Being a Verb

The doctor who delivered me, so my mother told me, proclaimed, “Someday he may grow up to be Vice President.” I wonder why he picked Vice President instead of President. Were my limitations so obvious even at the age of a few minutes?

But I also wonder about that early initiation into our fixation with being something in life.

In high school, we were all asked what we wanted to be when we finished growing up. And we took some sort of aptitude test to find out where we fit. Naturally, given that this was the era of the Vietnam War and the military draft, my aptitude turned out to be perfectly suited for military duty. Either that or disk jockey, I think.

Who knows when they are 18 how they want to spend the rest of their lives? How could you ever know such a thing?

And besides, and here is the crux of the whole thing, why do we ask what you want to be? The fact is, you are going to be spending your life doing, not being. If you’re going to be Vice President, you’re going to spend your days doing Vice President things, and, thinking about it a little, I think I’d much rather be Vice President than do Vice President things.

The myth of being something your whole life doesn’t hold water anyway. If you go the route that almost everyone goes, you’re going to be a lot of things and do a lot of things. You might as well realize that from the get-go.

And isn’t that a good thing?

Suppose then we ditch the question of what we want to be. Start with this question: what do you want to do? Right now, what, on the bigger scale of things, do you want to do? What is engrossing enough, interesting enough, rewarding enough, valuable enough for you to spend your days doing?

And what do you want to accomplish? What mark do you want to make on the world?

Forget about how long you are going to do it — few of us can see so far ahead and so unerringly into the future to know that.

And most of all, forget about what you want to be! You’re going to spend your life doing things, not making the rounds at parties telling people what you are, or congratulating yourself on your title.

Your life , and the mark that you make on the world, is what you do, not what you are.

It’s a much harder question. It’s way easier to think about what you want to say about yourself at the party than it is to think about what you want to do every day and what you want to accomplish by doing it.

For the record, I didn’t follow the disk jockey path. I didn’t know what I wanted to be or do when I was 18. I didn’t even really have either of those questions down, and that’s probably why I stayed in school and studied philosophy.

So I did that for kind of a long time, more than a decade, and I got a PhD.

Okay, now I’m something. I’m a PhD. Fleeting moment of being.

But then I began to see the problem. What am I going to do?

I think I would have been happy being a philosopher, but, surprisingly, there are no job openings and very few life roles for someone who wants to be a philosopher without doing the philosophy things like teaching, writing, and publishing.

I had turned some sort of corner and became a PhD only to find another corner. What do I want to do now?

Then I was in my thirties, and I think I finally started to realize that I wanted to spend my life doing something. No idea what at that point, but at least I realized I was a verb, not a noun.

And it was freeing.

Step back and look at the big picture.

What we think of as “natural” communities — they hunt, they grow food, they gather food — those are the “hunter gatherers”. I bet not one of them, if asked, would have said, “Oh yes, I’m a hunter-gatherer.”

Now look at us. The new mother or father looks at their daughter or son and wonders what they will be when they grow up. A doctor? A scientist? A Certified Public Accountant? A personal injury lawyer? A career criminal? A teacher?

It’s got to be one of those, right?

OR you could just unload it all and go off road and off grid. Forget what you want to be. What do you want to do?

You know what? Forget about having being something. Live a life. A life in which you accomplish things, affect things, affect other people who affect and accomplish things.

Yes, you’ll have to equip yourself for living. Learn how to do things. Most of all, learn how to learn how to do things.

Now, while we’re at it, let’s go for extra credit. Think about another question. What should I do?

Aristotle (okay, now the philosophy thing comes back) wrote a book — a classic in moral philosophy. Scholars study it and argue about minute points of translation and such, and it’s definitely not an easy read.

But Aristotle dedicated the book to his son, Nicomachus, He was helping his son think about how to live a good life.

There are mountains of books out there about how to succeed — how to lead, how to innovate, how to sell yourself or your idea, how to build and manage a career. How to be someone.

There’s almost nothing like what Aristotle wrote, at least in the secular world. How do I live a good life — how do I make myself a good person, what does it take, how do I make decisions about what I should do, especially about the big question of what I want to do in my life?

This is what Aristotle taught his son in the Nicomachean Ethics — you won’t find anything in there about how to corner the olive market, how to promote yourself, how to introduce a new, better olive press, how to become famous.

It’s all about how to be “happy”, where “happy” doesn’t mean retiring to the beach — it means becoming a good person. And “good person” is defined as an “activity” — a doing, not a being.

If I’m going to spend my life doing something, it better be good. It better be good for me, and good for the world I do it in.