Thirty-three weeks ago, I was in Istanbul. I shared a post to a group of entrepreneurs on Facebook:
“So, I’ve packed up my life in London and moved to Istanbul. I am with my brother. We’ll be running our company from here for the foreseeable. Anyone on this group from Istanbul? What’s the startup scene like!? Cheers with çay. (It’s epic here).”
Soon after, a stranger commented:
Selman, the commenter, lived in Nairobi, not Istanbul: “there’s no lockdown here”, he said on Zoom at the time. A couple of months later, when lockdown arrived in Istanbul, our conversation sprang to my mind. So we flew to Nairobi, and I settled down with no plans to leave. Selman has become a close friend.
None of this needed to happen. There are many conditionals: Selman may never have seen my post (there are hundreds added to the group every day), I might not have posted (I’ve only ever posted once or twice), I may not have ‘DM’d’ him (I failed to respond to the others who commented). I could write a book of these had-to-happens-to-actually-happen, but it’s a book I wouldn’t want anybody to read.
The point is this: this moment could not have happened. And I would not be sitting in Lavington, Nairobi having eggs benedict, writing to you.
The outside chance of it all puts the decisions we make in perspective. Outcomes are so contingent on luck. Moreover, how could I ever know if a decision is the best for me when it relies on a thread on Facebook? And to an infinite list of unseen events.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is a masterpiece of comment on our human condition. It pokes holes in our illusion of anything mattering (or being ‘heavy’).
Einmal ist keinmal, or ‘once is never’ is the thesis. Kundera explains: “What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
He remained annoyed with himself until he realised that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, ‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Life is easy
I wanted to write an essay about the importance of making hard decisions in life. I tried to explain my take on the importance of why, when we feel the fangs of confusion coming up to bite us in the back of the neck, the best course of action is taking some time to sit, and write, and be rational. I wanted to write about how feeling discomfort is the leading indicator of growth.
However, I’m very fortunate: my life has been easy. The hard things in life are burying a loved one too soon or living without the ‘net’ of social security that hangs beneath us. My friend’s grandmother had to choose between her husband and child or her family and home in Algeria. A hard decision: she never saw her parents again. The hard choices I’ve had to make have not—in relative terms—been hard. Decisions have sometimes been uncomfortable to implement—but not hard to choose the way forward.
It’s a simple but important distinction. So many of the decisions we face are not hard decisions in themselves, but they are hard to implement because they require discipline and nerves.
These are my hardest decisions:
A tough break-up six years ago
Leaving Knight Frank to join TopHat
Recognising a drinking problem, stopping, and re-designing my life away from it
Closing down Otto after we failed to raise funding
Pursuing Yokeru even when it was like crawling through Marmite
Quitting smoking (ongoing)
None of these have been hard to make. They were hard to do. When making a hard choice about a job, where to live, or a lover, it’s the implementation that’s daunting, not the decision itself. My own experience backs this up, as does the experience of many of the people I live with (I’ve been surveying).
I felt uncomfortable closing down Otto, or continuing Yokeru, stopping drinking and moving country. Yet, the decisions themselves were easy: Deep down, I knew what the right decision was. In each of those instances, the resistance I felt was not the resistance to making the decisions, but the opposition to the unknown quantity of discomfort that would follow.
There is no wrong decision
“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”
Einmal ist keinmal. Once is never. It all might as well not happen. From a philosophical perspective, we have one decision to make in life: do we interpret the ‘once is never’ truth as free and liberating, or as hopeless and hard. Light or heavy? Our destination is the same.
With heaviness, the truth of einmal ist keinmal leads us to nihilism. A true nihilist believes in nothing, lacks loyalties, and is without purpose (other than an impulse to destroy). After all, they say, what does it matter? —who cares, anyway?
The other option is acceptance of the ‘lightness’ of experience. We can choose to squeeze every last drop out of the time we have been awake.
“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.”
Like an actor going on cold, we don’t need to obsess about remembering our lines. What does it matter? There will be no re-run nor review. We stand there to experience the warmth of the stage lights, the nerves of being in front of an audience, the joy of applause. We watch ourselves, as the audience does, eyes wide in wonder at the experience that arrives.
This second route is powerful because decisions are interpreted as the right ones. “There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no comparison.” We find ourselves comparing our lives to our friends, but we can never know what disaster we’ve avoided by our ‘good’ decisions or the opportunities we’ve missed from our ‘bad’ ones. There is no counterfactual.
Kundera says life is a sketch. We are drawing our lives, and we are the only ones judging if they are any good or not: often against irrational criteria. But, what if—rather than drawing the future—we are filling the narrative of our past. Kundera puts it beautifully: “That is why life is always like a sketch. No, ‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.” When we die, there is no completed picture. With all of our memories, we don’t get stored in a cabinet; it’s all gone, for good.
We are the stories we tell ourselves. The illusion is that there is a cohesive narrative at all. Looking forward, we are surely going to be a product of chance. Job opportunities fall out of the air, friendships arise from the ether. But looking back, we see a logical narrative from crossroad to crossroad, all the way to today. This is important because if the sketch is in hindsight, and the future is random, and the present exists only once, these factors change how we make decisions.
Vertigo
If you’re like me, you’ve only experienced discomfort rather than hardship. The tricky thing we face day-to-day is Vertigo. We want more life experience, to make more an impact or earn more money—but we’re also ‘woke’ enough to recognise that we’re seeking more of an illusion built on emptiness. It’s a lived contradiction we don’t discuss.
Kundera points this out: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer Vertigo. What is Vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
Vertigo is an apt notion: it’s a symptom rather than a condition itself. It’s the sensation that you, or the environment around you, is spinning. In the context of our lives, it’s the feeling of ‘Holy shit, this is my life, in this universe. There are infinite possibilities, yet there is only one that is real, only one that exists. Am I making the most of this as I head towards the curtain call?’.
The feeling I get when I think about how I arrived in Nairobi is Vertigo, or when I think about how far away the stars are. Moreover, as Kundera says, it’s an unavoidable sensation. When we seek more from our lives, we are exposed to the feeling of “whoah, this might fall apart”, or “whoah I’m not on the right path”. But Vertigo, or discomfort, is a positive sign. It’s a signal that we’re striving. The feeling precedes change–it causes it.
A north star
We can also remember that we never know what we want. Each of us makes it up. Kundera notes, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
I wasn’t born with a purpose. Today, I want to be an entrepreneur who helps people get care when they need it while also exploring the world. So long as I’m playing a game on that pitch, I’ll continue to enjoy the process. I fabricated this, and I feel uncomfortable when I think about how I made it up. Others, however, are motivated by making money, or creating art, or bringing up children. They, too, are inventors of their purpose.
My purpose is my north star. It’s not an objective, and I can’t fail at it. It’s a holistic direction that guides my life decisions. Because of it, I am unlikely to start a pottery studio, nor will I become a baker. It simplifies the decisions I have to make today. I have not been out-and-out successful, either, and it doesn’t matter. I’d be willing to work in the domain for many years for it to work. While the brand Yokeru has been consistent, we’ve made many attempts and have failed many many many times. With careers, this iteration is done by jumping from organisation to organisation. It’s less accepted, but who cares? There cannot be too many shots at goal. And a life that’s spent shooting at a goal and never scoring is well lived, too!
Who knows, I might wake up tomorrow and change my life completely. I may develop a passion for glass blowing. Yet, having a north star (something to aim at) can help as we make headway in the world. It lifts a weight from us. We are heading towards our north star and can playfully make decisions that—previously—would have been heavy on our back.
Final thoughts
Our future is coming towards us fast. We are driving past many other versions of our lives. But, as Kundera says, there is only one reality. And maybe we never really have the option to live out another way? Perhaps there are no decisions to make; it’s all just uncomfortable implementation.
Every day, each of us arrives at a crossroads. Do we continue working or head off to a cabin? Should we call our grandmother or grab a coffee with a friend? Should we speak to the stranger at yoga or play it cool and stroll off? We don’t see most of the decisions we take—they slip by. We cruise on with our day and with our lives.
It’s comforting that all decisions (unless you’re the dice man, Luke Rhinehart) appear rational in hindsight. We rarely sit down to reflect on how random it is that we are here. The logical story we tell ourselves is easy to believe: a better sketch to draw. Otherwise, the lightness and insignificance of everything is unbearable.