On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism by Maria Popova

Delivered by Maria Popova at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication in 2016 (Source: Annenberg School of Communication)

This speech communicates the power of personal narrative slipped just under a simple-seeming story and also shows how wordplay and poetic turns of phrase make a message really pop. It was given by Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, at the commencement address of the Annenberg School for Communication in 2016. This issue of endless comparison is also the entire focus of Chapter 2 of The Happiness Equation (clearly I suffer from it too!) and I just loved seeing the same idea explored from a completely unique perspective.

Speech:

Good morning.

I want to talk to you today about the soul. Not the soul as that immortal unit of religious mythology, for I am a nonbeliever. And not the soul as a pop-culture commodity, that voracious consumer of self-help chicken soup. I mean the soul simply as that seismic core of personhood from which our actions, our thoughts, our ideals, radiate.

I live in New York, where something extraordinary happens every April. In the first days of spring, those days when the air turns from blistering to balmy, a certain gladness envelops the city — strangers smile at each other and give way and actually look up from their screens while walking. For a few short days, it’s like we remember how we can live and who we’re capable of being to one another.

I also practically live on my bike — that’s how I get everywhere — and the other week, on one of those first days of spring, I was going from Brooklyn to Harlem. I had somewhere to be and so I was pedaling pretty fast — which I enjoy doing and must admit I take a certain silly pride in — but I was also very much enjoying the ride and the river and the spring air and the smell of plum blossoms. And then, I sensed that somebody behind me was catching up in the bike lane, and going even faster than I was going. Suddenly it felt somehow competitive. He was trying to overtake me. I pedaled faster, but he kept catching up. Eventually, he did overtake me — and I felt strangely defeated.

But as he cruised past me, I realized the guy was on an electric bike. And I felt both a sort of redemption and a great sense of injustice — this unfair motorized advantage over my honest pedaling felt very demoralizing. But just as I was getting all self-righteously existential, I realized something else — the guy had a restaurant’s name on his back. He was a food delivery person. He wasn't rushing past me to slight me, or because he had some unfair competitive advantage in life, but because this was his daily strife — this is how this immigrant made his living.

My first response was to shame myself into a kind of gratitude for how fortunate I’ve been — because I too am an immigrant from a pretty poor country and it’s some miraculous confluence of chance and choice that has kept me from becoming a food delivery person on an electric bike in order to survive in New York City. And perhaps the guy has a more satisfying life than I do — perhaps he had a good mother and goes home to the love of his life and plays the violin at night. I don’t know, and I never will. But the point is that the second I begin comparing my pace to his, my life to his, I’m vacating my own experience of that spring day and ejecting myself into a kind of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his.

Now, I grew up in Bulgaria and my early childhood was spent under a communist dictatorship. But for all its evils, communism had one silver lining — when everyone had very little, no one felt like somebody else was cruising past them motorized by privilege.

I came to Penn straight from Bulgaria, and through the same confluence of chance and choice (and, yes, through a lot of very, very hard work — I don’t want to minimize the importance of that, but I also don’t want to imply that people who end up on the underprivileged end of the spectrum haven’t worked hard enough, because I think that is one of our most toxic cultural myths and it's a lot more complicated than that). But in any case, I came to Penn and I had an experience very very different from that of my childhood. Suddenly, as I was working four jobs to pay for school, I felt like everybody else was on a motorized bike and I was just pedalling myself to the ground.

Now, this, of course, is what happens in any environment densely populated by so-called peers — self-comparison becomes inevitable. Financial inequality was just my particular poison, but we do it along every imaginable axis of privilege and every dimension of identity — intelligence, beauty, athleticism, charisma that entrances the Van Pelt librarians into pardoning your late fees.

But here’s the thing about self-comparison: in addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own soul, your own life, it breeds in its extreme a kind of resignation. When we are constantly comparing ourselves to other people and feeling like there is something available to those with a certain existential advantage, but not available to us — we come to feel helpless. And the most toxic byproduct of this helplessness is cynicism — that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness of our own situation, we grow embittered about the goodness of the world. Cynicism is the sewage of the soul. It is a poverty of curiosity and imagination and ambition. Today, the soul is in dire need of stewardship and protection from cynicism.

The best defence against it is vigorous, intelligent, sincere hope — not blind optimism, because that too is a form of resignation, where we think everything will just work out just fine and we don't need to work hard in order to make it happen. I mean hope bolstered by critical thinking that is clear-headed in identifying what isn't working, in ourselves, in the world, but then envisions ways to make it work, to create that and endeavors to do it.

In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.

You are about to enter the ecosystem of cultural production. Most of you will go into journalism, media, policy, or some blurry blob of the Venn diagram, increasingly blurred by the boundaries of these forces, shape and culture, and public opinion. Whatever your specific vocation ends up being, your role as a creator of culture will be to help people discern what matters in the world and why, by steering them away from the meaningless and toward the meaningful. E.B. White said that the role of the writer is to lift people up, not to lower them down, and I believe that’s the role of every writer, every artist and every creator of culture.

Strive to be uncynical, to be a hope-giving force, to be a steward of substance. Choose to lift people up, not lower them down — because it is a choice, always, and because in doing so you lift yourself up.

Develop an inner barometer for your own value. Resist page-views and likes and retweets and all those silly-sounding quantification metrics that will be obsolete within the decade. They can’t tell you how much your work counts for and to whom. They can’t tell you who you are and what you’re worth. Don’t hang the stability of your soul on them. They are that demoralizing electric bike that makes you feel if only you could pedal faster — if only you could get more page-views and likes and retweets — you’d be worthier of your own life.

You will enter the world where, whatever career you may choose or make for yourself — because never forget that there are jobs you can get and jobs you can invent — you will often face the choice of construction and destruction, of building up and tearing down.

Among our most universal human longings is to affect the world with our actions somehow, to leave an imprint with our existence. Both destruction and construction can leave a mark and give us a sense of agency in the world.

Now, destruction is necessary sometimes — damaged and damaging systems need to be demolished to clear the way for more enlivening ones. But destruction alone, without construction to follow it, is hapless and lazy. Construction is more difficult, because it requires the capacity to imagine something new and better, and the willingness to exert ourselves toward building it, even at the risk of failure. But it is also far more satisfying in the end.

You may find your fate forked by construction and destruction frequently, in ways obvious and subtle. And you will have to choose between being the hammer-wielding vandal, who may attain more immediate results — more attention — by tearing things and people and ideas down, or the sculptor, patiently chiseling at the bedrock of how things are, in order to sculpt something new and beautiful and imaginative following a different vision, your vision, of how things can and should be.

Some active forms of destruction are more obvious and therefore, to the moral and well-intentioned person, easier to resist. It’s kind of hard not to notice that there’s a hammer there and to refuse to pick it up. But there are passive forms of destruction far more difficult to detect and thus to safeguard against, and the most pernicious of them is cynicism.

Our culture has created a reward system in which you get points for tearing down rather than building up, and for besieging with criticism and derision those who dare to work and live from a place of constructive hope. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively, in yourself and in those you love and in the communication with which you shape our world.

Cynicism, like all destruction, is easy, it’s lazy. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincere, active, constructive hope for the human spirit. This is the most potent antidote to cynicism, and it is an act of courage and resistance today.

It is also the most vitalizing sustenance for your soul.

But you — you — are in a very special position, leaving Annenberg, because your courage and resistance are to be enacted not only in the privacy of your inner life but in your outer contribution to public life. You are the packagers of tomorrow’s ideas and ideals, the sculptors of public opinion and of culture. As long as we feed people buzz, we cannot expect their minds to produce symphonies.

(long pause)

Never let the temptation of marketable mediocrity and easy cynicism rob you of the chance to ennoble public life and enlarge the human spirit — because we need that badly today, and because you need it badly for the survival of your soul.

So as you move through life, pedal hard — because that’s how you get places, and because it’s fun and so incredibly gratifying to propel yourself forward by your own will. But make sure the pace of your pedalling answers only to your own standards of vigor. Remain uncynical and don’t waste energy on those who pass you by on their electric bikes, because you never know what strife is driving them and, most of all, because the moment you focus on that, you vacate your soul.

Instead, pedal forth — but also remember to breathe in the spring air, to smile at a stranger. Because there is nothing more uncynical than being good to one another.

Thank you and congratulations.

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