Lesson 83 • Why bother[?/.]
How to continually jump off cliffs.
Why bother?
There is a sentence I find horrifying because knowing it’s Kurt Vonnegut’s makes you expect something poetic, which is exacerbated by a lifetime of cat posters that primed you to expect inspiration:
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the day down.
Let it sit with you.
What is it you feel? Incredulity? Futility? If you’re no creature of whimsy thriving on spontaneity and bright colors, then you aren’t inspired - you’re threatened.
I started Stoic Designer to meditate my way through engineering and design work, but find increasingly as I identify first as a writer and then an engineer that Stoic Designer is a meditation about craft.
Perhaps this is because the neuroticism I first faced head-on was industry predominant, but now that neuroticism, that anxiety, that flailing has bled out from the inkpot erasing the boundaries and borders of the everyday.
Regardless of your craft, the landscape is ever changing. The horizon of your career is not measured in decades, or even years, but quarters.
How will AI further tidal shift the economy? What moronic preventable horror will the joke of American governance provoke? Why learn to code when entry-level engineering roles are consumed by antediluvian engineers who no longer need to delegate chores? Why write a story when the likelihood there is a reader for it diminishes?
You won’t make a living from publishing.
You won’t make a living making art.
You won’t make a living having just one job.
You can’t even know what the world will look like by 2030.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the day down.
Why bother?
The creative journey is lonely. With the proliferation of content and the unpredictability of sustainability — let alone success — what's the point?
Failure and rejection is universal —
I love my rejection slips. They show me I try. — Sylvia Plath
— but there is work to do and it calls.
The blood jet is poetry, there is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath
But the stoic designer must at some point in the craft acknowledge its futility.
Sylvia Plath killed herself.
Why bother.
Whether the work or even the world we know flounders, whether there is or isn’t a reader, whether you’re laid off, …, there is very little you control.
Discontentment blooms in the valley between outcome and expectation.
So, adjust your expectations.
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. — Epictetus
The only part of your craft you control is its doing. The craft itself is the end to the means.
This is, to me, a cloying truth. It does not sit well. But I can’t reason past it, and I can either choose to suffer or I can change my mind.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. — Victor Frankl
The craft can, and should, distract you.
The practical approach is to just go deep. Identify and master the variables within your control. You cannot control the metrics — but you can control the dials.
You control how and where you spend your time, your inputs. Focusing on these elements shifts your attention from external outcomes to internal mastery. In doing so you not only enhance your skills but shift your focus.
Leave no time to dwell on the outcome and, eventually, the reward-circuitry tuned to it will rust.
This is just acknowledging that it may be difficult to divorce one’s sense of success from traditional markers like mass readership, widespread adoption, or great wealth, and that there is valuable and healthy distraction in the deliberate practice of our craft.
Deliberate practice rewires the brain. You might overtime reshape your sense of success and find instinctual fulfillment in the process itself — because that’s all there is.
Craft virtuously.
Furbelow
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