Wednesday, 1 April 2009

Make it Big, or Make it Right?

Linklater: Most people crave to find that little niche - "oh good, I can be an accountant."

Idler: People grab onto that as a result of fear.

Linklater: Yeah, the most gutsy thing is to reject things you’re pretty good at. If a person’s good at something, everyone encourages you to do that. And yet maybe it’s not what’s right. I have friends who have quit law school in their third year. Well, they could have been a lawyer, they could have made a lot of money, but they knew that wasn’t spiritually what they should be doing with their time. It took a while for them to find it out because they’d been programmed from childhood. But everyone’s going to stoke you if you do something that makes a lot of money.

[Richard Linklater]
Interview with The Idler, full text here.

Related posts:-
Escaping Uncertainty
Silent Violence
Sell Out
Walk a Straight Line
Posted by Forever Becoming at 15:28

1 comments:

  1. This underlying insecurity resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostile world tends to explain the genesis of a character trait which was, as Burckhardt has pointed out, characteristic of the individual of the Renaissance and not present, at least in the same intensity, in the member of the medieval social structure: his craving for fame.

    If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts.

    ... it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.

    [Erich Fromm]
    The Fear of Freedom, p.41-2
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