Go All The Way

Advice for living passionately in a passionless age

Nothing plagues our society worse than a lack of passion. Almost everything we do is passionless. Posting to serve an algorithm, consuming the lives of others through screens, pencil pushing to earn enough money to afford necessities while 30% of our paycheck is siphoned to another calamitous war. Everyone is either attention starved or attention deficient. People are more empowered and free to create than ever before, but they inevitably fail to launch. Perhaps it’s the fear of failure or our degradation into a passionless society. Our evolution into a ‘me first’ society where hedonism and immediate gratification rule the roost, but in the end, the self-conscious concern of one’s own perception thwarts any action.

Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard shared these concerns in his prescient work Two Ages: A Literary Review,

“Everyone is well informed; we all know everything, every course to take on and the alternative courses but no one is willing to take it.”

Throughout his philosophy, he laid out his view of the three stages of human existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. This simple video perfectly explains all three, but in the case that you haven’t leaped off this post yet, the aesthetic describes a sybaritic life spent chasing pleasures, the ethical life is one dedicated to morals and the community as a whole, and lastly, the religious (or transcendental) life is one devoted towards the eternal — God, truth, or any higher purpose. Assessing our current state of affairs, which stage would you suspect our culture lies within? Ah, yes. The self-serving, overindulgent, ‘I want it and I want it now!’ stage of aesthetics.

The pernicious effect of this is that it has plunged our culture into an era completely devoid of passion. Much of the mainstream art we consume — music, movies, social media — is made for profit. We’re spoon fed worthless entertainment by corporations that prey on our wallets and pleasure-seeking instincts. In the workplace, feel good productivity fills up people’s schedules, while time set aside for passion or the humanities is eradicated. Much of society is stuck leaving gluteal-shaped imprints in their couches, while the few who make authentic content fight for scraps.

Clinging desperately to the hope of optimism, I lean on the apt advice from the underground, iconic poet Charles Bukowski, “If you’re going to try, go all the way.” Not so easy in a world where we’re too self-conscious to try and our ability to finish anything we start is combatted by our dwindling attention spans; but his advice is worth following nonetheless.

The key to Bukowski’s poem is that it doesn’t promise happy endings. Money isn’t mentioned, suffering is implied, and uncertainty is part of the game.

“And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.”

Kierkegaard preached the same in his conception of the “Leap of Faith”. It’s never about any tangible reward or the admiration of the crowd. It’s about passion and reaching out into the beyond. Touching that feeling that Bukowski describes that cannot be felt through any other route. It’s a road of pain, loss, and possibly failure, but in the end the artist finds solace in the fact that “…he has nevertheless remained true to his love.”¹

Passion is about the Pursuit, Not the Reward

Living a passionate life requires you rebuke what you’ve been told for most of your life — that success lies in status, money, or material objects. This, of course, is an attitude that many of us publicly proclaim, but few of us actually live by. I think back on the words of novelist William H. Gass, “Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. […] One must be satisfied with that.” Like Gass, I believe serious art and passionate lives spring from the transcendental stage. They must serve a higher purpose and one that is not tied to material reward, reputation, or any certainty. We must be willing to shamelessly go all the way in our pursuits and live aggressively, fighting to protect our individuality. As Bukowski says, “It’s the only good fight there is.”

1. Quote from Fear & Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard