I’ve been finding that lately when I find myself myself feeling frustration towards various things in my life, annoyances or inconveniences that in the moment I don’t feel like doing; the sort of thing that might cause one to question why they have to do it, the response that has been most often coming to mind in these moments I feel is a mark of pride towards my own mental cycle, that response being “it’s the conceit of the whole thing”.
Human connection is often stressful, annoying, time consuming, and requires a certain amount of humility to communicate properly, but the upsides of having people around you who you enjoy being around outweigh those downsides. Those downsides are just the conceit of engaging in connection. You can’t have one without the other.
I enjoy having a neat and tidy living space and what that means is that there will be times when I don’t want to do the genera passive tidying up, and yet I must push through those feelings of unwant and do them anyways. That I feel those feelings and still must clean is the conceit of that desire for cleanliness.
That I must spend a lot of my free time in physical activity lest I atrophy from the sedentary nature of my career is the conceit of what I have chosen to do for a living. I find this framing helps me accept the sometimes less appealing aspects of my life, because many of them I know are simply requirements to do and have the things I love.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
There is a balance to be struck with this sort of thinking, because to determine what is simply a conceit of something you want to do or have, and what is a problem to be solved, is not an easy thing. Must we struggle to communicate consistently, or is there a way those frictions can be eliminated such the integration of our lives fit smooth? If we accept these struggles as simply the conceit of our connection, then there is no progress, but there is an inner peace. But if we do not accept them, and the struggles are inevitable, then alongside the struggles comes a great deal of strife.
Am I correct in my balance? I do not know. I find myself tending to put my mind at ease and accepting the less appealing aspects of life that I believe are required for the more appealing aspects I desire, but I also concede that perhaps this limits the contributions I am making to both how adroitly I live my own life and the general sum of human knowledge that allows us to simply wipe what might have been conceits of living in the past out of the memory of the living.
Is my own peace-of-mind only possible through the mental sacrifices of my predecessors, who toiled and struggling with problems I no longer need to face thanks to their problem solving? Sure, folding the laundry is the conceit of a man who wishes to be clothed, but roll back the clock a century and so is handwashing them. Would we have automatic washing machines if there weren’t a cohort of people determined to eliminate that work from their lives? I think it likely not.
And so I think the conclusion I am coming to is that for my profession, for the areas in which I can focus my energy and time, I should allow myself to be bothered by the papercuts and drudgery of the work, and to use that bother to spur my mind to find solutions. But for that which I do not have the means to solve, I should find the peace of mind to accept that it must be done. But which problems do I have the means to solve?
These questions, often answerless, I think are what it means to be human, and might just be the conceit of the whole thing.