Hot take: Maybe not all motivations need to be noble or righteous.
Here’s some more material personal motivations (absenting the more virtuous and spiritual motivations like sainthood drawing myself and others closer to heaven): I want to enjoy my days, raise my kids well, have enough money to live comfortably, and spend my time as I see fit, learn about the world, and focus on my hobbies.
Do you see the problem? They’re all fine motivations. They’re what most people want. But they also build a path to complacency. Because what happens when you have “enough” of each of them?
There’s a story about two middle class guys at a swanky cocktail party in New York. A billionaire walks in and is instantly surrounded by a mob of sycophants. One guy leans over and says, “See that guy? That guy makes more in one hour than you’ll make in a year. And he does it every hour of the day!”
The other guy says, “Yeah but I have something he’ll never have.”
“What’s that?”
”Enough.”
This is a good story. On the whole, it’s a principled story. With a principled theme. But there’s a flipside too, and it is yet another framing of the modern dilemma.
Fifty or a hundred years ago things weren’t so easy as they are today. A good lifestyle meant a considerable amount of daily toil. Leisure was a luxury, but even leisure demanded some effort.
In 2024 our technology has radically changed the state of our culture. We can entertain ourselves right to the grave and many do. Leisure is more passive and less active. The chains of resistance are so easy because we all carry the dopamine hit in our pockets at all times.
A simple, comfortable life - milquetoast and mid - was once a tremendous achievement. A luxury many desired. We called it The American Dream. Today we’ve built a factory to fragment, package, and shrinkwrap the dopamine doses of that dream and mass-market them to everyone. But the American Dream is dead, and this spectral echo we are living in is a fraud.
A lot of people know it’s a fraud, which is why everyone is so upset and enraged all the time. There’s a host of intertwining reasons for this - loss of community and corporate power and philosophy and politics and the phones, the phones, the phones - and I’m only going to talk about one of them: our motivations in our too-easy world.
People like Chris Bumstead capture our imagination. As Arnold’s modern successor, he’s taken the archetype of the strong, virile man and carved the most incredible sculpture from his own flesh. Almost every man would die to look like he does. Or at least they say that. Because hardly anyone will put in even 10% of the work that Bumstead puts in day after day.
The reason is motivations. Like all other professional bodybuilders, Chris is insane. He wants to win and he has made everything - _everything! _- subservient to this one goal. He eats 6 meals a day. Each one is delicately measured, weighed and recorded. Workouts are the same, multiple times a day. There’s no missing, no cheat days, no skipping. It is a 24 hour around the clock job to maximize the potential of a human body in a very specific aesthetic direction.
People like this, with weird but exciting motivations, seem alive to us. Adam Mastroianni shares an incredible litany of people with some of these motivations:
A better theory would start with the fact that other humans are just like us: they care about money and prestige, sure, but they also care about a bunch of other things, and they’ll work really hard to get those things.
And I mean really hard. Witness the infinite energy that a teenager will expend on figuring out whether their crush likes them back, or the weekends people will sink into pruning their rose bushes, or the hundreds of hours that fans will pour into making cosplay costumes. Behold this 170 page guide on how to identify locations in Mongolia so you can get better at GeoGuessr, a game where you see one random screenshot from Google Street View and you have to figure out where you are. Tremble at the man who, after losing his wife because it took too long for help to arrive after an accident, spent the rest of his life hewing a faster path to the hospital through a mountain.
I had never heard of the Mountain Man. This motherfucker spent 22 years carving a path 110 m long, 7.7 m deep and 9.1 m wide to form a road so that medical care would be available on time. He did this after his wife died waiting too long for a doctor. He did it by hand with a hammer and chisel. People doubted him and, in his words, “this steeled my resolve.” That’s not normal. It’s not sane.
Is it noble and principled? I’m not sure. It might be, one could argue it either way. Perhaps it started that way, just like Chris Bumstead started with “I want to have a good physique.” At some point, the principled motivation was overtaken by the desire to win and prove everyone wrong. It became unreasonable.
This kind of motivational single-mindedness is getting harder to see in our culture. It’s popular to look good but not try too hard, to be smart without being too bookish. Everything revolves around appearances and so we get influencers renting fake private jets for filming.
The inevitable result is that people who can ignore the twin draws of appearances and “enough” and maintain unreasonable focus on their motivations become the outliers. The business leaders. The sports stars. The Kobe Bryants. The Elon Musks. (Dear God read his biography.)
Doing something really extraordinary requires extraordinary motivation. The more pedestrian desires that we all hold, the ones that satisfy Maslow’s hierarchy for ourselves and our families, are insufficient. Extraordinary motivations are inherently selfish, in the narrow meaning of Adam Smith. They are no different than the butcher, the brewer, and the baker..
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
These raw self-interested desires push us more than we care to admit. We mask them in more palatable names like freedom or curiosity but they’re all selfish in some way. Comfort may be the enemy, but we also need a reason to choose pain. And it does not need to be noble.
Here’s another example: The Stradman has spent 12 years building a YouTube channel because he loved cars and wanted to share it. Yeah, but he also wanted those cars. He lusted for them. And eventually he bought himself a Bugatti (and plenty more too). That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I get it. I have always loved cars. They represent freedom for sure, but also mastery, skill, status, and sex appeal. They always have.
I want a fucking Lambo. I want a Porsche. Just because. I want to build enough value and give enough away that it’s trivial to go pick one up.
The idea of driving a car like that is a selfish vision of the future. It propels me.
This end is NOT virtuous and I know it. It is a sign of wealth and business success that crosses into the unreasonable, just as Bumstead’s physique became unreasonable. There needs to be some fundamental spark that maintains one’s vision, whether it’s living on Mars or championships. But once you’re in the game, the desire to WIN takes over. It’s not enough to love the process - as we’re taught so often. Bodybuilders love lifting weights, there’s no doubt about that. But that alone won’t consume them to do it 3 hours a day meticulously. They’d quit sometimes. There’s something beyond “the process” that consumes and enrages them. There’s the vision of themselves at the end, not just the result itself but the achievement and recognition.
Maybe JFK said this best 50+ years ago: we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” JFK gave the country a vision of itself as a country capable of putting someone on the Moon.
Two days from now I’m going to try to do 1,000 pushups in a day. I’ve been running every single day this year. Both are kinda dumb. Unreasonable. But that’s why they’re so valuable. The selfish vision of my future self will make me work. I’m doing them because I want to be the kind of person that can do them. I want to strive for it. Toil for it. Become that person that can do it.
I want that Lambo too.
Let’s go.
More motivation:
Footnote 1: There’s a tension with the Tolkien-esque idea that “It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” that I’ve not examined except to say that simple is not a synonym for easy.
Footnote 2: I pulled a not-so-clever little trick by promptly ignoring the more spiritual motivations that one can easily argue can produce the same unreasonable results. I’m more intrigued with this, but I wanted to at least keep this on the more material plane for now.