Why You Should Pursue Things That Excite You
Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks and spending their time in corporations where they feel invisible. The vast majority of my friends who work for big companies say they’re bored, unchallenged, and under-employed. They don’t see the tangible benefits of their hard work.”
— David Perell, What Should You Work On
We have been taught to rely on logic when in reality, our instincts are God’s greatest gift to us. The result of an overreliance on logic is individuals pursuing things that make sense logically rather than what lights them up.
In The Curse of Education by Harold Edward Gorst, he states:
… Nothing is more tragic, and yet nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination …
Many individuals are also bound by cultural and social norms, especially a certain subset of Asian parents who are notorious for giving their children bad advice. Their advice sounds a lot like this:
“Study hard, get a job, get married, have kids, have more kids, and then die.”
Now, if this is how you want to live your life, by all means, go ahead and do so. But what if you don’t?
A loss to society
So, what happens when you don’t pursue what excites you? According to Harold Edward Gorst, the consequences of individuals pursuing something that is antithetical to their strengths doesn’t just affect the individual, it also affects society as a whole.
The loss is not only to the individual, it is to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny the fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?
How often have you heard of brilliant individuals wasting their life away in a job they’re not fitted for, only for them to return home exhausted and unable to work on their passions and hobbies despite being very skilled in a particular area that is not their 9-5?
In Balzac, The Eccentric, this quote stood out to me:
... a master in one sphere can be a bungler when he ventures into another for which he is not fitted.
Which reminds me of this cartoon:
Low energy leads to mediocre standards
Many of us have complained about the mediocre standards by various industries. We see people fumbling along just to get by, doing just enough to get their pay check. What most don’t understand is that mediocrity is a signal to us that what we are doing is unaligned with who we are. When individuals are doing things that goes against their nature, there is a lack of energetic flow; we end up working harder and using more energy. By working up the energy just to complete menial tasks that are unexciting and mundane, there is a tendency to divert our attention to something less strenuous and more pleasurable. And that is how we start to procrastinate.
In Human Design, an esoteric system developed by a man who goes by the name of Ra Uru Hu, he states that there are two types of individuals who should avoid engaging in activities that make them drained or frustrated. Namely, Generators and Manifesting Generators. These are the individuals who benefit the least from not doing things that bring them joy. The result of pushing a Generator or Manifesting Generator to engage in activities that drain them then leads to a collective chain in society where things get done haphazardly, leading to mediocre outcomes.
Chronic procrastination leads to passive entertainment
All of us procrastinate to a certain degree. There will always be something that we don’t like doing. But what happens when individuals procrastinate on a consistent basis? It then becomes a habit. Chronic procrastination happens when individuals are not excited about the task or tasks at hand. Many of us end up procrastinating via passive entertainment. The form of entertainment that requires no participation on our part. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard mentions that “many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.” When we procrastinate, we are not present to fully enjoy and reap the benefits of our activities, especially when our time of enjoyment and leisure is done in a such a sacrilegious way where we pay little to no mind to it.
Compulsive passive entertainment leads to chronic addiction
When something becomes compulsively habitual, it takes on a different form; it is like a beast that has morphed into itself. There are things we do that bear neither meaning nor pleasure, yet we still gravitate towards them habitually. Many of the different forms of entertainment no longer give us the dopamine hit, simply because we have overrun their capacity to inject pleasure. The vial is empty, but yet we still pine for it like a drug addict who pines for another heavy dose.
All this stems from an unfulfilled life due to an unfulfilled calling.
You’ll end up hating yourself
The result of chronic procrastination and addiction is that you’ll end up hating yourself in the long run. And if you have kids, they will observe and learn from you. Many young people today have a rather nihilistic outlook through years of observing their parents, teachers, and adult-figures in their lives.
And when these kids become older, they have already internalised that life is this shitty pathway where everything is a duty and a chore. There is no joy and meaning in anything.
The gist of it is this: you can of course, pursue things that do not bring you joy. But bear this in mind: you’ll be temporarily happy but you’ll never be content, because it’s not your soul’s mission.
We should choose the path of enlargement, not service to wealth, power, fame, or the accolades of others, because it is what is asked of us by the soul.
February 2, 2018
—James Hollis, Jungian analyst, Living an Examined Life ⛵️