Authored by Mark Manson and titled by Geocklyn
Recently, a friend of mine met a woman while on vacation in
another country. They had immediate chemistry
and decided to keep in touch after he left. As the months passed by, he became
more and more enamored with her, telling me that he had never met a woman like
this before. He said he hadn’t felt this way since he met his last serious ex.
Apparently the feeling was mutual, as the woman continued battling through time
zones to keep in touch with him as well. Soon, despite living on different
continents, they conjured up plans to see each other again.....
At one point, he went as far as to suggest to me that he’d be able to arrange his work-travel situation to where he could even live in her country a few months out of the year and make a relationship work. This was serious business — especially coming from a friend I knew to be particularly commitment-averse.
Eventually they found a solution. He had another upcoming
trip overseas, and he could
take the following week off at a beach town nearby and arrange to have her
flown there to meet him with his frequent flyer points. She excitedly accepted.
He arranged for a romantic room, massage trips at a local spa, walks on the
beach, the whole nine yards. It was finally going to happen.
We are all beaten over the head that we should always pursue
our dreams, always follow our passions, always turn reality into what we
believe will make us happy. Most marketing and advertising is based on this. The
majority of the self-help industry pushes this. And with
the rise of Tim Ferriss and “lifestyle design” obsession of this generation, it
has become a borderline religion.
To
create and define one’s own life is viewed as some sort of salvation; to remain
trapped within the confines of traditional society as some kind of hell.
But this isn’t necessarily rock hard capital-T truth. In
fact, it’s largely a cultural belief. The entire modus operandi of United States was the idea that any person
can achieve what they desire assuming they work hard enough. Individuality and
originality have been successfully marketed to us the past century to the point
of parody. We’re told that such-and-such shaving cream will make us “our own
man” and that driving a mass-produced sports car is the best way to express
ourselves.
Here’s a KFC commercial that uses chicken fingers to appeal
to our individuality:
But it’s not just materialism. The “follow you dreams”
mentality dominates our relationships as well. It’s only in the last couple
centuries that romantic love has been
championed as the sole prerequisite for a happy relationship.
Lonely? Just fall in love and then live happily ever after!
Duh.
It’s reached the point where practically all of our pop
culture is based upon the idea that romantic love is a justification
for just about any neurotic behavior.
The
underlying assumption behind all of this? You deserve your dreams. You owe it
to yourself to pursue them at all costs. Achieve your dreams and they will
finally make you happy once and for all.
Whether it’s a new career,
being the best-dressed person at a party, reaching enlightenment, or
realizing a tryst with a woman halfway around the planet, we’re told that we
owe it to ourselves to go out and get it, and we’re some type of failure if we
don’t. (Now buy this hemorrhoid cream for $19.95.)
The Purpose of Fantasy
In his book What Women Want, author Daniel Bergner interviewed
hundreds women about their sex lives and sexual fantasies. I found One story in
the book particularly interesting.
One young woman from New York City had had a recurring
sexual fantasy for years. In the fantasy, she is in a restaurant and she goes
to the bathroom. But before she can close the door, the waiter follows her in,
pushes her up against the wall and fucks her aggressively from behind. In some
fantasies, there’s a second waiter. In some fantasies, there are people
watching and verbal threats. Regardless, the fantasy always ends with the
waiter screaming with pleasure as he cums inside her.
On one of her birthdays, a group of her friends threw a
little party for her at a small restaurant in Brooklyn. She was an artist, and
so she hung out with what I suppose would be kind of a progressive and
freethinking crowd. A lot of her friends were gay men, including her best
friend. Her best friend told her that he had gotten her a gift, but it was a
surprise.
About halfway through the
dinner, as the gay friend is teasing her about what her present is going to be
and how she’s going to get it soon, the waiter comes up behind her and whispers
in her ear, “You should go to the bathroom.” She freezes. She immediately knows
what her “gift” is. The waiter is hot — exactly her type physically, exactly
the type of man she fantasizes about. Her gay friend starts giggling wildly.
“Well? Are you going to go or not?”
She gets up, heart pounding, and she enters the bathroom,
and before she can close the door behind her, the waiter pushes it back open.
He closes it and locks it behind him and looks her in the eyes. She’s
speechless, terrified and excited and wet all at the same time. He grabs her
and starts kissing her hard, grabbing her body. She kisses back, closing her
eyes, falling back into her fantasy, unable to distinguish her mind from
reality. The waiter undoes his pants and whips out his cock, it’s hard and ready.
He goes to grab her. She hesitates. She looks away and
resists his pull. She can’t do it. He tries to move her again and she won’t.
She says, “I can’t do this.” He looks confused. He says, “Yeah, you can.” And
goes to grab her again. She says, “No, no, I have a boyfriend.” He looks at her
for a moment confused. Finally he says, “Are you sure?” She says, “Yeah, I’m
sure,” unlocks the bathroom and runs out.
If there’s any kind of dream or fantasy that deserves to not
be pursued, it’s the rape fantasy. According to research, at least 30% of women
fantasize about being raped at some point (and some put that as a low
estimate.) Bergner and sex researchers suggest that one reason for the
prevalence of aggressive fantasies isn’t so much the rape themselves, but rather
the desire to feel a loss of control.
Losing control in reality is dangerous. Despite how arousing
it may be, one could get hurt or killed. It’s only possible to lose control and
stay safe within the confines of one’s own mind.
The reason not every fantasy should be pursued is because fantasies
never have negative repercussions. Reality does. You’re able to feel
fear and terror without ever actually being in danger. You can feel excitement
and adrenaline without ever actually risking anything. You can experience the
joy and pride of a great success without actually suffering through the hard
work.
Sometimes wanting something is better than having it
“For most of my adolescence and
young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in
I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but
when. I was biding my time until I could invest the effort into getting out
there and making it work.
Even when I started my first online business,
it was with an eye to cash in quick and then finally start my belated career as
a musician. Even as recently as a year ago, I bought a guitar with half a mind
to start practicing again and join a band in some of the locations I ended up
living.
But despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life,
the reality never came. And it took me a long time to figure out why.
I didn’t actually want it.
I’m in love with the result — the image of me on stage,
people cheering, me rocking out, putting everything I have into what I’m
playing — but I’m not in love with the process.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a
group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to
show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 lbs
of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a
mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that
I don’t like to climb. I just want to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself.
Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough
or I didn’t believe in myself enough. Lifestyle designers would tell me that I
gave in to my conventional role in society. I’d be told to do affirmations or
join a mastermind group or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that:
I thought I wanted something. But I didn’t. End of story.
I’ve since
discovered that the rock star fantasy has less to do with actually rocking out
on stage than simply feeling acknowledged and appreciated. It’s no coincidence
that as my personal relationships improve dramatically, the fantasy slowly
fades into the background. It’s a periodic mental indulgence now, not a driving
need.”
Reality is always messy
At the end of his brilliant album Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn Manson plays a loop of a
spoken sentence, “When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will
be destroyed.” The line is repeated over and over as what was a dark and
beautiful ballad devolves into a chaos of clustered samples and distorted
noise.
Later, in his autobiography,
Uncle Marilyn explained what that line meant and why he ended the album with
it.
After achieving all of his goals — the fame, the fortune, the
social critiques, the artistic statements, the rock star status — he was
paradoxically the most miserable he had ever been in his life. Reality hadn’t
lived up to his fantasies. There were stresses and pains he could have never
imagined. Vices had taken hold. The character of those around him had changed.
In the book, he relates breaking down and crying into a pile
of cocaine in the studio while recording the song. Because at the tender age of
27, he felt he had nothing else to look forward to in life. He had already
achieved everything he had ever wanted. And the excess of it was destroying
him.
In my own life, I’ve written about how the dream of living
as a digital nomad — traveling the world and working online — has at times
presented unpredictable
challenges and downsides that you never get when you live in one
place. Fellow nomad Benny Lewis recently wrote about
similar issues in his life.
The truth is that pain, longing and frustration are just a
fact of life. We believe that our dreams will solve all of our current problems
without recognizing that they will simply create new variants of the same
problems we experience now. Sure, these are often better problems to have. But sometimes they can be worse. And
sometimes we’d be better off dealing with our shit in the present instead of
pursuing some ideal in the future.
How do we know the difference? How do we know what’s worth
pursuing? We don’t always. But here are two guidelines that can help:
1.
Fall in
love with the process, not the result – If your job is drudgery now,
then there’s no reason to suspect it won’t still be drudgery when you make
partner or when you’re managing your own division. We live in a results-based
society, and unfortunately this gets most of us (70% by some surveys) into the
wrong pursuits and career paths.
2.
What’s
motivating you? – Take a long, hard look at what’s really driving
you. Is it some compensation for an unmet need? Or is it a genuine expression
of enthusiasm and joy? The fact that I fantasized about being on stage in front
of thousands of screaming fans and didn’t fantasize about writing or playing
new songs is telling.
Does this mean you shouldn’t
pursue your dreams? Is this some kind of nihilistic screed against how the
world is shit and we should all waste away and nothing matters anyway?
No.
I’m simply urging you to exert a little caution. We’ve all
been bombarded with the message that if we’re not making ourselves special in
some way, then we don’t matter. But as David Foster Wallace wrote
at length about, some of the most heroic people in the world are those who toil
silently through the monotony and boredom, who live lives of simple
satisfaction and anonymous successes. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
When my friend informed me of his beach getaway plan with
his foreign love interest, I strongly advised him against it. I went on about perceptual biases, how
distance allows us to idealize others, about being blinded by infatuation, how
it sets a terrible precedent for a relationship, and so on.
He said he understood. But he had never met a woman like her
and that if he didn’t at least find out, he’d wonder “What if?” for the rest of
his life.
Sounds reasonable, even admirable. And hey, I don’t really
blame him. Although I wouldn’t have done the same. Because my point was that he
actually hadn’t met this woman yet.
The woman he had met who was “like nobody else” was a product of his fantasies
and desires, not reality. What was
reality were the dozens of women around him whom he was ignoring in favor of
pursuing a romantic phantom.
The week of the getaway came. He disappeared online for a
few days. When he resurfaced, his first message to me was, “Well, I know you’re
going to say ‘I told you so,’ but…”
From his account, the first day was fine, if a bit awkward
and distant. But then the weight of the stratospheric expectations crashed
through on the second day. She couldn’t square the circle of their lifestyle
differences, the living on two different continents. I imagine reality hit her
like a slap in the face: she’s on some beach somewhere with a guy she only met
for a few hours the year before. What the hell was she doing?
She told him that she thought they should just be friends.
Obviously, my friend was disappointed. But by the third day,
the disappointment had turned into anger — and not necessarily at her, but at
reality. This woman who “had everything he looks for in a woman,” and who was
like “no one he had met before,” had within three days become “immature,”
“entitled,” and “unappreciative.”
But the fact
is that she had always been those things. Just as he had always been just a
friend to her.
They were
just the last ones to find out.
By Geocklyn
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