Success and Its Discontents

When Elon Musk found out he was the richest man in the world, it’s said he looked up and remarked, “Well, back to work.” I’m not sure what you do with such news. There is no rule or standard. But, for my money, I wish he would have stopped working. I wish he would have sat around the table with a few friends or invited the neighborhood in. Maybe he should have taken three weeks off and made a practice of, early in the morning, placing his bare feet on wet grass and looking up into a sky that he could never master. Or, just drape a sign over the doorway that says: “Mr. Bucks.” Smash plates and yell “OPAH!” Blow out a speaker with an unrelenting bass line.

The wealth is whatever, the party and rest is what matters. Of course, he wouldn’t. That’s not how our modern prophets of productivity behave. They pivot, scale, iterate. But I wonder what kind of wealth it is that forbids a man to pause?

I, of course, am biased. I live in a tradition that sees time through a sequence of fasts and feasts. To not, even briefly, overeat and over-laugh after a season of fasting is at worst a soul-stealing tragedy — at best it is comedy. Why would someone spring over Easter or slip past Christmas? But, of course, this is what Scrooges always do. God commands us rest and adorns the Sabbath day with the weighty word: holy, meaning the seraphim and slow Saturdays are, in a way, cousins. And because they’re cousins we might imagine a wingy-eyed seraphim finding repose on the furniture of heaven.

And what about Jesus who was always reclining and dining, cast as a “glutton and a drunkard” by the very folks that would, over time, send him cross-ward. Once, and mysteriously — at least to me — he told some interviewers that even fasting was to be forgone (Mk 2:19). To follow Jesus, it would seem, is to pass through busting banquets and smashing parties and narrow gates, all in equal measure.

The word “recreation” itself means, if you follow the etymological breadcrumbs, “create again.” If we go on, without rest — the word whispers — we slowly become whittled down versions of ourselves. Uncreated. It may be that we even, slowly, shirk off our usness, de-creating the very dirt and breath that makes us human. Other things begin to happen as well. Our smiles are cut away as joy is deemed useless by our own cruel inner clicking accountants. And because, in this way, none of us are “built different.” We, needing to stop, but not seeing its efficiency, risk reducing rest to brief escapes — the insides of a pill or the false halo of a flat screen’s blue light. And as we stack coins or likes or accolades or replies or sales or shares we heap up things that hide us from ourselves. We may even become smaller, Gollum-like, cravenly fusing to the soul-stunting object of our over-desire, a soul contortionist bending our bones and breath to fit neatly within the cells of a spreadsheet, or whatever else.

Is this all an overstatement? Yes, perhaps. But, if I have overstated I have, up to this point, over-narrowed as well. It is not just Musk and his ilk that have lost themselves in the fury of more. It is also possibly you, and it is, at least occasionally, me.

Last week marked the release of my first book, and even though it’s early morning on the day of the release, I have clicked “refresh” seven times on my “Amazon reports” while writing these words. After the incessant taps, in perfect absurdity, the sales numbers sat unmoved, in repose. I should, I tell myself, simply revel in the conclusion of creation — a finale, a sentence ripe for a point of exclamation. I should nap and dream of the thread of connection between angels and hammocks. I should, for a day, resist the urge to suck in my gut and instead parade around my house in old sweatpants as if I’m the lead in a marching band. Shouldn’t I? But, alas, I am myself, the tragic-comedy trying to slip past celebration on the way to “more.” Or is it that the compulsion to hit refresh and to go on working has no real rationality?

The patterns of work have driven such deep ruts in our minds we cannot emerge out by simply going on.

How slippery the soul is, bobbing and weaving around its best values. But, perhaps now is the opportunity? Even at the risk of this small piece of writing ending poorly. My apologies for the abrupt end, but my sweatpants are calling and, right now, it is a sacrament to read a book that doesn’t bear my name. Right now, there is nothing to prove and no need for drive. I am simply agreeing with Jesus that “it is finished.”