ASK A DELUSIONAL GIRL: NO. 2
THIS WEEK, YOU ASKED:
Ever since I was a kid, I've been extremely competitive when it comes to academics. How do I get myself to stop caring so much about winning and just enjoy the process of learning new information?
What this question comes down to is loving something for its own sake rather than its end result. The answer, of course, is to cultivate a sense of pseudo-meditative presence embedded within the activity itself and it is a very stupid and frustrating answer when faced with an activity that is designed for the sake of its outcome.
Learning is only ever partially for its own sake. For its own sake it feels good to exercise out mental capacities and engage in a process which pushes our humanity a little past what we thought it was capable of. Challenges introduce us to new forms of becoming and accelerate potential into existence. But there is a secondary, secret pleasure to this expansive gain. Learning gives us knowledge, knowledge gives us power, and power is a whole lot of fun to lord around over other people.
Now I am the last person on earth to begrudge you your sadism. I love sadists… and in many ways I am one. Well, everyone’s a sadist, just not everyone can face it. Only when you face it can you move towards an ethical sadism and that’s one part of the answer.
The pursuit of power is the hero’s journey just as well as the villain’s. What differentiates the two is the hero’s recognition of power’s secondary quality. In the twofold at hand, the villain knows more than he learns, while the hero learns more than he will ever know. It’s the whole trick of life: resenting life’s material complexities is as much a weakness as prioritizing them, although at first glance it always seems like it has to be one or the other.
The real weakness of academic validation comes in its possibility of failure. If we stop looking at virtuosity from the outside in (like the villain) we see that virtue appears only at the core of situations where no option of failure is given. Your question implies that you already understand that it is virtuous to learn for its own sake but it also implies a belief that the evil of competition lies more clearly in a desire for success than in a fear of failure. They are in fact the same thing!
The only way to really deprioritize academic validation is to remove your whole concept of learning from that suprastructure. You can learn about as much from biology, philosophy, or mathematics as you can from fucking, or going for a walk in the woods. Let go of moralized notions of intelligence. Learn how to learn from the things you can’t fail at then extrapolate that method to the ones you can. And I don’t suggest here that you give up all discipline for the sake of hedonism, because the differences and similarities of life’s offerings is the source of the learning. You must do it all equally. Think of it this way: if you’re predisposed to academics, the academics will make no sense without the world’s context. If you have a desire to learn for its own sake you are in such a good place; you have a desire to live and all life asks of someone is to desire and recognize it.
Don’t think of who you will be but of what you want to know. Seek information that inspires you, not to be a doctor or lawyer but to ask an unexpected question at the next party you go to. You may still be a doctor but incidentally only. Don’t work for things you have no real passion for, would you work on the day that you’re dying? Work in the way most fruitful for your existence and know that you stand to lose everything if it becomes your sole purpose.
It’s a weird irony but you will only ever learn anything by realizing that the point of life is not to know but to hang out and have fun. When life is its own purpose everything worth knowing comes premade, absorbed within. Academia becomes fun too after you abandon it, academics become a playful art of patterns representing what exists. We seek validation when we try to force ourselves a specific way. We find wisdom when we have no way and come to know the world for pleasure’s own sake.
What does a good apology actually look like when the person you've wronged wants nothing to do with you afterwards?
A question of this form only ever comes up at a crisis point, a critical intersection between two individuals who have already known each other well and are suddenly subject to the whims of cosmic reordering, metaphysical course changings and uncertainty in its purest form. The potential to commit a wrongdoing on another person has its source first and foremost in intimacy. In order to hurt somebody, they must let you close enough.
To look at it from the side of the wrongdoer: you are likely experiencing some combination of guilt and shame about your own actions together with an anxiety about the future of your relationship and a level of empathetic pain towards the one you care for. The way to survive emotions like these is the prerogative of each individual they belong to but for the sake of the apology the first step has to be picking them apart. If you allow your emotions to get all muddled up you will become eternally trapped within them because guilt, while useful, is only ever for the sake of the self. If the empathy you feel for the hurt of your friend is only the side effect of your guilt it is dishonourable and the best thing you can do is abandon the situation entirely. Assuming that the empathy is genuine, it is your north star at such a moment. Truth is the only way out of suffering.
Generally, there will be two aspects to the suffering of the wrong-done-one. There is the actual wrong itself and then there is the fact that they have become a victim at the hands of someone they trusted. The first is irreversible. Luckily human relations as a whole are mired by pain and its unavoidability makes it that it does not necessarily amount to ruin. All of the virtues of the world, pain as surely as love, live eternally beyond and come only to inhabit us by the great luck of chancing upon them and great skill of inviting them in. Luck of the virtue is no business of the human being, rather the question which defines you is: how do you handle it?
The second suffering of your loved one is that which holds all hope inside of it because this is not a pain which has come to pass but which lives and breathes alongside both of you. This pain is an active component in the design of the distance between two individuals and it is malleable. Meaning in relationships is found so much more in context than language. The context is broken trust, to move forwards a genuine step must be taken to alter the context for the other’s sake. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t apologize, because language has value for its own sake. There’s no one size fits all approach, but some general best practice includes displays of remorse and regret, explaining without overexplaining, show what you’ve learned and the changes you’ve made, and for the love of God: don’t make it about yourself.
What is required of you now amounts to some combination of faith and humility. And a conscious prioritization of the other’s subjectivity, for a relationship must maintain equilibrium in order to function properly and by behaving selfishly you have shoved your friend down in one fast pendulum swing. If you have respect for this person, you owe them responsible use of the power you have snatched. You, having placed the mutuality of the love between the two of you at risk have made yourself its sole caretaker and must take care of it well so you can return it to her when she´s back on her feet.
The other thing is, relationships have to change. All too often a conflict between close friends with explosive outcomes is a surfacing of long built tensions much bigger than the facts of the situation itself. Wrongdoing is often a metaphor which puts a relationship through flames so that it can renew itself. Enough intellectuals to make you despair would argue all loves end but those thinkers are (obviously) men who witness the world blind of all women are willing to withstand for one another. No human being in all of history has existed solely for her own sake, and if there must be at least one constant in this world why not the good one? Pain isn’t something which dies or kills, it becomes absorbed in the whole smorgasbord of experience like the brilliant original sacrifice which gives all the rest meaning.
Surviving a changing relationship is not for the faint of heart. It is tumultuous and devastating in those moments where the world turns itself over and, like life itself, it is something which must more or less be weathered in solitude. A relationship which withstands the turnover of time demands a continual giving over of the self and a continual reservation of the self as a necessary precondition of this possibility. A friendship fails only when both parties won’t weather the storm and having brought on the storm, this is the faith you owe her. Show your willingness to keep up your part of the bargain, regardless of her decision.
The thing is, you can’t undo a wrong inflicted on someone you love. Pain has no antidote but it does have a sister, pleasure in equal measure. There is that great equalizer, the thing constant through all life’s ups and downs, it’s not exactly love but something resembling it. Take hardship with as much rawness as you possibly can and know it will come to pass. We learn who we are in the moments untethered and, given a world full of chaos, we show who we are willing to be for our friends.
Maya Chambers is a writer and advice columnist for Delude Magazine. You can read more of her work on her substack.