„Alter steht für Radikalität und Meisterschaft“ („Age stands for radicalism and mastery“) - Udo Lindenberg
At the time when I was about six years old, my mother was already divorced and lived alone with us. Once in a while she had an affair she brought home. I remember one guy particularly well. I was working on detailed plans for a submarine which I was planning to build by myself from wood. So I seized the opportunity to get the opinion of a technically competent male (my mother was not interested at all in technical things) and I showed him my drawings for the submarine and asked him to give me some advice on how I could improve it. His reply was simple and short: „Your submarine will never work, you are too young to build a submarine“. I was shocked and could not believe what he had just said. I thought that he was probably just stupid and hiding the fact that he did not know anything about submarines behind this answer. Or that he was intentionally hiding his knowledge from me (which would be outright evil). I complained to my mother about the man and we never saw him again. My mother, as the great mother she was, always immediately dropped her acquaintances if they did not get along well with my brother or me.
When I was pursuing one of my projects, my mother always had a very difficult time to tear me away from my „work“. I was so deeply immersed that I did not care about anything else. I could not feel my hunger anymore and I tried to hold my pee to postpone the moment when I had to go to toilet (which more than once lead to a small disaster). My mother had to literally drag me to the kitchen table to make sure I got my nutrients and after the minimum time at the table I would ask her if I could leave again, back to my drawings or construction site. It was a time when no food could match the pleasure of working on my dreams. Not by orders of magnitude.
And what am I doing now, soon 50 years later? I’m spending hours on the dinner table with friends, where the subject often revolves around fine food and expensive wine. We discuss in great detail how an additional ounce of pleasure could be squeezed out of an asparagus risotto. About subtle details in the taste of sophisticated wines. And I got a bit fat, like most people around me. My elderly friends at the table are, like me, all terribly educated and know a lot. They know that submarines are built from expensive marine grade stainless steel and that they are never going to build one. Therefore nobody talks about his plans for a submarine anymore but only about food. We talk about designer furniture and how to build the perfect home.
And a few days ago I realized: I don’t like all this! I don’t want to walk this path. I don’t want to get old like this. So I decided to think about it for a while. The result is (the rest of) this blog post.
Adults tend to think that to drink great wine (a privilege we deny our children) is far more pleasurable than pursuing a dream. That the calm state of having everything sorted out, well organized and under control is preferable to the chaos and uncertainties of childhood. This might be true for some people, but not for me. For me it is a state of despair. I today crave food because I have nothing else anymore. It’s the only thing left and it has shockingly little to offer for me.
Most people burry their dreams already in their twenties. Few people become aware of the colossal magnitude of this loss. They subconsciously follow many strategies to compensate it:
- Pursue shallow pleasures for distraction: Food, buying things they don’t need, traveling to exotic countries from which they don’t understand the culture (and are also not really interested in).
- They try to compensate the loss of meaningful goals (which a dream naturally provides) by trying to achieve generic instrumental goals: they hoard money, property, status or collect art. These goals are meaningless by themselves but could be theoretically used to pursue a true goal (in case such a goal could be found later). Pursuing generic instrumental goals is a strategy to bridge a short period without a true goal, to make sure the precious life time is not waisted completely. But unfortunately for almost all people the dreams never come back. And the only option remaining is to use the money on shallow pleasures: an Omega watch, a Gucci bag, a Tesla, a stay in a luxury hotel.
- They make kids. If you don’t have your own dreams anymore you can at least feed on those of others like a vampire. Yes, kids are a natural source of big dreams. We listen to their great plans and wishes and we laugh about their naivety and remember the time long gone when we had our own. Of course the whole thing also has a sad side: we know, one day we will have to send them to school, where their dreams will be crushed too. Where they get slowly worn down by the process of „accepting reality“. And then they will become boring like us too. And the cycle repeats.
- They escape into the dream worlds of books, computer games and movies where dreams by definition cannot materialize.
My mother told me, not long before she died, that life is not worth living without a dream. That one then becomes a burden for others, telling them that their dreams are naive and will never materialize. For a long time I found this a bit melodramatic. But I know now how fundamentally true it is. The loss of all dreams is an epic disaster.
Then why and how do we lose our dreams?
I found a clue in a quote of Picasso:
„It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child“ - Pablo Picasso
It is much easier to dream if you know little. In this sense innocence is indeed bliss. The word dreamer has a negative connotation. A dreamer is a person which ignores reality. A person which does not want to know (like the people who recently built a submarine from fiberglass and ignored physics. It did not end well). But by this definition a child is not a dreamer. Children simply don’t know, they don’t ignore anything they do know. And this true not knowing is what allows them to dream.
Not knowing means freedom for the mind. Every aspect of a subject which is unknown offers an additional degree of freedom for the process of discovering novel solutions (and therefore for making dreams come true). It opens new possibilities for creation and change.
But then is losing dreams not unavoidable as we learn more with age? It depends very much on how we learn:
- We can stop thinking whenever we believe to have understood something (and be proud of how much we know).
- Or, we can think further and try to discover all the further questions which arise from what we have just found out (and be happy about how much we don't know yet)
In case 1 we soon end up „knowing a lot“. In case 2 there are always more open questions than answers. We could even say that in this case that the more we learn, the less we know. And this is a great thing because it opens the stage for our dreams!
Unfortunately in our schools method 1 is used (see also my older blog post Our schools produce nerds, followers and believers). Children are forced to blindly copy the „knowledge“ of „great minds“ into their brains without thinking much by themselves.
But all this „knowledge“ accumulated over the centuries is, if used improperly, more a burden than a blessing. It clutters our minds and interferes with our creative thinking. It's also often wrong or only relatively true in many ways:
- It can be simply wrong (19th century doctors: „only men can have an orgasm“)
- It can be that it's only true because so many people believe it to be true („money rules the world“)
- It can be true because of a shared experience of many people („people are selfish“). This means it could become false if the experience changes
- It can be that people want to believe something they know is false because what they belive to be true is too scary for them. But the real truth might, after careful examination, offer far superior options.
These are just a few examples. The possibilities to find flaws in the generally accepted „truth“ are endless. And the search for them is a fun activity!
Furthermore famous authors don’t write their books because they want to reveal an eternal truth to the public. No, they much more likely write them to impress some women (men). So should we consider their books useless garbage because of this? Garbage they (in a way) are, but often useful garbage if used properly! All this „garbage“ can be turned quite easily into pure gold if mixed with the right ingredients: dreams and the courage to think freely. Our cultural heritage should not be memorized, worshiped and enshrined, but ripped into pieces, kneaded like clay and shaped into something useful for ourselves!
As soon as we allow ourselves to relativise and use our cultural heritage without any false respect for our own critical thinking, our dreams will come back. The unknown is the substrate on which dreams can grow. And the dreams will grow, sooner or later, as surely as the mould on the cheese sandwich you forgot in the fridge.
And what about my dreams?
Here we go: www.mission-paradise.org
Is it garbage too? Yes (but hopefully useful nonetheless)!
Image created by DALLE-3 (forced to paint something similar to the famous painting by Gottfried Helnwein (who in turn tried to paint like Edward Hopper))
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