The Permanent Problem
Keynes promised his grandchildren a world where the economic problem was solved. We built it, and then we ran from it.
Contents · 11 sections
The phone wakes before I do.
It lies face up on the nightstand and fills the dark with a small cold light, and by the time I open my eyes it has been working for hours. Messages have arrived from people who are awake in other cities. Numbers have changed. Somebody needs an answer. Before my feet touch the floor, before I have said a word to anyone or to God, I can feel the day standing over the bed like a creditor. I reach for the phone the way a drowning man reaches for a rope, except that the rope is what is pulling me under, and I know it, and I reach anyway.
I want to understand why.
Not in the way the articles explain it, with dopamine and design and the attention economy. Those explanations are true, and they are small. They tell me how the hook is shaped. They do not tell me why I was swimming toward it. I want to follow this one gesture, the hand moving toward the light in the dark, all the way down to where it starts. I suspect that if I can explain why I reach for the phone, I can explain most of my life. I suspect it might explain yours.
I. The prophecy
In 1930, as the Great Depression was closing over the West and men were beginning to stand in bread lines, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay about the distant future.11 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930). Reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (1931). He called it “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Everyone around him was asking how the world would survive the next year. He asked what it would look like in a hundred.
His answer was astonishing, and I did not know about it until this week.
Keynes argued that the depression was a passing illness, and that underneath it a deeper force was at work. Capital was compounding. Technology was multiplying what a single hour of human labor could make. If there were no great wars and no great growth in population, he wrote, then within a hundred years the standard of living in the advanced countries would be somewhere between four and eight times higher than it was in 1930. And at that point something would happen that had never happened before in the history of the species. The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, the oldest war there is, would be won.
He thought people would work perhaps fifteen hours a week. Three-hour shifts, he said, enough to satisfy the old Adam in us that still wanted to do something. And then he wrote the sentence that I have not been able to stop thinking about. When the economic problem is solved, he said, man will be faced for the first time since his creation with “his real, his permanent problem.” How to use his freedom. How to occupy the leisure that science and compound interest have won for him. How to live wisely and agreeably and well.
I am one of his grandchildren. He was writing about me.
And here is what I need you to see. He was right about the money. By most measures the wealth arrived, roughly as he predicted, roughly on schedule. The machines he imagined were built, and then machines he could not have imagined, and this year the machines learned to write and to reason. If you had shown Keynes the room I am sitting in, the clean water and the warm air and the food in the kitchen and the library of every book ever written glowing in my pocket, he would have said: there, you see, it happened. The economic problem is solved. And then he would have asked the only question that matters. So what are you doing with your freedom?
And I would have had to show him the phone. I would have had to tell him that I work more than my grandfather did. That the people around me who are richest are often the ones who work the most. That we have the fifteen-hour week’s worth of wealth and the sixty-hour week’s worth of exhaustion. That we arrived at the gate of his country and did not go in.
He was right about everything except us.
This essay is an attempt to answer one question. Why? Why, when we finally had the thing every generation before us died wanting, did we keep running? I have heard the usual answers, and I believe they are all true and all insufficient. I want to go through them one by one, because I think the real answer is underneath them, and I think it is worse than any of them, and I think it is also the only one that leaves a door open.
II. Three answers that are true and not enough
The first answer is greed. We want more. The Greeks had a word for it, pleonexia, the hunger for more than your share, and they thought it was the root of most of what goes wrong in a city.
In the second book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates builds a city out of words to see where justice comes from. He begins with a simple one. The people grow grain and bake bread, make wine and shoes and clothes, lie on beds strewn with myrtle, and sing hymns to the gods. They have no more children than they can feed, because they fear poverty and war. It is a good place. His young friend Glaucon laughs at it and calls it a city of pigs.22 Plato, Republic, Book II, 372a to 373e. Glaucon calls it a city of pigs at 372d. He wants couches. He wants sauces and perfumes and pastries. Very well, says Socrates. Let us build the luxurious city. But then the land will not be enough. We will need to take a slice of our neighbor’s, and they of ours, if they too abandon themselves to the endless getting of money. And then, he says quietly, we have found the origin of war.
I believe this. I believe that most of the fighting I see, between companies, between nations, between the few people at the top of any new technology who sue each other over who owns it, comes from wanting without a limit. But greed is not an explanation. It is a description. To say I keep running because I want more is only to say again that I keep running. Why do I want more? I am not hungry. I am not cold. I do not even like most of the things I buy. If I am greedy, I am greedy for something I cannot name, and that is the thing I need to find.
The second answer is that the race is rigged. Keynes himself saw this one coming, and it is subtle. He divided human needs into two kinds. Some needs are absolute. We feel them whatever anyone else has: food, warmth, shelter, safety. Those can be satisfied. Others are relative. We feel them only because satisfying them raises us above our neighbors. Those, Keynes admitted, may be insatiable, because the higher everyone climbs, the higher the bar for being above them.
Nearly fifty years later the economist Fred Hirsch gave this its most perfect image. If everyone stands on tiptoe, he wrote, no one sees any better.33 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (1976). A civilization that has satisfied its absolute needs and keeps growing anyway is a crowd on tiptoe, aching in the calves, seeing exactly what it saw before.
I watched it happen this year with my own eyes. When the machines learned to do in a minute what used to take a day, I thought for one naive afternoon that the day had been given back to us. It had not. The bar moved. The work that was enough last year was not enough this year. Now you need the machine just to stand where you were already standing, and if you refuse it you are not at the old baseline, you are below the new one. The gift was real. And everyone who received it began to run faster to stay in the same place.
There is a moment in Through the Looking-Glass that I read as a child and did not understand. Alice runs hand in hand with the Red Queen, faster and faster, until the wind tears at her hair and she cannot breathe, and when they finally stop and she collapses under a tree, she looks around and nothing has moved. In our country, Alice says, you would generally get to somewhere else if you ran very fast for a long time. And the Queen says, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”44 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), chapter 2. I thought it was a joke. It is not a joke. It is the most exact description of a positional economy that I know.
But this answer, too, stops short. It explains why the race never ends. It does not explain why I entered it. No one forced me to stand on tiptoe. The relative needs are only needs if I care where I stand relative to others. Keynes, Hirsch, and the Red Queen describe the trap with great precision. None of them explain why I walked into it, or why, standing inside it now with the door wide open, I do not walk out.
The third answer is the one I give most often, and it is the weakest. I need the money.
Epicurus divided desires the way Keynes divided needs. Some are natural and necessary, and they have a limit: when you have eaten, you are full. Others are empty, and they have no limit at all, because no amount of fame or wealth or power ever arrives at a point where the wanting stops. He has a saying that has survived twenty-three centuries: nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.55 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, on natural and empty desires. The saying is Vatican Saying 68.
Here is a confession that I find genuinely frightening. I have never once sat down and calculated what enough would cost. I have spreadsheets for everything. I have a system that tracks the balance in every account I own and warns me when a fact goes stale. I have never asked it the only financial question that matters to the life I say I want: how much, and then I stop? I have never asked because I am afraid of the answer. I suspect the number is smaller than I pretend. I suspect that if I wrote it down, the sentence “I need the money” would turn out to mean “I need the money to keep running,” which is the thing I am trying to explain, wearing the costume of a reason.
So. Greed is a description and not a cause. The rigged race explains why it does not end, but not why I joined. The need for money is, past a point I have refused to measure, a lie. All three answers are true. None of them reach the bottom.
III. The hunt and the hare
The answer was written down in the late 1650s by a man dying slowly of an illness no one could name.
Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and inventor, one of the great minds of his century, and in the last years of his life he filled scraps of paper with notes for a book he never finished. The scraps were found after his death and published as the Pensées, the thoughts. Among them is a passage on what he called divertissement. Diversion. It is the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about my life, and he wrote it nearly four centuries ago.
All of humanity’s misery, Pascal said, comes from a single thing. A man cannot sit quietly in a room alone.66 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (published 1670), the fragments on diversion. Fragment 139 in the Brunschvicg numbering.
He meant it literally. Look at the king, he said, who has everything. Leave him without diversion, without games or hunts or wars or conversation, and let him think about himself, and he will be the most miserable man in his kingdom. That is why kings are surrounded by people whose whole job is to keep them from thinking about themselves. Look at the man who spends his whole day hunting a hare. If you offered him the hare in the morning, he would not take it. He does not want the hare. He wants the hunt. The hare is only the excuse. Give a gambler, every day, the money he might win, on the condition that he does not gamble, and you will make him unhappy. He does not want the money. He wants the agitation that keeps him from seeing his own condition.
They love the chase more than the catch.
When I read that sentence I put the book down for a long time.
Because that is the answer, and it is not about the economy at all. We did not fail to reach Keynes’s country. We reached it. We stood at the gate and looked inside, and we saw what was waiting there. Not leisure in the sense of rest. Not a fifteen-hour week full of hobbies. What was waiting inside was the room. The quiet room, alone, with nothing left to do, and only the oldest question in it. What am I? What is all of this for? And we turned around. We ran back out into the race, and we called it ambition, and we called it providing, and we called it the economy, and it was none of those things. It was flight.
Keynes half knew. In the same essay, after the prophecy, he wrote that he looked forward to the age of abundance with dread as well as hope. He noticed that the wives of the wealthy in his own time, freed from work by money and servants, were often miserable, and he wrote that a fearful problem lay ahead for the ordinary person with no special talents who was suddenly free. He feared, in his words, a general nervous breakdown. He saw that the economic problem had been hiding a harder problem, and that the economic problem had been, in its cruel way, a mercy. As long as you are hungry, you do not have to ask what you are for.
So here is the thing I believe, and I am going to say it plainly, because it is the center of everything else.
The phone is not the disease. The race is not the disease. The economy, with all its Red Queens and its tiptoes, is not the disease. They are the medicine. We take them, every morning, before our feet touch the floor, against a pain we have agreed never to feel: the pain of standing in the quiet room and not knowing what we are. My hand reaches for the light in the dark because the dark is where the question lives.
That is why I reach for the phone. That is why the richest civilization in history works harder than its grandparents. That is why the machines Keynes dreamed of did not set us free. We did not want to be free. Freedom is the room. We wanted the hunt.
IV. What the machines were for
There is a man who has made a fortune by seeing what others missed, and he asks one question of everyone who wants to work for him. What important truth do very few people agree with you on?77 Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (2014), chapter 1. He believes, more fiercely than almost anyone alive, that the future belongs to those who build new things. He believes that a world which stops inventing becomes a world of fixed pies, and that people with fixed pies go to war over the slices. Growth, in his account, is what keeps the peace.
This week his question found me, and I have an answer, and I want to defend it properly.
Almost everyone I know believes that the most important work in the world is to build more. I believe the most important work in the world is to finally use what we have built for what it was for.
To see what it was for, you have to go back to Aristotle, and you have to look at something ugly.
Aristotle believed that the highest human life was the life of contemplation. Not prayer exactly, and not daydreaming, but the active, joyful exercise of the mind on the things most worth understanding, done for its own sake, needing nothing outside itself. He called the condition that makes this possible scholē, leisure. It is the word that, by way of Latin, gave us “school.” For Aristotle, leisure was not the opposite of serious activity. It was the purpose of all serious activity. We are busy, he wrote, in order to have leisure, the way we make war in order to have peace.88 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, chapter 7 (1177b).
And here is the ugly part. In Aristotle’s world, the leisure of the few was paid for by the labor of the many. Someone had to grind the grain and draw the water so that the philosopher could think. Aristotle defended slavery. He thought some people were made for it.
But in the same book, in the Politics, there is a strange and wonderful passage. He imagines, for a moment, a world in which tools could do their own work. If every instrument could accomplish its task at a word of command, he says, like the moving statues of Daedalus or the self-propelled tripods of the god Hephaestus that rolled into the assembly of the gods on their own; if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum could touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, then master craftsmen would have no need of helpers, and masters would have no need of slaves.99 Aristotle, Politics, Book I, chapter 4 (1253b).
Read that again, slowly, and then look at the world we live in.
Aristotle named the one condition under which the contemplative life could belong to everyone and not to a few: tools that work by themselves. We built them. We built them over two and a half centuries, the engine and the loom and the dynamo and the computer, and this year we built the last one he could have imagined, the instrument that answers at a word of command. The shuttle weaves. The plectrum plays. For the first time in the history of the species, the price of the examined life does not have to be paid by someone else’s chains.
And we used the self-weaving shuttle to weave faster.
We took the machines that could have bought us leisure, and we used them to make more work. We had Aristotle’s sentence in our hands, we are busy in order to have leisure, and we turned it inside out. We are given leisure, and we use it to be busy. That is not a failure of technology. Technology did exactly what it promised. It is a failure of nerve.
So here is my answer to the man with the question, and I think it goes deeper than his.
He fears that without growth the world becomes a fixed pie and people fight. He is right that a fixed pie breeds war. Plato saw it before he did. But look at what makes the pie fixed. It is not the amount of grain. It is the kind of wanting. Glaucon’s city did not go to war because it ran out of bread. It went to war because it wanted sauces and couches without limit, and no finite land can feed an infinite appetite. Epicurus’s limited desires cannot be fought over, because once they are satisfied there is nothing left to take. And the goods of the inner life, understanding, peace, the examined life, cannot be fought over at all. When I understand something true, I have not taken it from you. When I find peace, there is not less left in the world for you to find. Socrates gave away everything he knew for his whole life and died owning almost nothing and was not poorer by a single thought. Twenty-four centuries later I am reading him in a room he could not have imagined, and he is still giving.
The inner life is the only economy without scarcity. It is the only game in which every player can win completely and no one loses anything. If you want a world without wars over fixed pies, the answer is not only to grow the pie forever. That only builds Glaucon’s city with better weapons. The answer is to change what we hunger for. Growth without an education of desire is fever. It feels like health from the inside until the city burns.
That is my contrarian truth. Most people believe technology’s task is to keep making more. I believe technology’s task is nearly finished for those of us who already have enough, and that we are refusing to accept its gift, because the gift is the room, and the room is the one place we are afraid to go.
V. The objection I have to answer
There is an objection to everything I have said, and it is serious, and if I do not answer it I am a fraud.
It goes like this. This is a philosophy for the comfortable. You are writing from a warm room in one of the richest cities on earth. Billions of people still live under the arrows. They need clean water, medicine, electricity, safe roads, food that does not run out in a bad year. For them the economic problem is not solved. For them the outward work is everything. Your inner life is a luxury, and your call to stop building is the call of a man who has already been fed telling the hungry to meditate.
I want to concede everything in that objection that is true, because almost all of it is true.
Yes, the economic problem is not solved everywhere. Yes, for most of the people alive today, more technology, more growth, more of the outward work, is a matter of life and death, and the man with the question is right to want it. The engineer who builds a water system for a village is doing holy work. The scientist who makes a vaccine cheaper is doing holy work. I am not against building. I am not against growth. I would be a monster to be against them.
But look at what makes that work holy. It is not the building. It is what the building is for. It clears the ground. It moves someone else out from under the arrows, so that they, too, can someday stand at the gate of the quiet room and decide whether to go in. The outward work is sacred when it has an end beyond itself. The water system is for the child who no longer dies of cholera. The child is not for the water system.
And now look at me. I am not out under the arrows. I was carried out from under them by my parents, and their parents, and by two hundred years of people building engines. Nobody in that village is helped by my refusal to sit still. No child drinks cleaner water because I checked my email at five in the morning. My running is not solidarity with the poor. It is waste. It is a man pulled half drowned out of the sea who keeps on swimming, on the sand, in his sleep, while the people still in the water watch him and wonder what he is doing.
So the objection is right about the world and wrong about me. Its truth is the reason I must turn inward, not the reason I may refuse. If billions of people would give anything for the freedom I have, then the least I owe them is to not squander it on the hunt. The comfortable person who turns inward is not abandoning the poor. The comfortable person who keeps running, and calls it necessity, is insulting them.
VI. And then what?
When I was small I had a question I used like a crowbar.
I remember walking home with my father in the evening. His work clothes still smelled of the work. His hands were too tired to hold anything but mine. I asked him why he worked so much.
“So you can have more than I had.”
“And then what?”
“Then you’ll get a good job.”
“And then what?”
“Then you’ll work hard, and take care of your children, so they can have more than you.”
“And then what?”
He laughed. He put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he did, and he did not answer.
I have carried that unanswered question for twenty years. I carried it so long I forgot it was a question. I thought it was the shape of my life.
Every child who has asked it has discovered the same thing. It does not stop. Money is for something; no one wants the paper. What money buys, at the bottom, is time. But time is for something too. I have had empty time, whole Sundays of it, and it sat in my hands like water, and I could not wait to get back to the race. Freedom is for something. Every answer points past itself to another, like a staircase in a dream: flight after flight, each landing a door, each door opening on another stair.
Aristotle saw the staircase. At the very start of his Ethics he says that if everything we choose is chosen for the sake of something else, the chain goes on forever, and then our desire is empty and futile.1010 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 2 (1094a). So there must be something at the top. Something we want for itself, and for nothing beyond it. He called it the telos, the end, and he called the life that reaches it eudaimonia, a word we translate weakly as happiness and which means something closer to a soul that has become what it was for.
I want to be careful here, because this is where essays like this one usually go soft. They say the answer is “meaning” or “connection” or “presence,” and they let the word do the work. I am going to try to say what I actually mean.
When I say the top of the stairs is inward, I do not mean a feeling. I mean an activity. I mean the hour when I am reading something hard and true, and the room disappears, and I am no longer a person with a calendar and a name, I am only attention, following a thought to where it goes. I mean the moment, which has happened to me perhaps a dozen times in my life, when an idea I have been circling for days suddenly opens, and I see it, and for an instant it is as if I were not looking at the world but were part of what the world was looking at. I mean the feeling, at the end of a long walk with no phone, that the boundary between me and the trees has become thin. I do not have a better phrase for this than the one I used out loud this week, which embarrassed me even as I said it. Becoming one with the universe. The Hindu tradition calls it moksha. The Buddhists call it nirvana. Spinoza called it the intellectual love of God. William James, who studied hundreds of accounts of it, insisted that it belonged to persons and not to institutions, that the experience was primary and every church built on top of it came later.1111 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture II. I believe that. I believe it is the oldest human pursuit and the only one that was ever actually the point.
This is what Socrates meant when he told the jury that the unexamined life is not worth living. Not that you should think about your life now and then. That the examining is the life. That the man who spends his days questioning, understanding, and coming to terms with himself is not preparing to live. He is living, and everyone else is preparing.
So the oldest problem a human being has is not hunger, and it is not cold. It is himself. Every tool our kind ever made was a way of clearing the ground so that we could finally face that problem. We cleared it. And we stood on the cleared ground and built another tool, so that we would not have to face it after all.
VII. The gadfly’s courage
Socrates is the one person in history who went into the room and never came out.
He walked barefoot through the marketplace of Athens and owned almost nothing. He made no money. He wrote no books. He stopped people in the street, generals and poets and politicians and craftsmen, and asked them what courage was, what justice was, what they actually knew, and he kept asking until the floor dropped out from under them. He called himself a gadfly, the insect that stings a large, lazy horse to keep it awake. The city did not want to be awake. In 399 BC they put him on trial and condemned him to death.
What I had not understood until this week is why he refused to save himself, and what it has to do with me.
At his trial Socrates says something that sounds, at first, like a debating trick. He says that to fear death is to think you are wise when you are not.1212 Plato, Apology, 29a. The gadfly is at 30e, and the unexamined life at 38a. Nobody knows what death is, he says. It might be the greatest of all goods. Yet people fear it as if they knew it were the greatest of evils. And this, he says, is the most shameful kind of ignorance: believing you know what you do not.
Sit with that, and then turn it toward your own life, as I have had to turn it toward mine.
I am afraid to leave the race. I tell myself it is because I know what is out there: failure, poverty, my family’s disappointment, a life that comes to nothing. But I do not know that. I have never been out there. I have never once lived a single week of the life I say I want. I am afraid of the room the way the jurors were afraid of death, as if I knew it were a disaster, when I have never set foot in it. My fear is not prudence. It is the exact ignorance Socrates was killed for naming. It is a claim to knowledge I do not have.
That changes the question entirely. I have been asking, Am I brave enough to leave? The real question is, Am I honest enough to admit I do not know what I am afraid of? Courage, in Socrates’ account, is not a feeling of strength. It is the refusal to pretend you know what you do not. It is a form of honesty.
When the poison had climbed to his waist, Socrates uncovered his face and spoke his last words to his friend. Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Pay it, and do not forget.1313 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. A rooster was the offering you made to the god of healing when you recovered from an illness. People have argued about the line for two thousand years. Here is how I read it. He was not dying. He was being cured. The thing everyone feared was, for him, the end of a long fever.
I am not going to drink hemlock. Nobody is asking me to die. They are only asking me to sit quietly in a room. And I am more afraid of that than he was of the cup.
VIII. The waiter
Now the part I did not want to write.
I build things for a living. I am good at it. People depend on what I make. And this week, when someone asked me plainly what I thought of my work, I said that I believe all of it is in bad faith.
Jean-Paul Sartre has a waiter in Being and Nothingness.1414 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Part One, chapter 2, “Bad Faith.” The waiter moves a little too quickly. He bends forward a little too eagerly. He carries his tray with a little too much precision, balancing it like a tightrope walker. He is, Sartre says, playing at being a waiter. And he plays it so completely that he forgets something essential: he is not a waiter the way a rock is a rock. He is a free man who is doing waiter-things, and who could, at any moment, put the tray down. Sartre called this forgetting bad faith. It is the lie you tell yourself so well that it becomes your face. Its whole purpose is to escape the vertigo of your own freedom, by pretending that you are a thing with a nature, and not a person with a choice.
I know that waiter. I see him in the black glass of my laptop every morning before it wakes.
And this week I went further. I said I was a coward. I said I was incompetent. I said I was too afraid and too small to live the life I believe in. I want to be honest about how those words felt in my mouth, because I think it is the most important thing in this essay. They felt like relief.
A verdict is easier than a decision. If I am a coward, then the case is closed. Cowardice is my nature, the way waiting is the waiter’s nature. There is nothing to be done about a nature. I can go back to running, sad, and absolved.
Sartre saw this move too, and he closed the door on it. In a lecture he gave in Paris in 1945, he said that a coward is not born.1515 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” a lecture given in Paris in October 1945. The coward makes himself cowardly, by his acts, and the hero makes himself heroic, and there is always a possibility for the coward to stop being a coward, just as there is always a possibility for the hero to stop being a hero. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament that excuses you. There are only cowardly acts, one after another, and each of them could have been otherwise.
Which means that when I said “I am a coward,” I was not confessing. I was doing the waiter’s trick one level deeper. I was turning a series of choices into a nature, so that I would not have to make the next choice. The word coward was not my shame. It was my alibi.
So let me go through the alibis, one by one, and see which of them survive.
I need the money. I have already admitted that I have never calculated how much. Until I do, this is not a reason. It is a refusal to look.
I am incompetent. I would not know how to live any other way. Of course I would not. Nobody knows how to live a life they have not lived. Socrates claimed to know nothing, and walked into the marketplace every day anyway. Knowing comes after the first step, not before it. Incompetence at a life you have never tried is not a verdict on you. It is a description of being a beginner.
And then there is the last alibi, the one I have been circling this whole essay, the one I have been afraid to look at directly.
IX. My parents
I think of my mother’s hands more than her face. Those hands have washed ten thousand dishes and folded ten thousand shirts. I have seen them at a kitchen table late at night under one bulb, counting money that would never quite be enough, when she thought I was asleep. When I tell her I am tired, she asks if I am eating. When I tell her I am thinking about my life, she asks if something is wrong at work. She has no word for the thing I am trying to describe in this essay. For years I held that against her. I thought my parents were so deep in the old ways that they could not imagine life could be more than providing and surviving. I thought that if I left the race, I would be telling them that their whole sacrifice bought the wrong thing.
Here is what I have to say, and it is the hardest sentence I have ever written.
My family is not my reason. My family is my alibi.
I have used them the way the waiter uses his tray. I can’t, because of them. I can’t, because they need me. I can’t, because they gave everything, and who am I to walk away from what they built. And every one of those sentences has a true thing inside it, and every one of them is also a way of not choosing, and of making them responsible for my not choosing. I have put my parents between me and the room, and I have told myself they are the ones holding the door shut.
They are not. Let me tell you what I think my father was doing on that sidewalk.
I asked him, and then what?, again and again, and he did not answer. For twenty years I thought he did not answer because he did not know. Now I think he did not answer because the answer was standing next to him, holding his hand. He did not need the word telos. He had one. It was me. My mother did not need Aristotle to know what all those dishes were for. Every plate was for something, and she never once had to ask what, because it was in the next room, asleep. My parents were not lost on the staircase. They found the top of it. It was a child, and they gave their lives to it gladly, and they never confused the dishes with the child.
That is what I have confused.
My parents worked for an end. Their labor had a telos, and they knew it, and it was love. That is not bad faith. That is the opposite of bad faith. It is the most honest relationship to work a human being can have: I do this, and it is hard, and I know exactly what it is for.
The sociologist Robert Merton had a dry name for what happened to me.1616 Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces (1940). He called it goal displacement. It is what happens in an organization, or a life, when the means slowly and quietly becomes the end. The rules were made to serve the mission, and one day the rules are the mission. The ladder was built to reach the house, and one day you live on the ladder. My parents ran so that I would not have to run. They bought, with their whole lives, my freedom to choose. And I took that freedom and spent it on running, and then I told myself I was running for them.
The only way to betray what they gave me is to not use it.
So here is the distinction I have been looking for this whole time, and I am going to state it as precisely as I can, because I think it is the answer to the question I asked at the start of this essay.
Work is not the enemy. Bad faith is not a job title. Work is in good faith when I know what it is for, and when I stop once it has done that. Work is in bad faith when it is for nothing, or for more, or for the hunt, and when I tell myself I have no choice. The same hours at the same desk can be either. A man who works to provide for the people he loves, and who has calculated what that requires, and who stops there and turns toward the room with whatever is left, is living exactly as Aristotle said: busy for the sake of leisure. A man who works because he cannot bear to stop, and says it is for his family, and has never once asked how much they actually need, is the waiter with his tray.
I do not know yet which of these men I am. I suspect I have been the second, and that I could become the first. I suspect the difference between them is not a career change. It is one honest number, and one honest hour.
X. The first hour
There is no trap door. I used to wait for one: a sudden morning when I would stand up from the desk, walk out into the light, and never come back. Nobody leaves a life that way, and the fantasy of the trap door is itself another hunt. It lets me wait for a day that will never come, instead of acting on the one that is here. You do not escape a life the way you escape a burning building. You leave it the way you entered it. One hour at a time.
So here is what I am going to do.
Tomorrow the phone will wake before I do. It will glow on the nightstand, heavy with the world. I will not touch it. I will take the book from the table, and for one hour I will read and think and let everything wait. No messages. No work. Nothing that needs me. One hour of Aristotle’s scholē. One hour in Pascal’s room.
I want to be exact about what this hour is not. It is not self-care. It is not a productivity technique to make me better at the race. It is not a reward for working hard. If I treat it as any of those, it will become one more thing to optimize, one more lap. The hour is the first act of the argument of this essay. It is the experiment that tests it. I have claimed, in this essay, that the race is a flight from the room, that the machines were built to give us the room, that my fear of the room is ignorance pretending to be knowledge, and that my excuses are alibis. The hour is where I find out whether I believe any of it. Socrates did not write his philosophy down. He walked into the marketplace. This is my marketplace. It is a chair and a book and sixty minutes, and it is harder for me than anything I do at work.
And I already know what I think will happen.
I think the work will get done anyway. I think that when the hour is over, the messages will still be there, and nothing will have caught fire, and the world will have spent sixty minutes perfectly well without me. I think I will discover that the urgency I wake into every morning was never the world’s. It was mine. It was the hunt, dressed up as a duty.
And if that is what happens, then I will be facing the real question. Not the question of one hour. The question of all the others.
XI. The permanent problem
There is something about Through the Looking-Glass that I missed as a child, because I was paying attention to the running.
Alice does not escape the Red Queen’s country by running faster. That is the one thing the book makes clear cannot work. She crosses it the way a pawn crosses a chessboard. One square at a time, slowly, with long stretches in which nothing seems to happen, through a country full of strange people who have forgotten what they are for. And when she reaches the eighth square, the last one, at the far edge of the board, she finds a golden crown on her head. She is a queen.
The pawn was never weak. It was only early.
Keynes said that when the economic problem was solved, his grandchildren would face for the first time their real, their permanent problem: how to use their freedom, how to live wisely and agreeably and well. He was right. He was a hundred years early, and four years from now, in 2030, the century he gave us will be over. It was never really an economic prediction. It was a dare. He was daring us to stop running when the reason to run was gone, and to walk into the room, and to find out what we are.
I think I have been refusing his dare my whole life. I think most of us have.
Tomorrow I will move one square.
And if, as I suspect, that hour costs me nothing, if the world does not end and the work still gets done and I sit in the quiet and find that the quiet does not kill me, then I will no longer be able to say that I do not have time, or that I cannot afford it, or that someone is holding the door. I will have proven to myself that the door was always open.
And then I will have to answer the question I have been running from since I was a boy on a sidewalk, holding my father’s hand, asking him again and again until he laughed and could not say.
If one hour is free, what is the rest of my life for?
Notes
-
John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930). Reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (1931). ↩
-
Plato, Republic, Book II, 372a to 373e. Glaucon calls it a city of pigs at 372d. ↩
-
Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (1976). ↩
-
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), chapter 2. ↩
-
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, on natural and empty desires. The saying is Vatican Saying 68. ↩
-
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (published 1670), the fragments on diversion. Fragment 139 in the Brunschvicg numbering. ↩
-
Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (2014), chapter 1. ↩
-
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, chapter 7 (1177b). ↩
-
Aristotle, Politics, Book I, chapter 4 (1253b). ↩
-
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 2 (1094a). ↩
-
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture II. ↩
-
Plato, Apology, 29a. The gadfly is at 30e, and the unexamined life at 38a. ↩
-
Plato, Phaedo, 118a. ↩
-
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Part One, chapter 2, “Bad Faith.” ↩
-
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” a lecture given in Paris in October 1945. ↩
-
Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces (1940). ↩