Bruce Springsteen

Six years ago, I went back to school to get an advanced degree in my field, intending to start the path to become a university professor. As hubristic as it sounds, I wasn’t at all worried about the difficulty of the program. I thought I was embarking on a journey that would lead me to my life’s purpose, and that this grand, fiery idea would walk me through any obstacles unforeseen.

Additionally, I loved my subject, and I thought, no matter what happened, I would at least be having fun. I never considered what I might do when the subject wasn’t fun anymore, when it became my job.

I needed more than fascination to get through graduate school. I needed resilience. And I didn’t have it. When the work got tedious and repetitive, I had no way to push through.

How could, my meaning, my purpose for living, be boring?

I have to confess, I don’t know much about Bruce Springsteen. I know he plays the guitar and sings a song called “Born in the USA,” but I’m most interested in how he has been successful in his field for so long.

I want to be successful in mine. I know the practical steps. Most of us can simply look those up. But what do you do when your field gets a little...old? Rerouting can be difficult when you smack up against this for the first time - when the work you once liked gets hard in a not-fun way.

Later, in an interview on a podcast with Conan O’Brian, Bruce Springsteen talked more about this famous line, this time with more explicit advice:

“You have to refine the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time without it driving you crazy. That is the mark of adulthood.”

A: It’s all we have.

B: It’s only rock n’ roll.

Both of these statements are true.

How do you throw yourself into something as if it’s the only thing that matters AND know that it doesn’t ultimately matter?

In school, I knew I wasn’t the only one struggling. But my fellow students seemed OK with struggling, losing precious hours of their finite life-time to work that was only sometimes interesting and at the same time, cognizant of the fact that their work was not the most important thing in their lives.

When I asked, the other students would try to set me at ease.

You should chill out. Everything’s fine. We’re grad students in the humanities. Nothing we do matters.

We’re not curing cancer or anything. It’s not that important.

It’s only rock n’ roll.

I could not square these two in my mind. How do they devote so much time to preparing for class, writing papers, all with the knowledge that it doesn’t matter?

It used to make me angry. I thought they were intentionally obscuring how hard they worked and how seriously they took their subject. But they were telling the truth. They just left out half of it.

Thinking that you are the only one struggling in a sea of more talented and more knowledgeable people is a common theme in most work-related endeavors, and of course I don’t actually know what my colleagues were thinking. But I’ve been trying to figure out why anyone would say their work didn’t matter when they put so much effort into doing it well.

Maybe they knew that the reward comes when you loosen your grip enough to have fun, when you don’t drown your work in expectations. Maybe they didn’t look to their work to give them meaning or ultimate purpose. Maybe they knew that grand ideas like these make unsuitable fuel for a rewarding job.

Because this was a job. And I don’t think it was all they had.

They made time, however little, for friends and interests outside of their subject. They knew that a career is mostly work, with pleasure interspersed. They liked the subject material enough that they could muscle their way through the boring parts. And they didn’t resent the boring parts. They expected them.

They were just...working. Living. In it. Whether it mattered wasn’t the point.

Because of course it mattered. And of course it didn’t matter.

It’s the ability to hold the paradox and know that it is true.

A) Life is full of rewards.

B) Life owes me nothing.

It frees me of expectation while making room for enough optimism to live.

It still drives me crazy. I suppose I’m not an adult yet.

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