---
title: Fear to Attempt
description: Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt
date: 2025-06-20
tags: philosophy
---

> Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt
>
> - Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure_

We _need_ you to dream; then pursue those dreams with vigor. You are a human being. You are a machine with hopes and dreams; a calculator who looks at cold, mute, void, dead nature, and somehow sees God and meaning despite yourself. You are a [teetering bulb of dread and dream](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/russell_edson/poems/15012). You cannot help but see the world in infinite terms. Despite your best efforts, you believe in right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. Nihilism is your greatest lie to yourself, and you feel the nausea it induces when it [crawls into your heart and dies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xuzSjl8eU), because it is _unnatural_ and anti-life. Are you truly so bored with the ease and comfort that the vast array of the past has struggled, and suffered, and died to provide you with, that you have to cut yourself to remember you can feel?

> Shall I be carried to the skies,
>
> On flowery beds of ease,
>
> While others fought to win the prize,
>
> And sailed through bloody seas?
>
> Laura Ingalls Wilder, _Little House in the Big Woods_, p. 96

---

_Use this life_. Determine what is good, or at least, what is not evil, then _act_ as a humble servant of the former, and in direct repudiation of the latter. Your heart will thank you for it, even if the world never does. It is a cooling salve for your depression and melancholy. Though at the cost of greater anxiety. But anxiety is excitement also, and adventurousness, and _worth the struggle_.

> Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
>
> Theodore Roosevelt, [_Strenuous Life_](https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text)

You are hopelessly finite; but your actions can and do graze infinity. You can make a [dent in the Universe](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)>). Some of us little people have. And they who have are frightfully similar to you.

---

How can any honest person look around at their world and not see that it is a [museum of passion projects](https://x.com/collision/status/1529452415346302976)? A handful of souls through the brief span of history shake off their multitude of excuses, doubts, fears, false friends, oppressive family - shed the dying skin - to chase these impossible dreams, and oftener than we should expect, achieve them. Even in the infested rivers of Calcutta, what is all that trash polluting the river? It is the unmaintained dreams of the past piling on and on into a neglectful present. Plastics and juice boxes and old toys are miracles if you stop them from coalescing into growing piles of grime.

Work passionately to some purpose. Most of those who regret working hard worked hard as slaves to some lower passion like money or cheap status. Those who conduct their work in service of Eternity have a cleaner conscience. Did we hear honest words of regret from Socrates? From Cicero or Cato? From Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, or Washington? Only in their moments of weakness and fear when their tasks ahead bore relentlessly down on them. But, determining to answer the Call of Duty, they steeled themselves and pressed forward, leaving behind a trail of proud memories which sustained genuine pride in the shade of life.

---

> My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.
>
> Soren Kierkegaard, _Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_

Work toward depression and nothingness, and you will achieve it.

Weekends we spend alone, absorbing Netflix, Youtube, ads. Burning away the candle on video games, where we pretend we are heroes, when _real_ knighthood beckons to the brave. Doomscrolling our ten-second videos of AI-generated sequences of ever-more unintelligible noises and images, then we complain that we can't afford a house. Watch porn, then complain there are no good women. Work harder and smarter on justifying our inaction, and find enemies to our supposed purposes everywhere. We will never find an enemy sufficient to outsource our self-loathing. In this way we will never be cured of it. We are not taking our problems seriously by failing to recognize ourselves as their root cause. And who can we expect to take us seriously if not ourselves?

You are not jealous of the past. You have more than them if you cared to look. You are jealous of your own better nature which you glimpse buried within yourself manifesting forthrightly in others. Their lived virtue is recognizable to you as your own dormant morality.

You are not jealous of the past, except their Hope for the future. Reclaim the Hope, and you'll quickly see the thousand conveniences and asymmetric advantages afforded to you not given them.

That hope will be reclaimed with the youthful vigor of active optimism; never by a passive pessimism.

---

> "Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; _God helps them that help themselves_.
>
> Benjamin Franklin, _The Way to Wealth_

You have the _internet_ friend! And you're using it to watch cat videos and porn. What's wrong with you? How many philosophers through the millenia have _dreamed_ of this moment, where anyone and everyone had access to the voluminous fount of human knowledge! So many of them thought this day would [unleash the golden age](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins) we've finally been waiting for. You can, for next to nothing, read the minds of the greatest thinkers, inventors, and scientists who've ever lived. But instead, we discovered that we are easily hackable, we will still use the evil software of companies we know are ill-designing against us, or at best do not care. We sell our souls in as near literal a sense as anyone could have possibly imagined, for a little convenience, a little fun, a little dopamine, and say that it is impractical to live without them, and give up. If we use this great tool for knowledge at all we're most likely to use it for a petty win in a debate not worth having. For the most part, we've shortened our attention spans and become addicted further still to our baser instincts. This is not Utopia. This is a Brave New World, and we, for the most part, feel oppressed by a future we wrongly think we have little power to avoid.

---

> The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
>
> [Alan Kay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTPI6wh-Lr0)

Knowledge and wisdom are now cheap, and as such, unvalued. Even our educated don't know much today, because knowledge and understanding are no longer the point. The knowledge of our college graduates is the kind of knowledge any true thinker hates. Commoditized and packaged so they can "get a job" and "have a career", and rarely develop the mark of a truth-seeker:

> So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
>
> Albert Einstein, [Correspondance to Robert Thorton in 1944](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/AEquotes.pdf)

---

You can adopt the whole human heritage. Do not be bound by superficial alliances. Be bound by vision and destiny. The human race is your anchor. Any giant's shoulders are shoulders to stand on if they are good and true. I admire Socrates and Pericles, though I am not Greek. Cicero and the Antonines, though I am not Roman. Confucius, Nietzsche, Kant, Petrarch, Da Vinci, what do I care for their allegiances? They painted their minds to us, and now they are mine.

Even within these flawed humans, or any flawed human, we can take the good and discard the bad. No human is really one human. We are instead a hash of blurry archetypes, oscillatingly present or absent from person to person, and within the same person at different times, places, and circumstances.

> Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.
>
> Emerson, _Think_, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32

---

Is the state of society not to your liking? _Good_. _Fix it!_. What else do you have to do? Complain? Settle? You are not allowed to be angry and _do nothing_. Society will sink under the festering weight of this accumulated hypocrisy. I do not intend to imply this is easy; swimming against the tide never is. Far from it. Only that it is worth it. It is _necessary_.

Do you see problems? Well I see an army of problem-solvers; an array of latent potential waiting to unleash its energy, and hold back the tide of societal decay. Your mission in life is waiting for you. What excites you? If you have nothing that excites you, then what bothers you? What do you wish was, that isn't now? There is your destiny. Only a liar can't think of a worthy pursuit that will provide him a lifetime of work. Worthy pursuits and things worth doing are ever-present. You are far more limited than they are scarce. If you cultivate reasons enough for Being, imbibe enough meaning and purpose in your daily diet, a panoply of destinies scream and beg for you to take them on.

I've heard the cry from other people my age that "everything's been done", and all this noise about artificial intelligence isn't helping young people dream about brighter futures. It seems to be feeding their already weak grasp on the meaning of life. They constantly ask themselves what they will have to do, not realizing the opportunity lying latent in every problem. Every where I look I see little issues, and have reached the point that I lament the fact that I don't have the time or energy to work on all of them myself, as they would distract too much from an even greater or more exciting mission.

Do you feel that the problems are too big? Start small. Rome wasn't built in a day. Do you feel unmatched by the impenetrable weight of what you're fighting? Fight it anyway, and become a salient force to be reckoned with along the way, growing strong from each victory, and stronger still from each defeat. A scattered array of untrained militia defeated the might of the British Empire at its height, with muskets they used to hunt birds and deer. Can you honestly decry that your petty worries are anywhere near _that_ insurmountable? You have been living through the _Pax Americana_, and you and I spent the whole of it complaining, and if we're not extremely careful we will be reminded what real pain and suffering is.

---

> I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
>
> Karl Popper, _Realism and the Aim of Science_

So long as there are problems, this world needs your hidden and unique offerings. So long as there are problems, you can be the solution. Do not deprive us of your secret skills. Meet your destiny head-on. Cast your gaze upward toward the Lights of the Firmament, and dream.
