Unquiet thoughts and worthwhile lives

As I am struggling with a serious setback in my illness, I inevitably get intrusive thoughts (as John Dowland calls them, “unquiet thoughts”). One of these intrusive thoughts is the following: If I die now (or soon), then I haven't really accomplished anything. “You have not written anything that has real significance or impact", the self-loathing voice says, “Maybe if you had more time. But now! Ah, it's all in vain. Vanity of vanities.”

Unquiet thoughts, from John Dowland's First Book of Songs or Ayres, 1597, “So thoughts and words and looks shall die together.”

Then I wonder, why do I have thoughts that go against my explicit values? I have argued that we should reject the idea that we can be reduced to our usefulness. For academics this is, among others, impact in the field, citations, and other metrics of recognition. Achievement and productivity culture is toxic and harmful. Rather, human beings should simply exist, simply be, without any regard to usefulness or even aims (e.g., here on Zhuangzi or here on Spinoza, and in my recent book Wonderstruck in the later chapters).

But it's one thing to explicitly endorse values, quite another one to live and die in accordance with them. If I can't even apply the idea that humans should simply be to my own life, do I believe in this at all? Am I a hypocrite?

Perhaps I am too conditioned by how academia tells us what matters. In academia, simply being is not good enough. This is best captured in the following perennial job market advice by job coach Karen Kelsky, “The fact is, Dear Readers, "yourself"  is the very last person you want to be.”

No, for academia yourself is not going to cut it. You need to do more, do better, be more excellent, win awards, write books everyone talks about that also change the field. And if you are not there yet (few of us are), then you should pretend, put up a fake persona of this confident and stellar academic—the one who is worthy of awards and of being widely cited. Someone who is part of the in-crowd. We tend to think of academia as liberating, as the ideal job that gives you freedom, but it can also be a mental prison. You adopt these habits and they never let you go.

Academia is not unique in this regard. Our entire society is built around how useful we might be to others, which primarily means our economic output. Less productive members, such as old, disabled, or poor people, are told they do not matter. You will remember how the CDC director said in early 2022 that Covid-19 at that point mainly killed people who were already “unwell to begin with,” and that this was “welcome news.” (Side thought: I'm now one of those people with multiple comorbidities who can “fall by the wayside,” and maybe this also explains why I am trying to find self-value in my work.)

At this point, I am struggling for my life and going through difficult treatments. Whether I wrote anything of significance should not matter to me at all. We all had a good-natured laugh when Jason Stanley said on Twitter that the wanted to still be read in 200 years, or else his work had been in vain. But maybe we laughed at ourselves, at the carnival mirror it presented, distorting and exaggerating our anxieties.

Ultimately, I stand by my values. It doesn’t matter if my works survive long-term, or what I wrote, or whether I wrote anything at all—all these things do not matter for a worthwhile life. My life could have gone many different ways where I didn't write at all, and it would not have taken away or added value. To be sure, writing did contribute to my personal sense of meaning and I hope it gives joy to some people. But it is not the metric by which I should assess my value.