Hustle and Hubris

The coffee bean is the greatest gift Nature has given us. It is also the greatest curse. This comes from a love of coffee and the process and a hypothesis of the results of history. I heard an argument once that the Enlightenment was kicked (in part) off thanks to the power of coffee (but I do not know where). People tended to live by the routine of the sun more rigidly than we do today. Coffee allowed people to stay up later, deep into the night, reading or writing, or deeply contemplating. If this is true (which I have my skepticism about if one takes in the general stubbornness of humans) then European Enlightenment thinkers were able to kick off the Enlightenment because they could stay awake longer and do more reading, more scientific tests, more philosophical writing, more work of all kinds. It allowed humanity to surpass the limitations set out by Nature that are core to the basic biology and psychology of humanity.

I fell into hustle culture and productivity culture in my undergrad years. I started off with coffee because I learned that there was a complex world of coffee brewing from the YouTuber Matt D’Avella who was (and still seems to be) a large creator focusing on productivity and lifestyle content. I fell into the hole of minimalism, waking up early, exercising at the gym, cold showers, etc. Anything to surpass the limitations of the mind and body and achieve a true greatness of being. This is the unmistakable allure to the myth of productivity: to hear of great minds knowing multiple languages and working absolute magic on a chalkboard. To read about true polymaths in history like DaVinci or Cornelius Agrippa or ibn Sina. To be deified like Imhotep who had it claimed that his father was the god Ptah Himself all because of his intellectual capabilities. For anyone who loves the realm of the mind, all of these figures are role models to look up to, Sages to imitate and, if we work hard enough, become someday. To be great, truly great, is something honorable to aspire to.

While his style of greatness was quite superficial, I could see how young men looked up to Andrew Tate. His sophistry promised greatness in hedonistic pleasure and dutiful suffering. Bryan Johnson’s mindless pursuit of anti-aging promises a greatness that will surpass his (supposedly) long and (supposedly) healthy life. Gary Vee’s constant coked-up yelling into a camera instills the desire to do better and to be as “successful”¹ and coked-up as him.

There is an ancient Egyptian text titled The Immortality of the Writer, which is only a few stanzas which I want to share in full:

If you would only accomplish this, becoming expert in writing:
Those writers of knowledge from the time of events after the gods,
those who foretold the future,
their names have become fixed for eternity,
though they are gone, they have completed their lifespan,
and all their kin are forgotten.

They did not make for themselves a chapel of copper,
or a stela for it of iron from the sky.
They did not manage to leave heirs,
from their children, to pronounce their names,
but they have achieved heirs out of writings,
out of the teachings in those.

They are given the book as ritual-priest,
The writing-board as loving-son.
Teachings are their chapels,
the writing-rush their child,
and the block of stone the wife.
From great to small, (all) are given as his children,
for the writer, he is their leader.

The doors of their chapels are undone,
Their ka-priests have gone.
Their tombstones are smeared with mud,
their tombs are forgotten,
but their names are read out on their scrolls,
written when they were young.
Being remembered makes them, to the limits of eternity.

Be a writer - put it in your heart,
and your name is created by the same.
Scrolls are more useful than tombstones,
than building a solid enclosure.
They act as chapels and chambers,
by the desire of the one pronouncing their name.
For sure there is most use in the cemetery
for a name in the mouths of men.

A man is dead, his corpse is in the ground:
when all his family are laid in the earth,
It is writing that lets him be remembered,
in the mouth of the reciter of the formula.
Scrolls are more useful than a built house,
than chapels on the west,
they are more perfect than palace towers,
longer-lasting than a monument in a temple.

Is there anyone here like Hordedef?
Is there another like Imhotep?
There is no family born for us like Neferty,
and Khety their leader.
Let me remind you of the name of Ptahemdjehuty
Khakheperraseneb.
Is there another like Ptahhotep?
Kaires too?

Those who knew how to foretell the future,
What came from their mouths took place,
and may be found in (their) phrasing.
They are given the offspring of others
as heirs as if their (own) children.
They hid their powers from the whole land,
to be read in (their) teachings.
They are gone, their names might be forgotten,
but writing lets them be remembered.

Greatness is a desire to live forever. To have your existence live on even after the body has turned to dust and soil and all the people that you know and that know them and that know them have all done the same. It makes sense why a mortal species would find solace in living forever, not bodily, but through one’s work. This still works within the limitations of the human body and mind. Yet, today, our limits are not profitable.

Plenty has been said about the damaging effects of capitalism² and hustle culture on the body the psyche and even the morals of humanity. When a small group of people dictate the livability of the many through wages and prices then this will lead to severe societal and economic damage. This setup of the one having (effectively) financial control over the many is an easy setup to instill greed in the few. It disconnects one from not just the means of production but the process of production. They do not understand the labor required to maintain a growing profit year after year, and so when the line is in the red they blame the laborers for not surpassing their limits to make a larger profit. There is only so much money to go around and the 1% are already hoarding the vast majority of it. It is not hubris on the end of the workers because we understand the labor intimately. It is hubris on the end of the bourgeoisie to think that we can surpass our natural limits for them. Dante’s Inferno posits that the greatest sin against Nature is sodomy, but in this current age, those who will be forced to walk across burning coals will be those who spit in the face of Nature’s limitations and force others to surpass them.

I use hubris deliberately here, and not pride or greed (although the latter is present) and I want to explain hubris through a couple of myths. The most obvious one for any myth-lover would be the story of Arachne, the weaver to thought herself superior to Minerva, the goddess of crafts, and challenged the goddess. Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses that she was “irked to be aligned with such a teacher.”³ She is even given a chance to repent for this hubris by Minerva herself disguised as an old woman. For her hubris (although Ovid makes it out that Arachne won) she is turned into a spider. While she proved herself great, she was punished for refuting any connection to the one who taught her this craft.

The second myth is that of Phaeton. He was the son of Apollo and was promised by the god one thing his heart desired most, which was to ride his sun chariot. Apollo did the best he could to talk his son from doing so, giving him warning after warning about the violent natures of his horses and the dangers of driving the chariot across the firmament and through the constellations, but even with all of these warning Phaeton refused to listen to reason or his limits regarding how to drive the chariot. The destruction wrought across the Earth is long a drawn out, but there is one passage I find most startling:⁴

The land splits open. Through the cracks the light enters
Tartarus, startling hell’s king and queen.
The ocean shrinks. The sea becomes a plain
of thirsty sand, and peaks once topped by water
rise and augment the scattered Cyclades.
Fish seek the lowest depths, and arching dolphins
do not dare leap above the water’s surface
into known breezes. Corpses of dead seals
float face up in the surf. There is a rumor
that Nereus, Doris, and their daughters hid
in heated grottos. Neptune dared three times
to lift his arms and face above the surf
and three times could not bear the fiery air.⁵

The world was ravaged by fire, the results of Phaeton’s hubris spreading farther than just his own death to the death of thousands of lives, the ripping open of the Earth all the way down to Tartarus, and the shrinking of 3/4ths of the earth’s surface. He had all the warnings that could be given but ignored his own limitations and ignorance because he wanted to pursue greatness.

To use very religious language for a moment: we humans were created deliberately by some higher, greater, wiser power(s) and to say that we can overcome our deliberate designs slaps the wise and powerful creator(s) in the face and tells them to fuck off. It is surpassing the god(s) we worship, thinking we are superior in every way. To move to more secular rhetoric: we humans were created in alignment with the laws that govern the universe, and fighting our limitations is a hubristic effort that separates us from the universe which we emerged from and continue our existence. This is not to diminish the greatness of superhuman acts. Space travel is a superhuman act, using the laws of nature to go where no living creature and sought out before. Coffee is a superhuman drug, using chemistry and biology to continue one’s intellectual pursuits. Warp travel is a superhuman concept, literally bending space around one’s spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light. All of these are superhuman and not hubris because we still work within the limitations of the universe and ourselves to achieve everlasting greatness. Yet, it is hubris to think one can achieve greatness by surpassing the limitations we have as mortal beings.

The ending lines of Ovid’s rendition of the Phaeton myth sums it up perfectly: “Phaeton, who drove his father’s chariot, / lies here. He failed, yet died from great endeavors.”⁶ We will die from the actions of great hubris, but we do not have to die in the pursuit of great endeavors.

Works Cited

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Stephanie McCarter, Penguin, New York, 2022.

“The immortality of the writer.” University College London. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/authorspchb.html

1. I use quotation marks because success is never defined or explained and is used as an empty word that means and points to nothing but can be filled with the agendas of the speakers in the moment before being emptied out again and filled within something else entirely the next day.

2. Let me define my terms a little more precisely. I do not use the typical online-left definition of capitalism being ‘whatever I have about the current economic system.’ When I say capitalism I mean an economic system where a small group of people or a single person (bourgeoisie) own the means of productions, pays laborers (proletariat) to utilize those means of production, and sets prices on the product of the labors’ work.

3. Ovid 6.24

4. This would also be a great passage to pull out when talking about how corporate greed and lobbying from oil companies will be the death of the natural world.

5. Ovid 2.280-292

6. Ovid 2.355-356