My kids told me I should sell my bread.
I make sourdough, you see. It’s a fun family tradition. They watch me. They ask me when it’s ready. They don’t help much. Then they gleefully eat and say “we should sell this for money!”
Today I had leftover bread, so I made bread pudding. That was fun. It was tasty. And, as if on cue, my children said “you should sell this!”
There’s something magnificently simple about children. I think they really meant it. They saw something fun and thought “let’s make money from doing this.”
It reminds me of a student who recently popped by. He asked me what he should major in. I asked what advice he’d gotten. He answered “everyone tells me to do what I love!” This is in line with what I’d guessed. In fact, I ask my classes regularly what kind of advice they get, and it is consistently the same: study what you love. Do what brings fulfillment. Be authentically you. Find your passion and pursue it.
Of course, it’s all rubbish advice. I told him as much.
It’s like a kid telling you to sell what is fun to make rather than what is profitable.
There is some pragmatic old-man wisdom here. A dear relative of mine studied in a field that is somewhat less pragmatic—an artistic endeavor that is fun and engaging and interesting and creative, but not exactly practical or high-earning. I asked what her experience was. She said, with a mix of humor and earnest regret, that “they were the best four years of my life!” (The implication, dear reader, is that she has struggled ever since.)
In the first place, pursuing what you love is a good way to wind up without a decent job, and as it turns out, having a decent job contributes a great deal to life’s meaning. If you can contribute to a family and a community, you can have time for other things. Yes, it’s a tragedy that so many nice men become dentists rather than poets or musicians, but many of those dentists have time to make music, serve at a soup kitchen, and raise good kids.
I’m reminded of Brother Merrill, who was in my congregation growing up. He was always the choir director. His wife was the pianist. He had a grand voice, filled with vibrato—even when not singing. He would happily correct others’ grammar, encourage people to speak up clearly, and always, always to enunciate—he played the role of choir director in every facet of everyone’s lives. (And by the way, we all loved it. He was charming and kind and all of his corrections came with a good dose of love and affection.)
I remember one day my father asked him why he’d chosen his career—he was a cancer surgeon. His answer has stayed with me: “I wanted to do two things: sing and farm. I could be a singer or a farmer, or I could be a surgeon and do both.”
Going for profit feels icky—and it should. You should be obsessed with something higher and nobler than base materialism. And yet, profit is a signal that the activity is one that people value! They are willing to pay you for it, after all. And this is the great secret of capitalism: that you can only make money repeatedly and consistently if you have found ways to give people things that they need and want—you will only get ahead by helping others. If you want to get ahead—really get ahead—you need to think about others first.
He who seeketh his life shall lose it, indeed.
I love The Art of Manliness podcast, and this episode was particularly interesting to me. It helped me make a few connections that I hadn’t before about purpose and meaning.
Specifically, I’ve always worried about the “find fulfillment” mantra of our age. It’s fundamentally selfish, and more directly, how does one go about finding fulfillment? Even if it’s not selfish, doe sit work?
Not according to the protagonist of the New Testament. He who seeketh his life shall lose it. And he who loseth his life for my sake and the gospel’s, shall find it.
This is a profound, even eternal law.
I’m not writing an advice column, and if I were, I hope some editor would be kinder than to title it “on the virtues of selling out.” Perhaps I’d go with something like “on the virtue of growing up.”
My kids want to sell bread because they don’t make it—I do. It’s cost-free. It’s fun to make. They also don’t understand prices.
But let’s skip all that. The real issue here is that looking for your purpose is inevitably the worst way to find it.
I gave some advice to that young student who came by. Make a list of the things that make you feel alive—that fill a deep hunger within you. It’s not wrong, it’s just incomplete.
Make that list—then make another: a list of what the world needs.
Find what checks both boxes.
According to the podcast, Nietzche said that you should think of the four most important moments of your life and try to draw a line between them to find “the fundamental law of who you are.” Brooks says, again in the podcast, that the best way to find purpose is to lose yourself—to stop asking “what do I want from life?” but rather, “what does life demand of me?”
I do not see people today who have too little—rather, they have too much. We are cursed by abundance. We have too much food and too much stimulation and too many people to ask on dates and too many choices of what to binge-watch. We could seek more, every day, from today to the last day of our fat, happy, rich lives, but we would simply be fatter, happier, richer, and somehow emptier.
The rich life—not merely the happy life, but the real, rich, textured, meaningful life—is one of subtraction as much as addition, in a Buddhist kind of way. It is one focused on sacrifice and minimalism and answering important questions—finding a quest, and devoting yourself to it.
So if you want to know what I think you should study, find what you love. Write it down. Then realize that it isn’t about you. That’s the first lesson.
It’s about doing some good in the world, and making the world better for your having been here.
And ironically, if you pursue helping others, you will be richly rewarded for it.