cruel admiration

Echo and Narcissus (John William Waterhouse, 1903)

i.

For a good chunk of my childhood, I was obsessed with Carey Price.

"Who's Carey Price?" the non-Canadian may ask. When I played hockey, Price was the best goalie on the planet.

Every time I was on the ice, I'd try to play precisely like him. The same placid poise and athletic grace. I have memories of sitting at my Dad's old oak desk in the living room, on our family's one Mac computer, screen thick as a brick, watching all of his game footage, practice drills, and interviews. Anything I could find. I'd save up from my job delivering newspapers to buy any hockey magazine he was featured in, learning about his childhood skating on a frozen river in rural BC and flying in a bush plane to hockey practice and bow-hunting in the offseason. If there was anything to know, down to the names of his two chocolate labs and favorite breakfast cereal, I knew it. Once, in Toronto, I saw him play live. It was a “bloody near-religious experience”.

I wanted to be exactly like him. Really, I wanted to be him. Except for the stark and brutal fact that I wasn't.

Somewhere along the way, honest admiration turned to fervent fixation, and fervent fixation twisted into unhealthy obsession. The gap between who I was and who I wanted to be was torture.

After I quit hockey, or hockey quit me, I guess it was mutual, and got entrenched in the goofy gladiatorial gamesmanship of business school, it was three upper-year students who were headed for the silvery lights of New York City investment banks. Later, when I fell off the corporate conveyor belt and cursed convention, it was Tim Ferriss. Most recently, it’s been Simon Sarris¹.

Everyone worships. I spent most of my life worshipping role models, trying to follow in their footprints. And it ate me alive.

But still, it wasn’t a freely chosen thing. Even after understanding the emptiness in it, I kept running for the fake train tunnel painted on the side of the brick wall.

ii.

Admiration isn't that simple.

For starters, there doesn't seem to be any getting rid of it. Admiration is built into us from birth. Smaller children admire the bigger children on the playground, follow them around, and copy what they do, without even knowing it or being able to explain why.

Really, admiration forms the roots of imitation. For children but also adults. All the time I meet people I instinctively admire and absorb their habits and mannerisms, even shades of their worldview, without even noticing it. How they always tuck in their chair when leaving a cafe, or touch people on the elbow when they speak to them, or boisterously believe the world is a good place with bad spots, rather than a bad place with good spots. Consciously too, I might cut my hair like them or read Steinbeck's books they recommend or try photography because they make it look elegant and effortless.

Tell me who you admire and I'll tell you who you'll become.

If we go a level deeper, admiration is a mirror: it reflects the edges of my ideal. I can get a sense of what my ideal is, at least its outline, by examining patterns in the people I admire. Put a different way, my admiration is a window into my subconscious value structure.

I don't admire just anyone. Yet I don't fully understand why I admire the people I do. They radiate a way of being that resonates with this deeply held intuition of who I am and, more importantly, who I want to be. It's almost a romance, in that I can't articulate any real criteria, but I know it when I see it. In an instant. And think “That’s it”.

If you want to go another level deeper with me, totally cool if not, it's like I already have a fully formed ideal of the man I want to become that's imprinted in the back of my brain. When I encounter people who reflect fragments of that ideal, fireworks go off. A voice in my brain whispers, "Yes, move closer to that". It's almost like who I could be in the future already exists, somehow, and beckons back to me in the present, to steer my choices. It’s like that saying: You don't choose your interests, your interests choose you.

In this way, my role models push me toward my potential. The people I admire remind me that I'm not everything that I could be. That I'm doing a bunch of half-witted things I know I should stop doing. That I could aim higher. That being self-complacent is a sin.

But, while admiration can be a healthy and helpful thing, it has a dark and desolate side. That no one talks about.

iii. cruel admiration

Admiration is a search for something. Something outside of myself. Some sense of self that I don't possess.

To cut to the core, it's a self-conception I crave. I want to be confident, competent, important, loved. I want to exist in great measure. And I want to feel like it too.

Philosopher Rene Girard believed humans admire others who seem to possess a certain fullness of being that they lack themselves. If I copy and paste the same things they have, if I live how they live, there's an unspoken but persuasive promise that I will attain that very same fullness. I will finally feel whole.

But there's a problem: it's a self-destructive illusion.

In the very act of admiration, I put that feeling of fullness permanently outside myself. As long as I continue to admire another person, I will never be "it". I will never be in the driver's seat of my life. Rather, I will only gaze longingly at some infinite thing I cannot have. A life that is not intimately my own. An inner circle of bliss that I am barred from.

In the feverish desire for "it", a magical meaningful life, "it" slips right through my fingers.

This, I would argue, is why admiration is cruel. Seriously admiring another person makes me feel like I want to live my life all over again. Be utterly different.

Cruel admiration, defined, is when someone you admire actually becomes an obstacle to your flourishing². An obstacle to ever admiring yourself. Not self-admiration in the vain and conceited sense, but rather a snug contentedness in the life you happen to be living. An okayness with who you happen to be.

iv.

In our extremely online era, the downsides of admiration are amplified. It's never the people I know personally who engender obsession. I have real life role models, but I see too much of their awkward humanity to place them on a pedestal. But now, the seat of role models has moved, musically, from the town carpenter with careful hands or the village potter with kind eyes to a stranger on the Internet. Rather, to be more precise, some stranger's selectively shared shards of their life.

A crush is just a lack of information. Any admiration, in excess, is the same. Earnest and uncontrolled, but ultimately unrealistic. I've met a lot of people. But I have never met a single person who has a dream life in reality.

When I get close enough to anyone, I see the wrinkles and pores and the crazy rebellious hairs that stand straight up. How they leave the milk out or don't always listen or drink too much red wine. These aren't bad things. But they are markedly human.

Maybe that's why love is the way to life, while admiration can be so punishing. We admire something for a reason. But we love something for no reason at all.

There are a lot of wise, well-read, and grounded people out there. But even they disagree on what surmounts to a good life. Each presents a different image of what life ought to be. Of what it means to live well.

I’ve learned if I ask enough people for advice, it all cancels to zero. In the same way, if I look to enough people to tell me how to live (meaning how they live) my head will spin till it pops off. I have to decide for myself. There is no formula. It feels stupid to type that sentence, but there isn't. Perfect execution is a myth.

If there's anything to avoid, it's this: living a life of momentary allegiances, only to realize that I've never lived a life I can call my own. That I've wasted all my energy caught up in the impossible act of trying to live someone else's.

Besides, a good life, a life that actually fits, cannot be engineered, but rather must unfold. It's less about structure and more about surprise.

The problem with role models is how they foster romantic visions of what my life should look like. Visions of what my life could look like, if it weren't for the painful, frustrating, and humiliating limitations. The problem, then, with role models is how they pull me from paying attention to the life I am living—to the pale ground beneath my feet, to the real opportunities before me and the real people who need me—and push me to pursue an abstract image. One that flows with milk and honey, but was never promised.

On the drive home last weekend, snow drifting down and blanketing long frozen farm fields, roadside horses in their handsome coats, I kept thinking to myself: I just want to become as Tommy Dixon as I can be.

v.

It's tricky.

I don't think the solution is to dispel with admiration. If I murder my ideal, I have nothing to aim at. That’s a very bad thing. Humans are all idealists. We cannot survive without hope and an aim of some kind. Hope, mind you, is only a virtue when being hopeful takes courage. Put simply, hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless.

I'm beginning to believe the trouble is less with loving ideals and more with loving the wrong ideals. I'm beginning to believe there is only one real ideal to love.

Especially in the attention economy, it's worth thinking about how your own admiration can hurt you. How it becomes an obstacle to flourishing, to happiness. To a life that feels good when nobody’s looking. It's worth challenging your admiration when it becomes cruel.

Clearly, there’s a tightrope to tread here.

Maybe admiration can lead to the discovery of my authentic self, serving as some collage of inspiration that sparks desire and action, insight and experimentation. But, maybe admiration only leads me to something tantalizingly close to who I am. Close enough that I can never break away to become myself, unadorned, as I've always wanted to be. Maybe, most likely, both are true.

But here’s one thing I know: the most dangerous and the most painful things in this life are always the things that are so close. But. Not. Quite. It.

The crack is an infinite chasm, while the chasms never bother me at all.

Sleep properly and go for walks,

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• Time with family, calls with friends, helping out at the local humane shelter. Reading plenty. I’ve started garden planning for the Spring, building a gear wall for my outdoor equipment, and carving a coffee tamper.

• I’m close to a big transition in my life, which was been taking up much of my time and free thinking space.

📸 photos i took:

January in Ontario.

1. It was interesting while writing this, how hard and uncomfortable and embarrassing it was to talk about my own admiration. I wanted to keep it all hidden. Especially as a "man" there was a perverse but poignant feeling that I shouldn't look up to anyone. That it somehow makes me lesser.

2. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s coinage "cruel optimism".