The Fight

Imagine this scenario:

A man stands on the shore, miles from any other human presence. He is desolate, alone. For the past twenty years of his life, he has worked ceaselessly on a critical open question in mathematics, the solution to which would make it feasible for humans to travel across galaxies. Educated at the best institutions, mentored by the greatest geniuses of his day, and encouraged by his incredible past successes in the field, he had begun to work on the problem with as great of fanfare as can exist within an academic community. Gradually, as he had toiled without progress, his reputation had faded and he had become increasingly reclusive. Eventually, divorced and estranged from his family, he had pruned away every aspect of his life outside of this one question. The man walks slowly back and forth, wracking his brain for what had gone wrong in all his previous approaches, what key had escaped him.

In a blazing flash of insight, he understands. The wrong turns, the twisted equations and garden-path lemmas, the towering perplexity of twenty years - gone. He understands. It is true; it is real. With the mere publication of one proof, even the sketch of the dazzlingly unlikely intuition, humanity will dance across the stars within a century.

In the next moment, a titanic wave engulfs the coast, obliterating him in one painless moment.

Does his epiphany matter? This is the limit of your supposition: a moment of supreme realization and an achievement that only a few among billions could hope for, lasting as short a time as could matter to a human being. What you think of meaning in human life depends on what you answer to that question. If you believe that his epiphany does matter, you also believe in the meaning of temporary things - of what leaves an impression, but not a legacy.

In this case, the "fight against inertia" does matter, but only as the genuine pursuit of a deeply felt aim, rather than lust for meaning swaddled in the language of social contribution. To use the language of "Drive," people feel most fulfilled when they have autonomy, mastery, and purpose; less pedantically, we are only happy in the deeper sense when using our abilities to their fullest extent. Chasing your visions and striving for achievement matter as a consequence not of the goal, but of advancing towards it. It is important to know that your goal matters to others, and that you have the means to achieve it, but it does not register on the scale of personal meaning whether it is ever achieved. Only the motion, the overcoming of inertia, differentiates between personal meaning and lack thereof. Mathematically, although everyone's life begins and ends at zero, that fact in no way diminishes the value of the integral in between.

Happiness, success, passion and meaning are four qualities that attract some of the most contentious attention from both HN readers and young people in general. I would argue that they share a common quality: they are only achievable at the highest level as byproducts of action, not goals in and of themselves. Pursuing them directly drives them away; if the young Mark Zuckerberg had been in it for the money, he would have gone to Microsoft, and if the young Steve Jobs had made it his goal to find meaning, he would have stayed on perpetual pilgrimage in India instead of starting Apple. The victory of ambivalence and subconcious motives comes from mistaking the yearning towards these things for the path that leads to them.

Internalizing death, if you believe in the meaning of temporary things, does justify certain ways of thinking and behaving. It means knowing that you will, relatively soon, be rendered forever passive and motionless. In the meantime, you may as well move.

What a fantastic answer to that assumption. I'm writing that one down in a corner of my mind for later use (sometime between now and the heat death of the universe). :-)