When the Only Game in Town is Your Own
How to set the rules for your creative endeavors, so you play your game. AND: McEwan's new novel; how to reclaim your mind; and the most cerebral sports podcast out there.
Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.
Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.
Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with the recommendations.
…What We Can Know: You’ll tear through Ian McEwan’s latest novel, too.
It’s set 100 years from now and seen through the eyes of an historian, who looks at our era in comparison to his own: a deluged Europe, after global warming has flooded and left uninhabitable more than 20 major cities throughout the world.
This is not post-apocalyptic climate fiction, though. Because it’s McEwan—and, as with Lessons and Atonement, McEwan at his finest—What We Can Know is a tale of love and betrayal and deceit and, in the end, ironic redemption. Two tales in fact: One set in the 2010s, the other in the 2120s, and both weaving together by the final page a narrative that is so very satisfying.
I swear, every book of his you read, the better your own writing will become. Such a pleasure to be in the company of a master.
…“Can You Reclaim Your Mind?” An essay that’ll stick with you, from The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman, on breaking free in midlife of calcified thoughts and habits, because it’s in midlife, as Jung observed, that the journey truly begins. We are presented with a choice. We either continue to live falsely, impressed by others’ opinions and blinkered by limiting beliefs, or we become unapologetically ourselves.
I’ll step out of Rothman’s way here:
Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called “impersonality,” meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that captures the idea nicely. Geuss recalls a mentor—a school teacher of his—dispensing advice about becoming a visual artist. “Set aside half an hour or forty-five minutes a day,” the mentor said, and then draw, while ignoring “all the exercises and principles and things one might have learned.” Afterward, instead of judging your drawing, look at it and say to yourself, “So, this is what-I-do-on-a-day-like-this.”…
Impersonality is one of those big ideas that scholars can elucidate forever. It sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: seeing yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container. In her book “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World,” the writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies “the self-consistency fallacy” as “the assumption that ‘I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.’ ” She suggests making adventurous “pacts” with yourself and seeing where they lead. You’re not a musician, but you can still decide to write a song every week for six weeks; you’re not a poet, but you can still try writing a poem every day for ten days; you’ve never started a business, but you can still sell something on Etsy. Maybe it will turn out that, actually, you “are” a musician, writer, or entrepreneur.
…Pablo Torre Finds Out: And specifically Tuesday’s podcast/YouTube episode. Torre brings on the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who argues via his new book that life is not only a game but has been gamified in ways you can’t even see.
Nguyen is here to present to you the actual playing field.
I don’t know of another sports podcast this cerebral. Torre and Nguyen discuss Thomas Hobbes and our collective 500-year march toward ranking everything, but they mostly discuss how to find qualitative joy amid the increasingly quantified world’s effort to cramp you within its cage, diminish you.
Even when you find yourself in that cage, you also find you hold the key to free yourself. That’s one of the episode’s takeways.
Like I said: Not your average sports podcast. Pablo and I used to work together at ESPN the Magazine. It’s wonderful to see him succeed like this.
This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: When the only game in town is your own.
A moving sequence of the above interview comes when Nguyen describes the student who approached him recently. She was like him. The child of Asian immigrants and pushed to succeed by the standards of our age: to get into the right college, and then pursue the status-edifying career that would delight her parents and enrich herself.
She didn’t even know she didn’t want that. Didn’t see, until Nguyen helped her see, how, say, any college’s “worth” was nothing more than an arbitrary ranking from U.S. News and World Report. She realized her life had been trapped in bad games, she said. Those bad games were the cause of her anorexia and her depression, and nothing, not being a Division-I athlete, not earning a 4.0 GPA, could break her free of the games’ doom loop. If anything, her hard work contributed to it. The hard work reinforced the bad games’ rules.
What would happen, she ultimately asked herself, if she chose how she would measure her life?
Two years ago at this time, I was heading to Park City, Utah. The Accidental Getaway Driver was having its premier at Sundance, and the feature film was based on a story I’d written for GQ.
I remember so much about that January afternoon: the nerves over how the film would be received, my name on the big screen, and then the ovation the movie got when the end credits rolled. The film would go on to win Sundance’s Best Director Prize. It would go on to gain national and international distribution.
You know what I remember most, two years later?
How fleeting that satisfaction was, how insufficient even. I spent too much time gauging how our film would compare to others. There’s a lesson here in what Teddy Roosevelt once said: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” But there’s a bigger lesson, too.
A few days after I’d flown home I realized I was playing the game that the festival and, by extension, Hollywood wanted me to play. I had focused on whether we would “win,” even though there is no “winning” in art. Because even though our film had indeed won and even though that winning—a prize; eventually distribution—allowed our low-budget indie to be released theatrically and streamed today, and even though I’m very grateful for all that, my gratitude is not the same thing as happiness.
Happiness is not prizes, or distribution on streaming platforms or, as Nguyen’s undergraduate learned, a 4.0 GPA and a diploma from a leading university. Happiness is found when you listen to what you feel called to do and then you do it, over and over and over.
The real prize of Sundance, I realized in the months after the festival, was the opportunity to write more. Writing another magazine story, another book, another script, hell, another edition of TWPL: Creation is the goal. More specifically, getting better at the creation by a standard I myself judged: That’s the goal.
I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions because every year I’ve made one I’ve drifted toward something extrinsic. More money, or a book of mine on some list, or some favorable write up.
All of that is playing a game, though, by its rules. Play if you want—it’s hard not to—but I can tell you what Nguyen does above: You’ll be disillusioned, and that’s even when you win.
Make the only game you play your own. You’ll feel better. You’ll write more.
Quote of the Week: “Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them — work, family, health, friends, and spirit… and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls — family, health, friends, and spirit — are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same.”
—Brian Dyson, explaining the point of any professional game: To quit playing it.
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