Wolfe for help with some of the data analyses mentioned in this article. Finally, I thank Jonathan Baron, David Myers, Barry Schwartz, and Martin E. P. Seligman for suggestions that have improved this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mi- haly Csikszentmihalyi, Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University, 1021 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711. October 1999 • American Psychologist Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/99/S2.00 Vol. 54, No. 10, 821-827 821 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi it is to live pleasantly without living wisely, virtuously, and justly . . . take thought, then, for these and kindred matters day and night.... You shall be disturbed neither waking nor sleep- ing, and you shall live as a god among men. (Epicurus of Samos, trans. 1998, p. 48) This is not the image of epicureanism held by most people. The popular view holds that pleasure and material comforts should be grasped wherever they can, and that these alone will improve the quality of ones life. As the fruits of technology have ripened and the life span has lengthened, the hope that increased material rewards would bring about a better life seemed for a while justified. Now, at the end of the second millennium, it is be- coming clear that the solution is not that simple. Inhabitants of the wealthiest industrialized Western nations are living in a period of unprecedented riches, in conditions that previous generations would have considered luxuriously comfortable, in relative peace and security, and they are living on the average close to twice as long as their great- grandparents did. Yet, despite all these improvements in material conditions, it does not seem that people are so much more satisfied with their lives than they were before. The Ambiguous Relationship Between Material and Subjective Well-Being The indirect evidence that those of us living in the United States today are not happier than our ancestors were comes from national statistics of social pathology—the figures that show the doubling and tripling of violent crimes, family breakdown, and psychosomatic complaints since at least the halfway mark of the century. If material well- being leads to happiness, why is it that neither capitalist nor socialist solutions seem to work? Why is it that the crew on the flagship of capitalist affluence is becoming increasingly addicted to drugs for falling asleep, for waking up, for staying slim, for escaping boredom and depression? Why are suicides and loneliness such a problem in Sweden, which has applied the best of socialist principles to provide material security to its people? Direct evidence about the ambiguous relationship of material and subjective well-being comes from studies of happiness that psychologists and other social scientists have finally started to pursue, after a long delay in which research on happiness was considered too soft for scientists to undertake. It is true that these surveys are based on self-reports and on verbal scales that might have different meanings depending on the culture and the language in which they are written. Thus, the results of culturally and methodologically circumscribed studies need to be taken with more than the usual grain of salt. Nevertheless, at this point they represent the state of the art—an art that will inevitably become more precise with time. Although cross-national comparisons show a reason- able correlation between the wealth of a country as mea- sured by its gross national product and the self-reported happiness of its inhabitants (Inglehart, 1990), the relation- ship is far from perfect. The inhabitants of Germany and Japan, for instance, nations with more than twice the gross national product of Ireland, report much lower levels of happiness. Comparisons within countries show an even weaker relationship between material and subjective well-being. Diener, Horwitz, and Emmons (1985), in a study of some of the wealthiest individuals in the United States, found their levels of happiness to be barely above that of indi- viduals with average incomes. After following a group of lottery winners, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978) concluded that despite their sudden increase in wealth, their happiness was no different from that of people struck by traumas, such as blindness or paraplegia. That having more money to spend does not necessarily bring about greater subjective well-being has also been docu- mented on a national scale by David G. Myers (1993). His calculations show that although the adjusted value of after- tax personal income in the United States has more than doubled between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of people describing themselves as very happy has remained un- changed at 30\% (Myers, 1993, pp. 41-42). In the American Psychologist s January 2000 special issue on positive psychology, David G. Myers (in press) and Ed Diener (in press) discuss in great detail the lack of relationship between material and subjective well-being, so I will not belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that in current longitudinal studies of a representative sample of almost 1,000 American adolescents conducted with the experience sampling method and supported by the Sloan Foundation, a consistently low negative relationship be- tween material and subjective well-being has been found (Csikszentmihalyi & Schneider, in press). For instance, the reported happiness of teenagers (measured several times a day for a week in each of three years) shows a very significant inverse relationship to the social class of the community in which teens live, to their parents level of 822 October 1999 • American Psychologist education, and to their parents occupational status. Chil- dren of the lowest socioeconomic strata generally report the highest happiness, and upper middle-class children gener- ally report the least happiness. Does this mean that more affluent children are in fact less happy, or does it mean that the norms of their social class prescribe that they should present themselves as less happy? At this point, we are unable to make this vital distinction. Yet despite the evidence that the relationship between material wealth and happiness is tenuous at best, most people still cling to the notion that their problems would be resolved if they only had more money. In a survey con- ducted at the University of Michigan, when people were asked what would improve the quality of their lives, the first and foremost answer was more money (Campbell, 1981). Given these facts, it seems that one of the most im- portant tasks psychologists face is to better understand the dynamics of happiness and to communicate these findings to the public at large. If the main justification of psychol- ogy is to help reduce psychic distress and support psychic well-being, then psychologists should try to prevent the disillusionment that comes when people find out that they have wasted their lives struggling to reach goals that cannot satisfy them. Psychologists should be able to provide al- ternatives that in the long run will lead to a more rewarding life. Why Material Rewards Do Not Necessarily Make People Happy To answer this question, Ill start by reflecting on why material rewards, which people regard so highly, do not necessarily provide the happiness expected from them. The first reason is the well-documented escalation of expecta- tions. If people strive for a certain level of affluence think- ing that it will make them happy, they find that on reaching it, they become very quickly habituated, and at that point they start hankering for the next level of income, property, or good health. In a 1987 poll conducted by the Chicago Tribune, people who earned less than $30,000 a year said that $50,000 would fulfill their dreams, whereas those with yearly incomes of over $100,000 said they would need $250,000 to be satisfied (Pay Nags, 1987; Rich Think Big, 1987; see also Myers, 1993, p. 57). Several studies have confirmed that goals keep getting pushed upward as soon as a lower level is reached. It is not the objective size of the reward but its difference from ones adaptation level that provides subjective value (e.g., Davis, 1959; Michalos, 1985; Parducci, 1995). The second reason is related to the first. When re- sources are unevenly distributed, people evaluate their pos- sessions not in terms of what they need to live in comfort, but in comparison with those who have the most. Thus, the relatively affluent feel poor in comparison with the very rich and are unhappy as a result. This phenomenon of relative deprivation (Martin, 1981; Williams, 1975) seems to be fairly universal and well-entrenched. In the United States, the disparity in incomes between the top percentage and the rest is getting wider; this does not bode well for the future happiness of the population. The third reason is that even though being rich and famous might be rewarding, nobody has ever claimed that material rewards alone are sufficient to make us happy. Other conditions—such as a satisfying family life, having intimate friends, having time to reflect and pursue diverse interests—have been shown to be related to happiness (Myers, 1993; Myers & Diener, 1995; Veenhoven, 1988). There is no intrinsic reason why these two sets of re- wards—the material and the socioemotional—should be mutually exclusive. In practice, however, it is very difficult to reconcile their conflicting demands. As many psychol- ogists from William James (1890) to Herbert A. Simon (1969) have remarked, time is the ultimate scarce resource, and the allocation of time (or more precisely, of attention over time) presents difficult choices that eventually deter- mine the content and quality of our lives. This is why professional and business persons find it so difficult to balance the demands of work and family, and why they so rarely feel that they have not shortchanged one of these vital aspects of their lives. Material advantages do not readily translate into social and emotional benefits. In fact, to the extent that most of ones psychic energy becomes invested in material goals, it is typical for sensitivity to other rewards to atrophy. Friend- ship, art, literature, natural beauty, religion, and philosophy become less and less interesting. The Swedish economist Stephen Linder was the first to point out that as income and therefore the value of ones time increases, it becomes less and less rational to spend it on anything besides making money—or on spending it conspicuously (Linder, 1970). The opportunity costs of playing with ones child, reading poetry, or attending a family reunion become too high, and so one stops doing such irrational things. Eventually a person who only responds to material rewards becomes blind to any other kind and loses the ability to derive happiness from other sources (see also Benedikt, 1999; Scitovsky, 1975). As is true of addiction in general, mate- rial rewards at first enrich the quality of life. Because of this, we tend to conclude that more must be better. But life is rarely linear; in most cases, what is good in small quantities becomes commonplace and then harmful in larger doses. Dependence on material goals is so difficult to avoid in part because our culture has progressively eliminated every alternative that in previous times used to give mean- ing and purpose to individual lives. Although hard com- parative data are lacking, many historians (e.g., Polanyi, 1957) have claimed that past cultures provided a greater variety of attractive models for successful lives. A person could be valued and admired because he or she was a saint, a bon vivant, a wise person, a good craftsman, a brave patriot, or an upright citizen. Nowadays the logic of reduc- ing everything to quantifiable measures has made the dollar the common metric by which to evaluate every aspect of human action. The worth of a person and of a persons accomplishments are determined by the price they fetch in the marketplace. It is useless to claim that a painting is October 1999 • American Psychologist 823 good art unless it gets high bids at Sothebys, nor can we claim that someone is wise unless he or she can charge five figures for a consultation. Given the hegemony of material rewards in our cultures restricted repertoire, it is not sur- prising that so many people feel that their only hope for a happy life is to amass all the earthly goods they can lay hands on. To recapitulate, there are several reasons for the lack of a direct relationship between material well-being and happiness. Two of them are sociocultural: (a) The growing disparity in wealth makes even the reasonably affluent feel poor, (b) This relative deprivation is exacerbated by a cultural factor, namely, the lack of alternative values and a wide range of successful lifestyles that could compensate for a single, zero-sum hierarchy based on dollars and cents. Two of the reasons are more psychological: (a) When we evaluate success, our minds use a strategy of escalating expectations, so that few people are ever satisfied for long with what they possess or what they have achieved, (b) As more psychic energy is invested in material goals, less of it is left to pursue other goals that are also necessary for a life in which one aspires to happiness. None of this is intended to suggest that the material rewards of wealth, health, comfort, and fame detract from happiness. Rather, after a certain minimum threshold— which is not stable but varies with the distribution of resources in the given society—they seem to be irrelevant. Of course, most people will still go on from cradle to grave believing that if they could only have had more money, or good looks, or lucky breaks, they would have achieved that elusive state. Psychological Approaches to Happiness If people are wrong about the relation between material conditions and how happy they are, then what does matter? The alternative to the materialist approach has always been something that used to be called a spiritual and nowadays we may call a psychological solution. This approach is based on the premise that if happiness is a mental state, people should be able to control it through cognitive means. Of course, it is also possible to control the mind pharmacologically. Every culture has developed drugs ranging from peyote to heroin to alcohol in an effort to improve the quality of experience by direct chemical means. In my opinion, however, chemically induced well- being lacks a vital ingredient of happiness: the knowledge that one is responsible for having achieved it. Happiness is not something that happens to people but something that they make happen. In some cultures, drugs ingested in a ritual, ceremonial context appear to have lasting beneficial effects, but in such cases the benefits most likely result primarily from per- forming the ritual, rather than from the chemicals per se. Thus, in discussing psychological approaches to happiness, I focus exclusively on processes in which human con- sciousness uses its self-organizing ability to achieve a positive internal state through its own efforts, with minimal reliance on external manipulation of the nervous system. There have been many very different ways to program the mind to increase happiness or at least to avoid being unhappy. Some religions have done it by promising an eternal life of happiness follows our earthly existence. Others, on realizing that most unhappiness is the result of frustrated goals and thwarted desires, teach people to give up desires altogether and thus avoid disappointment. Still others, such as Yoga and Zen, have developed complex techniques for controlling the stream of thoughts and feel- ings, thereby providing the means for shutting out negative content from consciousness. Some of the most radical and sophisticated disciplines for self-control of the mind were those developed in India, culminating in the Buddhist teachings 25 centuries ago. Regardless of its truth content, faith in a supernatural order seems to enhance subjective well-being: Surveys generally show a low but consistent correlation between religiosity and happiness (Csikszent- mihalyi & Patton, 1997; Myers, 1993). Contemporary psychology has developed several so- lutions that share some of the premises of these ancient traditions but differ drastically in content and detail. What is common to them is the assumption that cognitive tech- niques, attributions, attitudes, and perceptual styles can change the effects of material conditions on consciousness, help restructure an individuals goals, and consequently improve the quality of experience. Maslows (1968, 1971) self-actualization, Block and Blocks (1980) ego-resil- iency, Dieners (1984, in press) positive emotionality, An- tonovskys (1979) salutogenic approach, Seemans (1996) personality integration, Deci and Ryans (1985; Ryan & Deci, in press) autonomy, Scheier and Carvers (1985) dispositional optimism, and Seligmans (1991) learned op- timism are only a few of the theoretical concepts developed recently, many with their own preventive and therapeutic implications. The Experience of Flow My own addition to this list is the concept of the autotelic experience, or flow, and of the autotelic personality. The concept describes a particular kind of experience that is so engrossing and enjoyable that it becomes autotelic, that is, worth doing for its own sake even though it may have no consequence outside itself. Creative activities, music, sports, games, and religious rituals are typical sources for this kind of experience. Autotelic persons are those who have such flow experiences relatively often, regardless of what they are doing. Of course, we never do anything purely for its own sake. Our motives are always a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic considerations. For instance, composers may write music because they hope to sell it and pay the bills, because they want to become famous, because their self- images depends on writing songs—all of these being ex- trinsic motives. But if the composers are motivated only by these extrinsic rewards, they are missing an essential in- gredient. In addition to these rewards, they could also enjoy writing music for its own sake—in which case, the activity would become autotelic. My studies (e.g., Csikszentmiha- lyi, 1975, 1996, 1997) have suggested that happiness de- 824 October 1999 • American Psychologist William James WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT? WilliamJames (1842-1910) was a renowned psychologist, philosopher, and popular lecturer. He is probably remembered most for his 1905 Gifford Lec­ tures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, and for his Pragmatism, one of the foundational works in a distinctively American school of philoso­ phy that he helped to establish, along with his contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce and his heir, John Dewey. The following essay, What Makes a Life Significant?, exhibits his characteristically exploratory and accessible style, having originally been delivered as a lecture to college students. In the essay, James first suggests that a significant life must overcome great resistance in a struggle against malevolent forces; such a life is led by only a few heroes or heroines, who attain immortal fame. Later, he revises that view to suggest that a significant life is possible for everyone, perhaps especially for those ordinary laborers who struggle daily to earn a living in ways that are often exemplary. Which of the two views seems more plausible to you? Later in the essay, James suggests that ideals are a large part, at least half, of what makes lives significant. Are some ideals more worthy of our lifes devotion than others? Is there any way of distinguishing between admirable devotion to an ideal and dangerous fanaticism? As an example of a struggle that incorporates ideals and that is large enough to engage human energies and efforts, James discusses the labor question, the effort to provide fair wages and conditions for workers, which was very much alive during the period in which he wrote. Which issues, ques­ tions, or struggles are most worthy of human devotion and energy today? ... A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake [ a center for the arts and edu­ cation in upstate New York]. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, William James, \1/hat Makes a Life Significant?, in The Writings of William James, ed. John McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 645-60. 16 William James · What Makes a Life Significant? one feels ones self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intel­ ligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music - a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicy­ cling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special dub-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners. I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this com­ munity so refined that icecream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, - I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity. Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the realization - on a small, sample 17 PROLOGUE scale of course - of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hos­ tile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, ifl could. So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, - the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight any where, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet get­ ting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still - this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the places historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field. Such absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed, then, a suf­ ficient explanation for Chautauquas flatness and lack of zest. But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the 18 William James · What Makes a Life Significant? romancers or the poets pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale. Was in Gesang s oll leben muss im Leben untergehn. [That which should live in song must perish in life.) Even now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life. With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is go­ ing up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain. As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sus­ tainers, these the very parents of our life. Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in looking at the peasant­ women, in from the country on their business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and 19 PROLOGUE short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, stump­ ing through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote; -and yet at bottom, when you came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared. If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi [Leo Tolstoy, the Russian au­ thor], you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious natural man. Where now is ourTolstoi, I said, to bring the truth of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched culture -as it calls itself-is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide-bound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling [prominent authors of the time] be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborers existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice? And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight into life. In Gods eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of clean­ liness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels oflife, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole busi­ ness; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show. 20 f .. William James · What Makes a Life Significant? Thus are mens lives levelled up as well as levelled down, -levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to arise -the Buddha, the Christ, or some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi -to redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes one stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent increase. This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great con­ tent. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal way. Tolstois levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of mel­ ancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled My Confession, which led the way to his more specifically religious works. In his masterpiece War and Peace, - assuredly the greatest of human novels, -the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoi to let God into the world again for the reader. Poor lit­ tle Karataieff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end. The more, writes Tolstoi in the work My Confession, the more I ex­ amined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibil­ ity of life .... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so .... The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with joy .... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with 21 PROLOGUE the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life. Those who understand lifes meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me -more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a new signifi­ cance. I understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working pop­ ulace, of that multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted it. In a similar way does [Robert Louis] Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind. What a wonderful thing, he writes, is this Man! How surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives, -who should have blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? ... [Yet) it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheer­ ful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; ... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical em­ ployments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, ... often re­ paying the worlds scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple; ... everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the ensign of mans ineffectual goodness, - ah! ifl could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls. 22 David Foster Wallace, Kenyon Commencement Address Background This speech was originally delivered by David Foster Wallace as the 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. Speech Transcript There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, hows the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” If at this moment youre worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please dont be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So lets get concrete… A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Heres one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because its so socially repulsive, but its pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience youve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other peoples thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please dont worry that Im getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue-its a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. By way of example, lets say its an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day youre tired, and youre stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember theres no food at home-you havent had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. Its the end of the workday, and the traffics very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course its the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the stores hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and its pretty much the last place you want to be, but you cant just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit stores crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there arent enough checkout lanes open even though its the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you cant take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register. Anyway, you finally get to the checkout lines front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesnt fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I dont make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, Im going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and its going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: Ive worked really hard all day and Im starved and tired and I cant even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people. Or, of course, if Im in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our childrens children will despise us for wasting all the futures fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth… Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesnt have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. Its the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when Im operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the worlds priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: Its not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and hes trying to rush to the hospital, and hes in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on. Again, please dont think that Im giving you moral advice, or that Im saying youre “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because its hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if youre like me, some days you wont be able to do it, or you just flat-out wont want to. But most days, if youre aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe shes not usually like this; maybe shes been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband whos dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but its also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If youre automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that arent pointless and annoying. But if youve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuffs necessarily true: The only thing thats capital-T True is that you get to decide how youre going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesnt. You get to decide what to worship… Because heres something else thats true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. Its the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-its been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that theyre evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. Theyre the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that thats what youre doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesnt sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please dont dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.” It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now. I wish you way more than luck.