The question at the end of this project — was it worth it — has been asked properly before, by people who spent their careers on it. Here is what they found, including the part where one of them says you can never know in advance.
Gauguin, and the answer nobody wants
In 1976 Bernard Williams published an essay called “Moral Luck” containing a thought experiment he built loosely on Paul Gauguin. A man leaves his wife and children, who are left in real difficulty, because he believes he can become a great painter and can only do it by going.
Was he right to?
Williams’ answer is the most unsettling thing I found while researching this. The only thing that can justify the choice is success. Not the sincerity of the belief, not the seriousness of the sacrifice, not the reasoning at the time. If he becomes a great painter, the choice acquires a justification. If he does not, the desertion simply stands, unjustified.
Which means the justification is retrospective, and it depends on something the man does not control. He cannot know at the moment of leaving whether he is the artist he thinks he is. He finds out afterwards, along with everyone else, and by then the family is already gone.
That is the logic underneath every one of the five works in this project. Andrew Neiman’s bargain, Marty’s certainty that he is the best alive, Kanye in Hawaii proving it, Oppenheimer solving his problem. Each of them is making a bet whose morality gets settled by a coin they do not toss.
Williams has a second idea that matters here, from an essay in the same collection. He calls them ground projects — the commitments that give a person a reason to go on at all. His point is that moral theory cannot simply instruct you to give one up in favour of impartial duty, because without it there is no longer anybody there to do the duty. The strongest sympathetic reading of the obsessive is this one: the work is not a project they weigh against other projects. It is the condition of their having any.
Meaningful and wretched at the same time
Susan Wolf spent a career on what makes a life meaningful, and her conclusion in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) is that meaning needs two things that have to be connected: subjective fulfilment and objective worth. Being gripped is not enough on its own, or a life spent in a gripping delusion would count. Doing something valuable is not enough either, if you are dead inside while doing it. Meaning arises, in her phrase, when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.
Here is why that is uncomfortable rather than reassuring. Andrew Neiman plausibly satisfies both. Drumming is genuinely worth doing. He is genuinely, totally engaged with it. And the engagement is because of the worth, not by coincidence.
So on the best available account of meaning, his life can be meaningful and also a disaster. Wolf is explicit that meaning is not the same as wellbeing and does not guarantee it. That is not a loophole in her theory. It is the finding.
Aristotle is the hostile witness, and worth hearing. In the Nicomachean Ethics he insists that eudaimonia — flourishing — is a property of a complete life, not of a peak. “One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.” On those terms a person who produces something immortal and dies at thirty-four has not completed a life, and the work does not fix that. Charlie Parker died at thirty-four. The coroner, looking at his body, estimated his age at somewhere between fifty and sixty.
The distinction that does the most work
If you take one framework away from this project, take this one, because it is the only place I found where the vitality of devotion and its pathology are separated with actual measurement behind them.
In 2003 Robert Vallerand and colleagues published research distinguishing two kinds of passion for an activity you love. Harmonious passion is autonomously chosen: the thing occupies a large but not total place in your identity, and you can step out of it. Obsessive passion comes from internal pressure — your self-esteem is contingent on it — and it produces an uncontrollable urge, conflict with the rest of your life, and rigid persistence when stopping would be wiser.
The crucial finding is that both predict high engagement and high effort. They do not differ on how hard you work or how much you care. They differ on wellbeing, and on whether you can stop.
Which means the popular story — that you have to choose between being great and being well — is not what the evidence says. What it says is that there are two roads to the same intensity, and one of them costs more.
And the awkward corollary, which any honest conclusion has to sit with: Vallerand’s advice to an ordinary reader would be to cultivate the harmonious kind. Which is precisely not the configuration these five works are about.
A better metaphor than fire
The instinct is to call purpose a fire — it gives light and warmth and it burns what it touches. It is a decent image and it only says one thing.
Sports medicine has a better one. The joint consensus statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine describes three states an athlete can be in after overload. Functional overreaching: performance dips, you recover in days, and you come back better than before. Non-functional overreaching: recovery takes weeks or months and you gain nothing. Overtraining syndrome: prolonged maladaptation, recovery measured in months to years.
Three things make this the right frame. Overload is necessary — you do not adapt without it. The variable that separates growth from ruin is recovery, not effort. And the three states are distinguishable only by how long the return takes, which means you cannot tell which one you are in from the inside, at the time.
Fire only destroys. This explains why people keep doing it, why it sometimes works, and why nobody can tell in the moment whether they are building something or breaking it.
Three things I am not going to say
Researching this turned up three ideas that appear constantly in writing about ambition and do not survive contact with the evidence.
That suffering produces the art. The tortured artist is a Renaissance career strategy, not a psychological finding. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower documented it in Born Under Saturn (1963): painters and sculptors claimed the melancholic temperament to distinguish themselves from craftsmen and climb the social ladder. The modern evidence mostly runs the other way — artistic careers cause suffering more reliably than suffering causes art.
That grit is the secret. Angela Duckworth’s construct correlates with plain conscientiousness at a corrected correlation of .84 in a meta-analysis of 66,807 people. That is not a failed replication and I do not want to overstate it — the effect exists. But it is largely a new name for a trait we already had, and its predictive power is moderate.
That what does not kill you makes you stronger. Post-traumatic growth, measured properly against before-and-after data rather than by asking people to recall how much they have changed, mostly is not there. In one study, perceived growth was associated with increased distress, while actual measured growth was associated with less — meaning they are different things, and the one people report is not the one that helps. Genuine growth showed up in something between 5 and 25 percent of participants depending on the outcome measured.
I have left all three out of the project rather than repeat them, and this note is where that decision is recorded.
Where this comes from
- Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1976), collected in Moral Luck (1981) — twelve pages, and the single most useful thing in the project
- Bernard Williams on Gauguin — Aeon — a readable way in
- Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010)
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7 and I.9–10 — the complete-life argument, and Solon’s dictum
- Vallerand et al., “Les Passions de l’Âme: On Obsessive and Harmonious Passion,” JPSP (2003)
- Meeusen et al., ECSS/ACSM overtraining consensus statement (2013)
- Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn (1963)
- Credé, Tynan & Harms, “Much Ado About Grit,” JPSP (2017)
- Frazier et al., “Does Self-Reported Posttraumatic Growth Reflect Genuine Positive Change?”, Psychological Science (2009)
- Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (2017) — where the telic and atelic distinction comes from
- Agnes Callard, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) — on wanting something you cannot yet understand the value of