What is the prime aim of life?
- Queensbury’s Defense Attorney questioned Oscar Wilde on the stand, and this was a response to the question: “Pleasure is the only thing one should live for”?
I think that the realization of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realize oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain. I am, on that point, entirely on the side of the ancients—the Greeks. It is a pagan idea. https://www.famous-trials.com/wilde/346-literarypart
I wholeheartedly agree. However, the pressure of work/life balance had me questioning a lot of unknowable, unquantifiable things like meaning and purpose, and I got sidetracked by civic responsibility, production of goods/services as personal value. Time is lost to other’s expectations, especially the fundamental framework of productivity as the core aim of life, vs self-actualization as Mr. Wilde posited.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days” – Annie Dillard
WORK / LIFE Balance
“The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way… These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes almost delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment… We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life”. – from “The 3 Marriages: Reimagining the Work, Self, and Relationship” by David Whyte
A Modern Search for Stillness and Calm
- And in this, comes the desire for stillness, and calm. It’s something I’ve pined for my whole life, in fact anecdotally my mother would come and check on me in the dead of night and said I would sleeptalk “I just want calm”… and if you know me, you know where that comes from.
In fact, I’ve a shelved story that involves a subsect of future human culture abandoning all tech for a life in the present, vs living via tech and being pulled to augmented realities, virtual ones, or pushed and pulled into the past or future.
“We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off — our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk…
Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply”. Pico Iyer, on the art of stillness…
which means being fully present. It’s hard to do, because it’s profitable for capitalism to not allow or foster it. https://fs.blog/2015/02/the-art-of-stillness/
LEISURE
- I took my philosophy classes, but I deeply wished to have read this essay on the nature of human existence having the prime aim of leisure, which has been lost to our manic obsession with productivity, hence the first time in history we speak of “work life balance”. In the past life was about work as survival, not productivity, and everything was meant to keep us functioning as we enjoyed family, food, arts, culture, and leisure.
“Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism” –>
“Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity … or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.” https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper/
“And yet the most significant human achievements between Aristotle’s time and our own — our greatest art, the most enduring ideas of philosophy, the spark for every technological breakthrough — originated in leisure, in moments of unburdened contemplation, of absolute presence with the universe within one’s own mind and absolute attentiveness to life without, be it Galileo inventing modern timekeeping after watching a pendulum swing in a cathedral or Oliver Sacks illuminating music’s incredible effects on the mind while hiking in a Norwegian fjord”.
BEING PRESENT
- SLOWING DOWN, and reconciling the notion of being incapable of being in the present, and the spirit of releasing oneself into the moment, on vacation. How many times have you caught yourself on vacation sad about the end of it, or thinking about how excited you were to finally be on it? These forces pull you from the present and your current stillness with nature. I do now get, as someone who likes thinking about this, why I love sitting on a chair on vacation and staring at the sea.
“We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come,” – Alan Watts.
Anaïs Nin truly understood this, and it’s detailed here in this excellent long form dissection of a particular part of her Diaries. A longer article with more excerpts is here: “Vacation and the art of presence” https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/14/anais-nin-diary-vacation-presence/
There’s two types of people on vacation. Instagram people setting up needy shot after desperate “I am relevant” shot… then there is the stunning and legendary and amazing Anaïs Nin:
I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.
To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep… Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body… As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.
Sontag also noted this:
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” -Susan Sontag, 1977.
To truly disconnect from everything that is not yourself, past or future, is the ultimate dream of “still” leisure and a true connection to the present and your available self. Of course, it was easier to do in Nin’s day, and the system has built an edifice impossible to push back on, something I’ve struggled in technology for over a decade. Just when you think you’ve found a way out, they pull you back in. =)