Abandon Your Goals

“...the decision is to encourage the psycopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness.” --Norman Mailer

At what moment do we abandon joy and clamber for security? As children we are bombarded with a the idea that with hard work and talent we will transcend cultural norms and achieve wild dreams. Creativity and passion are encouraged and grown only to be later abandoned to wither as dreams are traded for goals.

Our era is one in which life is increasingly quantified and made more rational. The uncertainties of our inherited future spur reactionary desires for the imaginary surety in obsolete models. Financial collapse, terror and political polarization offer no shortage of anxiety. But even as tensions build and systemic sustainability becomes increasingly dubious, twentieth-century ideals are held close.

The American Dream is a dead religion yet believers are steadfast in their determination to sacrifice the present for an increasingly distant tomorrow. From recent generations we have inherited a dismal way of life wherein to succeed is to consume and time must be bided in order to attain an idealized future free of its prerequisites. This hereditary sentence is illusory because we can only hope to escape the prison of our past through exploration of the creativity that is stifled when we adhere to the norms of that past. Such is the duplicity of the so-called American Dream.

The quest for stability has led to the atrophy of artistic sense. Escape from the agonizing ennui of contemporary life is usually bought at the mall or online with free shipping. Collectively, we have become so preoccupied working to satisfy our consumer compulsions that we are unable to move or even think outside the repetitive patterns of everyday life. What is left is the space between earning and spending which in the absence of any sort of substantive outlet becomes dead time – little bits of life frittered away watching predictable, shitty television shows or wasting time on Spaceface or working at some other meaningless task.

The greatest resource that any person can possess is time. Time is absolute potential, time alone can become precisely anything and is traded away at an incredible cost. When I buy a new car, I am buying it with the hours of my life or worse, with the promise of future hours. Had I not cashed in my dreams for more practical goals this would probably seem an insane transaction. But if I realize that I do not need a shiny fast car, that a simple one (or even a bicycle) is better, I have improved my life. If I do not buy things that I don’t need I will waste less time working and I am more free, and can pursue more important things like art or adventure.

It is a bleak path we will travel if we allow our creativity and our capacity to invent and interpret  to be continually co-opted and undermined by an unrelenting desire for some sort of even-keeled formulaic security. I don’t mean to advocate some corny, outdated hippie notion like tune in, turn on, drop out – to do so would be to give in to brazen sentimentality and I most certainly do not mean to offer any sort of ‘answer.’ There are no answers. But in this postmillennial moment there is a desperate need for creativity and substance that may be at least partially fulfilled if more of us can choose the courage to opt-out of this oversanitized death-race into which we were born. Our present is a future with unlimited possibility but we are taking our cues from the people who paved the world, the people who commodified desire and who turned dreams into product. By striving to do less we can allow ourselves to dream of more.

Our only hope is to abandon all hope, the most effective action is to do nothing. Cut the cord.

{Len Gatz may or may not be an adventurer currently exploring the sprawling suburban wilderness of the Intermountain West.}

Image: courtesy the author.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 9:42 pm. It is filed under Bullshit!, Culture and tagged with abandonment, american dream, cynicism, dispair, essays, false hopes, freedom, redemption, reveries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.