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I’m immediately reminded of the denouement of “This is Water”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s . It’s becom

I’m immediately reminded of the denouement of “This is Water”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s . It’s become/ perhaps always has been a little trite or on the nose, but it’s also not wrong. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

rabidrat 8y ago
Really insightful, thank you. I'm struck by this: > Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. which suggests that Imposter Syndrome is a result of "worshipping" intellect, particularly our own individual intelligence. We spend many days judging interview candidates for their intelligence (even when it is not clear that anything more than adequate intelligence is needed for quality, lasting work), and then wonder why we are so afraid that we feel like imposters.
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  Oof. I listen to this essay regularly but this part has never stuck out to me in particular before.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I think imposter syndrome is something completely different - a result of answers begetting more unanswerable questions and the "hard" not feeling significant anymore. Thus it becomes "Anyone who can do N dimensional vector calculus can do what I do but I can't even come up with a way to unify physics or prove or disprove P = NP, I'm a failure and a fraud." Even though there are say only 5 people in the world capable of rederiving his work in a year. The runaway progression is the same however. That happens in some cases with eating disorders - even when ribs are showing and they weigh under 100lbs they are convinced they are fat.
monkeydreams 8y ago
Trite, but not untrue.
slededit 8y ago
It’s a nice thought, and gives a sense the world is fair. But it doesn’t ring true to me. Some people are hot, and they know it. They do not feel ugly. Ditto for intelligence.
- bo1024 8y ago
  I think the key word is "worship". Not e.g. "value intellect" etc. but worship it. I draw a parallel to sports. It's easy for young athletes to "worship" ability in their sport...to the point where, when you achieve success, you look down on those who are worse than you and look up to those who are better. Reality is that while athletic accomplishment is admirable it does not automatically make you a good person and vice versa. My experience with "intelligence" has been a bit similar although I have found that smart people I encounter also tend to be wonderful human beings. But I know correlation is not causation. Anyway, my point is that I think there's an unhealthy "worship" vs a healthy "value" of intelligence beauty etc, and DFW's quote makes sense to me from that perspective.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  They don't stay hot forever, though. They eventually grow old and wrinkly and gray and sick. You could argue that they're still hot that way, but most people will choose the young hot person over the old hot person. That's what it's saying that "when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you." I.e. you will start to lose that beauty in many different ways, no matter how desperately you try to hold on to it, with plastic surgery, spending all your time in the gym, etc, and you will no longer be able to win your internal game of being more beautiful than others that you valued so much, before you have died (unless you die young, then... I guess you win, if you call that a victory). And for intelligence, a common saying is "The more I know, the more I realize I don't know". An intelligent person will just see more and more out there they could be learning and aren't, or don't understand and want to, and no matter how accomplished or smart they are, they can probably always find someone smarter and have used their intelligence more effectively over the years. There's a game designer named Chris Crawford, for instance. Really smart guy, designed some classic games in the early Mac years and worked for Atari way back in the early days. But at one point he left the game industry because he saw it going the wrong direction for interactive storytelling and started building a storytelling game engine called Storytron that was super ambitious, could tell dynamic cinematic stories and was super complicated. He started building that about 26 years ago now. It still isn't built. I'll let him use his own words: "In 1992 I dedicated myself to the task of making games that centered on character interaction. It was about then that I settled on the term “interactive storytelling” to describe my efforts. This was long before anybody else was thinking along such lines (although Brenda Laurel had speculated about drama in games a few years earlier). I remember how my friends in the games industry told me that I was absolutely crazy to pursue this line of development -- nobody was interested in stories in games. I know this is difficult to believe now that everybody is talking stories, but it really was the case that, in the early 90s, nobody thought that stories had any place in games. The biggest hit of that time was Doom, and the team that developed it had famously split apart over a dispute regarding the role of story. The winning faction insisted that “we don’t need no stinking story -- action is all that matters”. The rest of the games industry applauded their clarity of thinking. Stories were for wimps. As the years rolled by, I pursued my lonely quest, picking up a few like-minded idealists along the way. With little financing, it was slow, painful going. We made a major push starting in 2007, but in the summer of 2009 it became clear that we had failed to garner any support. I put Storytron into a coma and contemplated my future. Thus, when my sixtieth birthday struck, I found myself bereft of achievement in my most important undertaking. I have always felt a calm self-assurance that I am right, that I have developed ideas that would surely conquer the world if I only gave the world enough time to recognize them. My sixtieth birthday shouted loudly that my ideas had most definitely failed to conquer the world. It certainly looks as if I am a washed-up failure. I don’t really believe that -- I still believe that I’ve hit upon a solid approach to interactive storytelling and that someday the world will appreciate my work. But with each passing day the evidence of my failure mounts." In fact, on that same link, he downplays his own intelligence by comparing himself to others, exactly what I was just arguing: "I do not consider myself particularly intelligent; I have known some real geniuses and the feeling of utter inferiority I feel in their presence drives home the mediocrity of my own intelligence." I feel he's being too modest. I've read a lot of his writings and feel that he's a super smart guy and I've learned a lot from him. But here he is seeing other smarter people out there and comparing himself to him and finding himself coming up short. I also think I'm pretty smart, at least in some respects, and used to value that over just about everything else. But eventually you don't find the success you thought you would, or all that learning doesn't lead to breakthroughs or opportunities you thought it would, or you spend your time on dead ends, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by taking a chance on something and failing, and that's when 'worshipping' intelligence will fail you. Source: http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
I don’t see how the advocacy for self-destructively putting everyone else on a pedestal and serving them first and yourself last follows from the rest of the quote.

rabidrat 8y ago

Really insightful, thank you. I'm struck by this: > Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. which suggests that Imposter Syndrome is a result of "worshipping" intellect, particularly our own individual intelligence. We spend many days judging interview candidates for their intelligence (even when it is not clear that anything more than adequate intelligence is needed for quality, lasting work), and then wonder why we are so afraid that we feel like imposters.

Taylor_OD 8y ago
Oof. I listen to this essay regularly but this part has never stuck out to me in particular before.
Nasrudith 8y ago
I think imposter syndrome is something completely different - a result of answers begetting more unanswerable questions and the "hard" not feeling significant anymore. Thus it becomes "Anyone who can do N dimensional vector calculus can do what I do but I can't even come up with a way to unify physics or prove or disprove P = NP, I'm a failure and a fraud." Even though there are say only 5 people in the world capable of rederiving his work in a year. The runaway progression is the same however. That happens in some cases with eating disorders - even when ribs are showing and they weigh under 100lbs they are convinced they are fat.

monkeydreams 8y ago

Trite, but not untrue.

slededit 8y ago

It’s a nice thought, and gives a sense the world is fair. But it doesn’t ring true to me. Some people are hot, and they know it. They do not feel ugly. Ditto for intelligence.

bo1024 8y ago
I think the key word is "worship". Not e.g. "value intellect" etc. but worship it. I draw a parallel to sports. It's easy for young athletes to "worship" ability in their sport...to the point where, when you achieve success, you look down on those who are worse than you and look up to those who are better. Reality is that while athletic accomplishment is admirable it does not automatically make you a good person and vice versa. My experience with "intelligence" has been a bit similar although I have found that smart people I encounter also tend to be wonderful human beings. But I know correlation is not causation. Anyway, my point is that I think there's an unhealthy "worship" vs a healthy "value" of intelligence beauty etc, and DFW's quote makes sense to me from that perspective.
cableshaft 8y ago
They don't stay hot forever, though. They eventually grow old and wrinkly and gray and sick. You could argue that they're still hot that way, but most people will choose the young hot person over the old hot person. That's what it's saying that "when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you." I.e. you will start to lose that beauty in many different ways, no matter how desperately you try to hold on to it, with plastic surgery, spending all your time in the gym, etc, and you will no longer be able to win your internal game of being more beautiful than others that you valued so much, before you have died (unless you die young, then... I guess you win, if you call that a victory). And for intelligence, a common saying is "The more I know, the more I realize I don't know". An intelligent person will just see more and more out there they could be learning and aren't, or don't understand and want to, and no matter how accomplished or smart they are, they can probably always find someone smarter and have used their intelligence more effectively over the years. There's a game designer named Chris Crawford, for instance. Really smart guy, designed some classic games in the early Mac years and worked for Atari way back in the early days. But at one point he left the game industry because he saw it going the wrong direction for interactive storytelling and started building a storytelling game engine called Storytron that was super ambitious, could tell dynamic cinematic stories and was super complicated. He started building that about 26 years ago now. It still isn't built. I'll let him use his own words: "In 1992 I dedicated myself to the task of making games that centered on character interaction. It was about then that I settled on the term “interactive storytelling” to describe my efforts. This was long before anybody else was thinking along such lines (although Brenda Laurel had speculated about drama in games a few years earlier). I remember how my friends in the games industry told me that I was absolutely crazy to pursue this line of development -- nobody was interested in stories in games. I know this is difficult to believe now that everybody is talking stories, but it really was the case that, in the early 90s, nobody thought that stories had any place in games. The biggest hit of that time was Doom, and the team that developed it had famously split apart over a dispute regarding the role of story. The winning faction insisted that “we don’t need no stinking story -- action is all that matters”. The rest of the games industry applauded their clarity of thinking. Stories were for wimps. As the years rolled by, I pursued my lonely quest, picking up a few like-minded idealists along the way. With little financing, it was slow, painful going. We made a major push starting in 2007, but in the summer of 2009 it became clear that we had failed to garner any support. I put Storytron into a coma and contemplated my future. Thus, when my sixtieth birthday struck, I found myself bereft of achievement in my most important undertaking. I have always felt a calm self-assurance that I am right, that I have developed ideas that would surely conquer the world if I only gave the world enough time to recognize them. My sixtieth birthday shouted loudly that my ideas had most definitely failed to conquer the world. It certainly looks as if I am a washed-up failure. I don’t really believe that -- I still believe that I’ve hit upon a solid approach to interactive storytelling and that someday the world will appreciate my work. But with each passing day the evidence of my failure mounts." In fact, on that same link, he downplays his own intelligence by comparing himself to others, exactly what I was just arguing: "I do not consider myself particularly intelligent; I have known some real geniuses and the feeling of utter inferiority I feel in their presence drives home the mediocrity of my own intelligence." I feel he's being too modest. I've read a lot of his writings and feel that he's a super smart guy and I've learned a lot from him. But here he is seeing other smarter people out there and comparing himself to him and finding himself coming up short. I also think I'm pretty smart, at least in some respects, and used to value that over just about everything else. But eventually you don't find the success you thought you would, or all that learning doesn't lead to breakthroughs or opportunities you thought it would, or you spend your time on dead ends, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by taking a chance on something and failing, and that's when 'worshipping' intelligence will fail you. Source: http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html

Chris_Chambers 8y ago

I don’t see how the advocacy for self-destructively putting everyone else on a pedestal and serving them first and yourself last follows from the rest of the quote.