Dashing dog, searching for purpose | Derek Sivers
People search for their passion or purpose. But “purpose” and “passion” are words we use when we’re not working.
@patrickrhone An interesting take. That’s my experience too. But - “You are not a story,” he says. Not sure about that. Not quite that I am a story, but that life is story-shaped. I just listened to a philosophy podcast discussion on exactly this:
@patrickrhone quote This reminds me of something that Justin Mackelroy said in an old video. It hit so hard that I rewound a bunch of times to transcribe it:
> As far as your life, I think I started having more success when I stopped feeling like there was a narrative to my life. I think, once you let go of that idea then, first off you stop seeing yourself as the most important thing in your narrative. You see yourself as more of a component.
> There’s no arc to my story. There’s no climax, anti-climax, or denouement. So, trying to find where things connected or what made sense in my arc, didn’t really make a lot of sense. Once I let go of that, I started having more success and became happier.
I heard it less as new rules to live by and more of a call to stop making myself anxious.
@writingslowly Yeah, I’ve been thinking on the “You are not a story” part. And, the more I think on it the more I agree… I think it has to do with perspective.
Stories are the things we tell. The story itself is not us. But we are certainly the authors of the story we tell through our choices and actions. Change the choices, change the actions, and the story changes as well.
I think if we believe the story is us — that it is what we are — then that limits us to the stories we’ve told to/about ourselves or that others believe. The truth is we can change the story. We don’t have to be it.
@patrickrhone @writingslowly I’m of two minds. When choosing a video to watch, I always count it as two strikes if it’s “based on a true story,” precisely because reality doesn’t have a story arc (so tends to make a poor story).
However, I think a story arc—most obviously the Hero’s Journey, but other story structures can work too—is a great way to organize your life, or individual pieces of it. Accept the call to adventure, gather powers and allies, confront evil, face your own dark night of the soul, overcome evil, and then return home to teach what you’ve learned.
Sure, you can nit-pick about imposing a story structure on top of a reality that has none, but that doesn’t make it less useful as a way to think about achieving what you want.
@philipbrewer I think the hair splitting here is between who we are and what we do. The story is what we do. It may be driven by and depend on who we are but they are two separate things.
Of course, I’m a believer in nondualism so that certainly is influencing my take here.
@patrickrhone That’s very interesting. To my mind, the story is what we tell ourselves about what we do.
@patrickrhone Related purely to linguistic side of nondualism: In Esperanto the word “kelkaj” means “some” or “a few.” English speakers have no trouble using it, but speakers of some other foreign languages have added to Esperanto the word pluraj, which means exactly the same thing, except that it specifically means “more than one,” presumably because their native language has different words for “more than none,” “more than one,” and “more than two,” and they can’t simplify their speaking to use a word which might mean any of those things.
@tracydurnell.com I share your feeling of liking and disliking the whole concept. It is an uncomfortable contradiction. I feel like it’s impossible for humans to totally avoid narratives because we’re compulsively drawn to them. Most of us live in a state where we
comfortably consume multiple narratives all at the same time through books, tv, movies, etc. Even advertisements are usually short narratives. It’s kind of amazing how many universes we can swim through without loosing track and I think that has a profound meaning.
Stories are a significant part of how we process and understand our world.
The quote from Winnie Lim, however, cuts right to the unhealthy side of narrative thinking. It’s really great! Her warning about becoming trapped in an identity or decision simply because we feel it is how our story should go is mirrored in the quote I shared. We’re not always the main character and there is a lot of freedom and relief that can come from that.