What Is Left

What is a man for once he has done everything he was supposed to do?

There are ways to measure a life: money earned, work accomplished, titles held, people who know your name. By most of those measures, I have done well. And still there is the question of what any of it was for.

Camus began with a simpler question. Why not kill yourself? He thought deciding whether life is worth living was the one philosophical question that truly mattered. I used to think it was a question for men whose lives had gone wrong. It is harder to explain why a man whose life has gone exactly to plan might find himself asking it.

If you have met every milestone and still find yourself looking over the edge, perhaps the problem is not that you failed. Perhaps you were asking the numbers to tell you something they couldn’t.

Yet here we are.

I have stood on one success after another. People applauded. There was always another achievement, another reason to be pleased with myself. And through it all I felt very little. Not sadness. Sadness would at least have been something. Something to examine, something to fix.

I know how to fix things.

But nothing was broken. There was only the absence of whatever I had expected to find when I got there.

What I keep coming back to is smaller than anything I spent my life pursuing. The wet nose of the dog at six in the morning. Light through the cottonwoods, broken up on the road. The ten minutes traffic gives back when it stops dead on the highway and there is nowhere to be but here. Nobody has ever been promoted for noticing any of it.

Here is the problem. Measuring things is my job. I know how it works. The moment I try to measure the dog’s nose, it stops being the dog’s nose. Put the light through the trees on a dashboard and it becomes a wellbeing KPI, and by Q3 someone wants it up and to the right.

We can turn almost anything into a metric. Even happiness.

Especially happiness.

And once we can measure it, we can demand more of it. The dog doesn’t care how productive I’ve been. The cottonwoods don’t know what I do for a living. Neither one needs to.

So we go back to work. We take our gruel, our daily allotment of happiness, and give back the extra two percent.

I know where the two percent goes. I have watched a number move a fraction of a point and called it a good quarter. I have watched men congratulate one another for it.

I have been one of those men.

It does not come back to us. It is baked into the quarterly results and oozes out the other side as another aircraft, another tower, another statue no one will ever love. And tomorrow someone will ask for another two percent.

Some of the work mattered. Things got built. Things worked that would not have otherwise, and people depended on them. I don’t regret the work.

I regret expecting it to be enough.

Every morning, whether we know it or not, we answer Camus. We get out of bed, make coffee, go to work, come home. We continue. That is a kind of answer, though not a particularly good one.

Camus had a word for living with the absurd without pretending it could be resolved: revolt. I have always liked that word. It sounds deliberate. Defiant.

Most mornings I get up because the alarm went off.

But Camus knew about the alarm clock. He wrote about the commute, the office, the meal, the commute, sleep, the same rhythm day after day, until one day a man looks up and asks why. He did not think that moment was the end of anything. He thought it was where waking up begins. Which may mean that standing here, asking, is the closest I have come to the word I like so much.

The worst part is that I already know where the good parts of my life are. I wrote them down a few paragraphs ago. The dog. The light. The traffic. I know another achievement will not settle the question. And still I go back. I give the extra two percent. I watch the numbers move. I collect another small piece of evidence that I have succeeded.

And sometimes I stand in a parking lot, watching a private jet climb away toward somewhere I will never see, wondering why I do not feel the way I thought I would.

I have known all this for years. Knowing has changed remarkably little.

Yet here we are.

The dog is waiting at the door.