Tyler Durdin was right - never be complete.
“...CAN YOU HEAR THE WIND, FATHER? REMEMBER WHAT MOTHER USED TO SAY ABOUT THE WIND? THE WIND CANNOT DEFEAT THE TREE WITH STRONG ROOTS…”
—HAWK, THE REVENANT
I bought a copy of Michael Punkes ‘The Revenant’, a little over two years ago, and after an aborted attempt to get stuck into it, the relatively thin paperback took up silent residence on my bedside table amongst the growing pile of ‘to be read’. Last month for no apparent reason I decided to give it another go - and I simply couldn’t put it down. The two hundred odd pages depicting the true story of frontiersman Hugh Glass in the 1830’s American wilderness was devoured in a matter of days. I then wrestled our Netflix account out of ‘kids’ mode so I could track down the film adaptation - regardless of your opinion of the acting (or Tom Hardy’s accent) the landscape and cinematography is nothing short of jaw dropping.
Image: ‘The Revenant”
But enough of the literary and film review - two themes struck home hard for me - Hardship and Value. Let’s go light on the first and deeper on the second.
HARDSHIP
These men operated in working conditions that would send an Occupational Health and Safety Officer into total apoplexy. Months on end, tracking, trapping and trying to prove the viability of a fur trade along the untamed Mississippi. If the bears, wolves, cold exposure or starvation didn’t kill you, there’s a good chance the indigenous Indian tribes would. That’s if you didn’t get completely lost in the totally uncharted wilderness, working your way from Fort to Fort, in the desperate hope that when / if you arrive, the Fort hasn’t been raided, burnt to the ground or just plain abandoned for the winter. These were hard men in every sense of the word. But that very hardship gave them a hauntingly clear metric by which to measure something that many of us today struggle with - a sense of value.
VALUE.
“QUI PLUS FAIT, MIEUX VAULT"
“WHO DOES MORE IS WORTH MORE”
GEOFFROI DE CHARNY
“So Paul, what do you do?”
“Take a seat mate, this will take a while...”
Give a different answer, get a different response. Tell them I’m a pharmacist (which is true) and you can see the mental cogs turning, making a host of conscious / unconscious assumptions on income, education, likely political affiliation. Tell the next person I’m a personal trainer (which is true) and we get a fresh suite of shiny new assumptions. Tell them I drive a forklift in a warehouse (which was true, I also have an MBA and built the company) and the cogs turn again. But the underlying premises are the same, you have a blue / white collar job, degree / no degree, this income, that income, ipso facto you are worth ‘this’.
The real cracker is when I answer with ‘I’m a stay at home Dad’. That tends to grind the cogs to a halt. Generally, I get a raised eyebrow and an ‘Oh...’ You can see that they’re doing the mental arithmetic but keep getting stuck, ‘can he not work?’ ‘what’s his wife do?’ ‘yeah but what else do you do?’. The mental friction comes from the way we define and therefore value ourselves - especially as men. Without knowing ‘what you do’ in terms of a paying job, I’m suddenly left with no frame of reference for valuing you, your worth, your contribution or your standing amongst others, especially other men.
For a long stretch the nature of the workforce helped dictate and reinforce what were long considered standard gender roles - Dad worked and provided financially and Mum ran the household and shouldered the vast daily burden of raising the progeny. The nature of work, especially through the twentieth century helped cement that - industrialisation, manufacturing, primary industry, war, all these fostered an advantage to those better suited to physical labour. Literally, the strong were favoured. In the US census of 1970, a census that covered almost two hundred million humans, the number of men who listed there occupation as ‘stay at home dad’ was……six. That’s not a typo, it was six individuals. Out of two hundred million.
Then the workforce dynamics changed as the industrial revolution gave way to the digital one, the workforce ideal moved from a preference for brawn to brain - from hardware to wetware. As manufacturing jobs moved or vanished and the information age, mobility of work and automation gained greater ascension, men found the ground shifting under their feet and women found themselves no longer behind the strength curve - IQ and EQ is not gender biased.
Here’s the rub - if you have valued your ‘worth’ based primarily on your capacity for financial provision, and identify yourself as a title rather than a full fledged, multi-dimensional human being, then when the goal posts moved (and in an evolutionary sense they moved damn fast) there was a sudden margin-call on your leveraged sense of self-worth.
So what the hell do we do now? You need to re-define yourself. Not in terms of your job. Not in terms of your earning capacity - but in terms of what you really, honestly, bring to the table. And that process can be scary as hell.
“...WHEN YOU REALISE THAT THE STORY YOU’RE TELLING IS JUST WORDS, THEN YOU CAN JUST CRUMBLE IT UP AND THROW YOUR PAST IN THE TRASHCAN…”
- CHUCK PALAHNIUK.
So you can start with new words. A new script. A new story arc.
In my experience, developing (and considering) yourself to be multi-dimensional serves not only as a great hedge against feeling like your value is lost due to one single seismic shift, but it also allows you to see how deep and far your abilities run.
More and more I find myself using the phrase, ‘I’m the father of two young boys’. A strong component of my self worth is increasingly derived from my capacity to raise them both. I often use the example that when I was in Year 12, I had my life planned out - I was going to get a medical degree, become a Doctor and my business card would reflect as such.
Decades later and my business card is devoid of the term ‘Doctor’ - but it carries a myriad of others - Mountain Climber, Adventurer, Entrepreneur, Pharmacist, Speaker, Husband, Father, Son, Brother, Nerd.
All those personas bring value and joy into my life - at varying times and in varying ways.
So take some time to reflect on who you are and what you do beyond the narrow definitions of the title at the office, or the role that society has deemed you fit to fill. Revel in your complexity - it is your shield against the storm and your banner in battle.
“…I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may…”
- Tyler Durdin, Fight Club
OCTOBER 7, 2019