So, is the dream worth it?

Publishing a book won't make you happy, but it'll keep you busy

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

My friend Stephenie, who’s from the rural south, once told me about her multiyear quest to buy an apartment in Manhattan, describing this quest as her “Personal Everest.”

Ah, a handy metaphor for big goals and the horrendous process of achieving them! It’ll make immediate sense to anyone hustling on a big dream, whether you’re trying to finish a screenplay—or, I don’t know, it could be a totally straight and no less worthy dream like saving up $1 million in your 401(k).

No matter what your dream is, the process of achieving it is likely to be a grueling slog. Even getting to the base of the mountain takes some doing, usually. WHY?? In fact no part of the trek turns out to be easy, except the brief dizzy beginning when the goal first occurs to you and you think to yourself, Oh how wonderful it’ll be when Netflix buys my series idea for one billion dollars—surely this won’t be too hard! Only to find out that, holy crap, now you’re in for it. You signed up before you knew any better, and now you’re stuck.

Worst of all, you cannot know ahead of time if reaching the goal is going to give you some profound, lasting sense of achievement. You can’t even know if you’ll be genuinely glad you did it. So why do we do try to accomplish anything?

Is the dream, or any dream, even worth it?

You might find that, when you reach the top of your Personal Everest, your primary sensations are exhaustion and emptiness. Just a guess—okay, yes, this has lately been my own experience. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about what creative path I chose and wondering if I shouldn’t have picked out a better, smarter one. It took me five years to get one dark joke of a book published, and that’s not counting the earlier time I spent writing bad novels. And the result? The fulfillment and joy I expected? Let me explain what I’ve gotten instead.

What I’ve gotten, as the worst of my burnout has started to pass away, is the understanding that the question should not be: Is the dream worth it? Nor should it be: Is your own Personal Everest going to bring you every last one of the worldly and emotional payoffs you’ve been seeking?

The only meaningful question is: Was the mission an adequate vessel for your restlessness and agita and most dire personality flaws during the time you were on that mission? The best way to understand the process of achieving big goals is that they are actually outlets for the parts of you that would otherwise run amok, causing all sorts of dumb and hurtful havoc in your life. That’s their primary benefit, and it’s not a small one.

Another important benefit is how they force you to carve out a part of your existence that’s just about your personal creative endeavor—a room of one’s own of the mind. A kind of metaphysical privacy. Plus, a whole identity that’s different from being someone’s mom or dad, or somebody’s husband or son or daughter, that’s probably also separate from how you make your living, too.

Miley Cyrus, in “The Climb,” covered approximately none of this. Instead that song glorifies struggle in the dumbest way. If you’ve ever been through any really testing and difficult experience, then you know better than to glibly celebrate hard knocks. You’re probably just glad to have made it through at all. Like are you kidding me, Miley, the climb is awful! (Also, is she really trying to tell us that struggle and rejection are so much better than a $160 million net worth and sleeping with Liam Hemsworth? C’MON.)

Still, while you’re climbing, it does give you something to do.

If it weren’t for the climb, you might be drinking too much, or getting even less exercise, or picking fights with people because your anxious nature is flailing around without the overbearing sense of purpose that it craves. You might be like some mid-century housewife, harping on your kids because there’s a haunting hollowness to your life. You might be like some disappointed, bullying father who, out of his own sense of failure, knocks his poor kids around and teaches them to do it the next generation.

We might think about it this way: Climbing your Personal Everest is a highly imperfect way of dealing with your shit, but given the alternatives, it’s not that bad.

Speaking for myself, I do wish now that somehow I’d managed to imprint on some other dream when I was a kid. My parents have a lot to answer for in taking me to the library and letting me read pretty much whatever interested me! Those underpaid, sensitive teachers who encouraged me should be ashamed of themselves! Now I can’t stop wanting to write books even knowing what I know. Bastards.

I do need some kind of outlet though, and that’s probably never going to change—like, I don’t even aspire to that level of emotional health—and if you’re reading this email, that might be true for you, too. Nature itself has a lot to answer for in making humans curious and restless and then, apparently, not caring much where those qualities may lead us. Yet it tends to be true that we’re better off for being on some quest than not. A paradox.

There’s a question I often get about Poe and it’s related: Does his posthumous success somehow redeem the difficulties of his life? What good are his fame and recognition-as-a-genius now if he never experienced those satisfactions while he was still breathing?

And the answer applies to whatever you’re attempting to do with your own life, and what I’m attempting to do with mine.

Poe’s existence, in all likelihood, would’ve been so much more difficult and awful—because unfocused, because unproductive, because undirected—without his work. The satisfactions of success may have eluded him. (Frankly? I think they elude most of us.) But the work gave structure and purpose to his life, saving him from worse fates. It is, in the final analysis, a kind of good fortune. Maybe the perverse kind, but since that seems to be the only kind available—well, we’ll take it, right? Hahahaha, what choice do we really have!

I’m glad for the five dumb years it took me to get my dark joke of a book out in the world because it gave me something to do. Maybe that’s true for your own sick joke of a goal, your own Personal Everest? Something to meditate on as the curtain comes down on the year.

A good link

Here’s Stephenie’s fantastic essay about her Personal Everest/apartment search. I also liked this Pysche article about mimetic desire. And a book I’ve enjoyed lately is The Dangers of an Ordinary Night by Lynne Reeves. It’s a thriller for theater nerds, only smarter, more compassionate and nuanced about family dynamics than most thrillers. The freaking New York Times called it out as a good holiday gift, and they’re not wrong.

As always, thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best in your climb,

Cat