This post is about a shorthand that has become important in my own mind, but to point towards a problem I don’t think is particularly common. So I’m not sure if this story is ‘blog post’ material. (But then again, I’m not sure if this is a blog.)
At some point between 2021 and 2023, my personality changed such that doing difficult things became inherently attractive. (I think this is true of everyone to some point. In a reductive case, babies all seem to want to do difficult things.) When my personality shifted in this way, circa age 28, the most impactful difference was that I started hosting events and doing some public speaking, things I was too terrified to contemplate 3 years prior. My social life became dramatically richer because I was taking more initiative.
But I’m also more attracted to challenge in mundane ways. I’m writing this because I noticed I wanted to go to a potluck tonight. This means acquiring groceries and cooking in a window where I am doing a lot of childcare, packing so that my 8 month old can be entertained in the back yard, and doing more childcare once there. The old me would have gone, “That sounds like a pain. I’ll pass.” But when I was considering it five minutes ago, I thought, “That sounds difficult. I want to do it.”
A few weeks ago, I described this personality shift to my husband, saying that it had been the most impactful meta-change I’d experienced. He was positive about it overall, and added, “One thing I worry about is… well… you know that famous speech, we go to the moon not because it is easy –”
I erupted, “I HATE that line! It makes no sense!”
We were in perfect agreement about that.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
(The whole thing is less hateable, but I still dislike it. A nation is not a football team. Subsets of those people, or individuals, can have the telos of contest, but I think the nation’s telos ought to be the flourishing and ease of its people.)
I like this shorthand. Once I step back, going to the potluck tonight is going-to-the-moon shaped. It’ll be a lot of work I’m not well prepared to do, in return for merely a pleasant social evening (punctuated by stress about the baby). I have this temptation often, so it is nice to be able to think, “I might be going to the moon, let’s pull back.” It is a concept that saves me time.
But the emotional reason this phrase has staying power for me is that I’d been drifting out of alignment with my spouse in that conversation, and we snapped together when he quoted that speech. It made me feel love, because in some areas we have the same shape of mind. That mind hears a line like “We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard” and goes, there is something fundamentally wrong with that step of reasoning. It is a beautiful speech, but the beauty can’t cover over the logical dissonance. We can’t un-notice it. It stuck in both of our minds for years, pissing us off.
Because we were on the same emotional page about it, we came to agreement quickly that one major aspect of my attraction-to-difficulty is ‘incorrect’. The underlying attitude can be marvelously productive, but only as a modulator of a logical thought process, not a replacement of it. One ought not go to the moon because it is hard.