What a Drunk Womanising Degenerate Taught Me About Meaning and Purpose
“Find What You Love And Let It Kill You”
Hey Friends,
Would I like Charles Bukowski if I met him? Probably not.
But at least he’s genuine. For better or for worse, I would know where I stand with him, and I respect that.
Bukowski was a gloriously flawed human being. He was a bawdy, gross, womanising, drunken asshole. He would turn up wasted to poetry readings and spit profanity at the audience. He was also partial to whipping out his bits and exposing them for the world to see.
But underneath all that degeneracy was a deep and introspective man with more character than most people today.
Despite spending his life broke and drunk and struggling to hold on to a job, he kept on writing, even when no one read his work. It was almost 30 years later that he finally managed to land his first book deal.
When he accepted it, he wrote, “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that takes quite a bit of bravery and courage to leave behind something secure and go after your dreams.
There’s a raw honesty in his writing – he shamelessly writes about his fears, failures, regret and self-destruction. His writing is the embodiment of the repulsive yet endearing man he was. Bukowski was unapologetically himself.
There’s a natural human desire to want to be well-liked. But sometimes, when we place too much emphasis on being well-liked or “nice”, it stops us from being our truest, most authentic selves.
What Bukowski understood is that life can be ugly, messy and unfair. He never understood the obsession for certainty and peace or the ideology behind it. He understood that everything comes at a cost: You don’t get success without failure. You don’t get love without pain. You don’t get meaning without sacrifice.
Finding purpose has become the hottest thing.
No longer do we want to slave away to the corporate overlords. Instead, we’re quietly quitting and searching for something more important. We want to be noticed. We want to be admired. We want to find meaning.
The search for meaning has become the new luxury good. And just like a Chanel bag, we’ve come to idealise meaning.
As a result, we have hucksters who exploit this and write content like “5 Simple Steps To Finding Your Purpose.” They then upsell you with a course or, worse, tell you to hire them as a life coach. They sell the dream that if you find the “one thing” that you are born to do, suddenly everything will fall into place, and life will become sunshine and rainbows.
As someone who has had the luxury and privilege to find meaning, let me shatter some illusions: finding meaning and purpose isn’t at the end of a 6-week life coaching course or an Ayahuasca yoga retreat in Bali. Finding purpose and meaning is a non-trivial task. It’s also random and accidental.
The process is more like crawling through the mud, running through an arctic snowstorm, climbing Mount Everest and walking back down to go find it. And once you get there, you have to love it. Like, love it so much that you will let it kill you.
You don’t wake up one day and decide you’re going to become one thing forever. Life is a constant work in progress. How purpose and meaning works is you try something and be self-aware enough to see how it makes you feel. If it doesn’t spark a fire in you, you adjust and try again. But the most important thing is you take action and do something. Anything.
Some get it on their first few attempts. Some take hundreds of attempts to find it. And even if you do get it right, it’s still possible that it can change again in the future. Because you change, and the things you value change. Apart from death and taxes, nothing in life is certain.
While I don’t recommend anyone to aspire to be like Bukowski, we all can learn a thing or two from him.
What Bukowski understood is that doing what you love doesn’t mean you’ll always love what you do because love requires sacrifice. It’s like trying to find someone to marry. You don’t pick someone who makes you happy all the time, nor is this realistic. You pick someone who you want to be with even when they’ve pissed you off because they forgot to take the trash out.
Be under no illusions that life won’t be without a bumpy ride.
Poker had plenty of miserable points. There were days when I was sick of losing but still had to get out of bed and go to the casino or open my laptop to make a living.
Writing is the same. I don’t sit down, and words come flowing out of my pen. There are days that I feel frustrated I can’t write anything. On the days I hate writing, I have to pretend that I love it. And there’s nothing wrong with hating the work. At least with hate, I still feel something towards it. Because the opposite of love isn’t hate – It’s indifference.
Anything worthwhile in life cannot be bought — only earned. We earn it by building from scratch. Brick by brick. Piece by piece. Until one day, we’re able to step back and smile at the result of our own blood, sweat and tears.
And that is what a meaningful life is.
As Bukowski once said, “We’re here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so that Death will tremble to take us.”
— Jason Vu Nguyen