Eudaimonia
A few days ago I struck a conversation with some friends of mine who are not climbers. They were curious why I climb and if I ever get bored. I gave some hand-wavy answers along the lines of “I enjoy the adventure, the movement and the partnership”, which were legitimate reasons. Nonetheless, I am unsure if those reasons exactly answer the reason of why we climb. Somehow the true reason feels a bit more elusive.
Quotes such as “Why climb a mountain? — Because it’s there” are just cheesy and cliché. But maybe there is some truths to it: maybe we don’t always need a reason or purpose for things.
We climbers go climb at the same place, hell, even the same climb over and over. Why? Only to chase some imaginary difficulty grades? I myself have written about “if climbing is a meaningless pursuit” — to which I still have no answers to.
What I have come to realize is, these might be the wrong questions to ask. I think we as humans are born to just do things, even if they carry no "purpose” or “meaning”.
As adults we are trapped in the education systems and the corporate world. We are told to work hard and make money. In school we learned to feel guilty when we are not spending time doing homework, or applying to an internship. We call that “good time management”. Being bored and daydreaming become a “waste of time”. We think of the things we do as means to an end, as if they are leading us to somewhere better, as if they will make us better humans.
“activity of the soul in accordance with virtue”
The reason why we climb is in itself. Sending a hard route means just that, and as soon as we finish a project — we are onto the next. They are simply silly things we do as humans. Anyone who attempts to assign purpose and meaning would ultimately find disappointment. The Greeks are thousands years ahead of us: Eudaimonia is a world coined by Aristotle, describing “human flourishing” or “living well”. He believed that “Eudaimonia, or our flourishing isn’t produced by our actions. IT IS in our actions.”
Kids don’t ask for purpose or meaning in the things they do. They just do it. Somewhere along the way of becoming an adult, we have lost that part of us. Our society demands productivity from every individual and our full human existence is sidelined. The concept of “alienation” refers to how modern society treat people less like humans because their lives and labor have been reduced to economic functions.
At some point along the way, universities have become factories of productive people. Bill Readings argue in his book “The University in Ruins” that the modern universities have long lost their original humanistic purposes. They have now been replaced by the pursuit of “excellence” in extremely specialized fields. Instead of asking “what kind of humans beings should education cultivate”, we now ask “how can this be measured, ranked, branded, funded, and optimized”. This is the sad reality: humanity departments in major research universities are dying. Funding is funnelled into physical science divisions and we think of English majors as “useless” and history majors as “unemployable”. We are told are we should get into engineering and computer science, because it’s easy to find a job and make more money.
“How to make an employable human” has become more important than “How to make a good human”, and that is really fucking sad.
As we hold productivity and efficiency on the pedestal, we criticize the opposite: Leisure is counter-productive, being bored is bad and daydreaming is a waste of time. Even though they are a part of being human.
Somehow, as we grow into our adult selves, we have lost pieces of humanity. Perhaps the reason why we are afraid to be replaced by AI is not because AI is becoming more human, but because we are becoming more like machines.
Reference:
In Praise of Idleness — Bertrand Russell
A blog post — Andrew Bisharat
