The Resistance

I first came across the work of Steven Pressfield in a podcast episode for The Art of Manliness. It was called "Overcoming the Resistance" and I was deeply interested in the subject matter. I was talking with a coworker about it and he happened to have one of Pressfield's books called The War of Art. He leant it to me and it is in the process of kicking my ass. The concept is that we all have work to do that we fail to do because of the existence of a force Pressfield labels The Resistance. The Resistance can take many forms, both benign and pernicious, but basically consists of anything that contributes to our laziness of apathy. I present two gems:

"Of course not all sex is a manifestation of Resistance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust but Resistance. 

It goes without saying that this principle applies to drugs, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing fat, sugar, salt, or chocolate."

Every time you do one of those things on that list you are denuding your impact. You are giving in. Now there might be some circumstances in which that can be appropriate--shopping, after all, is in some respects a necessity--but when you feel the emptiness afterward you know you were trying to avoid labor. Anyone who has ever had a drink or watched TV or eaten a pint of Ben and Jerry's to avoid something more pressing knows the feeling of emptiness Pressman describes.

Second:

"As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work."

I really resonate with this. Everything within popular and consumer culture militates against our real productivity. Everything is a short term fix for our restlessness. We buy and it scratches the itch, but doesn't heal the wound. So we try something else, equally useless. Our only real solution is to opt out.

This culture has, moreover, become tyrannical. I see students every day buried in the artificial light of their smartphones. I took a kid backpacking last week who brought a charger so he could play games in his tent at night. While camped. In the Canyonlands. 

We are addicts, addicted above all to comfort. To what is easy. We have been lulled to sleep. And we need to wake. We need to fight the Resistance. We need to be useful.