5:30 AM. Dawn signals the beginning of resistance, a daily morning struggle. Doubt is already there, staring at me. It waits patiently, ready to seep into every vein of my vital energy; faster than a virus, it consumes me in seconds. It pins me to the bed. All I can do is think, and I lose myself in the illusion of a reality I overanalyse. If I want to escape, I have no choice but to get up as quickly as possible, in one swift motion. Any moment of inaction will be seized by doubt, which will drag me down into its quicksand. With difficulty, I pull myself free from the tentacles of thought, but I manage. The day can begin.
To offer oneself the possibility of doing what one desires... a chance, an opportunity, a dream... It's a bit of all that at once, but it's especially a war against oneself. A fu***** fight that infuriates me every day. A confrontation that weighs heavily on my being, because it all depends on me. Indeed, I can't blame anyone, not that colleague who doesn't do their job well, nor the incompetent boss who can't decide what they want and makes you redo the same work a hundred and fifty times! No, I am alone with my own decisions and desires, in the deepest solitude in this cave where no one hears the screams of my doubts. The walls of this cavern echo the words of Jacques Brel: "You deserve it!" Because yes, I am one of those privileged ones who have decided to "do what they want," unlike others who are "forced" to work for others. But I think privilege is not the right word, I would call it more like masochism, maybe that's why we are not many. You will tell me that it's a question of money, that if everyone was given the necessary financial means, they would throw themselves into their dreams with open arms. Well, I'm far from sure I agree with that hypothesis. Money is the best excuse for not being. I'm not trying to make a grand point here, and if you think I'm overly focused on myself, my goal is simply to share my vulnerability, my doubts and my struggles as a potential source of reflection, a point of support for those who encounter the same kind of obstacles, particularly in a culture that glorifies overt personal triumph. I even come to think that this self-help fad, this "believe in yourself, go for your dreams" is a pandemic disease labeled with the word "meritocracy". A few years ago, I was unaware that this "you can if you want" principle was a phrase that weighed down the being with the heavy weight of its flaws. As I mentioned in my previous writings, humans, for the first time in millennia, find themselves completely alone in the world, forced to adopt a harmful narcissism. A sword so heavy to carry that we often lay down our weapons and surrender. Freed from this weight, we feel relieved but completely unaware of having abandoned our existence. I won't say any more about this here, I think I've already covered this topic, so I invite you to read my previous texts1.
Let's return to meritocracy, that ideological concept where everyone should be able to achieve what they desire based on their personal merit and not on their social origins or any other criteria unrelated to their individual abilities. If it's a principle that aims to be egalitarian on paper, in reality, it's far from impartial. It's certain that if we let the train of our lives pass by without getting on, we'll stay on the platform. Reaching one's ambitions is a commitment, and without action, nothing will happen. But it's not just work and talent that lead the dance. As things stand, if we weren't born with a silver spoon in our mouths, it will be more difficult, and even sometimes almost impossible, to achieve our dreams. Meritocracy, a chimerical figure of a demagogic society, drowns us in the fatality of simply being who we are without any other alternative. And associating our failures with our "inability" to make the necessary effort plunges us into an abyss of solitude and injustice. It's even more difficult to recover from such a blow when our education has been for a long time (in the Western world) the opposite of developing the "self". Our educational system is still unfortunately more focused today on educare (that is, training, molding) than on educere (leading out, accompanying). The little technical soldier answers the call, overshadowing the explorer of our lives. And this may be one of the reasons why we are paralyzed at the idea of following our own instinct, we have ultimately not learned to act without orders. The paternalism of our societies freezes people into only doing what they are told to do; a lethargic attitude that is admittedly very easy and seductive to follow. But this passivity has a price: malaise, overwork, burnout. Subjected to a pyramidal system that we can no longer bear, we are merely executors, not to say machines. We rebel against the system, clinging desperately to the illusion of a personal freedom that has long since faded. An energy that we waste in struggling, but which will never lead to victory; like Sisyphus, we push this freedom to the top of a mountain, from where it will always fall back down. Isn't it rather the denial of responsibility that we are fighting against? We ultimately go against others because we can't go towards ourselves, we flee because we don't want to be held responsible for our own actions (a behavior well known to our politicians). A fear of being scolded by this almighty father who points out our mistakes, our inability to do "well". For most of us, all we know how to do is work for others, and it starts in school by responding to the expectations of others who are there to validate (or not) our doing. So how can we be?
I think that Resistance, Part X, call it what you want, is the very definition of not having learned to be. Having has conjugated our lives from the beginning, and it will take much more than self-help books to help us free ourselves. But aren't we going astray by wanting to "be better"? Why and what does it really mean to "have confidence in ourselves," "know how to speak in public," "not be afraid" and so on? Isn't wanting to improve already the fact of not accepting ourselves as we are? As Alan Watts2 says, the one who wants to be better is no longer the one who needs to be well. There is a kind of distance between the us and the self. Schizophrenic, we unconsciously rely on this "other us," as if this "external us" could, in some way, understand us better than ourselves. Doesn't fleeing into the quest for polishing our beings distance us even further from who we are? Being afraid, having doubts, procrastinating, not finishing things, is it really "bad"? It's certain, and even if I'm not sure I can do it, and even if every morning I wake up with this doubt staring at me, I would like, the day I no longer wake up, to leave with the failure of having tried rather than the complaint of having left my life in the hands of others.
Alan Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.