Oscar Wilde on Attainment

My college education has prepared me for an artistic life, not a defined one.

I found an excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis today about his desire to lead “the Artistic Life,” and it felt like a God moment because Wilde perfectly articulates how I’ve been feeling lately about the external panic to have everything figured out by the time seniors graduate college. For context, I am graduating in May with a writing degree and a history minor. I feel the pressure in my personal finance class when I read about 20-year career planning and the need to accept the highest possible salary as soon as possible, because that will determine my earnings for the rest of my career. I feel it in comments from people about the need to pick a major with high earnings potential. I feel it in classmates bragging about how they will be a New York Times bestseller and the number of jobs, internships, and graduate programs they’re applying for. I feel it in friends’ anxiety over needing a job offer by May. It all feels like capitalist propaganda to me. The underlying message is that one’s occupation makes one whole, and salary is the primary determinant of a successful life. However, if the hedonic treadmill is true, we will only continue to desire more as we adjust to more.

We cannot stand the insecurity of being a living, breathing human with no path or direction. No attainment with nothing to attain. No self.

I feel two external pressures at play — the need for financial security and security of status. I understand the former to an extent. My peace of mind increases as my financial security does. I value things like the freedom not to work while I travel or while my kids are young. I want to have a large enough emergency fund so that when health emergencies happen, money isn’t an added stress. I want to live debt-free so I can invest in a retirement index fund. These are reasons I’m taking a personal finance class in the first place. However, the language of the textbook, of those around me, and of our larger American late-stage capitalist culture is not just surrounding being able to pay for the life one wants to live. It’s making one’s career their life and identity. It’s the security of status — knowing exactly what you are, something separate from our being.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, page 95

We cannot stand the insecurity of being a living, breathing human with no path or direction. No attainment with nothing to attain. No self. I was not put on this earth to be a writer or yoga instructor or mother or Buddhist — to become those things as some type of mask separate from my human being. I was put on this earth to feel. To write, do yoga, raise children, and meditate. To practice loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and appreciative joy. Wilde says, “to recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.” No label, career, or status could make my soul knowable. But if I aim to make one my identity, I will. That will be my punishment. Like Wilde, I do hope to produce work that will lead to an artistic life. To do so, I must tune out the “career equals success and life” propaganda and remember that money is nothing more than a means to live. I must exist as a verb, not a noun.