All beacons are tied to the world as it is. Accidental, circumstantial, material.
Is it weird that I thought that this wasn’t the case? For the longest time, I truly believed in this thing called “passion”. Like, I genuinely believed in this intrinsic inner drive that overcomes all concerns about the world as it is, and just focuses on itself for the sake of itself.
(Funnily enough, this is what a lot of people think philosophers are saying, but it’s very different. Nietzsche’s key invariant is directly contradictory to this kind of framing - you cannot go off and abandon the material world - and yet so many people read him and conclude something like, “Just follow your passion and desire! It’s far more important than anything else!”)
Maybe people with more common sense, or more cynical, immediately recognize this, no intellectualizing needed. Of course there is no passion!
- You think people really care about passion? No, they care about fame, power, money, prestige.
- You think there is some “thing” called passion? No, that’s an external label! What happens is, you see someone keep at it for a long time, and you retrofit the explanation as “passion”. But there is no such thing as passion!
- Works sucks. It always sucks. “Passion” gets you only so far. “Discipline” is what matters.
- Forget all this philosophical talk. People just work. Stop trying to psychoanalyze grand narratives around everything.
Even this blog will become a real beacon, and not an idealized one. It’s not going to be one, specific, revolutionary idea that I post here on this blog, to which I can come back to every day and look to, to keep moving forward. The most likely, rational outcome is, that if I continue to post high quality content to this blog, I will look back on the accumulation of posts, and the grit and consistency needed to actualize such a blog, and be proud of that, and not any one specific article.
But it’s nicer to believe, isn’t it?