Being (Un) Important

2011-02-11

For most of my life I've had this fantasy of becoming important. Maybe I would make an "important" work of art or solve an "important" physics problem or come up with an "important" sociological theory and everyone would think I am "important".

One of the things I was confronted with in college, and to greater extend in graduate school is that I'm not actually that smart. In any case, the chances of anyone, including myself, becoming "important" are not very good. I often struggled with physics and math in college (I majored in physics) and really struggled in graduate school (PhD program in physics) and ended up leaving graduate school after the first year. As a result of this struggle while I was in graduate school, for the first time in my life I began questioning what happiness meant to me. In order to do this, I had to let go of the idea that I should become "important".

I began thinking about all the many things that I do and how I feel when I do each. I identified activities and situations in which I felt relaxed, happy, and accomplished. For example, I consistently feel happy when hanging out with people that I like, doing physical activities such as martial arts or yoga, teaching, making things with my hands, or writing. Likewise, I identified activities and situations which typically make me feel anxious, depressed, or unsatisfied. I'm still figuring these things out, and it is certainly not clear cut. For example, a career in physics will not probably not lead me to happiness, but I still enjoy working on physics problems in my spare time, discussing physics with my friends, and teaching physics. A career in computer programming would also likely not make me happy since I hate being force to sit in front of a computer for long periods of time. But I still enjoy programming and working on small projects in my spare time.

Not only was the desire to be "important" blocking me from happiness and fulfillment, but I realized that there are some fundamentally ambiguous things about "importance". What exactly does it mean to be "important"? What kind of effects does an "important" thing or person cause? We end up with all kinds of ingrained notions of what it means to be "important" and they seem much more concrete than they really are. Is writing a popular book or praised academic paper "important"? Is inventing a "revolutionary" technology "important"? Is being a leader "important"? The problem with "importance" is that the world and our influence on it is beyond our ability to comprehend or predict. For example, I currently teach an algebra and environment science class for 9th graders in an after school program. My general goal is to show my students new ways of thinking and learning that will actually be useful in their lives. However, I cannot predict what kind of influence I will have on my students and will likely never really know whether I have made a positive impact on their lives now or in 5, 10, 20, or 50 years.

Maybe something I will do will not be "important" in my lifetime, but 100 years from now someone will discover it and the time will be ripe for it to change the world. Or maybe I will do something in my life time that is immediately hailed as "important" and everyone will be talking about it, but 10 or 20 or 100 years from now no one will care. One will have to admit that the thing I did was not really "important" at all, but only popular at the time. Or even worse, maybe no one will ever realize that the "important" thing I did actually had devastatingly negative consequences. Or, maybe I will really do something immensely "important" that changes the world in a positive way forever, but neither I nor anyone else will ever realize it.