You will never do anything remarkable

This is my twenty-first post in the Advent of Writing series.

Today has been busy: preparing for Christmas and spending time with family. So I don’t have a full post of my own thoughts to share. But fortunately, I have something better: someone else’s thoughts. This is a partially and slightly edited transcript from the video “You Will Never Do Anything Remarkable” by exurb1a.

It had a huge effect on me when I first watched it, about five years ago.

It’s witty, clever, and delivers an important message with a beautiful story. I won’t include the entire story here, just the culmination.

By all means, you should watch the video, but let this be a small glimpse into it.

Enjoy:

For the longest time I believed that there were two types of people:

The knowers, who knew what they were doing with their lives, and then the feckless plebs like me, who were just wandering idiots going from plan to misguided plan. Thirty is now spitting distance away from me, and, you know, the most traumatic part of exiting one’s twenties isn’t the sudden random failure of body parts, nor the blissful crushing hug of student debt, or even losing the ability to party past six in the morning and not die. It is the realization that this model is bollocks, because these people do not exist. Now, clearly, expertise exists, don’t trust a barista to fly your plane, nor a pilot to make your double frothy laxative anxiety juice. But when it comes to wisdom, or working out how to be happy, or big boy and big girl meaning of life stuff, no one has a damn clue what they’re doing. Not your heroes, not the smartest among us. When it comes to matters of the soul, it is open season. And this is a wonderful thing, because it means that as far as art or innovation goes, the world is anarchy.

And while you may have convinced yourself that there’s no point trying to do anything groundbreaking or novel because someone will do it better. Whoever the greats are that you respect, obviously they had the same doubts, and they pushed through it. They were intensely interested in or devoted to something, while simultaneously feeling lost all the time. A long period of confusion isn’t a side effect of trying to do something radically interesting, it’s the price of admission. We forget that Van Gogh was 27 before he even bothered trying to paint properly, that Darwin told us: “I was considered by all my masters and my father a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect”, that Emily Dickinson was barely even recognized during her lifetime, that it wasn’t until a hundred years after Melville’s death that anyone really gave a damn about Moby-Dick. They were beset on all sides by mean critics, or the worst critic of all: themselves.

Cthulhu’s dick, I have heard of art classes where the teacher begins the first semester by assuring the students they’ll never break through, and it’s pointless to try; rejection letters writers received, instructing them to put down their pens and never bother at it again; vacuous jaded bollocks that convinces young artists to give up, but may I humbly recommend that if one is informed you will never do anything remarkable with your life, perhaps the most appropriate response isn’t “Yeah, you’re probably right”, but rather, “Fuck off! And who the fuck are you anyway?!” The shit they will tell you: “you’ve had all your good ideas”, “it’s all been done before”, “you’re too old, too young, too dumb”, “there’s nothing new under the sun”.

Let’s say your lifespan is 80 years, or about 29,200 days. If you’re 18, you’re about 6,500 days through. 28 about 10,000 days through. 38 about 14,000 days through. Regardless of whether one believes in an afterlife or not, these days are not coming back, and there is not enough time to listen to cynics. By the power of Grayskull, look at where we are. Historically, technologically, galactically, the whole game! This isn’t normal, is it?

Act without expectation. Make cool stuff just because. Give cats fishies always.

Today, this week, this month, year, decade, and century. Will occasionally be referenced in history, and that will be that. If one is cautious about pursuing an unusual path, it may help to remember that the cynics will be forgotten just as readily as your failures will be, too. There has never been a better time to do a thing. And just by virtue of how weird existing is in the first place, there are a trillion interesting things still undone, unmade, and unsaid. Those areas have not been drilled, Eli. It is a wilderness out there for everyone. It always was.

The greats didn’t know they were greats, they were just mortal humans who refused to bow to cynicism. And were we to draw some collective lesson from their lives, it might sound something like: in your projects, in your silly pursuits, in your unlikely follies, and your expeditions into the abyss to recover those strange mental metals you will fashion into something no one has ever made before. I wish you the very, very best of luck.

Now sod off and be remarkable please.