On not being good enough
Oh, the quest for perfection. Reminds me of my handsome, arrogant, oh so difficult younger self. He thought - wrongly - that he could do anything.
I know, I speak as a 100 year old man, and it’s because I feel just like that. So much has happened. Such a lot of bad things, I feel like I have a thousand years of memories inside me.
The question - and this is probably THE question - of humanity is exactly that: am I good enough?
and the counter question is just as useless. Good enough for what?
and then, the mind of the most stable and the mind of the most insecure goes in a thousand different directions and starts telling the story of everything that it’s not.
Good enough to ask out a pretty girl? She’s a 9 and you’re a 6. Nevermind.
Good enough for that PhD? You’re dumber than a pile of rocks. Dumb rocks. Really dumb rocks.
Good enough to apply to that job? They probably would pick anyone but you.
Good enough for the car I want? This one needs a taller driver.
Good enough for the dog breed I want to share my life with? Can you run 10 kilometers?
Good enough to get out of bed and do what it takes? Nah, I’ll better stay in and wait for everything to be perfectly aligned!
Want a quick answer?
You already know what it is, but, do you want it? Or better yet, need it?
No, you’re not good enough. But that’s good, why? because it doesn’t matter.
When I was a kid I used to imagine what it would feel like to be… Don’t know, Isaac Newton or Einstein, or Oppenheimer or Darwin, men who got to pick god’s brain and translate natural law into - sometimes terrible - applications.
Thinking about these gods in human form I imagined them with halos around their holy heads, pondering and writing with absolute elegance and absolute motivation and absolute clarity and just, getting there and for a moment I thought that would happen for me. Then, I started reading about those science patron saints and then, I really got to see myself in them:
Newton is probably what everyone wants to get to be if they are way, way into math and don’t mind dying a virgin. A lonely, fearful, difficult, vindictive man that guarded his ideas tooth and nail and was always ready to be violently jealous of anyone with a similar idea.
Einstein was the biggest failure in the world for about half his life - or at least I’m sure he felt like it -, the world struggled to find a place for such a genius - literally - and he ended up working as a clerk in a patent office. Had a long as hell failure period and then, when everything flourished and the sun shone? He watched his theories turned into nuclear fire that annihilates cities from above with the power of physics.
Oppenheimer is probably my favorite case to illustrate this point: a living, breathing example of success. Hell, his success can be measured in kilotons. Not in a couple of kilotons, either. A lot of kilotons.
And then we have the man underneath the legend. Another small man, driven by jealousy to the point that, according to the famous story, he poisoned an apple meant for Patrick Blackett — and we won’t talk too much about Blackett here because that man looks damn near perfect and we don’t want to hurt the argument. We hate you, Blackett. We hate you and your damned adequacy!
Oppenheimer, before the hat, before the desert, before the cigarette, before becoming the haunted priest of the atomic age, was a brilliant and miserable young man who could barely survive not being the best person in the room.
That is what makes him useful to this argument. Not the bomb. Not the quote. Not the Sanskrit. The jealousy.
The future father of the atomic bomb was almost destroyed by the simple fact that another man was better than him at something.
And then history, because history has a disgusting sense of humor, took that unstable, theatrical, wounded man, gave him a secret city, a deadline, an army of physicists, and the fear of Hitler, and asked him to open the sun.
He did.
And when the sun opened, it did not make him whole. He was still a small, jealous man who lacked elegance and was bad at lab work. Speak about seeing yourself in your heroes!
Let’s not even go into Darwin, or you know what? Let’s, for some, the Antichrist; for others, a father of modern science; for those of us with a wicked sense of humor, the guy who discovered a lot of species and tasted them all. But are we talking about an Übermensch? The best among the best? Born from success into a cradle of gold?
Hell no. Remember what you’re reading.
Darwin was not a glorious conqueror in a chariot of gold: he was nausea, headaches, stomach pain, anxiety, religious dread, family grief, notebooks, pigeons, worms, letters, and twenty years of delay before he finally dared to publish the idea that had been eating him alive.
Have you ever needed to puke because your nerves got the best of you? Congrats, you’re on the same list Darwin was on.
This is the secret that Paris, the pyramids and the statues of great men all have in common: when they build them, and when we tell stories about them, we tend to ignore the smell of fear, piss and shit.
When they build the statue of the hero, they hide the humanity and bury the body, because it wouldn’t fit the narrative. What narrative? The narrative.
"All men are equal, but some are more equal than others."
Am I saying it’s likely that you, dear reader, could reshape our understanding of the universe as much as Einstein did in his time? Probably no.
The closest thing to destiny I have experienced is a little voice in my head that tells me: “This doesn’t exist and it should. Get inventing.”
The things I build, I build not because I want to, but because I need to.
That’s called drive.
And you have it, because you’ve read until this point of a very dense essay by a guy who enjoys being dense.
The point I’m trying to make about meaning, about destiny, about determination, drive and the human quest to be “enough” is, the whole debate is worthless.
You’re a feeble biological machine, little more than 120 pounds of organic matter, some in active decomp, some waiting for just the right moment. The moment you die, the trillions of bacteria in your gut flora will get to work on you like nothing changed. You feel right now that you’re bursting with ideas? Just wait.
But being a little pile of meat and fluid is glorious in a way. All those patron saints of science we spent a couple minutes looking at before? Same bodies, same functions, same experiences, except, apparently, Patrick-fucking-Blackett, who was apparently made of solid gold and had a nuclear reactor instead of a colon.
The height of human creation, the height of science, love, and art, the beautiful and at the same time messed up and terrifying world we live in? It is the creation of creatures like ourselves. It’s our creation. And understanding society as a group of simple primates driven by their worst impulses, craving everything that is shiny and bad for them, explains a lot. It also makes every achievement, every creation, every time a human squeezes blood out of stone, a miracle.
We are creatures of the flesh. In religious terms, we are dust. We come from the lowest. If we look at it from biology, even the most beautiful woman is more bacteria than she is human. We’re all somewhat obsessed with sex and fame, though we all have different ways of manifesting it and, that’s alright!
Always remember that soon enough you will die and when you do, you’ll be gone forever. So, life being something without inherent meaning but with a lot of possibilities for meaning, balance in such a way that you take enough risk to keep the adrenaline running and secure yourself enough to keep yourself grounded.
Apparently, the golden point is focusing on a few subjects for work instead of tens or hundreds, just a few lifelong friends, and keeping the internal speech working. Keep yourself smart and alive.
Go out tonight, have a beer, think about the world, design an atomic model that’s flawed from the start, have some fun and tomorrow: start. The sky is the limit and the sky never ends. Try. Because humanity is at its best when it’s trying something new.
And, if you get a chance, piss on Patrick Blackett’s grave. It’s what Oppenheimer would have wanted.
