Go Ahead, Squander Your Potential

On the right to self-destruct

There’s a troublesome idea that’s been floating around in my writing network lately, and the idea is this: crushes are just misplaced ambition. As Isabel of Mind Mine writes:

The feeling we get around a crush, or when a crush is starting to form, is actually quite similar to the feeling we get when we define a new goal or set a new aim that really excites us. Like signing up for a marathon, or trying to get into medical school […] These crushes just represent something I want to see more of within myself.

In my experience, there is some truth to this idea — sometimes, a desire to be with someone is simply a misplaced desire to be someone. And in a pinch it can be helpful, even enlightening to go trawling for the roots of one’s own desire — particularly when such an expedition reveals the convenient fact that what one wanted all along was in fact achievable with cold, hard self-discipline. (Thought you wanted someone who would never love you back? Psych! You just wanted a PhD.) But does this approach actually work? And more to the point — who does it work for?

Photography by hwangtoe.

When I was an undergraduate, awash in new experience and all manner of glimmering stranger, I used a very similar rule of thumb to help me manage my own emotions. I asked myself, do I want to be with them, or do I want to BE them? If I wanted to be with them, courtship could proceed as usual. But if I wanted to be them, well, I needed to examine my own life and look at the ways in which I could embody the qualities I admired in my crush, not through “marrying into them” so to speak, but through good old hard work. The fashioning of the self.

And, indeed, Ava Huang of Bookbear Express advocates just this approach in her essay on half-heartedness, suggesting that one let go of the desire for requited love from an ambivalent partner — and focus instead on finding something to love deeply and resolutely: an activity, a practice, something to wholly invest in, like writing. She ends her piece with the following frothy incantation:

Don’t rely on someone else to give you what you need. Choose what nourishes you every day. See how strong you become when you remember that love is just reassertation, choosing something over and over.

If one cannot be loved, one can still do. With such a bracing notion, it almost seems possible to transmute every longing into ambition — and every inconvenient emotion into growth. For a certain kind of person, this idea is utterly intoxicating — but it is also, I think, wrong.

Painting by Sadamasa Motonaga.

For starters, it is not always possible to transmute romantic desire into ambition. Sometimes, what one wants is not to be someone else, after all, but merely to be with them; sometimes romantic desire is as sincere as it seems. In such cases, no amount of psychoanalysis can release one from the natural course of wanting and its extinguishment — longing is simply something one must feel through, reluctantly or otherwise, numbed-out or otherwise.

But even in the cases where one’s crush is, in fact, motivated by some kind of envy or personal admiration, it seems to me an escape from the primary stuff of life to then resolve the suffering of desire into self-improvement — as though the greatest possible yield of difficult experience is personal growth, to speak of life as something that produces a “yield” at all. There is an undeniable appeal to the idea that any situation, however dire, can be metabolized into a strengthening exercise. But at the extremes of life — disease, natural disaster or manmade catastrophe — such an idea reveals itself to be, ultimately, an elaborate form of coping with limited range. Yes, it is comforting to believe one’s personal narrative of progress will proceed, unbroken, until death. (Or, as superstar Adele once captioned on an Instagram post of a workout: “I used to cry but now I sweat.”) But one may not always be able to transmute the tears into a good workout. Sometimes, pain simply demands to be felt — and to circumvent that demand with hard work seems to me to be a kind of refusal of one’s own humanity.¹

Perhaps we are speaking, here, not of growth and its opposite, but of two different kinds of growth — on one side, the strengthening of the self through the acquisition of certain qualities, skills or social positions. On the other, growth in the sense of enlargement: in the faculties of patience, self-acceptance, self-compassion… wherein one learns to abide by oneself with care while living through an unhappy situation. This is hardly the growth that is implied in the comparison between a crush and “signing up for a marathon” or “trying to get into medical school.” Rather, the growth that might occur from such a situation — say, genuinely unrequited love — is not growth of capacity, but growth of capaciousness: the ability and willingness to endure life itself, in precisely the form that life takes. One sits there, blinking in the harsh light of day. Without trying to move the pain, it can be possible to realize that pain has its own movements — and sometimes, of its own accord, transforms.

Image source unknown.

But, the idea that “crushes are just misplaced ambition” is still a rather popular one — particularly in my circles. Having grown up in the Gifted Program, then attended an elite educational institution where I still teach, I seem to be surrounded now by a set of peers who tend to see the world as a series of goals and setbacks. The great unquestioned credo we were all raised with is the idea that ambition is good — and, too, that reaching one’s full potential is a kind of moral duty. (Potential as defined by what? And duty to whom?) The thrumming theme of this able generation, a theme felt everywhere in the things that we create, the way we speak about them and ourselves, is the idea that we ought to all strive, and constantly: towards better self, better world, and better metrics to monitor both.

Even Isabel — the writer cited above — is a wonderful example of this: a Substacker who fits neatly into a rising internet subculture I would describe as “Gen Z soft ambition chic.” These are writers who work in the intersection of the personal essay and self-help — whose work purports to guide the reader to a better, more holistically accomplished life, wherein the word “accomplished” is usually defined in some relation to a contemporary status game, and the word “holistically” refers to soft, even feminine aesthetics that seem to suggest that power can be achieved without domination. The audience for such writing is, it seems, enormous — Ava Huang’s popular Substack Bookbear Express touts an audience of thousands of paid subscribers, and is regularly cited to me by friends and acquaintances. There, she describes herself, relatably, as “a young woman in STEM who also likes the liberal arts.” The writer’s biography attached to Isabel Mind Mine reads: “I write for people who want to succeed without losing themselves along the way.” In this world, success is always possible alongside genuine thriving — wherein neither success nor thriving are clearly defined; again, capital hides itself in gel nails and a meditation retreat.

But — let us ask the question more directly — what is wrong with ambition? Isn’t it always good to strive to accomplish more — and isn’t it obviously bad to squander one’s potential?

Image by Scandebergs.

I came up believing my own version of the above, surrounded by others who also believed it. But as I’ve gotten older, deepening both my commitments and my questions, I’ve come to believe just the opposite: actually, I think it is sometimes very important to squander one’s own potential. Sometimes, the courage to destroy oneself is the only political agency one has — and it is only upon this courage that new worlds can possibly be made.

The classic example of this is the hunger strike — one of the most direct forms of self-deprivation in order to achieve a political goal. Gandhi’s hunger strikes led to what India was then calling swaraj, or self-rule — and perhaps in a broader, poetical sense, the most profound form of self-rule must include the capacity to harm oneself in strategic or higher-order ways. Otherwise, what appears to be the rule of self is actually the rule of ideology — the ideology of constant improvement.

But there is another example that I love, one that I think about often because it seems to me so stark it is almost rude — the poet George Oppen, indeed my favourite poet of all time, stopped writing poetry for two decades in the middle of his life. During this time, he and his wife Mary Oppen were deeply involved in political organizing; they joined the Communist Party USA and helped organized the Utica New York Milk Strike. He then fought in the Second World War and returned, wounded and subject to political suspicion, and he didn’t begin writing poetry again until 1958.² He published three books of poetry over the next ten years, the third of which, Of Being Numerous, won the Pulitzer Prize.

I mention the Pulitzer here because to me, it feels essential that this was not just any poet — not some hobbyist or dabbler, scribbling on weekends as an act of self-expression. Oppen was so gifted at writing that the society he lived in saw it fit to grant him one of the loftiest literary honors of his time. Louise Glück, the now-Nobel Laureate in Literature, sang his praises endlessly in her poetry workshop; I studied his work as a formal exercise in class. This was the man who abandoned his craft for 20 years — the one who, arguably, could have produced six more books during that time, books representing now-unknown literary riches, lines that will never be written, that can no longer even be imagined. For those 20 years, Oppen made the decision that the world would be more improved by a mediocre leftist organizer than a staggeringly gifted poet. And it is this very decision that I respect in him the most — the one that I fear my peers and I may never be able to make.

If it is ever called upon us to abandon the machinery of an unjust society, even if such abandonment means abandoning, on some level, our gifts, our talent, our “potential” — how do we find the strength to do it anyway? What might such an abandonment even look like?

Artwork by Steve Messam.

I think one small answer lies in the metaphor of games — of how we play them, and more to the point, how we make them visible for what they are.

An odd but illustrative example:

On some commercial flights — perhaps on older or smaller planes — there is no airplane safety video. Instead, there is a live demonstration, wherein the stewards and stewardesses place themselves at key intervals in the aisles, and perform a brief piece of theatre with props. Here: how to buckle and unbuckle the seatbelt — featuring an actual seatbelt. Here: the bright orange intake tube for the life preserver vest; the red tab to make it inflate. To indicate the aisles, the forearm bent at the elbow and then straightened, as in semaphore.

There is an uncanny formality to these demonstrations that I love — the fingers, suddenly pointers, educational aids; the body, suddenly as standard and gestural as a mannequin. And in spite of the shared script, each actor approaches the dance a little differently: one might be serious, utterly absorbed in the task; another, ironically smiling as if to say, this is weird for me too. One might be bored, almost dissociated out of a body no longer theirs. Another, eager and serviceable, eyes searching for other eyes, for willing receivers.

As the same gestures are repeated down the aisle, in as many variations as there are people to express them, one gets the impression of a game that is being played on different registers simultaneously. There are those who fully buy in, who perhaps do not even realize they are playing a game at all. Then there are those who are all too aware of the artifice in which they participate — and who make that awareness clear in the way they play the game. To the outside observer, such variations present themselves as an invitation to place oneself in right relation to the game — to renew one’s sense of credulousness, of faith, in the presented totality. Do I buy in, or do I check out? Do I let myself believe?

Image by Matt Avallone.

The example of the airplane safety demonstration is, admittedly, an obscure instantiation of a broader phenomenon — and one that I’d like to argue is actually pervasive. Social reality is built upon games — upon arrangements of people, gestures, acts, incantations that have agreed-upon meanings. Sometimes these games are so engrossing that we do not recognize they are constructed — as in many religious rites to the faithful — and sometimes these games are transparently, well, games — as in the FIFA World Cup. Some of the games we play in society appear to be self-evidently important while simultaneously upholding unjust relations of power. It is this final category of game that interests me the most — as a player myself, albeit one more interested in revealing the cracks.

What I am interested in are these moments, as in the airplane safety demonstration, wherein the façade of the game falters — where, for a moment, the actors reveal the game to be an ongoing act of collective imagination, and for that reason, vulnerable to sudden and transformative change — even to total upheaval.

The belief in one’s own potential is such a game — as is the idea that we owe it to society to be as ambitious as possible; to maximize our achievements, our impact, or our profit. I believe ardently that we seem to spontaneously crave the bettering of ourselves and each other, but I reject the idea that this “bettering” should and must be narrowly defined to suit societal definitions of productivity, progress and/or growth.

Thus, in the spirit of creating the conditions for new worlds, I am indebted to those who have shown me the cracks in these games that we play — and I in turn see it as my own political duty to open these cracks a little bit wider for those who will come after me. Yes, some part of me will always want to fulfill my potential from within these walls — but another part of me, a part I hold in sacred trust, wants to see what water pours forth from beyond them. Let the walls come down, I hear it say. Let it all come in.

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If you liked this essay, you might enjoy reading this essay on desire, this one on suffering through a brutal crush on a friend, and this one on reclaiming laziness. As always, the full archive is here.

Paid subscriptions don’t get you anything new (yet) but are a wonderful way to support the work. A special thank you to the paid subscribers who are already on the roster, I’m humbled by your help! 🌟

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Discussion Questions

The discussion group has come to a close — for now. Enormous thank you to Michael for being a fantastic ringleader, and those who joined over the months! 🙏 🤲

For these questions, free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.

1. Do you feel it is important for you to fulfill your potential? Why or why not? If you feel it is a duty, to whom or what do you feel duty-bound?

2. Would you say you are an ambitious person? Ambitious for what?

3. Have you ever “dropped out” of a difficult career, rat-race or ambition and experienced something unexpected? What happened, and how did it feel?

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Acknowledgements

The metaphor of the “cracks in the wall” [of capitalism] first came into my life through the brilliant, surreal, funny and spirited writings of the Zapatistas. Thank you 🙏

To Matthew: do you remember where you were when we spoke about this a few weeks ago? I was walking on Carlton, on my way to drop some books off at the library; it was dark, maybe even lightly snowing, into the bulbs of orange light that lined the road. My earbuds kept cutting out so I had to hold my phone in front of me like a dowsing road, and my fingers were freezing, and somewhere in between the wildness of the environment and your incisive questions I found myself nearly shouting at you about ambition, the duty to fulfill one’s potential, and whether or not all crushes could be metabolized into personal growth. It was incredibly fun. This essay will probably seem so familiar to you as to appear redundant. My real first draft was our phone call, as it has been more than once now.

Finally, Leo Ariel first suggested I check out Isabel’s writing — in the comments section of one of my recent essays. Thank you, Leo! I probably didn’t read Isabel in the way that you thought I might, but this essay wouldn’t have happened had you not thought to suggest it. So thank you. ☺️

1. It even seems particularly heinous when applied to romance, because the longing for love can so easily be a reminder of our fundamentally social and embedded nature — and the transmutation of this longing into self-improvement is a direct or indirect endorsement of its opposite: a culturally-valorized image of the self as a collection of assets that persist across contexts. I don’t need you, or anyone — because I’m amazing!

2. Actually, Oppen’s return to poetry was more or less directly occasioned by his therapist’s interpretation of what he [Oppen] called the “rust in copper” dream — she [the therapist] suggested that the dreamt indicated a return to writing poetry, and he took up the suggestion.