An article from concert pianist James Rhodes is circulating among people right now.  It's a kind of carpe diem article called "Find What You Love and Let It Kill You," advising everyone to do something creative, rather than be another, you know, rat in the rat-race  Make some extra time and don't sulk it away doing something culturally vapid like watching television or something.  Here are the, uh, penultimate paragraphs:

          "Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke…

         What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?

         What if rather than a book club you joined a writer's club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?"

And you know, a lot of people are responding with: I got up earlier today and I spent more time doing something I cared about, or I did something new today, or I pushed myself to try a new thing.  To some extent, this is pretty wonderful, and Rhodes' advice is well-taken, but only to a point.  Because in the end the article is still about reward.  Rhodes gives up a City Job, chasing after security (money) and self-worth to become a concert pianist.  He then describes, however vaguely, his trials, depressions (mental hospital stay), no money, etc, all in the name of his art.  But what's weird is that it seems like the pianist thing is pretty much the same as the City Job, except instead of looking for some success which seems to come externally (money, respect of others, namely women), Rhodes explains that he's now impressing himself: in fact, he finds his achievements extraordinary and they continually astonish him (see the last paragraph).  What's weird here is that Rhodes substitutes one kind of success for another, one kind of reward for another.  It seems to me that this can be a decidedly mistaken way to go about things.  The article also betrays a kind of obvious and self-inflated judgment of others: that most people are wasting away their lives in bars or shit jobs or on the internet and their humaneness is pretty much whirling down the toilet with the rest of the shit, while Rhodes is playing music that most people can't even make sense of.  Still though, I don't mean to bash the guy - no matter what, our cultural ideology tells us to succeed.  And while succeeding in a bank job might feel culturally vapid, and playing piano might seem culturally profound, both aspirations are still based on kind of need for success: one is just external and the other, seemingly, internal.  Also, it's not that his advice is bad advice: it's just the same type of advice wearing different clothes.  

So, the big problem I see with the article is that it's still the same kind of cultural message we get all the time, the kind of head on approach: do something!  The problem with it, to me, is that it suggests all people can do something.  I mean, it's so intensely egalitarian as to be almost insulting, and this coming from someone who's also sickeningly egalitarian.  But more importantly, the head on approach of "do something with your life" is just the same version of what our society already gives us.  Get success!  Be good at a thing!  Be talented!  Go to heaven!  It seems to me that the first step in all of this isn't stepping away from the computer or tv or bar and then learning to play classical guitar or painting - the first step, and this isn't psychology, is to shut the fuck up.  While on the surface, tv and fb and the bar seem to be kind of mind numbing activities, what they really are are activities that allow for particular and easy thought-patterns.  As much as we like to think that a human turns off completely while watching tv, this isn't the case: most people think, laugh, mock, parody, get moved, etc, when watching tv.  There's a lot of thinking, and often feeling, happening in situations like tv watching, internet surfing, and bar crawling.  The answer isn't: do something!  which is just another prescription for thinking, albeit maybe in a different way.  In fact, there's not really an answer, however inspiring Rhodes' piece seems to be, but a good starting place is not more doing; it's actually less doing.  Stopping.  Shutting up.  Turning off the tv, not going to the bar, not interneting, and certainly not just doing another thing.  To me, this is a huge thing our current world misses: that moment where stopping is an option, because it's in the stopping where something new opens up, and it's in the opening where the potentiality of newness is, of doing is, of creating is.  Because if you just move from one doing, however prescribed and limited, to another doing however seemingly expanded and profound, it's still  just you there trying to get something, reward either external or internal, endlessly running in circles, without ever seeing clearly what is and isn't really there.