FOLLOW YOUR BLISS - the idea of devoting your life to doing the thing that you most love, even if that means ___________________________________________________________________________________________

since this struck a chord with so many people

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

what position does this idea have in 2013. is it still something we should be unreservedly, unqualifiedly telling kids in high school. where is the safety net.

we should be teaching the idea of karma - what you give to others, you give to yourself. the rest is subjective.

Etsy makes this a viable notion.

i vote that we change this saying to FOLLOW YOUR BLOGS

i was thinking about spinning off from the Onion thread.

so many difficult issues here. the needs of the many vs the needs of the few. what constitutes a good or happy life. what Philip Larkin said about what you want vs what you get. entitlement, privilege, all those good old ILX footballs. i think these are the biggest questions we shd ask ourselves, really.

and cos it's knots on knots on knots i don't have a total grasp on the answers. what i feel, what i talk to my children or other young people about, is the importance of finding a way of living that fulfils them. the extreme end of that drive might be solipsism or narcissism, but i believe in some way that your first obligation in life is to yourself, or rather that it's not possible to live sanely for a long time without following that obligation.

too much too disjointed to write all at once, feel more comfortable with conversation than an essay. does the world owe us a living? about as much as we owe the world our cooperation, i reckon.

http://kfan.tumblr.com/post/45910246222/ok-by-now-youve-seen-this-article-in-the-onion

your dreams and ambitions are in flux and it might be impossible to determine where those things belong wholly to you and where they're produced by the people around you, both loved ones and society as a wider network.

that Kevin Fanning post says "we have our values wrong" and then says our values are right but we need to schedule them better. i think the first sentence was broadly true.

in a lot of ways me even telling you what your values should be isn't so much wrong on a moral or political level as just plain Quixotic.

what i feel, what i talk to my children or other young people about, is the importance of finding a way of living that fulfils them

yeah I mean, I think this is the first mover in this philosophy. you ask anybody in the_west, what is the goal of life? the goal of life is to be happy.

okay, if the goal of life is to be happy, then how do people achieve that?

by doing what they love.

out of all the things that people love, which of those things should they do?

the one that allows them to earn a living.

but nothing demands that analytical leap be made! nothing demands it. such a seductive conclusion, though. but so many gaps, pitfalls, perilous crevasses in between.

following your bliss seems in part like a response to the ye ole existential crisis that we have to spend most of our waking lives working. so a way of getting control of that terrible thought the answer is: follow your TRUE PASSION™ in life, even if it has utterly no value to the world and you're terrible at it.

http://i.imgur.com/7miqE39.jpg

there's a definite problem around the idea of a happy life that's unique to secular thought i think, maybe "western" secular thought in particular. a lot of 20th century literature deals with the idea that the pursuit of happiness leads to lack of fulfilment. a bog standard "life is hard, deal with it" is no response at all tho.

yeah I had a post typed out about the idea of a happy life being so the_west-flecked.

seems to me like, you could define a good life as a life where you were able to be relatively free from, uh, slings and arrows - where your bills were usually paid on time, where you had enough resources to deal with tragedies / medical problems / etc. and to the extent that money is involved with the conception of a good life, that's about as much usefulness as i'm willing to give it

I'll summarise what I said before:

If I can't do it 'properly', I'm not doing it.

i re-read some of Kevin Fanning's blogpost and it was better than i thought. "Maybe it’s not useful to define one person as the garbage collector and one person as the singer. Maybe everyone is a lot of things." That's good.

a lot of my thinking about stuff like this is prompted by working and socialising with disabled people, many of whom are locked out of a common conception of "living your dreams" but who seem to me to have as varied an experience of life and what it can be as anybody else does.

yeah there's def a whiff of 'if you're not doing it big you're not doing it right' in the air

the last thing to make me have ~thoughts~ about this was when i watched whateverest http://vimeo.com/58444378

Not even 'big', just 'properly'..

i reckon the source of the problem is people reaching 30 and realising they didn't bother to do what they want or point themselves towards it early enough.

it's never too late but like, it's also far easier the younger you are to follow dreams, because you have nothing to lose. like i am studying drama (a diploma) at night at the moment, and it's going great, really reinvigorated me, but i do envy the kids of 18 doing it who are just like "yeah of course i'm going to university to study drama" - and why wouldn't they, they have no job, no nothing, no commitments.

my job is my only commitment but it def is harder to walk away from whatever k a year to way less, or nothing - comfort erodes passion etc.

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is. It's unrealistic to expect that every moment of the day is going to be fascinating, although that's probably as true for 'bliss' careers as it is for being an office monkey but it should be possible to combine most jobs with a decent standard of living. The challenge is to address things like work / life balance, employment rights, affordable family accommodation, easy commuting, home-based-working, and so on, so the bits of our day that aren't taken up with fun things aren't making us so justifiably angry and we have more time away from work to focus on the things that matter most to us.

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is.

amassing capital is unpleasant :)))))

following your bliss is a way to shift responsibility to the individuals and away from society in providing a higher quality of life. miserable working 50 hours a week, never get to see your family, unfulfilled in the consumerist hellscape we call America 2.0? it's your fault cuz you ain't LIVIN THE DREAM like me, baby.

and so comes forth properity gurus, gettin' it done books, and lifehacker

i'd argue that the unpleasantness of work is directly related to the way we organise it and the way we organise our economies, but that leads to more questions - whether it's possible or desirable to change those things, how much of yourself you can sacrifice on that altar, whether you have an ethical duty to try to make things better for other people, including those not yet born, who mightn't feel the same way (or might have more tolerance for situations they don't like).

if a society that revolves around amassing commodities is causing you unhappiness, how do you persuade the people who think it's the only game in town - for whatever reason - to change it?

this thread = first world problems

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is.

about half the time i just think "wtf is this stupid meaningless shit" - when i'm doing stuff i like that also requires "work", like a play, i can get frustrated but my mind is expanding or i'm being challenged and i feel this so it's worth it.

the vast majority of people have fairly uninspiring jobs, from what i can tell.

xpost that's what she said

Etsy makes this a viable notion.

― your fretless ways (Eazy), Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:41 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure, if you make physical things and somehow can make/sell a bunch per month at a premium price, at which point you could probably have your own business, anyway.

what if my bliss is sitting outdoors or looking at art or arguing on ilx?

this thread = first world problems

― Mordy, Thursday, March 21, 2013 10:18 AM (37 seconds ago) Bookmark

wasn't gonna be the one who said it

what if my bliss is smoking weed, watching tv, listening to music and eating ice cream? life is so unfair.

Mordy, on one level that's not wrong, on a lot of levels it's dismissive bullshit that almost looks like you haven't read anything anybody's written.

some ppl have the luxury of being artists, musicians, poets, etc. that's like .01% of our population. the rest of us have the luxury of working at jobs that don't inspire us to feed ourselves and our families and to live.

i mean yeah lol life isn't going to come as pre-packaged satisfaction but "only first worlders think about quality of life or the purpose of life or how to live well"?

^

sorry i maybe should've included etsy kitsch designer in that first list so as to indicate that i am taking the posts before mine v seriously

how to live well in sierra leone means something very different than how to live well written on your laptop on ilx

some ppl have the luxury of being artists, musicians, poets, etc. that's like .01% of our population. the rest of us have the luxury of working at jobs that don't inspire us to feed ourselves and our families and to live.

true, but the path from one to the other is not some impossible bridge or something. lots of people cross it.

plus you can also make sacrifices to go some way towards more satisfaction with job. if you want to earn less, probably.

this guy has a family he supports and he claims we're the privileged ones

how to live well in sierra leone means something very different than how to live well written on your laptop on ilx

would you say it was more noble?

this is a lot bigger question than "why can't i be a rock star?" imo, even tho for some people it might be reducible to that.

even then, it isn't necessarily wholly selfish or wholly pointless to think "why can i not live differently and why is the life i live making me feel empty?" you could argue that those questions are entirely the problem of the person asking them but that certainly isn't the only way of approaching them.

props to anyone spending a lot of time and energy on the things they love most without caring if it actually elevates them at all (social adulation, financially etc.)...if they actually exist. i do wonder what that is like.

who's value is it, anyway, to "follow your bliss"? it's from people who it's either worked out for, or have some stake in this value (life gurus, people who want to maintain the status quo, etc.). this whole idea may not even have any actual value for 99.9% of people considering its sources, it's like we only place value on it for ourselves because it comes from authority, fits into our cultural narrative, etc.

if we weren't aware of this idea, would we even be worrying about it? wtf is "bliss" anyway.

props to anyone spending a lot of time and energy on the things they love most without caring if it actually elevates them at all (social adulation, financially etc.)...if they actually exist. i do wonder what that is like.

totally.

tbh, going back to the onion article, you can actually do a hobby pretty seriously in evenings and at weekends.

when Socrates said that the unexamined life isn't worth living he may have been hyping his latest book i guess

NV sharivari local garda and mordy all otm

The unexamined life is totalky worth living if examination of life isnt your bag, mileage varies

i think that's right, i wasn't so much agreeing with Socrates' line as pointing out that being dissatisfied with yr lot is hardly a recent phenomenon. at the same time the guy was the product of an aristocratic slave-owning society so idk

i think your conception of any possible afterlife must impact on your valuation of life in some ways too, allowing for the fact that most of us probably have indistinct or fuzzy notions of death and beyond.

I think there's something to be said about balance or fulfillment rather than bliss alone. I think I'd feel completely miserable if I did some of my free-time activities all the time.

Belief in working towards long term goals feeds into this p snugly imo, something ive not rly ever gone for myself but which works out for a lot of ppl who were probly raised right or w/e

^ the booming voice of capital

moishe postone has been blowing my mind re marx + capitalism btw and i want to share this amazing conclusion from: http://obeco.no.sapo.pt/mpt.htm

In Marx's mature works, then, the notion of the centrality of labor to social life is not a transhistorical proposition. It does not refer to the fact that material production is always a precondition of social life. Nor should it be taken as meaning that material production is the most essential dimension of social life in general, of even of capitalism in particular. Rather, it refers to the historically specific constitution by labor in capitalism of the social relations that fundamentally characterize that society. In other words, Marx analyzes labor in capitalism as constituting a historically determinate form of social mediation which is the ultimate social ground of the basic features of modernity -- in particular, its overarching historical dynamic. Rather than positing the social primacy of material production, Marx's mature theory seeks to show the primacy in capitalism of a form of social mediation (constituted by "abstract labor") that molds both the process of material production ("concrete labor") and consumption.

Labor in capitalism, then, is not only labor as we transhistorically and commonsensically understand it, according to Marx, but is a historically specific socially-mediating activity. Hence its products -- commodity, capital -- are both concrete labor products and objectified forms of social mediation. According to this analysis, the social relations that most basically characterize capitalist society are very different from the qualitatively specific, overt social relations -- such as kinship relations or relations of personal or direct domination -- which characterize non-capitalist societies. Although the latter kind of social relations continue to exist in capitalism, what ultimately structures that society is a new, underlying level of social relations that is constituted by labor. Those relations have a peculiar quasi-objective, formal character and are dualistic -- they are characterized by the opposition of an abstract, general, homogeneous dimension and a concrete, particular, material dimension, both of which appear to be "natural," rather than social, and condition social conceptions of natural reality.

The abstract character of the social mediation underlying capitalism is also expressed in the form of wealth dominant in that society.

It's about more than amassing commodities. I figure that I can remain in the bottom third of incomes relatively comfortably if I don't desire commodities and obscene luxuries - and not have children. I'm okay with that trade-off because I don't want kids to start with, but it's a pretty shitty bargain for a large chunk of people.

Aside from work-related issues re: the Onion piece, I don't know that westerners take into account the amount of time they spend consuming (TV, movies, games) rather than doing, and that's a fairly recent invention in the human reality. Watching TV or playing the PS3 vs. writing/painting/etc. is a choice many of us make - in part because we're tired from a day of work and want to shut off, granted, but still a choice.

i think that while we admire + privilege writing/painting/creative endeavors in an abstract sense, in a real sense situated in our society these are very difficult + often painful commoditized capital mediated experiences. we desire them, maybe bc we recognize that very rarely these creations do have the power to shock + breach + have a transformative element. (more cynically we are drawn to art out of social taste + class games.) but it's so rare. it's a little self-destructive being drawn to creating art i think; idk happy 420 etc. watching tv or playing the ps3 may be of more anesthesiac value than trying to paint for an hour after work every night

Watching bob Ross paint for hr in top 10 anesthetic pleasures

i think that's possibly because art still holds some elements of romanticism and self-actualization and all that that entails in a secular society. possibly what still appeals about being creative is that it addresses that undecidable distinction between 'capital mediated experiences' and some idealized notion of 'pure' creation or self-expression.

x-post!

oh man i tried to spell that word right so hard but in end i went with the closest i could force it to go xp

what appeals about art is the schopenhauerian notion of ceasing to exist in being enveloped by it

which is all I really hope for

enough with your being otm in this thread dayo

I'm cutting u off

haha i continue to feel that schopenhauer's due for a revival any day now.

watching tv or playing the ps3 may be of more anesthesiac value than trying to paint for an hour after work every night

I go drawing a couple of nights a week and most weekends (living the onion article pretty much to the letter) and it's completely absorbing like nothing else in my life, I cannot overstate the therapeutic value.

I mean for me, i'm sure other folk can get that out of videogames or whatever.

that's v cool ledge!

Obv I still curse my 9-5 drudgery Although as I like to say, if I hadn't had shit art teaching at school and basically given it up for 15 odd years, maybe now I could be a struggling penniless artist.

I'm fascinated by the decision to call oneself an artist. Like I know people who will confidently tell everyone they're a painter or director or whatever even though they've never actually made a dime in that field. And others who have had some small but decent level of success as an artist but still identify themselves with their day job. Sometimes it seems like a huge advantage to have the nerve to identify yourself with their dream calling but it's not something I've ever felt comfortable doing. It seems easier if you don't actually have a day job and a spouse or trust fund is supporting you because it's legitimately all you do even if you're not actually making a living off of it. I don't know, maybe it's a weird LA thing since everyone is a musician, actor, writer, or something.

what appeals about art is the schopenhauerian notion of ceasing to exist in being enveloped by it

which is all I really hope for

― 乒乓, Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:46 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the most inspiring thing I've heard all year.

Decision to call oneself an artist has really nothing to do w whether you are an artist or not. It's another signifier, like a shiny car, only geared towards a different social audience.

Or, it can be.

I don't mean necessarily in the sense of calling yourself "An Artist" in some self-important way but just where is the line between answering "what do you do?" with "I'm an actor" and answering with "I'm a waiter".

I've just noticed many complicated variations of this dynamic. people who do get paid professional work in their creative field but also have a day job that provides the bulk of their income, people who used to be highly successful in their field but aren't anymore, people who were highly successful in a creative field but are now trying to do something else so they don't mention the other thing, people who don't make much or any money in their creative field but do it full time because they're supported in some other way, etc.

The most successful artist I personally know - his works sell for upwards of £100,000 - doesn't even do art most of the time. He pops into his studio every couple of months, usually drunk, to give very vague instructions to the workers who make his pieces from start to finish for £7 an hour. They all identify as artists too, and some manage to put on shows or whatever outside the 9-5 drudge of selling their creative lives to someone else - resentment is directed less at this system than at their current position within it.

tell dale chihuly i said hi

thanks for that quote on marx, mordy.

i wonder how much the distinction we make between creating art and creating product is about control (or the illusion of control)? i definitely think it's a bit of an illusion or at least a red herring. like, at the end of the day we're just governed by a different thing, a grammar or whatever. we shouldn't look for happiness in creating something new. maybe in creating something that suits our awareness, or doesn't suit it but allows it or invites it to be involved, doesn't banish it. i think the pleasure people can get from literally all kinds of jobs can be the same as the pleasure people get from making 'art', the similarity being that the process can involve appreciating and mastering form and at the same time playing with form in that tiny little way or adding something to it. and at the end of the day value (or lack of it) is inescapable.

maybe we can't get away from labor and value as constitutive of social relations, but sometimes i wonder if there's a way we can stop measuring everything on a single sliding scale, or at least maybe it's worthwhile to just.. imagine other ways of measuring things that don't involve up and down, that aren't x-y graphable. that's what jumped out at me in noodle vague's post above, like the idea that how we're organized, along one or maybe two dimensions (money and time?) is not sufficient, that we aren't able to account for our relationships with the exchange of capital, and so that form of social organization cuts people off from each other. that fortunately is not the only reality but unfortunately it's the dominant shaping reality i think. anti-euclidianism as solvency. like if we have to have math, can't we make it more umm cyclical or something? and wouldn't that be a better match for us as organisms, as part of an ecosystem. i don't know, i'm not very sure of what i'm saying and even if i was it's probably fairly impossible for all intents and purposes. feel like my life is just going to be figuring out bits and pieces at a time, then watching them be destroyed by my own limits. at least they're there though, that's something.

the bits and pieces, i mean.

so i guess what i'm saying is that the revolution is a fractal maaan. n.b. i've never done any psychedelics.

and people who know anything about math probably want to kill me right now which, admittedly, would probably be a net benefit for human happiness.

"your bliss" is frightening.

also, you could turn out to be bad at it.

hahah cad (xposts)

thomas kinkade too may he r i p

if you blogged or painted or whatever, all day, then working in an office for two hours in the evening could be relaxing and fun.

This is my exact experience with temping (to supplement composing and teaching music).

I have plenty of old computer books from the early 80s and they tend to predict that in the future (now?) computers will pretty much do everything that needs to be done, people will have to work far less, and everyone will be able to spend more time following their bliss-learning, reading, drawing, composing, teaching, etc. That 1st generation of PC theorists were all hippies so that kinda makes sense.

I think we're pretty much on our way, and that they (and the OG hippies) were right about the future in a way. The arbitrariness of production work is manifesting itself more and more each year, instant global communication has been democratized, etc. The old power structures have such a tight grip on us that it's going to take a while. Unemployment is going to continue to climb as things get more and more automated and maybe it will be a generational thing but eventually the revolution is gonna come, it won't be violent or even political, it'll simply be people growing up in this new post-material world, structuring their society around different personal values than we have now.

It's either going to give everyone alot more free time to follow their blisses, or alot more free time to perfect their killer robot-battle skills.

I have plenty of old computer books from the early 80s and they tend to predict that in the future (now?) computers will pretty much do everything that needs to be done, people will have to work far less, and everyone will be able to spend more time following their bliss-learning, reading, drawing, composing, teaching, etc. That 1st generation of PC theorists were all hippies so that kinda makes sense.

Even a cursory understanding of the economy would suggest that this couldn't be true. How would these people working far less be earning money, unless they also owned the means of production?

was thinking about all this again, and it occurred to me that maybe the contemporary "follow your bliss" ethos, particularly in regard to creative/artistic pursuits, is so appealing precisely because it holds out the possibly of reconciliation between "capital" and "self-expression" or "self determination." it's this idea that you can not only do what you want and be some nebulous notion of "yourself" but even be compensated in/by the very system which is presently foreclosing those possibilities. (always thought the clearly facile "everyone's a superstar" thing is so interesting because of this.) difficulty of course is that any system of determination (and not just "capital") is by that very measure not compatible with the purity of "self" that is being aimed at in these pursuits.

there have been studies about this, and explanations of why we're unhappier about tasks when we're paid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Not gonna go back through this whole thread but I spent a good chunk of college agonizing over whether I wanted to stay on course to do software or if I wanted to switch streams and go for being a full-time musician in some capacity (I initially was thinking composition since I'd never really studied voice and figured I was behind the curve already to be a soloist with too small a range; oh how naive I was). I eventually decided that the facet of music I enjoyed the most was singing in ensembles and that was something I could do without having to have a music degree, plus going into the software field would allow me to earn enough money to be able to pursue singing as a side hobby. This wasn't as clear-cut a decision as I'm making it sound; the original driver was to find a discipline I enjoyed that would allow me to get a job without going to grad school, which was my college plan from day 1, but as school went on I found myself throwing more and more energy into singing things rather than computer things, making me question my major. Ultimately, a couple of contentious conversations with my parents and a continued desire to avoid grad school led me to finishing my CS degree and it wasn't until a friend asked me to sing in a pickup group he was putting together for grad school auditions, combined with other friends encouraging my wife and me to audition for a church choir full of alumni from our college church choir, that got me back on the regular singing path, which then wound its way into top-level volunteer gigs and then, miraculously, paid gigs. So, when I looked at that Onion article, I didn't think "oh damn, that hurts; I thought "I am amazed I get to perform at the level I do with so little comparative time commitment".

and people who know anything about math probably want to kill me right now

On the contrary, I know a lot about math and I'm here to tell you that you are basically trying to reinvent the theory of partially-ordered sets, which economists forget about at their peril

wut

In case you ever question that choice, you can keep this discussion in mind: http://www.wikihost.org/w/academe/music_theory_composition#sect11

xpost to DJP

(A CS background is increasingly valuable for composition-related jobs.)

the galois connection between employment and enjoyment.

build my galois high

The woman the year ahead of me when I studied CS (possibly not the only woman but the only one I met and there were only 3 in my year so probably not that inaccurate) is now a professional composer and turns up in the alumni magazine every so often after winning awards. It was observed that everyone in my CS tutorial group was v. musical except for me; of the four of us, two of the others had got music scholarships and one of them is now in several bands who are pretty cool and cultishly well-regarded if fairly low-key.

I scraped my way through grade 2 piano with like 3 points above the pass mark, gave up music lessons, and dropped out of CS too ;_;

to failure! *clinks glasses*

dropping/opting out of things is super-underrated.

not in Iceland, apparently

according to this book, Icelandic people are unusually happy because of their encouragement of failure and quitting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Bliss

In the process of bailing out on a career path I'd just started down right now actually. Gotta be honest, it feels pretty good. As a relative young'un round here (or so I'm led to believe) I'm at that stage in my life where I've got to try and make some sort of vague, ill-defined decision about my life in the directly foreseeable future, so I'm agonising over these sorts of issues on a more or less daily basis. Problem is of course that like most other people, I ain't got a fucking clue what MY BLISS might entail, and I'm wary of jumping into anything two-footed without having done a little bit of floating about trying to find out what this mysterious beast may be, or if it even exists at all. My brain, which has cost me a small fortune in government loans, hasn't been offering much besides ""CRISIS CRISIS CRISIS THIS IS HAPPENING NOW THIS IS YOUR LIFE A DECISION MUST BE MADE NOW NOW NOW" for the past year or so now either.

Totally aware that most everyone goes through this ("Oh but no one your age ever knows what they want to be - look at me, I don't even know what I want to be now", chortles EVERY OLD PERSON I KNOW ALL THE FUCKING TIME) but still can't help being in thrall to the idea that this first career choice is a biggie.

Steadily moving towards the conclusion that I might have to write my career off as a means of making money to fund the things that I actually enjoy (which can essentially be boiled down to 'my friends', which tbh is worrying the shit out of me right now as all of a sudden I don't seem to have many) and hence just stop worrying about whether or not I'm pursuing my ultimate destiny or any of that other Walt Disney bullshit. Sometimes that feels like the sensible, sustainable option, occasionally it makes me want to blow my brains out. My difficulty is that I cant tell whether that second response is me at my most selfish and petulant, or at my most lucid and in-touch with my own feelings. Or both? I suppose they mayn't be mutually exclusive

I have determined that figuring out what my dreams are and then achieving them is less important to me right now than being comfortable and safe and able to afford living on my own. Academia will always be there (unless it won't but w/e).