If you are given a choice between taking a scenic route or a shortcut, what would you choose? It depends, most people would say -- If I’m in a hurry I would take the shortcut. But if I’m taking a leisurely stroll, I would prefer the scenic route.
All right…what about the same question for life choices? Would most of us take a scenic route to life or choose to take a shortcut? I haven’t done a survey to know how most people would answer this question, but our actions seem to point to the latter – most of us are in a hurry to become rich and famous, to find that shortcut to achieve success in life.
And strangely enough, for those who have attained success, they seem to want something else. The richest people in the world are now engaged in a competition to see who can give away more and more quickly – Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott have all sworn to donate almost all of their fortune to charity. Elon Musk, who just topped Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world, has pledged to sell his estate and dedicate his entire net worth to colonizing Mars. At least these people have found the next thing to pursue, even if it is just to purge themselves from everything they earned so they can start all over again. There are plenty of others, however, who having found success, just decided there is nothing more they want and have chosen the tragic path of suicide. People like Anthony Bourdain, with a job that most of us can only dream of, decided he had tasted the best food in the world, taken the wildest adventures, met the most interesting people. He experienced everything he wanted and had enough.
The question is: these people may have found the shortcut to being rich and famous, but have they found the shortcut to life? What is the destination for life? A shortcut only makes sense if you know what your destination is. Without a destination in sight, how do you know that is a shortcut?
I recently read the book The Alchemist. Believe it or not, it’s the 1st fiction I have read in a long while. I generally prefer biographies, histories and books based on real events as I find real life way more interesting than even the wildest human imagination. But The Alchemist came highly recommended, so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s a fable about a boy who went on a journey which led him from a shepherd wanting to marry a baker’s daughter to becoming a successful crystal merchant to conquering the Sahara desert only to find the treasure he has been after is right in his backyard. Many celebrities touted the book as an inspiration for pursuing your dream. One of the most famous quotes from the book is “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”.
But is that what the book is about? What I took away from the book is something entirely different. It’s not about finding the treasure in his backyard, but the journey the boy took, and the people he met, the experiences he had along the way. What strikes me is the boy’s goal kept changing, from pursuing a baker’s daughter, to going to Egypt, to going back to being a shepherd, to finding a new love interest. He was far from a persistent, stubborn treasure hunter. He simply reacted to the situation he was in and made the best of it. And ultimately, that led him to the treasure in his backyard. In fact, the ending is what I find disappointing about the book – that forced morality of the treasure you’ve been looking for happens to be in your backyard just feels too convenient and contrived. Understandably, Paulo Coelho, the author, went on such a personal journey where the detour took him back to his original calling writing. That may be Paulo Coelho’s journey, but not necessarily everyone else’. Most people will never find the treasure they are looking for, let alone in their backyard. Some may keep dreaming about the treasure, just like the crystal merchant in the book who never made it to Mecca and was deliberate in his choice because “I'm afraid that if my dream is realized, I'll have no reason to go on living.” Some may choose to settle down in the desert oasis with the exotic Arabic lover. Some may continue the journey from Africa to Asia…
We all have our own journeys to take, destination unknown. The only reason why we think of these journeys as “maktub” (Arabic meaning “it is written” or “destined to be”) is because we are prone to a psychological phenomenon known as the confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. If we think we are destined to be a treasure hunter, we may attach additional meaning to our encounters and interpret them as “omens” that will lead us to the treasure, which in turn may make it more likely for us to find treasures, but it may not. There is no universe “conspiring to help us achieve it”, it is just a coping mechanism for our little minds to make sense of this universe, which is completely random and beyond logic.
The thought that the destination for our life is unknown, that most likely what we are pursuing now may not end up being our destiny, is unsatisfying, if not terrifying. It’s one of the biggest gripes about Indiana Jones 4: the central plot of the movie revolved around Crystal Skull, but it was never revealed because it was simply a “MacGuffin”. A MacGuffin is an object, device, or event used in movies that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. As Hitchcock explained: "The MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after but the audience don't care." When we are living our lives, we are the main characters in the movie so caught up in our goals and dreams, if only we could just step outside our own movie and watch it as an audience, we might discover, whatever we may be after, may just turn out to be a MacGuffin.
Then what? This line of thinking seems to lead to a self-defeatist conclusion: our life destination is unknown, whatever we are after may just turn out to be a MacGuffin. What is the point of doing anything at all?! As the story of the fisherman and the businessman goes: A successful businessman was on vacation and saw a fisherman. The fisherman claimed he would catch a few fish every day, enjoy them with his family and he was happy. The businessman, on the other hand, was eager to suggest that he could help build a much larger operation and make the fishing business a much bigger success. “And to what end?” the fisherman asked. To which the businessman replied: to spend more time with family and be happy. The story is frequently told to illustrate the futility of pursuing material success. That may be one lesson we can learn, but I find it intellectually dishonest to equate the fisherman who lives his entire life in a tiny village catching a few fish every day to another fisherman who has grown his business, experienced the thrills of an IPO, the failures of over expansion, and finally decided to return to that small village to live a simple life. The end results may be the same, but the journeys are entirely different.
And that is the point. Life is a journey. Destination unknown. The meaning of that journey does not come from some supernatural being. It comes entirely from you, what you make of it. If you want to believe there is a destiny to the end of the journey, so be it. But also be open to the possibility that your bullheaded determination may prevent you from seeing what is right in front of you that may lead you to a different path. What you perceive as a shortcut may just be a temporary stop to the final destination. Since nobody knows what our final destination is (and that is the fun part of it), we might as well take a scenic route.