A few weeks ago, shielded from the bracing cold in a warm room in the HackCville clubhouse on Elliewood Avenue, I was conversing with my co-organizers for upcoming Creative Lock-In. We had finished discussing logistics for the event and were sharing stories from our winter break. One of my peers recounted that she had met a girl from California, who, promptly after introducing herself, had asked her whether she’d ever had an epiphany.
My friend was surprised and conceded that she had not. We were all amused: the notion of an epiphany seemed nonsensical, almost theatrical. After laughing and shaking our heads, talk soon turned to the future: two of the girls were fourth-years and voiced their anxiety over the daunting prospect of leaving the University. How would they adjust to adult life? Would they be successful?
What is success? As students in a large and prestigious University, success appears to be measured according to professional parameters: you graduate, get a good job (if not necessarily a career) and proceed to lucre and promotion, spending years perfecting an assertive yet obsequious attitude — I’m a go-getter who responds well to authority! — and churning out cover letters expressing a voracious ambition for nothing in particular. It is a success rooted in devotion to your work, centered on remaining focused and and building occupational trajectory.
It is not a success that is congruent with an epiphany, defined as an “illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.” Rather than illuminating, our success obscures, stubbornly rooted in white-collar promotion and individualism that perhaps allows us to be happy in the most immediate sense but leaves us bereft of purpose.
We become our work, because we do little else. Not only do Americans work long hours; we are more likely to work late at night or on weekends, times when people in other nations use to cultivate a sense of self outside of their profession.
The line between one’s professional and personal life is becoming ever finer. About one-fifth of Americans report working from home at least once a week, and that number is projected to rise. In the near future, many more Americans will be involved in so-called “flexible work” programs, where they will do what they do from a home office. Though perhaps more accommodating — work in your pajamas! — the home office never closes, trapping the employee in a limbo of always or never working or not-working. The erosion of the spatial division between work and home as a result of technological innovation is psychically mirrored. Where once you marked the physical distance between your private and professional lives, that distance no longer exists. Back in the day, you would file the last of your paperwork in the “Outbox,” pack up your briefcase, drive home and recline on your couch with a book, a neat whiskey and a pensive cigarette. (I get all of my historical information from “Mad Men.”)
The more we can work, the more we do work — and the less we can imagine doing anything else. Some economists claim Americans work so much to be able to consume more: more hours translates into more money, which means more stuff. We have become practiced consumers, yearning for that third television. Our evolution has progressed, as economists Luis Rayo and Gary Becker put it, “so that [we] have reference points that adjust upwards as [our] circumstances improve.”
Work, then, becomes a means to achieve a series of temporary materialistic goals, a game of moneyed hopscotch. Each iProduct becomes a proxy for the meaning we lack, and makes us jump faster into the next chalk-ringed box. And the faster we jump, the less time we have for ourselves, leading to a dearth of creativity and original thought. This, in turn, precludes the formation of meaning, which makes us anxious: so we jump.
A reconceptualization of success is therefore in order. People are not business cards. Work may ultimately add meaning to a life, but the purpose is not inherent in work. Jude, from “Across the Universe,” a beautiful film following college-age kids in 1960s America set to the soundtrack of the Beatles, puts it best: “Well, surely it’s not what you do, but the, uh… the way that you do it.”
If we live well, and kindly, and avoid the booby traps of insular thought and fruitless busy-ness as best we can — that is success.
Tamar Ziff is a Viewpoint writer.
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