Haruki Murakami was a mediocre student. Like a lot of people who go on to high achievement later in life, the future novelist had trouble paying attention to what the teachers told him to pay attention to, and could only study what he was interested in. But he made it to college, and a few credits before graduating he opened a small jazz club in Tokyo. After a ton of hard work, he was able to pay the bills, hire a staff and keep the place open.
In 1978, Murakami was at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Japan watching a baseball game and drinking a beer. The leadoff batter for his team, the Yakult Swallows, laced the ball down the left field line. As the batter pulled into second base, a thought crossed through Murakami’s head: “You know what? I could try writing a novel.”
He started writing after closing time at his jazz club and eventually sent a manuscript off to a literary magazine — so blasé about it that he didn’t even make a copy for himself in case the magazine lost what he had sent in. It won a prize and was published the next summer. He decided to sell the bar, which was his only reliable source of income, and pursue writing. “I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir.
No longer doing the physically demanding work of running a bar, he started to put on weight. He decided to take up a sport, and running seemed like a good option: There was a track right by his house, it didn’t require fancy equipment and he could do it by himself.
He wasn’t lying when he talked about his tendency toward total commitment. By the late 2000s, he was running six miles a day, six days a week every week of the year, and had run in 23 marathons, plus many other long-distance races, an ultramarathon and some triathlons.
Even when he was young his times were not stellar, and he was miserable a lot of the time. The memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” is studded with sentences in which he describes his agony at one race after another: “As I ran this race, I felt I never, ever wanted to go through that again.” Or: “At around 23 miles I start to hate everything.” Or: “I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore.” Or: “It was draining physically, as you can imagine, and for a while afterward I swore I’d never run again.”
The first question that pops into my mind is: Why would he do something that regularly makes him miserable? But when you look around you see a lot of people out there choosing to do unpleasant things. I don’t just mean those adventure freaks who feel compelled to climb Mount Everest, walk across Antarctica or row the Atlantic — though all those things sound truly miserable. I mean us regular folks leading our regular lives.
All around us there are people who endure tedium to learn the violin, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard) or who start a business (which is insanely hard).
My own chosen form of misery is writing. Of course, this is now how I make a living, so I’m earning extrinsic rewards by writing. But I wrote before money was involved, and I’m sure I’ll write after, and the money itself isn’t sufficient motivation.
Every morning, seven days a week, I wake up and trudge immediately to my office and churn out my 1,200 words — the same daily routine for over 40 years. I don’t enjoy writing. It’s hard and anxiety-filled most of the time. Just figuring out the right structure for a piece is incredibly difficult and gets no easier with experience.
I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it.
We sometimes think humans operate by a hedonic or utilitarian logic. We seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We seek activities with low costs and high rewards. Effort is hard, so we try to reduce the amount of effort we have to put into things — including, often enough, the effort of thinking things through.
And I think we do operate by that kind of logic a lot of the time — just not when it comes to the most important things in our lives. When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.
Let me put it another way: We use cost-benefit analysis when we are operating in a prosaic frame of mind. But I don’t think anything great was ever accomplished in a prosaic frame of mind. People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges, because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.
The moment of enchantment can be so subtle and soft — a baseball player hits a double and Murakami contemplates writing a novel; he has a track by his house, so maybe he’ll take up running. But, unbidden, almost involuntarily, a commitment has been made — to some activity or ideal — a quiet passion has been inflamed. Some arduous journey has begun.
It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them.
They are able to hear that still, soft voice inside: “Maybe I could write a novel.” They are sensitive, impressionable, enthusiastic, absorbent, hospitable. They are open to being surprised, and when that constructive disorientation happens, they stop and contemplate: What am I being called upon to do here? Most of our great journeys begin with a surprise. Wonder, Descartes observed, “is a sudden surprise of the soul.”
What are the kinds of experiences that can kindle a life-altering enchantment? Some people stumble across a group of people who just seem cool, who just seem to be doing something worthwhile. They think: I want to be like them.
Moss Hart was an unhappy boy living in the Bronx with an active fantasy life. One day he took the subway down to Broadway and saw theater people who were putting their fantasies onstage and longed to join their company. On that day a playwright was born.
Other people find their vocation through some contact with beauty — a future astronomer awed by the beauty of the universe, a future mechanic awed by the beauty of a smoothly running engine. When he was 3 Yehudi Menuhin went to a concert by the violinist Louis Persinger and then told his parents he wanted a violin for his fourth birthday. “I did know instinctively,” he reflected decades later, “that to play was to be.”
Sometimes a scientific career will begin with a small observation: “That’s strange.” When he was 4 Einstein noticed invisible forces in the universe controlling the needle of the compass he held in his hand — and invisible forces became his life’s work. Some people go into careers of public service because somebody says something to them that seems to them life-gripping and true.
When Tony Wagner was 22, he asked a disciple of Gandhi for his definition of revolution. The man replied, “Revolution is the dynamic process of transforming individual virtues into social values.” Wagner realized at once that teaching was his best contribution to that process, and he went on to found the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
In all these cases there is a moment of ignition, something outside touching something deep inside, the opening up of new personal possibilities. I think of these as annunciation moments, moments when one is called, moments that prefigure so much of what happens in a life. “Where is your Self to be found?” the Austrian poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal asked. “Always in the deepest enchantment you have experienced.”
We surround these moments with commencement address clichés — follow your passion, follow your heart. But those phrases are so vague that they don’t mean anything. I want to understand more precisely what happens when one is gripped by a controlling desire. How exactly does some fervent commitment grow, take over your life and induce you to take on voluntary pain?
***
I guess the process starts in mystery. Like falling in love, these ignition moments happen at the deepest layer of our unconsciousness — that dark region where interests ignite, desires form, the motivational core of our being. This is the part of myself I can’t see easily into. Why am I interested in astronomy but not geology? I don’t know. Why am I entranced by Rembrandt and left cold by El Greco? I don’t know. Why do I love her but not her? I don’t know. We can decide what we’ll order off life’s menu, but we can’t decide what we like.
As in any kind of falling in love, it happens in the wildness of the heart. As in any kind of falling in love, it can start with a subtle prenotion, but it soon arouses amazing energies. As in any form of falling in love, it can lead to sublime irrationality. When you’ve fallen in love with a person, town or activity, it’s not because you calculated your way there; it’s because some flame was ignited by a force greater, darker and more passionate than your reasoning mind; it irradiates you, conquers you and demands obedience.
The next stage of any calling or vocation is curiosity. When you’re in love with someone, you can’t stop thinking about her. You want to learn all there is to know. Curiosity is the eros of the mind, a propulsive force. It can seem so childish. Throughout history people have been nervous around curiosity. You never know where it will take you. One of Vladimir Nabokov’s characters called it the purest form of insubordination. Curiosity drives you to explore that dark cave despite your fears of going down there. Curiosity is leaping ahead of the comfortable place you’ve settled and dragging you into the unknown.
In one of his novels, “1Q84,” Murakami described that kind of troublesome curiosity: “I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to.”
Einstein argued that theoretical physics is so arduous that it can be driven only by a passionate curiosity. The scientist’s “religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law,” he wrote. Richard Dawkins wrote that “the feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”
Like any passion, curiosity has to be transformed from a raw instinct to a methodical skill. When they are at their best, schools teach students how to arouse and discipline their curiosity. The effectively curious people have cognitive enthusiasm (they like to explore mysteries and think about new things), cognitive confidence (they are brave enough to tackle hard problems) and cognitive complexity (they don’t settle for simple stereotypes).
It doesn’t take long to hit the next stage of the passionate life: the discrepancy. The seeker notices the vast discrepancy between what she knows about some subject and what she’d like to know, how good she is at some activity, and how good she wants to be. Whether it is ballet, engineering or parenting, the seeker is humble enough to see where she falls short, inspired enough to set a high ideal and confident in her ability to close the gap.
Wanting flows from a sense of discrepancy. Based on the work of various psychologists, we could say that there are at least four basic psychological needs: for autonomy, belonging, competence and meaning. Of those, the drive for competence doesn’t get enough press. No matter how trivial an activity might be, most people seem to feel an innate need to get better at it — whether it’s kids learning double Dutch, me just shooting baskets in the driveway or somebody else proud at how much better he’s getting at flipping pancakes. Whenever you’re seeking improvement, you’re putting yourself on the edge of your abilities, on the hazardous cliff edge of life, and a little built-in thrill accompanies each accomplishment.
***
Then follows the first taste of mastery. When he wrote the movie “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin had to explain why Mark Zuckerberg was driven to start Facebook. He posited that maybe Zuckerberg was mooning over a lost love. But Zuckerberg himself had a more persuasive explanation: “They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” Maybe coders go on code-writing binges because they just like to code. Whether it’s coding, cooking or gardening, people intrinsically desire to achieve excellence at their craft.
This desire to build, create and get more competent at something is why Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by translating magazine articles into poetry and then back into prose. It’s why Bill Bradley taught himself to dribble a basketball by taping cardboard to the bottom of his glasses so he had to rely more on intuition than on sight. It’s why Marcel Proust rewrote portions of “Remembrance of Things Past” from his death bed. Even while in agony, breathing his last breath, he wanted his work to be better, to get it right.
When you see people ensconced in their craft, you’ll notice that they are often living what I’ve come to think of as a Zone 2 life, after the exercise trend. They are not manic; they are persistent. They’re not burning out with frantic energy, but they are just plowing their furrow, a little bit farther, day after day.
They live with an offensive spirit. They are drawn by some positive attraction, not driven by a fear of failure. They perceive obstacles as challenges, not threats. On their good days, they’ve assigned themselves the right level of difficulty. Happiness is usually not getting what you want or living with ease; it is living, from one hour to the next, at a level of just manageable difficulty.
By the time you’ve reached craftsman status you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work. You may want to be a rock star, but if you don’t love the arduous process of making music and touring, you won’t succeed. The craftsman has internalized knowledge of the field so she can work by intuition, using her repertoire of moves, relying on hunches, not rules. W.H. Auden captured it perfectly:
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
When people have reached this stage, they are living a life of leisure. These days we think of “leisure” as the relaxation we do when we’re not at work. But that’s not how people historically defined leisure. To them, leisure is the state of mind we are in when we are doing what we intrinsically want to do. The word “school” comes from the word “schole,” which is Greek for leisure. School is supposed to be any place where people are engaged in the passionate search for knowledge. In his memoir, Murakami doesn’t treat writing as work and running as leisure. They are both interconnected forms of leisure. Van Gogh was in a leisurely frame of mind when he wrote about painting in a letter to his brother, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”
A person at leisure is the opposite of a person who wants to be an influencer. She is driven by internal propulsion, not for outward display. When that is your mentality, it alters your attitude toward the suffering involved in the process of growth. The drudgery of the work feels like the unfurling of your very nature — a chef endlessly cutting vegetables, a bricklayer endlessly laying brick. One falls into a rhythm that is characteristically one’s own.
“No matter how mundane some action might appear,” Murakami wrote, “keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative even meditative act.” It becomes your natural way of living the world. Michelangelo once reported that things were only right with him when he was holding a chisel in his hand.
Effort becomes its own reward. Mountain climbers often don’t pick the easiest route up the mountain top; they pick the hardest route they can manage, because they value challenge, growth and the fruits of hard effort itself.
I was once in a grocery store in central Pennsylvania when I noticed that every jar on every shelf was carefully aligned. Somebody had taken some extra effort for the pleasure of doing it right. I think about this all the time — how our lives are sweetened by everyday excellence: The person smoothly and cheerfully checking you out at the grocery store or checking you in at the hotel reception desk.
***
When you’re committed to some big project, your relationship to pain changes. Murakami has clearly learned to take pride and satisfaction in his ability to withstand pain. “Pain is inevitable,” he wrote. “Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think. Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.” As Victor Frankl noted decades ago, people can derive meaning from their ability to withstand necessary suffering.
A 2012 University of Heidelberg study found that athletes and nonathletes have the same pain threshold, the point at which they feel pain, but that athletes have a higher pain tolerance, the amount of pain they are capable of bearing. And that tolerance comes from having continually overcome themselves in the process of training — experiencing the pain, confronting limitations and pushing through. Murakami reports that he’s not that energized by beating other people in races, just in competing against himself.
Nietzsche famously wrote that he who has a why to live for can endure any how. If you are gripped by a profound desire, you can endure the setbacks but proceed with determination.
How do people endure the most severe challenges and overcome the most alluring temptations? It’s generally not through heroic willpower and self-control. (If those faculties were strong enough, diets would work, and New Year’s resolutions would be fulfilled.) We usually can endure pain and difficulty only when we are possessed by a more gripping desire: I love my baby, so I will quit smoking. I love my country, so I will submit to Marine Corps boot camp.
Self-control is often the art of using a bigger desire to conquer a smaller desire. Once you commit to some vast possibility — loving your child, country or God — some of the lesser distractions and preferences (avoid pain at all costs) seem less compelling.
Murakami argues that the three most important traits in any writer are talent, focus and endurance. Maybe that’s the right order in inspiration-laden fields like novel writing or composing symphonies, but in most of our vocations, endurance, or stamina, matters most.
For decades Ray Kroc tried one venture after another — selling paper cups, real estate and milkshake machines, and playing the piano. Finally, in his 50s he heard about a restaurant named McDonald’s, drove halfway across the country to visit it and obsessively oversaw its growth. His determination, he wrote, was embodied in this homily: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” That’s an exaggeration, but not by much.
The best kind of colleagues at work have the attitude of a fully determined seeker: I’m going to figure this out, no matter what. And that kind of stamina flows only from a desire so steady it almost doesn’t make sense. Murakami is most impressive in his memoir when he is still running marathons in his 50s. His race times are creeping upward though he is training harder; his leg muscles are cramp-prone, the races more agonizing and often disappointing, and yet he keeps insisting that he is very glad that running is in his life and that he hopes to do it until he dies. We’re dazzled when a talented phenom emerges on the scene, but there’s also something tremendously moving about old veterans using their wiles to stay in the game. Murakami is 76 now, and undoubtedly is still running every day.
***
I’ve taken us on this journey because I wanted to understand why people choose voluntary pain. But I’ve also taken us on this journey for a deeper reason, because of a growing sense that this kind of arduous life is the best life to live. Like half of America, I’ve been watching “Adolescence” this week on Netflix. That show reveals, in brutal detail, how difficult it is to be a teenager in the age of social media. It cures you of the romantic notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — sometimes trauma just makes life unalterably worse.
You want to reach out to these kids and lighten the load, reduce stress, make everything easier. And yet I have found that paradoxically life goes smoother when you take on difficulties rather than trying to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid them more stress often leads to more satisfaction, at least until you get to the highest levels. The psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”
All this toil is not really about finishing a marathon or a newspaper article or a well-stocked shelf at the grocery store. It’s about slowly molding yourself into the strong person you want to be. It’s to expand yourself through challenge, steel yourself through discipline and grow in understanding, capacity and grace. The greatest achievement is the person you become via the ardor of the journey.
The self-esteem movement failed because it tried to persuade people that they were great by flattering them and offering words of affirmation. People are not idiots; we need to see ourselves actually accomplishing real things, learning real things, living up to real standards. At the end of his memoir Murakami wrote that on his gravestone he’d like to be identified as a writer and runner, and then he’d like it to say: “At Least He Never Walked.”
So, sure, on a shallow level we lead our lives on the axis of pleasure and pain. But at the deeper level, we live on the axis between intensity and drift. Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.
We want to be in love — with callings, projects and people. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference, and indifference is an absolutely terrible state to endure. I guess there are some people who have earned the right to want contentment above all, to sit back and enjoy whatever prosperity they’ve achieved. But I rarely meet such people, even people in retirement.
Several months ago, I had dinner next to a 100-year-old guy. His talk was full of books he was reading, lectures he was attending. I suspect a lot of the desires in his life had faded away — for status, sex — but he still wanted to learn, to grow in understanding.
We want to see our life as a drama, and the essence of drama is one person’s ferocious desire to confront an enormous obstacle, and the struggle to overcome that obstacle. If you want to understand any character, in a drama or in life, ask, “What pains is he willing to endure?” Some choose the pains of medical school or the priesthood or police work, but through the struggle at least we are acting, improving our skills.
There’s a scene in “Jurassic Park” in which some visitors are watching a T. Rex being fed lunch in the form of a goat. The Sam Neill character makes an observation that gets the whole movie going. The T. Rex, he says, “doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt.”
I would hate it if someone took the pain of writing out of my life. I suspect most marathoners would hate it if someone took the pain of those final few miles out of theirs. Our friend Mr. Dopamine is always leaping ahead, always anticipating positive reward, always sensing that there’s something better just over the next ridge. There’s a blessing in that human instability.
People tend to get melodramatic when they talk about the kind of enchantment I’m describing here, but they are not altogether wrong. The sculptor Henry Moore exaggerated but still captured the essential point: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
The post Why We Do Unpleasant Things appeared first on New York Times.
