Pirate King

Bertrand Russel says that his advice for any reasonably talented young man afflicted with the disease of sinusoidal ennui is to go out into the world, become a king and/or a pirate, explore and live such that survival is never at any point assured. We shall find happiness in struggle - through action, we shall enjoy the present. In motion there is contentment, and in comfortable solidity, decay and boredom and ultimately unhappiness. Like Will Smith says in my favorite movie of his, happiness is a pursuit. Where his character goes wrong is, however (although he may be forgiven for this given his circumstances), is his supposition that this pursuit is an unfortunate fact. Happiness is not a state; at least, not one achievable by ordinary folk who do not have much of a chance at achieving moksha and nirvana and the like. Happiness is necessarily active - it exists in the space between seconds spent moving.

I worry, sometimes, that what I really want from life is what Russell suggests: to become a pirate. Well, not that particular profession necessarily, but rather an absence of profession. Freedom. Freedom from the concept of a career, from the bred need to 'do well', to be successful, to earn lotsa money. From the need, from the disgusting, wretched nauseating need to have a resumé - an A4 size sheet of paper describing the sum total of me, my infinitely complex self with its myriad roots and branches and nodes and shy tendrils, to someone else who decides whether I'm 'good enough' to 'be successful' (quotation-mark everything) based on aforementioned sheet of paper. However, I would hope that I am not naïve: I understand that this organically-grown (and growing) system works best, and is probably the most optimal. It is all just rather unfortunate. I am also not anti-money: money is important, insomuch as it buys things that give us happiness: flight tickets to visit friends and family, books, art: all these things are (often) expensive. This of course begs one way of living a happy life: do a conventional job, amass capital, then do things that give you happiness. This is probably the model followed by a number of people; indeed, it seems like almost every one of my friends plans to do this. Yet here we sacrifice a number of the best years of our relative youth. Is there a point to being able to travel to the Amazon rainforest, when all of ones friends can't because they have families and they must be responsible adults? Or being able to afford the expenses of mountain-climbing, yet not having the knees for it? Can we, in another words, do better in our search for a model to life?

The best-case scenario, and the rarest, is when the performance and exercise of one's skills (the things that come to one naturally; we shall assume that this set is a subset of things we enjoy doing) results in wealth-creation. So the blessed are the computer science nerds, or the techies, or the people-who-love-finance-and-its-siblings: they love their jobs, and at the same time they earn money. To these people I say: I envy you.

Another case is that of the starving-yet-happy poet - intellectual satisfaction compenses for the lack of monetary satisfaction. The love for your craft outweighs the disadvantages to not having money. To these people I say: I respect you, but do not want to be you.

Why do I say that? Because I am increasingly suspicious that I don't have passions. At least none which are financially rewarding. I like computer science and math and engineering for the intellectual challenge of it. I would call what I'm studying 'interesting' and 'satisfying' and sometimes even downright fascinating, but is it my passion? I believe a definition of terms is in order. I define being passionate about something as an activity that you would do in your leisure time. It gives you so much happiness that you would exercise it on a holiday, even if there were no monetary benefit to being good at it. You would do it because the very act of it fills up your soul. You think about it all the time. It is a part of you. In that sense of the word, I doubt I'm passionate about anything.

Except maybe literature. Maybe. In any case, I shall never find out.