Keep going

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You’ll get there. It may not be the place you expected and it may not be the along path you intended, but if you stick at it, you will eventually get exactly where you are meant to be. Keep going.

A handsome statement for fatalists, hard determinists, and lacklustre types who believe in free will all right, but are happy just to cast their hopes for the future into the laps of the beneficent gods anyway.

But,“keep going: there will be some outcome or other” strikes us as less satisfactory for the hard-charging, ambitious folk who intend to paint LinkedIn’s canvas in the heroic spoils of achievement, self-actualisation, and triumph.

For there is a buried passive there: “meant”. Meant by whom? Your best you, rather than the one who actually showed up? Your mum? The eternal stars in which our futures are engraved? Illinois’ law enforcement community?

And as you sit there, at 3 am, re-dating trust deeds for the morning because some idiot’s meeting ran over, how should you translate this into practical action? It might not be the path you had in mind, and the outcomes along it might bear scant resemblance to to the painted dreams of your younger self, but should you just capitulate and keep going anyway? Is this a life, or a life sentence?

A kinder read is no more more encouraging: as we move through the cosmos, the sickly limbs of probability branch out in front of us, engulfed in an expanding miasma of adjacent possibles, while behind you, the road is solitary, desolate but, as far as you can tell, straight. An admonition to simply keep going, looking neither left nor right, shuts off all those adjacent possibilities, and also leaves you short of instructions should your road come to a fork.

Some may yet cling to the idea that the past, present and future are theoretically calculable and therefore already forged in iron, whether we know it or not. If so, you hardly need the digital prophets of LinkedIn to to tell you you where you are going, whether that is sainthood, martyrdom or jail, and they have no better idea than you do anyway.

For anyone else, there is that small matter of moral agency, the will to power, the forlorn belief that one can shape one’s own future.

Don’t just blithely keep going. Read the room. Make decisions. If you have to, and you have the fortitude to, change them.

Own your future; don’t let it own you. You are not flotsam.

See also

• LinkedIn