Stealing from Klosterman 1

I've decided to take on Chuck Klosterman's 12 questions from his book IV. They are all thought-provoking (some more than others, apparently), and I figured that you could think about how you'd answer right alongside mine.

Q: Think about your life.

Think about the greatest thing you have ever done, and think about the worst thing you have ever done. Try to remember what motivated you to do the former, and try to remember what motivated you to do the latter.

How similar are these two motives?


There are too many ways to evaluate the best or worst thing I've ever done. It all depends on the basis for the accomplishment. Human triumph, selflessness, morality, artistic significance?

I can think of two things that might qualify as the best I've ever done, and neither are based on ethics. The first was backpacking through New Mexico. 111 miles in 11 days. This was more of an achievement of humanity and strength against struggle than anything else. It was challenging, but also exhilarating and fun. The only thing that comes close to an ethical dimension is the lessons I learned and executed related to teamwork and helping my friends out along the way. We all helped each other, which helped the group. I suppose there is a degree of selflessness involved in that, but for the most part, I consider this to be the most manly thing I've ever done, not the most ethically triumphant.

The second was pulling a group together to print a magazine version of our newspaper. It is, in my view, an incredible achievement that demanded much harder, smarter work from a group of people that I knew were capable of it. In actually doing it, the group hated me throughout the process, but had an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment afterward which erased most of the animus.

My motivation for doing both of these lay in ego, I think. I wanted to achieve something great on both accounts. To propel myself and the group forward. To make a mark. To challenge myself and others to do something that most don't get to do. There's an intrinsic value there of challenge and an extrinsic one of bragging rights.

The worst thing I've ever done was mostly a crime of ignorance. My junior year of high school, my friend Tim was devastated by a relationship that he undertook - they had dated their entire senior year, and graduation pulled them apart despite caring deeply for one another. Because of this, I swore to myself that my senior year would be about casual dating instead of investing in one person only to see them go off to a different college (the death sentence for any high school relationship). This ideal led me to break the heart of a girl that otherwise would have made an incredible girlfriend. My treatment was mostly done in ignorance, never outright malice (when is it ever though?) but the effects were deep, and I caused her a lot of pain. This had something to do with ego - I was enjoying finally having a status in high school, gaining confidence in myself, and this swung the pendulum from one side of self-esteem to the other side of cockiness. To this day, the only thing in my life I really, honestly, deeply regret is the way I treated that girl that year. I wasn't intentional at all - opting instead for stringing her along without any assurance of my dedication to her. All the while, I should have been getting to know her more completely, focusing my time and energy on her, and treating her like the incredible human being she was.

My motivation for doing so, like I said, is hard to pinpoint because I didn't purposefully injure her. I purposefully rationalized the situation, and I was motivated by an ideal of not settling down (for the ethereal reason of not getting hurt later). I suppose that's the main motivation, not getting hurt. Wanting to be invincible by avoiding a situation that would cause me pain.

These two motivations have elements that are similar and elements that are not at all. One is about challenge and the other is about avoiding challenge. But they both have to do with ego in a way. They both involve me wanting to rise above something - in one case, the status quo of my achievements and in the other, the socially-accepted method of dating. In both cases, I wanted to appear stronger than I actually was. This helped with the former, and hurt another person in the latter.

These motivations are remarkably similar while being polar opposites. Both have elements of fear, but one is about overcoming it and one is about disowning it. They both fed into a perception of me that I wanted others to share. I wanted people to see me a certain way, and I imagine I thought that all of these actions would lead to people thinking of me the way I wanted to be thought of. As extraordinary. Someone who faced the wilderness, pushed the boundaries of where a publication could go, someone relationally unattainable. I would guess that almost all of my underlying reasons for doing anything is to make myself stand out - so that people see me as a unique individual.

Hope you enjoy questioning yourself. I'm borrowing, but I figure that sharing these questions is an excellent way to spread self-awareness. They won't all be this trenchant. Some of them will even come close to looking like a game of Would you Rather - and I know some of you will love that.