July 2025
July 4
Further Thoughts on Hearkening
The way you are living right now is very different from the way people lived in the past, and also very different from the way people live in different countries. This is true no matter who you are and where you live.
You often hear talk of “traditional living,” and about how we have shifted away from the ways of our ancestors. This is a subspecies of what I call Hearkening, which I have written about briefly in the past. The beautiful and infuriating thing about “traditional living” is that the time period you deem “traditional” is entirely arbitrary: it could be 1950s USA; it could be 19th-century England; it could be medieval Europe; it could be Babylonian times; or, if you have absolutely no imagination at all, it could be the 1990s, also known as the decade in which this author, a thirty year-old man, was born.
This is a thought so obvious that it would be best if no one felt obligated to put it into words, but unfortunately I feel such an obligation: People in the past were not living a traditional lifestyle. They were, instead, living whatever lifestyle made sense to them at the time. Often, this was predicated on material conditions and societal norms, each of which constantly push each other back and forth forever.
But even if we restrict our definition to a particular time period, we run into further issues of specification. Do we mean the lifestyle of the nobility, or the peasants? Do we mean the lifestyle of a travelling merchant, or a farmer attached to the land? Do you mean the lifestyle of the drunkard who wanders around the streets, or the upstanding young daughter of the town’s largest landowner? Is it more traditional to be nomadic or sedentary? Is it more traditional to share with one’s neighbours, or to take all one can get?
I live in Canada, but I’m the son of English parents. Traditional living in Canada is one thing, and traditional living in England is another thing. One can’t realistically live a traditional English lifestyle in the Canadian Prairies (putting aside the question of whether anyone can live a traditional lifestyle anywhere.) I also can’t live a traditional indigenous lifestyle, because I don’t know how, for one, and because different nations lived in this area at different times, with a wide variety of traditions. The area itself has also changed, in a geological sense, because the Earth is a living entity. And aside from it being a living entity, we built roads on top of it.
So how, I would like to know, is one supposed to live a traditional lifestyle? (I know there are approximately nineteen million Instagram accounts that would like to show me how.) And furthermore, why, if I may ask, is living a traditional lifestyle a good thing? Am I supposed to believe that people in the past had better lives? How am I supposed to believe this, when it goes against everything they ever wrote down? The only times they extolled the virtues of traditional lifestyles were when they were hearkening back to the traditional lifestyles of preceding generations, lamenting what they had lost. But all those people wrote were lamentations about what they’d lost from the generations before them! So really, it’s hearkening all the way down!
Traditions are evolving, growing, and changing things. When we talk about a “literary tradition,” we talk about a developing conversation between authors and their forebearers, as they transfigure the forms they grew up on into something new. A traditional lifestyle is exactly whatever lifestyle we live right at this moment, because no matter how much we try or don’t try, we are attached to the past. Our lifestyle may appear vastly different — and it may even be vastly different! — but we can’t escape the fact that it grew out of what came before. As it grows, it evolves, and gets better in some ways and worse in other ways.
I am a traditional man! Even though I spend a lot of time on my computer, or on my phone, and even though I play video games, a pastime that didn’t really exist when my dad was my age. Is it childish for a thirty year old to play games? I don’t know — is poker childish? Is soccer childish? Is whist childish? You know how much time full-grown adults used to spend playing whist, of all things? My parents have their friends over and play bridge, whereas I might get my friends in a voice chat and play Halo. Let’s be real for a second: Halo is a better game than bridge. Also, I know people don’t even play Halo anymore, but I’m a bit out of touch. You get the idea.
Look — let’s just stop using standards of judgment that don’t apply to what we are judging. It’s neither the 1950s nor the 1990s nor any other time period. Also, you live wherever you live. I know Americans love to write articles about how they moved to Europe after they retired and the lifestyle there is just so much more traditional and great and all that, but those people are retired, and therefore inherently not to be trusted. Of course Europe seems great — you don’t have a job! Everything is great when you don’t have a job! That is, if you also happen to have money!
We’ve got to work with what we have. If you have the wherewithal to live like it’s the 1950s, and that makes you the happiest person in the whole wide world, then all I can say is “Wahoo!” If you live like it’s 2036 and your life is a never-ending barrel of laughs, then that’s great too. I don’t revel in all aspects of our modern world, but I do download a million books onto my e-reader every year, and I do type on a keyboard and post my thoughts on the internet, and truly, what more can you ask for?
July 7
I’m trying to figure out how to live my life. And I wonder sometimes if I’m going to spend my whole life trying to figure out how to live my life, and then once I’ve figured it out I’ll be dead already. But I don’t know what else to do, so perhaps I can accept that my life itself is just the process of trying to figure out how to live my life.
In the Outer Chapters of Zhuangzi, there is a lot of talk about “intrinsic virtues.” The argument is reminiscent of Rousseau — essentially, we were all better off when we followed our natures, before we tried to govern each other and ourselves. The chapters in this vein hearken back to a time prior to China’s ancient legendary Emperors, when everybody just did whatever felt natural to them. They didn’t hem or haw, they didn’t make mistakes, and everybody was attuned to the Ways of Heaven.
Someone attuned to the Ways of Heaven doesn’t feel hot or cold and doesn’t like or dislike things. They don’t do what other people do, but they also don’t necessarily do what other people don’t do. They don’t let what other people do or don’t do affect them at all. They don’t run away from the world to live in isolation, but they also don’t rely on society.
In the Zhuangzi, a sage is a Perfect Man, but he’s also just some guy. When times are right, people might listen to his words and make the world a better place. When times are not right, he fades away in obscurity, seeming a fool. Either way, he never tries to do anything; he practices wu wei, doing by not-doing.
So you read all this and think, alright, maybe I should be a sage. It sounds like a good way to go. So then you think, what’s the natural thing for me to do right now? At this point, you’ve already messed up, because instead of doing the natural thing, you’re thinking about what it is. And also, you’re trying to do something, when you should be doing by not-doing. So then you think, well, maybe I just won’t do anything. Pretty quickly, you realize this isn’t going to get you anywhere, either.
But where are you trying to get to? You’re trying to become a sage, but that’s already a mistake, because you can’t become a sage by trying, only by not-doing. The only way to become a sage seems to involve already being a sage. And this is sort of where I’m stuck at the moment.
I don’t necessarily want to become a sage. I just want to life my life naturally, to “live the life spontaneously welling up inside of me.” I seem to be convinced that this is possible, despite the only examples I’ve ever heard of being fictional and/or legendary.
I’ve been trying to delete other people’s expectations of me. I’ve also been trying to delete other people’s judgments about my life. But I find in many cases that I can’t tell where their expectations/judgments end and mine begin. And then I wonder if there will even be anything left once I’ve deleted all these expectations and judgments, or if my life will just become a completely blank space. Will I continue to write if I have nothing to prove? If left entirely to my own devices, would I do anything at all? And if I did nothing at all, would I enjoy it? Or would I not enjoy it? And if I don’t enjoy it, is this because of guilt? And does this guilt come from failing myself, or failing someone else?
I’m so far from being natural at this point that I’m bordering on neuroticism. But then, what if I’m naturally neurotic? Is such a thing possible? Rousseau and many others wouldn’t think so, but their conception of nature is tied to a legendary past. One can’t be neurotic in Eden. But my natural state is within modern society, where it’s probably crazier to not be somewhat neurotic.
So, is my natural state any good? The assumption underlying all of this is that acting according to to one’s nature, or living the life that is spontaneously welling up inside of you, is a good thing. But I’ve only ever felt fulfilled when I’ve struggled to do something, like when I finished my first novel. And the satisfaction of my Free & Easy lifestyle comes from my not having to do things that other people feel they have to do: in other words, with the satisfaction of winning.
The argument against such successes is that they are fleeting: I finish my novel, and then I want to write another one. I simplify my life, and then I want to simplify it more. But then again, we’ve got to do something, don’t we? I can pretend that I’m a rock or a tree, but I’m not much of a rock or a tree. Just being alive means I have to breathe, and each time I’m done breathing I have to get ready to breathe again. It would be kind of a stupid question to wonder why I can’t just breathe once and then coast on that for the rest of my life.
And trees aren’t quite as stationary as people would like to believe! They’re busy; it’s just that they operate on a different timescale. Here’s a direct quote from a tree (emphasis added by me):
“The hawthorn, the pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs — when their fruit is ripe they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent, their small branches are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young, failing to fully live out their Heaven-given lifespans. They batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world, as do all the other things of the world. As for me, I’ve been working on being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I’ve finally managed it — and it is of great use to me! If I were useful, do you think I could have grown to be so great?”
You see, even the useless trees are working hard! Achieving one’s natural state means actively fighting against one’s unnatural state — but if you have to fight against it, as if it’s a current pulling you along, wouldn’t that make it one’s natural state? Perhaps it is not so. A salmon’s natural state is to fight against the current, making its way upriver. So perhaps a human’s natural state lies in fighting against it’s own natural state. We see the way we are going, and we say, “Let’s go somewhere else.” And we do that over and over again, leading ourselves this way and that, leaving behind us a topsy-turvy life unfit for any chronicle, finally ending up in a state neither finished or unfinished — that is to say, dead.