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Question: “What must one do to be sane?”
Freud’s Answer: “Love and Work.”
Freud had many foolish notions, but this answer is one of the deepest truths I know.
We are a nation of Egoists. We wrap ourselves in our iPhones and Facebook (and Daily Kos), we measure ourselves in our reflections, our likes, and our tribes. We are trapped in our games and the performance of our Selves. I’m not saying that we’re all arrogant narcissists, just that we grow into mature personae, and these set into comfortable grooves. As children, we look fresh-faced in every direction, all the world’s an adventure, every door beckons with new possibilities. As adults, we hunker down and focus on our goals and responsibilities, life becomes all schedules and habits. Your ego writes a soap opera or sitcom, and casts you as the star. Each episode has mostly the same characters, set, themes and goals. It takes a lot of effort and energy just to hold all of that together, to keep your game face on, and keep going.
Love and Work are crucial because they make us stretch past our known selves. When you commit your heart to something bigger than yourself, it challenges you. If you truly love another, you put up with their differences, you work to understand them, you learn to love what you find difficult. You make room in yourself to allow their full individuality. And you’re both balancing together, letting Us encompass and transcend Me vs. You. Because, if you’re not growing like that with some shared sacrifice, you’re heading for breakup or divorce. But, if you’re doing it right, you’ll find parts of yourself you never saw before.
Work is something similar, with less piercing passion and heartbreak. Work can mean the world to you, but you usually express that less operatically. You still commit for years or decades, to goals larger than yourself, to methods you only had a part in choosing. As with love, you need to choose wisely and be lucky, to find a career that suits you and a team you believe in and can fully commit yourself to.
I don’t know how many of us find a healthy career like that. Far too few, I think. Our skewed capitalism and consumer culture, our schools and curricula, are built around profit, greed and yesterday’s answers. We need a culture of organic humanism, of diversity and equity, and the US is nowhere near that. And yet we’re lucky here, in that the US has more of those humanist values in our American Dream than many other countries. Dollars rule us all, but many dreamers find their own way up.
We are all mostly or somewhat trapped in our egos. Love and Work — when they are healthy, when they challenge and nurture your individuality — are the universal medicines to grow beyond ourselves, they are the remedies that we all most need. If you can’t stretch beyond your known self, you will double down and dig deeper in that same old hole, you will languish inside your repetitions and addictions.
“He not busy being born is busy dying” — Bob Dylan
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