In Praise of the Unsustainable

Death sharpens mission. We know this. We have always known this.

Death sharpens mission. We know this. We have always known this.

Look at the urgency of immortality biohackers. They’re driven to work faster, go harder, experiment more daringly — why? Because death is peeking over their shoulders. This urgent drive to defeat their closest ally.

Any mission-based effort must be acutely aware of its own unsustainability. Of its own death — and thus its own Life and potency.

More: it must be acutely aware that any attempt at indefinite sustainability has a numbing effect; it imposes a bloodless impotence, a forgetting, a castration.

Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote:

You have to make up your mind irremediably. To live fully is to be something irrevocably.

Wherever nothing is irrevocable, Life’s fullness isn’t present.

Wherever you’re holding back, hiding behind security, prioritizing restrained sustainability, that’s where Mission, Vision, and Ambition are being traded away.

Effectiveness and vitality don’t come from prim accounting. They come from going all in — not in the one-dimensional frenzy of a youth with no sense — but in a mature, driven recognition that Life wants this from you.

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I think of these funds and endowments that fancy themselves to have Missions. They gather hundreds of millions of dollars — and then keep almost all of it in the silo. All these resources pulled together, just to secure the principal so they can hand out bits of the interest without tapping the real resources.

Misering out interest is profoundly uninteresting.

Securing the principal is insecure and unprincipled.

Are you going to keep your Life force siloed, in hopes of making it last forever? Or are you going to exert yourself in Life’s Mission, and die with the fruit of your efforts dripping down your chin?

How are you going to steward your Mission?

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You can talk about sprints versus marathons — but marathons have a finish line, and the runners know it. Their whole being is oriented towards it. They know the Mission, their pace isn’t sustainable — it’s appropriately unsustainable.

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We live in a world where the old paradigm and its systems are running on credit they can never repay. The inheritance is being spent down and the heirlooms are being pawned off.

The old vitality has run down. A blight has rotted through the silo.

Oof, I gotta stop overwriting like this.

Here’s the deal: there are a lot of things that need to happen in the world, and a lot of them are unsustainable efforts. They need to happen, and if there’s only enough resources to make them happen for 10 years, 4 years, even 1 year each — that’s fine. We can be proud of that. Those efforts can die happy and be buried with honor.

What would be a shame — no, not would, because it is in fact happening — what is a shame is when these efforts are prematurely stillborn because the people and institutions who could make them happen object on sustainability grounds. “The effort wouldn’t pay for itself year after year, so it’s not worth doing,” says the silo.

And the people who are willing to put in unsustainable time, effort, and resources on it — they’re out here doing it, but probably also putting too much of that time, effort, and resource into pitching to the silo in the hopes of more resources to stretch the sprint into a marathon. Or at least a 5k.

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My lens on a lot of this is fairly developmental. There is, at this moment in time, an opportunity to mature out of the existing paradigm. Some people are trying to seize and support that opportunity.

This becomes pretty complex, for any number of reasons.

• Most relevantly: maturing is by definition an unsustainable process. Ask the parents of any teenage boy how long they could sustain that grocery bill. Growth involves phases where huge amounts of energy have to be poured into the system to let things take their next shape. (Growth processes are, from an efficiency-embedded point of view, almost unforgivably wasteful.)

• Also relevant: nearly by definition, the majority of resources will always be with the people who are the best at (and most embedded in) the reigning paradigm. And from the point of view of the reigning paradigm, the next paradigm literally doesn’t make sense. In fact, to those embedded in the current paradigm, the next one will often look like a regression. So if you’re trying to get resources towards a new paradigm, it will almost always involve translating that new paradigm into the values of the existing one it seeks to replace, which is… tricky, to say the least. And often quite compromising.

Among those who write about developmental topics, I have a soft spot for Bill Plotkin. One reason for this is that he emphasizes something many developmental writers and researchers don’t: these shifts can absolutely fail.

Whether personal or cultural, when there’s an opportunity to step into more growth, maturity, and wholeness, there’s always a good chance that the process simply won’t take. Things can fall back to their previous level, or even to a lower level if the process really gets botched.

One of the things that can botch the process is, frankly, a lack of resources. An unsustainable outpouring of time, effort, energy is required to make even simple, natural shifts occur. When the process fails, the reason is often that the resources to make it succeed were either not available, or were held strategically in reserve when they needed to be profligately expended.

On the biological level, this looks like malnourishment during childhood and puberty. The body just doesn’t get the resources to grow how it could. The hungry hungry caterpillar goes into the cocoon but doesn’t burn its stored fat, so the butterfly never emerges.

On the personal level, this might look like “everything in me feels a deep, painful need to live my life differently — but that’s too terrifying, difficult, and uncertain, so I’ll just keep trucking and wait for this to pass.” The inner and outer resources required to make such big changes simply do not get mobilized.

On the cultural and societal levels, it can look much the same. Everyone knows that we all need to live differently, that what we’re doing feels bad, stunted, constraining. But when we look at what it would take to change it… fear and difficulty and uncertainty (even a deep sense of impossibility) overwhelm us. So the personal, emotional, social, financial, and institutional resources required to make such changes simply do not get mobilized.

Again, Ortega y Gasset:

You have to make up your mind irremediably. To live fully is to be something irrevocably.

Irremediable. Irrevocable. This is not gentle language. These are not gentle processes.

This is what it feels like to be stuck between competing unsustainabilities:

It’s impossible to keep being the way we’ve been.

It’s impossible to exhaust our resources creating a new way to be.

Stuck between impossible continuation and impossible transformation, there’s really only one choice. Continuation isn’t a real option.

Whether personally or collectively — we can stay in the blighted silo of the reigning paradigm, convincing ourselves that if we just keep on keeping on, stay with a nice sustainable pace, everything will work out. Or we can enact the messy unsustainable profligacy of the maturation process.

The choice depends, so often, on a sense of Mission, sharpened by an awareness of death. An awareness that the clock is ticking down, that the game is going to end either way, and that we’ll feel our best if we leave it all on the field.