CHAPTER 16

The Weight of Individuality

It is a creative person’s individuality that defines him. Most people are conventional and prize conformity; some people prize their individuality. Even if he trains himself to hold his tongue, an individual will already know as a young child that he can’t conform and that he wasn’t built to conform. Looking around, unable to understand why people are acting so conventionally, starting to feel alienated, out of place, and like a “stranger in a strange land,” he finds himself burdened by this pulsing energy: the fierce need to be himself. This need produces lifelong emotional consequences.

If you are born individual and find yourself presented with some arbitrary, odd-sounding rule—that you can only play with one of your toys at a time or that God will be offended if you don’t wear a hat—you immediately ask “Why?” If the answer makes no sense to you or if you get your ears boxed, you cry “No!” and begin to grow oppositional. A certain oppositional attitude naturally and inevitably flows from an individual’s adamant effort to reject humbug and to make personal sense of the world. What does this feel like, emotionally? It feels like a combination of sorrow and anger, tangled together to form a root ball of depression.

This oppositional attitude, perhaps suppressed in childhood, begins to announce itself and assert itself in adolescence and to grow as an individual’s interactions with the conventional world increase. It grows as his ability to “do his thing” is directly or indirectly restricted by the machinery of society. He finds himself in an odd kind of fight, not necessarily with any particular person or group of people but with everyone and everything meant to constrain him and reduce him to a cipher. He finds himself in a fight to the death, a fight to retain his individuality.

One proof that this dynamic actually takes place is the frequency with which we see it in the lives of creative people. Arnold Ludwig, in his study of “1000 extraordinary men and women” called The Price of Greatness, explained: “These individuals often have an attitude set that is oppositional in nature. These are not people who just see that the emperor has no clothes; they offer their own brand of attire for him to wear.”

Popping out of the womb individual, needing to experiment and to risk as part of their individuality, and feeling thwarted and frustrated by the oh-so-conventional universe into which they have been plopped at birth, the world’s individuals rush headlong like a ski jumper down a ramp toward reckless ways of dealing with their feelings of alienation and frustration. They are not only individual, they are driven to be individual, a drive that sets them apart and sends them racing through life.

Nature is not stupid. Nature makes the calculation that, for an individual to truly be individual, it had better invest him with enough power, passion, energy, and appetite to manifest that individuality. Otherwise individuality would be a cosmic joke, and nature doesn’t joke that way. So it invests the individual with extra drive. Just as it makes no sense to produce a creature that enjoys the leaves at the tops of trees without also providing him with a long neck, it makes no sense to produce a creature that is built to assert his individuality without providing him with the energy of assertion. This nature does.

Thus the individual has more energy, more charisma, bigger appetites, stronger needs, greater passion, more aliveness, more avidity: this is all the same idea and flows from the same wellspring. It is nature’s way of fueling the individual so that he can be individual. It should also be clear how this extra energy and fuller appetite lead to conditions such as addiction, mania, and insatiability.

Nature does not joke, but it does produce unintended consequences. One of the major unfortunate consequences of this extra drive—this extra ambition, this extra egotism, this extra appetite— is that the individual is hard-pressed, and often completely unable, to feel satisfied.

He eats a hundred peanuts—not satisfying enough. He writes a good book—not satisfying enough. He has a shot of excellent Scotch—not satisfying enough. He wins the Nobel Prize—not satisfying enough. This inability to get satisfied produces constant background unhappiness and makes him want some experience that will mask this feeling or make it go away. So he has another hundred peanuts or another Scotch—without, however, coming any closer to satisfying himself.

It is as if nature turbocharged some of its creatures and then failed to give them a decent braking system. It provided extra energy—and with it a susceptibility to mania. It provided extra ambition—and with it a susceptibility to grandiosity. It provided extra appetite—and with it a susceptibility to promiscuity, obesity, and alcoholism. It provided extra adrenaline—and with it a susceptibility to car wrecks. If all of these “extras” could be channeled and regulated, we might thank nature for its largesse. As it is, these extras make the individual’s life unruly and fraught with danger.

So nature, which doesn’t joke, nevertheless has its little joke and creates an individual who must know for himself, follow his own path, and be himself, puts it in his mind that he is born to do earth-shattering and life-saving work, gives him the energy to pursue this work and the courage to stand in opposition even to the whole world, and then turns around and tortures him. It heightens his core anxiety by giving him an existential outlook, making sure that nothing will satisfy him, pouring adrenaline through his system, and swelling his head so that he is primed to tip over, top-heavy, into self-centeredness.

The mandate to individuality forces the creative person to wonder about life’s large questions—pesters him with those questions—and demands that he respond to what he sees going on in the universe. It forces him to write a mournful poem, craft a subversive novel, and walk the earth from one end to the other on some unnameable quest. Each of these is an existential response, that is, a response arising from his plaintive, poignant questioning of the world into which nature has dropped him. On top of everything else, nature tells him that he is responsible for looking out for the world—nothing less is expected of him.

Of course, we aren’t equal to all of this. As individual as we are, as magnificent as we are, we are also quite puny. We may be large, but we are also small. Even if we do manage to persevere— to write our poems, to battle our windmills—it is not without a thousand ups and downs, frustrations and disappointments, rages and dirges. Is this your emotional landscape? Then you are probably an individual.

LESSON 16

Individuality has emotional consequences. Nature may have designated you as one of her individuals, but she has not provided you with a blueprint to follow. You will have to work that out, even while nursing a pain in your heart and a pain in your head.

To Do

1. Be the individual that you are. Do you really have a choice?

2. Become more mindful of your emotional landscape by adopting a self-observer’s attitude. Rage against injustice, but also observe what that rage is doing to your system. Write manically, but also observe whether you are racing too fast. Monitor yourself—that is your duty.

3. Learn how to calm yourself through the practice of slow, deep breathing. You have no better soothing tool than the regulation of your own breathing; use it to counteract your inner turmoil and speediness.

4. Wear the weight of your individuality as lightly as you can.