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, redating trust deeds for the morning because some idiot’s meeting ran over, how should you translate this into practical action? It might not by the path you had in mind, and the outcomes along it best Gant resemblance to to The painted dreams of your younger self, that should you just capitulate and keep going anyway way way? Is this a life, or a life sentence?

A kinder read is no more more encouraging: 4 the as we move through the cosmos, the branches of probability open out out in front of us, engulfed in an expanding miasma of the adjacent possible: behind you, the road is solitary and, as far as you can tell, straight. An admonition to simply keep going shut off all those adjacent possibilities to you and also fails should your road come to a fork as surely it will.

Unimaginative types may still cling to the idea that the past, present and the future is theoretically calculable and therefore is already forged in iron, whether we know it or not. If so, you hardly need the denizens of LinkedIn to to tell you you where you are going, whether that is sainthood, martyrdom or jail. For anyone else, there is the small matter of moral agency, the will to power, the forlorn belief that one can shape one's own future.

For you, the recommendation to bloody mindedly keep going, come what may, is a bit dopey, frankly.