Salve! Hearing of your recent misfortune (the job you lost,
the class you failed, the savings you burned in a hedge fund, etc.), I
decided to be kind and compose this letter. Rather than commiserate
with you in the usual maudlin fashion (which certainly has its place), I
am going to be frank--for we are very good friends, and I honor our
friendship.
I am very happy that Fortune has denied
your bid to check out on life. Over the last few years, I have watched
you slowly disintegrate, breaking yourself into pieces (public and
private, polished and rough, good and bad) and hawking those pieces in
the marketplace. Up until this moment, you always found a buyer for
something, and so you kept excavating--kept digging that hole in your
heart a little deeper, searching desperately among your entrails for
shiny things to polish and feed to the market. You felt very nervous
about this process, clearly, and there were times when you thought about
cashing out--taking a break, doing something else, finding a way to
exist that didn't involve betting your livelihood on people's finicky
taste for whatever shit you could scrounge to offer them. You said you
would take that break if Opportunity knocked. Well, she is knocking
now--very loudly.
Listen to what she says. "Look,
buddy, I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to cut through all the
bullshit everyone else in this marketplace will give you--about how
you're a wonderful person with some impressive skills and you just have
to try harder next time, blah blah--and tell you the truth. Being a
prostitute is no good if you have to beg for clientele. Trust me on
this one: the clients you want are the ones who come begging to you, not
the other way round. Never give your soul to any of the vultures here.
Don't go into a job interview you must ace. Don't take a class you
cannot fail. Don't bet any money you cannot lose on a hedge fund. That
divine fire that people rave about? Those 'impressive skills' you
spend so much time honing? At some point these gifts turn against you,
becoming the weapons the market uses to destroy you rather than the
tools you use to better yourself. Have you reached that point yet?"
"People
are weak, and the Market makes some of you weaker. It pretends to love
you, to want you, to need you, to value you, and so on. The wise among
you know that it is lying, that what it really wants is something
impersonal (some quality or value that exists independent of individual personae such
as you). The Market is secretly very happy when there are too many
people vying for its limited favors (that will always be limited, by
nature): the issue of a room full of eager prostitutes is that the
Market always gets well laid, but it cannot sleep with everyone. It
cannot love everyone. It cannot make everyone its special one-and-only.
What it can do is lie. The wise are not hurt by its lies, because
they have learned not to make their livelihood at the Market. They are
available to take the Market's favors, but they do not require them (as
you do). They are not dependent on the Market (as you are, right now).
The Market is only really good for people who do not need to be there.
Become one of those people. Until then, stay away from the Market: it
will always break you more than it makes you."
Where am I to go? is naturally your next question. You need a
larger perspective than the one you have right now--the close-minded
perspective of the narrow Market you have been courting in vain. Your
Market was too little for you, too small and specialized. You have to
find a larger Market (one that allows you access to more clients, more
needs, more opportunities to put yourself together without pulling
yourself apart). You have to re-assess your persona. What do
you really need to survive? Food? Clothing? Shelter? A community to
which you can contribute something meaningful? There are many ways to
have these things. Many poor people have them. Many losers. Be the
loser you already are: just enjoy it more, and waste less time wishing
you could find some other way to lose (e.g. the kind of loss that your
petty little Market calls success).
Is it really
true that there is no such thing as life without loss? I think this is
true, for we are all mortal. That means everything we do leads
eventually to death (at least as a way-station: even those who embrace
immortality do so by making death a gateway gods must pass). You must
learn to love loss, to love yourself as a loser. You must see that
losing contains valuable information, particularly when it is mitigated
loss (rather than the total loss you have encountered recently).
Success is a dream, a lie, a fairy-tale that unscrupulous Markets sell
to prostitutes that they want to have on the cheap. It weakens those
who pursue it, because they fail to learn from their own loss, and it
weakens those who gain it, because they fail to learn from others' loss
(and see a false security instead of the volatility that Nature makes).
Since
you must lose, make yours a beautiful loss. Don't lose someone else's
game. Don't let the Market define your loss. Lose your own way, doing
something you believe in. Instead of cutting yourself apart in
desperate hope that someone else will love your guts, cut yourself apart
because you already love them. The best loser is the one who loses his
own game, on terms that he has made purposely for himself. Be that
loser. Vale.
