Addicts love company
A father tells his children that he will pay their way through college, but only if they study business or something that will make them wealthy. He told me his goal was to hustle and grind until he made his first million, then retire early to live off the investments that will work on his behalf.
A few years later this hard-working father and husband told me, “I will never retire.”
I asked, “Why this change in plans?”
He said, “I don’t want my children to see me do nothing with my life, sitting around playing video games.”
“What happened to retiring early to focus on relationships, skill development, and passion projects?”
He said he had learned something important about himself: “I want to do those things, but inevitably will just play video games. I don’t want them to see me like that.”
To be a good example is an undeniable pressure felt by any well-meaning parent. To make a virtue of economic necessity is likewise understandable. You might not have the timenergy to invest in relationships, skills, and activities if they don’t turn a profit, but at least you can pay your kids’ way through college, right?
If chronically busy #hustle lifestyle enthusiasts would make themselves exceptions to the general rule and #grind so that others did not have to, that would be one thing. It could even be seen as an admirable sacrifice! But instead, like all addicts, they want you to join them.
If others do not take on similar responsibilities and stress, then the workaholics will never feel understood. Like everyone, they want to be recognized for their achievements. But recognition without effort is just words. For recognition of your effort to mean anything, those doing the recognizing must first undergo similar experiences, living a lifestyle stretched between profit and burnout. If others will not join them willingly and express admiration and appreciation in doing so, then achievement junkies entice us with rewards like college tuition payments, experience for our resume, or wages. Such rewards are not gifts though.
My friend, the father mentioned earlier, is working hard to make sure his kids get to go to college. We could say they are lucky in a sense, but I feel bad for them. This “gift” comes at too great a cost. They are being pressured to pursue higher education for money, not to qualify their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and research in a community of truth-seekers.[1]
Most of the people who find timenergy theory useful had absentee or distant parents who, even if they provided materially, failed to sacrifice time and energy into their relationship in any meaningful way. Some of the most “privileged” kids, in fact, got the least amount of quality time with their parents. If all the “material” advantages you ever had were ultimately given as proxies for a real relationship, or even worse, as carrots and sticks used to manipulate you, then it is hard to call that “privilege.” Timenergy lack unites us all. Not just one’s own individual timenergy, but the fact that loved ones don’t have it, or at least did not when it mattered most.
[1] This is, according to Karl Jaspers, the essence of what the University is supposed to be. I recommend his The Idea of the University, and/or the course at Theory Underground devoted to this work: theoryunderground.con/courses/TIOTU
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