The Renaissance Man vs. The Blue Collar Man

There are limits to ambition. The great remedy for regret is to realize that you only have one lifetime to do it all.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was a Renaissance Man. He was a sculptor, painter, an architect, and a playwright. He achieved a great deal in his lifetime. What is glossed over is that he had a lot of help and sometimes the help did it better than Bernini.

Leonardo is credited with being a Renaissance Man. His codices indicate a great deal of thought, but they yielded little in action. Leonardo was a daydreamer and a failure. This is because his ambitions were greater than his resources. I think of Leonardo when I hear people talk about regrets. These regrets are often not about wrong choices made but about other possibilities that were forfeited. When the road forks, you can go left or right, but you must choose one or the other. Both ways are likely to lead to something good but choosing one means not choosing the other. As I am fond of saying, you can be a marathoner or a bodybuilder but not both at the same time.

We live in an age of limitless choices and options. The downside is that it gives birth to limitless regrets. We have 500 channels to choose from but can only watch one at a time. We have libraries full of books but no time to read even one of those books. You can do almost anything with your life, but in the end, we usually choose to do nothing.

Time, money, and energy--these are the limiting factors. But they are actually resources. It is when our ambitions exceed these resources that we see them as limits. It comes down to the same thing. You only get one lifetime to do it all in.

Consider Paul McCartney. He was a Beatle. He plays bass, drums, guitar, and piano. He can sing and is considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Then consider this painting:



I realize that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I wouldn't hang this shit on any of my walls. The bare wall has more beauty to me. This is also why I don't sing "Hey Jude" on karaoke night anymore. It is better to stick with what you are good at doing. I'm not good at Beatles tunes.

The whole purpose and point of life is to be happy, and happiness comes from activity. It comes from doing. This is why the Renaissance Ideal appealed to me for such a long time because those Renaissance types are the epitome of the autotelic way. But it is an illusory path because you get frustration and regret instead of flow.

You have to edit your life. Life demands it. This is why I have turned from the Renaissance Man to the Blue Collar Man as the archetype for true existence. My whole life there has been a division between my more cerebral pursuits and my more practical pursuits. I enjoy writing and exploring various subjects, but they don't pay the bills. I have done various blue collar jobs that have paid the bills, but you don't get a Nobel prize by cleaning septic tanks. But you can find flow. This is because all blue collar work is about solving problems.

This struck me while watching one of the many blue collar reality shows on TV. In every episode, the workers run into snags and problems, and the producers love to throw them at you right before the cut to commercial to keep you hanging in there. And the trick works. I get excited and can't wait for the commercial to be over, so I can see how the latest problem got solved. But then I realized I lived the exact way those shows described. This is my life. I get problems thrown at me everyday, and I solve them. And it is an awesome feeling to see the look on the face of a boss or a customer who you helped out of a jam or made their lives better.

What is the contrast then between the Renaissance Man and the Blue Collar Man? That is simple. The Renaissance Man is about being while the Blue Collar Man is about doing. The Renaissance Man wants to be a doctor. The Blue Collar Man wants to save lives. The Renaissance Man wants a glowing resume. The Blue Collar Man wants to do a job well. The Renaissance Man wants achievements. The Blue Collar Man wants solutions.

It boils down to vanity. Blue collar people don't collect diplomas, awards, and accolades. These aren't the people that ran for student council or took extracurricular activities, so they had more to add to their yearbook profile. They took shop class and industrial arts to solve the problem of needing a paycheck in the future. Their lives were not dictated by design but by the needs of the moment. They weren't thinking so much about what they wanted to do with their lives so much as trying to get their car to run, so they could go cruising with their friends on Saturday night.

A sheepskin on the wall does not produce flow. There is no flow in a medal, a trophy, a title, or a killer CV. Every so often, I get some recognition for shit I have done, and it surprises me how little I care about that recognition. I just want that feeling I get when I lose myself in the work. I am beginning to recognize that my motivation is not money or status but hedonism. I am more akin to surf bums and skateboarders than I am to Nobel prize winners.

It all comes back to flow--that awesome feeling that comes when you lose yourself in what you are doing. This is the stoke that surfers are looking for on their boards. If flow is the goal, the solution you need to find is the one that works best for you and is the most elegant one possible. The Renaissance Ideal is not an elegant solution. It is a frustrated wish. We must never lose sight of the telos of our existence which is flourishing. Yet, we forget. We get sidetracked which is why we must always come back to first principles.

Ambition doesn't cut it. It is better to keep your life simple because this yields more flow and much less frustration. There is no happiness in what you have done. There is simply happiness in what you are doing.

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