The Forest and the Trees

Poor Gloria! On Monday, she vomited on the subway:
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

There is something rather sad and painful about watching all the serious candidates for US President. There they are, 22 of them, by my count. All with incredible resumes, all poised and sharp, all ambitious and driven. Many have spent their entire lives trying to get here. Yet in the end, only one of them gets to be president. The odds are awful.

And for each of them standing there, there are a hundred, a thousand, behind them with the same goal, of success in electoral politics, who never got this far.

In other words, for most of them, the morning after will feel like a wasted life, an ultimate failure.

It was the wrong tree, guys. You might as well have been chasing your tail.

I have the same feeling about academics. I once wanted to be an academic. But I discovered that most academic fields are based on fundamental errors. And most academic writing is an attempt to obfuscate so as to avoid being called on this. A very few academics make a worthwhile contribution to human knowledge. This has little to do with their innate talent or hard work, and most to do with dumb luck. For if you happen to find yourself in one of the fields that is off on the wrong track, it is impossible to buck that system. Go to grad school, and the odds are overwhelming that you will spend your entire life just pushing meaningless words around.

The same can obviously be said for the pursuit of money and possessions. One can never be satisfied; one can never have enough. Worse, the more one has, the more one fears to lose. You will, of course, eventually lose it; or your children or grandchildren will. And it means nothing to die the richest man in the graveyard.

Fame? Need I explain why fame is a curse? Read the life story of virtually any celebrity. Right up to the suicide.

There are a lot of wrong trees out there, and a lot of people barking up them.

In the end, the only tree worth barking up is the one with nails in it.