Motivations & Hope

I must declare my bias up front: I believe Halloween is possibly the most important holiday for the social fabric of our communities. What other time of the year do we open our doors to strangers? When else do we find ourselves out on our streets, shoulder-to-shoulder with our neighbors? When else might you see that one rather uptight dude that lives next door, dressed up, clearly against his will, as Spongebob Squarepants? When else do we fully embrace the opportunity to not take ourselves so seriously? Maybe our higher forms are more likely to come forth when we put on a costume, temporarily shed our restricted identities, and grant ourselves permission to just play. And for those that are not yet sold on my pitch on the nobility of Halloween, well, just try being angry at other humans when consuming copious amounts of Reeses or Butterfingers. It’s near impossible because you’re either 1) so jacked up on dopamine from far exceeding your daily sugar intake or 2) so full of self-loathing that there’s literally no room left to judge anyone but yourself.

There’s something wonderfully paradoxical about the fall: the busyness of life gets unleashed after summer break, while nature is just beginning to settle down in preparation for the winter. We head back to school, work, and routines with newfound intensity — I’ve heard jokes about the Fall being a second chance for lapsed New Year’s resolutions. But we’re also surrounded by constant reminders that there’s more to life than our newly-minted to-do list: the colors change, the light angles, and the air becomes impossible to ignore. Through something as simple as the chill of a cheekbone or the melody of a golden-crowned sparrow, we find ourselves snapped into awareness of life’s unfolding changes, of which we can only observe and appreciate. And for me, at least, there’s a welcomed comfort in this recognition. I will no doubt get swept up into rhythms of frenetic doing, but I look forward to the autumnal invitations to put on a sweater, grab a book, and fall behind on email now and then.

So, to my ~5 readers, if you happen to miss this one, good on ya and ‘tis the season.

If you’re still with me: while changes in the season are driven by the cycles of nature, I’ve always found it tough to pin down what drives the changes in us humans?

Motivations

There are an insurmountable number of self-help books with annoying titles that promise to make us more motivated in order to reach our highest aspirations. These books, of course, keep flying off the proverbial shelves because we inevitably continue to feel as if we’re falling short of our grander ambitions.

Some might argue that it’s maybe the ambitions themselves that are the problem — they’re either too ambitious, or, more likely, too broad and not appropriately calibrated in a way that allows us to appreciate progress along the journey. But even if we assume that our desires are reasonable, I still always find myself struggling to understand the driving forces that underpin them.

One category of motivation appears to be that of discomfort.

“No pain, no gain” is a phrase that makes me want to vomit. But I must admit, part of what has led to my remarkably diligent (and I’m sure, to wife, rather annoying) habit of rolling out my back and doing PT exercises daily is that I want to avoid being in pain. Suffering is a potent motivator.

Alain de Botton, a writer and wonderful purveyor of philosophical wisdom that won’t break your brain, was on a recent podcast discussing the motivations of great writers and thinkers. Without glorifying the trope of the troubled artist, it’s hard to argue with the creative force that stems from desperation.

[Discussing Descartes] He had the view that suffering is the great catalyst of insight. Therefore, if you want to get some material, suffer. If things are going well for you, you unite with the world. You feel kinship with the way things are. You're not a rebel or a revolutionary or a tragic figure. You quite like the way the world is because it's doing good things for you. But when you're desperate… you're reading life against the grain. In those moods, you're more likely to kind of find the great truths that are outside of the normal, satisfied, smug perfume.

You don’t have to be a philosopher to relate. It’s an all too common experience to look back on difficult times and recognize that subtle appreciation for lessons learned, perspectives gained, changes made. There’s something deeply moving about seeing our suffering as a gift that connects us to the shared human experience. But life would be a real cluster-fuck if we solely relied on hitting rock-bottom as a motivation to fully live.

The problem with pain-based motivations is that they’re at risk of resulting in an addictive cycle, given life has no shortage of problems — we squash one, but anxiety finds its next victim, and we’re in for a life-time of wack-a-mole. And on a broader societal level, it’s fairly obvious we don’t want to live in a world that weaponizes desperation as a motivating force. This is, tragically, the reality for many, and I don’t pretend to have the answers on how to change it — but ensuring that people can just get their basic needs met seems like a good start.

When realizing the dead-end that is despair, we’re forced to ponder more noble incentives.

Another route for motivation could be that of pleasure.

What are the ways in which we deepen our engagement in the world just because it feels good to do so? If you’re like me, it can sometimes be embarrassingly hard to answer that question. But through granting ourselves enough space and grace, we can begin to notice the signs.

I’m frankly not sure if this type of motivation is any purer than the former, but I’d like to think so. While fear motivates, it also constricts, eventually closing us off to the world. Pleasure / Joy / Appreciation — whatever we might want to call these lighter forces — happen to expand the more energy we give them.

A few years ago I was part of a development program through Coro Northern California. Our program lead, Erika, a remarkable group facilitator and wonderful human, shared a story of advice her grandmother gave at the end of her life. It’s stuck with me because of it’s potent simplicity. As the story goes, while reflecting on all the complexities that make up a life, her grandmother paused, turned to her and said:

Everything boils down to either love or fear.

We can have a choice on which to let behind the wheel.

Hope

Back in 2022 I read the book Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit and it really rocked my world, in a good way. I’m not an activist by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I well versed in the history of activism, but I was moved by Solnit’s distillation of the spirit of hope that has fueled these various movements.

There can be a tendency to want to vent about how shitty life is because it can feel more honest, or even more responsible as an act of bearing witness to the suffering of others. And being “dark” often gets conflated with being “interesting”. But dogmatic negativity can quickly become an excuse for inaction, serving as a crutch to take the easy way out, throw up our hands, and say, “Screw it, world’s on fire anyways!” And I get it: there’s something cathartic about lamenting over how fucked things really are. But we should be wary of falling victim to a certain righteousness that can stem from cynicism, as Solnit describes:

There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. The bleakness of the world is required as contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above.

At the same time, I also get really annoyed (even more so!) at pollyanna world views. Hope is a tricky word that can get co-opted as “everything will be just fine”. Clearly that’s a lie, and just another excuse to surrender our agency and responsibility. Throughout the book, Solnit tries to make the case for a more useful definition of “hope”.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It's also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. "Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté," the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked.

To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than doom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

While not a silver bullet to solving all our problems, hope is an essential motivator to carry us through these times, providing us the energy to stay present and engaged. And it’s clear that we are currently facing a crisis of hope, as evidence by an apparent plethora of polling data that essentially says people feel like things are bad and not getting any better.

How to repair this? I’m not entirely clear. I just know we need to prioritize the repairing.

For now, let’s not forget the healing potential of Halloween.

Closing quotes

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler

A parting album

Anyone else have soundtracks they love from movies they’ve never seen? That’s me with Nebraska by Mark Orton. The whole album is fantastic. I’d just start from the top with Their Pie. There’s a special feel to these songs, which is hard to describe, but is undoubtedly aligned with the vibes of Fall - get into it.