I was listening to this great podcast on the flight over to Spain. I've been avoiding Jordan Peterson's stuff lately, as sometimes he gets too preachy for my taste, but when I saw he recently had Michael Malice on the show, I figured that was worth a listen. Some of you may remember me mentioning Malice's course at PA about Soviet history, which was just stellar, so I was quite eager to listen to him outside the classroom. He certainly did not disappoint, there was a lot of good stuff in the interview, for sure, but one part in particular stuck to me.
In remembering his early years as an aspiring writer, working at Goldman&Sachs to pay the bills, he told JBP how he defined success at that point in his life. It wasn't your average "I wanna get published by Random House or whatever" or "I wanna be rich and have everyone know my name", it was far more interesting than that. Malice says he set out three rules, so to speak, so he would know when he'd 'made it'.
1. He could get up whenever he liked and not have to get up with an alarm clock.
As someone who's loathed alarm clocks since 4th grade, I very much related to this one. Obviously, the alarm itself isn't the issue, it's the significance of it, the sense that you owe somebody else your time and your precious rest. Besides being a night-owl like Malice, I know how grating this assumption that you can and should wake up early is. I think it's true that people have different points in the day when they're functioning at their best, and for someone who's at their most productive/free late at night, depending on an alarm clock is a bitch.
It's also, if you think about it, a tricky yet attainable type of success, because rather than set a materialistic goal, it focuses on quality of daily life which, if we're being reasonable, is more important. Obviously, you need some degree of financial freedom to tick this one off, though not as much as people might think. I don't think it's a matter of being a billionaire, just of being willing to walk a different path than most people will. So many people around me seem trapped, still, in this slave-ish mindset that you're supposed to get up, go to work, grit your teeth through the day, rinse and repeat in order to have a decent life. I don't think that needs to be the case, we just assume it is, then wonder why we're miserable.
I don't like having to wake up early, and I like even less the implications of having to do things on someone else's schedule. Perhaps that's childish, but to me, it's also a marker of freedom, which I deem important. So go, Mr. Malice.
2. He wouldn't be forced to interact with people he didn't want to interact with.
Another major reason to love the guy. Again, it's the sort of argument that in many miserable circles would have you written off as a spoiled, childish person. But I don't think so. A lot of people trapped in the traditional work force seem to have a whole arsenal of horror stories about dealing with customers, annoying co-workers or toxic bosses. Why do we assume that's just the norm?
Obviously, some jobs need you to interact with people, even people you don't want to interact with. But others (like writing) provide more fluidity. I'm a transparent person. I don't like having to pretend I'm enjoying a conversation when I'm not, nor do I really have the skills for it. Working on my own time, able to chat with people I find genuinely exciting sounds like a fucking lottery ticket to me.
3. Finally, he wouldn't have to make small talk.
It was an interesting distinction, one JBP noted, being similar in ways to the second point. But not entirely the same, because I think you can have very unpleasant small talk with someone you otherwise find interesting and exciting to deal with.
It seems to me our interactions are becoming shallower, that we skate past meaningful interactions and sustain our social needs on meager, second-rate how-do-you-dos. Largely because we're scared of being judged, feel increasingly isolated and subjected to this pressure to conform (or be really, really interesting and glamorous). It's bypassing so many fascinating conversations.
I'm terrible at small talk, too. Again, I can't really hide the fact that I'm not interested. I like to delve in and talk about real, meaningful, quirky things. It's often led to some very interesting revelations and chats with relative strangers. I've found that, once they establish a modicum of interest, people turn into these wonderfully complex, bizarre, interesting characters.
Of course, being who he is, JBP countered that we sometimes use these small talk openers as play, we're sussing out how and if we can play with someone on more complex topics and enjoy it. And maybe it's the fact that I'm not too good at it, but that hasn't often been the case for me. With a lot of the people I've deemed the most interesting and unusual in my life, we launched into deep, hefty topics right away, and found we played along quite nicely. So many of these surface interactions seem to stay on that level, and I wonder if we're really sparring at all, or just punching some kind of social card.
The way I see it, it's the being able to waltz around big, important, life and death topics that's the test to see if we can play together.
Anyway, all in all, I very much related with Malice's markers for success. Of course, he admitted that later on, money and such also took their place on the list. But I thought this was a very unusual, very focused way of defining success in one's youth.
So I guess my question is, how do you define it? And how did you define it when you were in your 20s? :)
