Stuck In The Mud
Let’s talk about greatness. Michael Jordan. Zinedine Zidane. Tiger Woods. Oprah Winfrey. Fred Hampton. Nikola Tesla. Albert Einstein. Charles Bukowski. Now I imagine some of you are looking at me through the screen, asking me who the hell Charles Bukowski is. “Who is Charles Bukowski?”. There you go, you just asked me, and I’m incredibly glad you did.
It’s hard to fit what greatness is into one box. It comes in so many different forms and it is so boundless that it is hard to quantify greatness. But you just know it when you see it. You can’t give evidence as to why J.K. Rowling is a great apart from throwing the Philosopher’s Stone at whatever mudblood is asking for it. It is just inherent in what they do. For some, it comes with incredible amounts of hard work and adversity. For some, almost none. Many also fall somewhere in between. Ultimately, these people are so extraordinary in their own ways that they are heralded by society as idols. They are what so many of us aspire to be. And that is what pushes some of us to the top. It’s also what keeps many of us stuck in the mud.
Since greatness is determined by society, there are unfortunately no criteria that one must meet to become a great. You have to face a tribunal of a few hundred million people, maybe more, who will decide if you’re worthy of greatness. If you achieve it, you will be immortalised. Ernest Becker explains why we wish to be immortalised very well. He states there are two versions of the self: the physical self which eats, poops and aches, and the inner self, which is who you think you are conceptually. Your thoughts, feelings and overall self-image. Death is something which scares us all. Maybe not consciously, but when staring over the edge of a cliff or the barrel of a 12 gauge, we’re not going to want to go just yet. The idea of us no longer being here scares us. Just think about the idea of you just coming to a dead stop when you die. All memories of you, everything you built and worked towards, literally the whole concept of you. Dead. It’s unsettling for most of us. Here is where it gets interesting…
We see death as mostly a physical phenomenon. Our bodies die and biodegrade or are cremated etc. But this may not be the case for our inner selves. Our inner selves can live on in the memories of others. And Becker argues this is why we engage in what we call ‘immortality projects’. We are so afraid of physical death and the concept of not being here anymore that we try to immortalise our inner selves. That’s why humans obsess over being the first human or group or country to do something. We write biographies, stick our names on buildings and name inventions after ourselves. Because at least that way, we feel we’ll never die in some respect.
The only individual on that list who isn’t regarded as a great by most is Bukowski. But he is the greatest in my eyes. Because he developed a genius philosophy, which to me is one of the greatest antidotes to the human condition.
“We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.” — Charles Bukowski. Just look at the man’s eloquence.
Charles Bukowski pioneered the philosophy of “Don’t try”. It seems like a very Zen Buddhist sentiment, but it is very true and applicable to today’s society. We spend a lot of time trying to be great for the sake of immortalising ourselves, hoping people remember us, trying to court approval from the world. But because of this we spend a lot of time doing things which we don’t want to. This year, I applied to the University of Oxford to study PPE. I love philosophy in particular, and I like PPE as a degree, but there wasn’t much reason for me to apply to Oxford other than for the name of the establishment. Just for the sake of being able to say I got in. And for many of us, that is why we want to be great. Just for the sake of being great. But that’s not how it works. You don’t approach something trying to become a great. You approach something because you genuinely love it, and you want to give it your all at every moment. It’s literally there every moment of every day. We feel glimpses of it. It crawls under our skin and inhabits the air we breathe. We can just feel it is right for us.
For me, that is writing. I never considered myself a creative person, I thought I was a massively left-brained, logical person with no ability to create. Only to break things down. Then, when I realised that creativity is in all of us in some shape of form, it led me to writing. I believe all humans love art. We exist largely for its sake. Art can be literal painting, it can be writing, speaking, rapping, directing, designing, sports, cooking food, reviewing books, deep sea diving, or a million other things. If you are truly passionate about something, it becomes your art. You get a little glimmer in your eye every time you speak about it. It’s not always great, but you do it regardless. When you’re not doing it, you can feel a magnetic pull from your subconscious irking you to do that thing. It may not even be one thing. It may be many things. It could be languages and academia at the same time. It doesn’t matter what it is. But you will know.
I want to reiterate the point that it does not matter what it is. So many of us don’t ever pursue the things we want to do because we’ll be looked down upon, or there’s not much security offered by it, or a million other reasons. This is a matter I am still very much dealing with to this day. It could seem ludicrous to turn down Oxford, or to refuse to go down a lucrative corporate route offering six figure salaries. But to me, it seems even worse to not spend time doing the things you absolutely love. My understanding is that it is possible to do both. Bukowski would work at the post office by day, and come home and write all night. It is a matter of balance. But the crucial topic at hand is not about where it fits in, it’s about fitting it in full stop. Just taking time out to do the things that we love, and trusting ourselves in pursuing it in some way. Not feeling guilty that we love what we love, and understanding that we deserve to pursue the things we can feel tugging at our legs day in and day out.
Anyone you look at who is great at something, you’ll find that they loved it. Because you have to be passionate about something to be great it at. And I mean relatively great. You can hate something and be better than anyone else, but you may be so far from your own potential. You can only go all the way if you love what you’re doing. So whether you’re old or young, take the time to realise that it’s not about the bloody money. You don’t love money, or the lifestyle, or any of that. You just tell yourself that because you hope money will someday fill the hole where passion is. It won’t, and you can only run away for so long. Find any celebrity or millionaire who hates their job and ask them if it’s worth it. And then go find anyone who loves what they do. No matter how poor or unstable their lives are, their lives have substance. They live their lives for some reason as opposed to just filling the gap with things that sound good or seem good in concept, like greatness and money. We’ll all be long dead and gone someday, so don’t stress what happens in between too much. Don’t worry about people remembering you. Because one day there will be no one to remember you. Just do what you enjoy. Reads books you like, not ones that people say make you smart. Because at the end of the line, you’ll thank yourself much more for all of the time you spent doing what you enjoy than you will for the time you wasted sacrificing for some bullshit.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Sorry to everyone getting PTSD from English Lit
For those deep in the working class like myself, it may be hard to say ‘do what you love’ when everyone is struggling and stricken by poverty. I understand that you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. If you want to put those you care about in a better position, I understand and respect that. But in my opinion, those who love you would never want you to sacrifice your hopes and dreams just to make their lives easier. Our parents struggle not so we can give them money and houses one day, but so we can actually have the opportunity to pursue something that means something to us. That when asked about it, a warm smile appears in our face. Life will always involve struggle, twenty cars or one, six million fans or none. Problems will always exist. You just have to find what is worth enduring those problems for. That’s where true beauty in this life is found.
I watch this video on Bukowski and his philosophy very frequently, as a comforting reminder to remove all of the pressure on my self to ‘be’ great. Because I am already great. Link here — https://youtu.be/eMTDAHK-tkE
