The Fantasy Of An Unconstrained Life
Out to eat a little while back, I overheard a woman at the table behind me say that she had decided she wasn’t going to have children because there was just so much she wanted to do. She was with three friends—another girl and two guys, who all looked to be in their early-thirties. One of the guys asked what she meant. She wanted to try being an actor, she explained. A painter. A writer. A filmmaker. “I want to try literally every art form there is,” she said. And to pursue all of those things, as she saw it, she needed to be completely free of the demands of having a family. Her friends, each in their own way, all agreed with the basic idea that a productive and creative life required as few constraints on their time as possible. One said he often wondered how much further along he’d be in his career if he hadn’t gotten married and had kids. Another said it was why she didn’t have a dog—she couldn’t imagine giving up so much of her time to walking it, feeding it, letting it out, taking it to the vet, cleaning up after it, picking up more food for it, “and on and on.” While I didn’t resonate with the opting out of marriage, children, and dogs part, I’ve had stretches of imagining that if only I had no obligations, no interruptions, no outside demands, nothing on my plate except what I put there, I’d be more productive, more creative, more free.
But I’ve come to think the opposite is nearer the truth: constraints, obligations, interruptions, and outside demands make people more productive and creative, not less—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
This Thing Of Withdrawing From The World
In front of a large audience of people “considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas,” as he put it, the economist Tyler Cowen asked Camille Paglia to offer a piece of advice, drawing on how she managed to become one of the most influential writers and thinkers of her generation while juggling the demands of parenthood and being a full-time college professor. “I think it’s a really good idea for artists to have jobs where you’re dealing with the frustrations and problems of everyday life,” she said. She cited Susan Sontag as a cautionary example: “She had a little success and then went off and became a luminary. Her life became about holding court at fancy dinner parties, being treated like a queen, going from lecture to lecture to be hailed as the Great One, which over time made her completely detached from ordinary life.” Her advice to the audience was to seek out the kinds of obligations that keep a person tethered to ordinary life. “Get a job,” she said. “A real job. And every time you have frustrations with the real job, say, ‘This is good. This is good because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it.’ This thing of withdrawing from the world to be an artist, I think, is a terrible mistake.”
How To Keep From Spinning Off The Planet
The musical Hamilton opened on Broadway in the summer of 2015 and quickly became a sensation. Famous people were in the audience every night. There were afterparties. There were people telling the show’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda that he was a genius. Asked, “What about your life allowed you to be able to handle the crazy success of the show?”—Lin said, “Vanessa [Lin’s wife]…and my first kid. He was born two weeks before rehearsal started.” So instead of attending afterparties, Lin went home to his wife and newborn. “All the noise and things that derail folks—like the getting invited to parties and the famous people—I had to say no to ninety percent of it,” Lin said. “Because I had to sleep eight hours and I knew I was gonna wake up twice and change diapers. My family really saved my ass, because I think that’s how you lose it.” As Ryan Holiday put it after referencing that story, “People are concerned that having kids or getting married will tie you down. And it does. It objectively does. But it ties you down to reality. It tethers you to the earth. It keeps you from spinning off the planet.”
A Sword Cutting Daisies
Three years after the Broadway success of his play The Glass Menagerie made him rich and famous, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote an essay titled, The Catastrophe of Success. Before fame, Williams writes, he lived “the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” It was a hard, bounded life: He worked as a factory worker, theater usher, elevator operator, and manual laborer, making just enough to cover rent and food, and wrote stories and plays in the margins of his days. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he wrote. When that struggle was removed and replaced by hotel suites, expensive restaurants, and people offering to do everything for him, Williams found himself feeling empty, depressed, and disconnected from his work. Without the vital efforts that defined and confined his earlier life, Williams writes that he came to “fully apprehend” that “the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.”
A String Doesn’t Keep A Kite From Rising
In the introduction to Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes about the seductive illusion of complete freedom—a life with “no bounds,” where you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. He compares the longing for unbounded autonomy to a dove “cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels,” imagining that “it could do even better in airless space.” Reflecting on a similar illusion—that artists need to be totally free of restrictions and limitations—the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning novelist André Gide wrote, “Art is always the result of constraint. To believe that it rises higher as it becomes freer is to believe that what keeps a kite from rising is its string. Kant’s dove, which thought it could fly better without the air to trouble its wings, did not realize that in order to fly, it had to have the air’s resistance to support its wings. Likewise art must be supported by resistance in order to rise.”
What Gives Life Its Bones
“I know no greater catalyst of creativity—in art or in life—than constraint,” Maria Popova writes. “It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives…Without the constraint of bones, there would be no wings.” So say to the constraints and obligations—chosen or imposed—of everyday life: This is good. This is reality. These are the bones of a productive and creative life.