I’ve been a bit on edge lately, which among my friends hasn’t been particularly surprising. The relationship I was in recently ended, I’ve been chronically underemployed, and the long days of Seattle summer mean there’s simply more time to fill. In other words, I’m bored.
I doubt anyone reading this is surprised by this revelation. After all, I’m just starting a post of my writings online, which typically is driven by a combination of boredom and narcissism that enables someone to write enough to maintain a steady output of writing, and to feel confident enough in their own importance to post it on the Internet. Surely, Peter, the reader is saying, it’s obvious that you’re bored. Please, dear God, don’t bore us.
I’ll do my best, as this post really isn’t about boredom. It’s occurred to me that one of the root causes of my current ennui has been a separate, ongoing effort of mine to simplify my life by getting rid of lots of “distractions” that I used to use to populate my life. Going back several years now, I’ve been getting rid of things like television and social media and magazine subscriptions. I got a divorce – not to say that my marriage was a distraction – which temporarily resulted in huge complications but eventually radically simplified things as I moved into my own place and got rid of huge quantities of “stuff” that had accumulated over the years, and got disentangled from my ex-wife’s interests. In times past, had I been modestly underemployed, I would have watched more television, read more magazines, cleaned up rooms and garages and cars and done lots of lawn work, but now, I don’t have access to all of those minor tasks and distractions. So I have lots of time for, well, not much – lots of time for my mind to drift, for my body to grow listless or stroll aimlessly on daytime streets, for my soul to wander and ponder and search for “meaning” in that way that tends to annoy the stuffing out of people.
Human beings are pretty good at ignoring distractions when we’re focused on survival. But few of us actually struggle for survival, much though nearly all of us struggle daily to earn a living (either actually, working for money, or virtually, by trying to think of ways to earn money). Struggling for survival would mean being uncertain as to how we will pay for food, housing, and clothing, and while a decent chunk of the population in modern post-industrial countries still worries about this, if you’re reading this essay – mostly likely on a shiny laptop or smartphone – you’re almost certainly not in that category. You have the means to exist – maybe not as comfortably as you’d like, but almost certainly without real fear of not existing due to starvation or exposure.
Our identity is a third “need” (along with food and shelter) for us humans, particularly when survival itself is no longer in question; without an identity, we are either not human – we’re simply famine victims struggling to regain our humanity – or else we become so disconnected from what it is to be human that we also start detaching from physical survival. This isn’t idle speculation: we see this in addicts, whose identity has eroded so much in the replacement of abstract meaning with neurochemical craving that hygiene and food become unimportant; and in suicides of all kinds. I’ve also seen it in my child, not in the sense that he lacks an identity but in the amazing amount of energy he devotes towards creating an identity of his own, even at age five. I’ll come back to my son, but for now, I’ll note that seeing his relentless pursuit of identity over the past few years is part of what has inspired me to think about distraction and calling and how they differ.
As an intimately personal concept, identity can’t be judged or categorized. We define it in the way that makes sense for us, and if we start to lose it, we redefine it or return to our definition as needed. I think the starting point for forming a fulsome identity is to acquire or discover (I’ll argue in a bit that this distinction is irrelevant) a calling. A calling is nothing more than an object which, in its pursuit and in its acquisition, has the ability – either intrinsically or in the mind of the called – to become recursive, that is, to open up pathways for further exploration or pursuit. We can think of plenty of examples of this and society has elevated certain pursuits as “callings” in and of themselves – think of how churches describe a “calling” to ministry, or how certain people have a “calling” towards charity. But even mundane things, like model trains, can become callings – a realm of activity and thought that regenerates itself endlessly.
A distraction, on the other hand, is simply an object whose pursuit and acquisition is an end unto itself. The trouble is, an individual can define almost anything as either a calling or a distraction, although some pursuits are more suited to one than the other. Television, for example, is very difficult to convert from a distraction to a calling – but nevertheless, some people have, going from watching television to pass the time, to watching it obsessively, to writing about it, to writing for it, to mapping the arc of their lives to it. There’s even a Talking Heads song about it. Granted, David Byrne and company weren’t celebrating the elevation of television to a calling, but they at least are honest enough to admit that it exists. And making a purely passive entertainment format the subject of a calling isn’t anything new – the conflation of personal meaning to the appreciation visual arts such as painting and sculpture, while viewed as an elevated pursuit by society, is essentially no different.
Nevertheless, there is a distinction between a distraction and a calling. Let’s stick with television to illustrate it: most people watch television and it passes through them, maybe exciting their minds or their hearts via the drama or comedy it presents, but in a candy coated sort of way. It leaves them essentially empty except in the moment of the experience – it doesn’t nourish or inspire, and in particular, the passive, mass-delivery nature of the medium inhibits the initiation of any dialogue or response function. But many people then take another step and transform their passive absorption of Cheers or Fools and Horses or Dowton Abbey into an active dialogue with others. Most people then stop there – conversation being a distraction for most people – but some portion don’t. The conversation becomes debate, becomes an open dialogue. At that point, the potential for television to become a calling – or put differently, for the enjoyment of television to become a mission, something that one can begin to think of as part of their identity – begins to emerge.
The distraction is not so much empty as closed: upon consummation, the experience ceases to have ongoing meaning. But the calling is radically open. While a given experience can be consummated, it simply leads to a cone-shaped expansion of possible new experiences, and the act of both navigating that cone and further expanding it can begin to create new meaning in the mind of the individual.
I’m writing this at my son’s weekly skateboarding clinic at Seattle Center. He enjoys skateboarding – and indeed he looks the part, thin and wiry and enthusiastic in a chill sort of way – but it’s not yet a calling to him. It’s fun and something to do because it’s Saturday and that’s what we do. He has one calling, though, and that is trains. Nothing wrong with that, in fact he was named after someone who arguably is drawn to the same calling, but the difference is stark. He brings the concepts of trains to skateboarding; indeed, trains can be integrated into almost any concept to him. But he rarely if ever brings other concepts to the world of trains. For him, trains have so much interpretive and integrative possibility that they are a full world unto themselves: they are an identity, whereas skateboarding is just a thing to do and could never supply enough to define him.
At this moment, though, I don’t want to come across as condemning distractions entirely. They don’t work as a stable foundation for defining identity, but in our modern world, where physical survival occupies a vanishing amount of our time, we need to fill our time or else we will be overtaken with ennui. And distractions are like seasoning in life as well – we all know how dull people who have only a calling to define them can be, moaning on and on about how everything from the price of root beer to our choice of hair style relates somehow to veganism or cosmic consciousness or the saving power of one’s religion. Distractions remind us that the world is diverse and interesting and silly and cool, and that in and of itself is a great thing.
As I mentioned, I’ve spent several years reducing the distractions in my life, largely successfully. I have less “stuff”, I don’t fill my life with activities which I only vaguely enjoy but which take up lots of time. Strangely, though, I’ve also lost my callings. I had two callings as a young adult: I wanted to have a family, and I was passionately engaged with the question of what “value” means as a concept. Lots of people have looked at me sideways for having that latter intellectual pursuit as a calling, which I suppose is understandable – it’s incredibly abstract – but in many ways it was an ideal calling. It’s essentially an exploration of the human condition and humanity’s ability to abstract concepts, which is infinitely complex and recursive and thus inexhaustible. It can be explored in a broad range of ways – I explored it via becoming a banker, banking being the nexus point where abstract value normalization takes place in modern society – therefore you don’t have to get locked into any one pursuit.
But for whatever reason – possibly because I don’t have a ready outlet to explore it, possibly because it’s not as compelling to me as it once was – that calling has faded and now seems closed, at least for the time being. Its fading has put me in a new state of being, that of limbo, a curious netherworld. I’m caught between one phase of my life, formerly defined by the exploration of value and how that defines us as humans, and the next phase, which may continue that exploration or it may not.
My other “calling” was to get married and have a family. I got married relatively early, at age 25, but for a litany of reasons, we didn’t have a child until much later, and by that time, the calling of having a family had literally become divorced from any calling to be married. I am still called to fatherhood: I love my son dearly, and even when we’re not spending time together – most of the time, as he lives primarily with his mom – I’m thinking about him, about how he’s growing and changing and how his mind and soul are starting that amazing process of firing. I recognize the profound influence I have as a parent over him, and I’m both daunted and blessed and honored by the role I get to play in his life. Reflecting on my own father, and the billions of ways his every act and every utterance changed me, makes me realize how humbling this project is – although calling being a father a project is a poor way of describing it. But while it’s easy to identify as being a father, it doesn’t provide me with a complete identity, for reasons I don’t completely understand. In fact, the identity of “father” crystalizes the sense in me that my identity as myself is fundamentally in limbo. Being a father, in a complete way, means showing him what it means to be human. Being human means having an identity – but as I say, without a calling, without a purpose that feels compelling right now, my identity feels incomplete. What is that demonstrating to my son, I find myself asking? Am I showing him what it is to be human, or am I showing him what it is to be a shell?
The “calling” to be a married person has gone away entirely, but it hasn’t been replaced by anything. There is still a physical craving for a relationship – our sex drive is probably the single strongest biochemical drive we have – but that’s not the same. A calling engages all parts of us – our minds, our bodies, our souls – whereas my desire for physical contact doesn’t do that. It could be that I’ll meet someone who does engage all of that, and then there will be an overarching need, a “calling”, to be with that person – but again, I no longer identify myself as needing to be married, to have that as a definition. I think that’s healthy in the sense that having a need to “be” a husband or partner is a barrier to having a true partnership or loving relationship. But in an immediate sense for me, it is also another element of feeling in limbo: I’ve lost the “calling” to be married with children, but it hasn’t been replaced with a new calling to be with someone specific simply because they are who they are – or, for that matter, to be on my own, simply because that’s what is calling to me.
On that score, though, I suppose I’m called to help other people and other creatures. I love my dog; I can’t imagine not being with him, and I can’t imagine doing things that would harm him. I love my family – my parents and my sister – and want to help them. I love my friends, and while my friends don’t actively need assisting right now, I’d be there for them in a second if they did. Are these callings? I think they are, by my definition. They engage me on every level of being; people – whether friends or family – are the living definition of open ended possibility; and they all are part of my “identity” in a core way. But they aren’t my core callings – the things I would define for myself, to fire my own internal drive towards being an independent part of an all-embracing and inescapable world but at least somewhat on my terms. So while my friends and family are important, and while I’m called to serve them and love them, it’s not the type of calling that can help define my own, individual identity.
My distractions have been pared down but I still have a few. I like baseball. I like playing golf. I like swimming in lakes. I like reading, the more abstract the better but also I like reading essays and newspapers. I like good food. None of these things will lift me out of limbo, however, and by paring down my distractions I see that fact much more clearly than I did when I had far more distractions. If you have enough distractions – and I know quite a few people who do, chasing fancier cars and bigger boats and more vacations despite rapidly diminishing interest in any of them – then your life will fill up. You’ll work harder – consuming more of your time and energy – to support and supply them. Eventually the lack of any core calling will be irrelevant: one will have filled all of their lives in being distracted and sustaining those distractions.
But if you pare all that back, leaving yourself with a few intense but simple distractions that exist simply to remind you of the wonder of the world, you’ll find that your identity still needs definition. And if you had a calling and that fades, you’ll find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, and a very indistinct vision of how to move forward.
Again, I’m writing this (or I started writing this) while my son was at a skateboarding clinic, watching my son try out something new, which might become a calling, a distraction, or a forgotten experiment. At five years old, we are playing with infinite possibility, and our identity is maximally fluid. I don’t know that I can replicate that. It’s not that I can’t explore new things like my son does, but at age forty-two, the world is slowly becoming less infinite purely because one’s awareness of one’s finiteness is more sharply in focus. I am a father, I am aware of the network of family and friends that I choose to love, I know of the need to support myself and others. I’ll need to embed my new calling within that web of other callings which I don’t want to go away – whereas my son, should he find a calling now, can place it at the core of his identity, the way I did when I chose to light upon the human expression of value, and being married, as my core callings back when I was embarking on my adult journey.
I think the greatest tragedy in life is to have a calling and reject it – and I know plenty of people who have done that, and they are more completely miserable than anyone else I know, even if outwardly they seem successful and “happy”. You see them manically pursuing their distractions but never being satisfied, and I’ve had lots of conversations where they see a glimpse of their own misery but can’t let go of the traps they’ve created. I get really nervous when I see other people start to slip down the slope of rejecting a calling, but it’s hard, especially if you’re called to do something that society doesn’t particularly reward or care about. It’s hard, and I sympathise – and usually stay silent. And I’ve seen lots of people I went to school and university fade into something much less than a life by rejecting their callings for something societally acceptable.
I’m not in that particular hell, thankfully. It’s not that I’ve rejected a valid calling, it’s that what I most passionately and completely desired as a young adult no longer resonates. “Being married” was always probably a false desire – it’s not about being married, it’s about the person to whom you are married, and even that only comes about when your own identity is fully secure. My intellectual project of exploring value truly felt like a calling – and it is still open ended – but it’s faded. I’m not sure why, and maybe it will return – or maybe it’s simmering, and writing like I am is part of the process of transforming it into something new. But I haven’t rejected anything. I don’t feel tragic.
Conversely, the people I most admire are the ones who find a calling and embrace it fully, ignoring what the world thinks about it and leaning into the potential of that calling without any fear. I’m lucky to know quite a few people like that, but their calling is wholly their own – although sometimes their stories are so compelling that it makes me wonder whether I should give their callings a good look for myself. Lots of people use friends and family as their core driver of identity – and I think that was probably the norm for most of humanity’s time on earth. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that – but it’s not me. As I said above, while friends and family are a calling, my own identity – and one’s callings – are intensely personal, and I can’t say that I’m driven towards that tribal intensity of calling towards ones network that is implied by that. I’m not afraid of surrendering myself to whatever it is that will be that compelling, necessary, open-ended object of total fascination of my being, but until I find it, I won’t try to fill the gap with other people’s passions.
So in the meantime, I’m in limbo. I’m not in hell – rejecting that which I’m truly called to do – but I’m also not in paradise. As I look around, I think there are actually more people trapped here than we care to realize, but the reason for that is that we’re encouraged to fill our lives with distractions. As I said, distractions are great as a seasoning to life – but you can’t live on herbs and spices. You need some substance. The modern world, though, doesn’t really care if you’re living on substance or on savor; as long as you purchase things, and in being compelled to purchase things have a job and pay taxes and outwardly appear “normal”, all is good. Advertising and social media exist, it seems, simply to ensure that we stay focused on our distractions – and if any one given distraction should fade in interest, advertising and social media will gladly supply us with an infinite variety of other distractions to engage our interest (and our money).
With too many distractions, you can stay in limbo and be reasonably comfortable. I’m not comfortable. Hopefully I’m not too boring.