People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life. Successful people always credit "hard work", which gives the impression that they spend hour after hour, day after day, forcing themselves to do stuff they don't feel like doing. That may or may not lead to a better life, but it always leads to burnout.
The actual secret of highly successful people is that they're obsessed. It would be nice if super-achievers would stop pretending to have moral virtue, and admit that they put in the hours for the same reason as stalkers and video game addicts, and they're just lucky that they happen to be obsessed with something that society considers worthwhile.
From Ran Prieur’s 067.
Obsession can never be the admitted reason, and so I completely agree that it's a common factor between high achievers in our world, because as pointed out, if you have to force yourself constantly to do things, you will inevitably burn out. But there does seem to be a difference between the obsession of let's say Michelangelo and someone like Jeff Bezos. 13 Businessmen are mainly concerned with their own wealth, which can of course lead to genuinely helpful changes in society, but isn't the main focus, while artists, especially the great ones, are overall concerned with something beyond themselves. As Keith Johnstone says:
We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God.
So while I am not an obsessive type of person and prefer doing things at my own pace, I don't think it's a good idea to necessarily view all of it as a bad thing. The type of obsessions promoted by the modern world: workaholism, video games addictions, niche hobby infatuation and the likes, are toxic because they are escapes. But work isn't necessarily an escape because it can simply be something you really want to bring into the world.
6 Darren Allen explains that very well in his essay the Technological System. Basically, an increase in power never stays local for long, and eventually becomes integrated in the system as a whole, which keeps getting more and more powerful, better at controlling people to prevent them from pursuing any alternative, on and on.
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2024-08-25