I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of sacrifice. One of Jordan Peterson’s last biblical lecture series explores the psychological underpinnings and implications of Abraham ready and willing to sacrifice Isaac in order to keep his covenant with God. One idea discussed was that if you don’t know what to sacrifice, looking to what you hold dear is a good place to start. Whether there’s a direct proportionality to what you hold dearest getting sacrificed and then you getting in return something commensurate was up for discussion.
In the modern world, I wonder if people consider themselves sacrificing anything that matters. If you spend all day at a job you moderately are okay with or outright dislike, but your time otherwise would have been grinding a videogame or perhaps getting yourself into some kind of trouble, is your time considered a sacrifice? Perhaps you actually want less time to yourself, less time to be burdened with thoughts that can’t be resolved or to find room to remind yourself that you’re not being everything that you believe you could be. Higher intensity professions and paychecks sacrifice any number of generally considered “human” traits in order to excel if you think high finance and big business. More noble pursuits will have you sacrificing sleep and your health to learn all there is to learn in order to practice medicine.
It seems then, that sacrifice is personal. You know if you’re giving up something meaningful to you in order to accomplish something else that’s more worthwhile. You also know if what you’ve given up means nothing to you and you’re trying to fly under the radar. A recent reddit /r/showerthought post said the first time they learned to appreciate working towards goals was after they loaded Grand Theft Auto up with cheat codes and got immediately bored. No time or emotional investment was paid; no real reward was conjured to be reaped.
I think it’s harder to conceive of sacrifice in the modern era. Comfort is the default. When you read a statistic that says 78% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, we’re not focused on the part where people are getting paid to do an array of jobs, most unnecessary or flirting with a robot takeover, and are hardly back-breaking. We have the option to be poor in cozy apartment complexes. Before it dawned on us we were living in an oligarchy, they made sure to set the stage to keep us tucked in and quiet. My little over a month of being quasi-homeless has had some points of pains in the ass, but it hasn’t been too hard to recline my car seat and ping pong between different dwellings.
Thus, in my mind, the real sacrifice is your comfort. It’s putting yourself outside what you’re used to. To get anywhere in our culture, you have to keep sacrificing the feeling that you’re safe or moral or smart. You have to challenge your polite relationships and boldly claim the identity that’s willing to contrast anyone who thinks they have the real answer. I talk a lot about my propensity to antagonize. I don’t respect comments, behaviors, or general dispositions out of you that I won’t grant myself. I’m rarely comfortable, and it’s not because I couldn’t conceive of myself sitting playing video games for the next 7 years on the 15 thousand dollars I had saved up.
To me, time is king. The more you pay attention to time, the more you can utilize it to make the perpetual moment approach comfort and approach sense. Coasting on conscious circumstance won’t cut it. We’re incidental first, human second. So even when I made money at studies, that was as much as 3 weeks at a time of my life living in precisely opposite of the terms and conditions I’d prefer. Trust, the pain of a spinal headache you never want to experience in service to your larger goals. If I keep doing the accounting, those previous sacrifices have set me up to live a considerably larger portion of the rest of my life in service to my other goals and creative endeavors. I’m semi-retired at 29 and need to work 2 days a month to keep up with payments on my garage. Often, my most money-making friends have comparable rents to keep them in place.
I don’t want to make the mistake of reducing it all to money either. I know people who absolutely love what they do no matter the hours or paycheck. I’m absolutely jealous of these people. I’ve never had that capacity. I learn quickly, and then I get bored. That’s a strong pattern I’ve never been able to escape. If something holds my attention for 3 months it’s either insanely difficult or a miracle leaving aside accidentally tapping into old obsessive tendencies from childhood. The only metric I have from which to try and assess the general working population is how much their words match up with their actions. I can’t count the number of times the South Park character who says, “I love my work” comes to mind in the plane-arium episode. I know it’s easy for people to turn “making the best of” into “this is the best.”
That’s another important distinction to me. I’m nowhere near at my best. I haven’t been for a long time. I don’t have even a quasi-routine that would suggest perpetual progress or practice. I don’t have as many stronger ties as I think I can foster. I don’t have the free mental space that has me feeling focused and excited to devour the next topic that catches my interest. I’m still on the edge. Having a toilet has become like a symbol for when I think I’ll be in a good place. It’s just hard to brag about your circumstances without a place to shit.
I can, and persistently do, imagine my best. When I have some kind of musical instrument practice and workout regime in place every day, I’ll be harping on my best. When I’m sitting down to watch at least a movie a day with at least one other person, ring the best bell again. The suggestion there is that I’ve either found a dope ass person who’s always down and around for movies, or I’ve freed up someone’s time that they feel obligated to indulge me on a nightly tradition; either way a win. When I can see a project through from conception to finish on a predetermined timeline, look out. I won’t have a mapping website stall for a year because finding an extra $500 is practically impossible for the working poor. I won’t go to the straw-bale house builder all excited with my cardboard and SketchUp models crossing my fingers I’ll find $20K through studies before winter. When I start losing myself because I’m so involved with shit above my societally presumed station, I’ll have peaked.
And that’s precisely what I want for you. We’ve all grown familiar with similar levels of “privilege,” a word I’m growing increasingly impatient with, and finding ways to shake the shit out of our baby, for God, appears to have a timeless transcendent quality if you can find the right path. That’s the heart of all of my frustration and anxiety. That’s my shying away from trying to invest in too many new distracting experiences or people. My environment is my car, Byron’s apartment, my dad’s house, my garage, everything my land can be, and the rest of the world at the same time. 2/3 of those aren’t the most comfortable, and therefore 2/3 of those are what I’m working on and learning about. How do your environments scale? And can you make them better by giving more of yourself than time you wouldn’t know what to do with otherwise or a body you stopped respecting some time ago?
