against brute forcing

Karen Kilimnik, Dinner in the Alley, 2010

American culture encourages everyone to be a go-getter, and I’ve been reflecting lately that even in my former incarnation as a Semi-Gifted Kid I was never much of one. I sort of mashed myself into that shape, because I liked to please and it was important to my parents that I do the things—good grades, piano, math competitions, etcetera. And also I really wanted to go to college in the United States and college admissions requires teenagers to jump through insane and arbitrary hoops to prove that they are Worthy of Receiving an Elite Education. So I jumped! And then, of course, I quickly left college for Silicon Valley, which is where I met people so good at go-getting I kind of gave up on the whole thing.

Everyone in my life is so excellent at showing initiative. I mean, any one of my friends could cold email the statue of someone who died in 1578 and get a response in 30 minutes. They’re very crisp communicators and extremely competitive. A lot of them run companies or are otherwise self-employed in a way that requires them to just do things constantly. And again, everything in our culture sort of implies that that’s just how you have to be to succeed. You have to be working really hard all the time and constantly brute forcing things. But what I’ve become passionate about in the past couple of years is the idea of not forcing things.

Take the ayahuasca discourse. Urban legend has it that people take ayahuasca and afterwards do things like give up on their startups, which is bad because productivity, ambition, greatness, etc. Now, my argument is that if you do psychedelics and quit something afterwards, it’s probably because you didn’t like or care about it very much. Again, we live in a culture that teaches smart young people that they have to direct their attention and energy towards something, even if it’s arbitrary and they don’t get any sense of meaning out of it. Because of that you get a lot of people trying very hard to brute force something that’s essentially meaningless to them. To me, that’s a bad outcome.

I say this as someone who believes she has the best job in the world. But I could never have brute forced my way into my job, because everything sort of happened organically in a way that was impossible to predict. I started posting on Twitter, and then I started sharing my writing on a platform called Reading Supply, and then I became aware of the existence of Substack and started posting there. I got very lucky. But also, I’ve now been writing this newsletter for long enough (four years!!) to report that it’s not exactly a cakewalk. Writing a post is easy enough, but writing posts that people like enough to keep paying for, month after month, year after year, keeping the same schedule regardless of what’s going on in your personal life (people do not like it when you skip a week), constantly trying to stay consistent with what’s already working while trying to introduce new and fun elements, is… I mean, it’s a very privileged job, but it’s still a job.

I say this to illustrate that there are lots of opportunities to be challenged, even if you’re not brute forcing. I feel like people create this false binary where either you approach life in a super Type A way where you’re grinding away until you collapse exhausted at 1 AM or you’re unambitious and never going to contribute anything to society. I feel like what working in a more creative field has taught me is that actually there’s a lot of value to thinking and strategizing and you actually can’t do that well if you don’t take space for yourself.

Another way to say it: you don’t get to work on very many things for 10 years, so choose what you focus on carefully. Save your persistence for what’s truly close to your heart.

The same approach applies to relationships. If something is uphill all the way, it’s probably just… not that good? The biggest difference between me now and me 10 years ago is that 10 years ago if someone I liked could say to me “Well, maybe this relationship isn’t a great idea,” and I would’ve been like, “Wait, no, I need to prove you wrong.” And what I’ve learned since then is that if someone tells you a relationship with them is a bad idea you should just be like okay cool! Because you really don’t actually get to be in that many meaningful relationships in your life. So you should really reserve your effort and care and love for what is so deeply meaningful to you.

You can make a lot of things happen if you’re smart and persistent. But should you? I think most people should do less and try to understand themselves more. And maybe the only way to understand is through doing, but sometimes it doesn’t have to be. Like, maybe you have to date that awful guy to realize you shouldn’t be with awful guys, but also maybe you could just take a step back and be like, Am I acting like an idiot? And maybe you have to drop out of your PhD after 3.5 years in order to realize you hated grad school but also maybe you could’ve just been like… wait a second… do I actually want to go to grad school?

When I see people who are really good at brute forcing things I fear that they’ll just throw themselves at the nearest attractive obstacle without any sense of like… what is actually spiritually significant to them. And I actually think most people can find something to do that is deeply meaningful. I do not think that we teach our youth this! I would hazard a guess that most people who are graduating from Yale and, say, taking a job at McKinsey reason that they’re giving themselves financial stability and lots of optionality by taking a high-status job that gives them flexibility for the future. Which okay, perfectly true, but still, at some point you’re going to have to actually solve the problem of who you are and what you care about. And if you don’t, if you spend years distracting yourself from the very difficult task of figuring out what is actually meaningful and aspirational to you, in 10 years you might take several tabs of acid and be like, wait, I don’t feel connected to a single thing in my life. Nothing about my materially comfortable, spiritually bereft existence feels Real to me. And that sudden realization might lead to you doing things that make people on Twitter judge you.

But a life that looks good is not the same thing as a life that feels good. Maybe no one can tell the difference except for you, but you’ll struggle to fool yourself. More and more I notice that most people are primarily motivated by the avoidance of certain feelings. For instance, if you have spent a lot of time investing in something you don’t actually like very much, admitting that to yourself creates a lot of pain and discomfort and regret and uncertainty. And you might think to yourself, I can just avoid feeling all of those things if I don’t look at the problem too hard. I mean, my life is good, right? Everyone thinks my life is good. People envy me and the existence I’ve created by working very hard. That is basically the same thing as happiness.

To believe that joy and meaning are achievable for you means that you would have to go out there and look for it. Which is hard in a different way than throwing yourself at a concrete problem that can eventually be broken down by brute force. From the outside, it can seem insane to let go of certainty for something as intangible, as indefensible, as meaning and connection. But for many people I think that’s the most important decision they can make.