On taking things seriously

Plus: my guide for choosing a word for the year

Dec 20, 2023

∙ Paid

“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”
— Thomas Edison

For the last several years, I’ve chosen a word for the year.

In 2022, it was ‘practice’, which saw me cooking in a French kitchen and playing around with a novel. This year, ‘vitality’ saw me enter into a daytime season, commit to my sobriety, and run a half-marathon. I’m certain none of these would have happened if they were framed as resolutions. Instead, having a word helped gently guide my decisions and compose the year.

I share more on my process for choosing a word each year for paid subscribers below (subscribe here to access), but for 2024, I’ve landed on the word ‘serious’—somewhat to my surprise. Serious has always seemed a bit, well, serious. But I’ve come to see precisely why it’s important.

To me, the word is less about being taken seriously—we have no control over that—but rather to take the things I care about, and myself, seriously.

There are many things that I care about that are overshadowed by my own self-consciousness, fear, or general fatigue. The result is that I often feel that I’m waiting for my life to begin.

What have I been waiting for? I’d like to say the right timing, the right conditions, the right amount of savings, the right opportunity. But the truth is, I just haven’t taken myself seriously.

Taking things seriously doesn’t mean we must become more productive or successful. Rather, by definition it means to demand careful consideration. We have to listen to ourselves and inhabit our own version of a serious life—that is, we have to remember what it is we care about again and again.

When we inhabit our serious life, we no longer hide, we no longer bemoan, we no longer do things that don’t bring us alive.

There is a scene in the 2021 film Pig that speaks to this.

The protagonist, Rob, a former celebrated chef turned reclusive truffle-forager played by Nicholas Cage, visits an old colleague Derek’s new restaurant.

Rob: What is the…concept here?
Derek: Um, well, uh, we’re interested in taking local ingredients, uh, native to this region and…and just deconstructing them, you know, making the…the familiar feel foreign, thereby giving us, uh, an even greater appreciation of food as a whole.
Rob: This is the kind of cooking you like?
Derek: It’s cutting-edge, it’s very exciting.

Rob: Exciting.
Derek: Uh, I mean, everybody loves it.
Rob: You like cooking it?
Derek: Absolutely.

There’s a trembling insincerity mixed with insecurity in Derek’s voice as he says, “absolutely.”

This is an example of being caught up in the idea of being taken seriously—when we become so attached to what everybody loves, we can compromise ourselves.

Rob goes on to ask Derek whatever happened to the pub that he always used to talk about opening. Stuttering, Derek explains that was such a long time ago, and nobody wants pubs—it would be “a terrible investment.”

Here, Rob points to the illusion of it all.

Rob: They’re not real. You get that, right? None of it is real. The critics aren’t real, the customers aren’t real, because this isn’t real. You aren’t real.

This distils for me the cost of taking the wrong things seriously.

When we strive to be taken seriously, we lose ourselves. We spend so much time fussing about what other people think, what is popular, and what already works that we don’t even see our own desires. They get lost in the tangle of it all—like Derek’s dream of opening a humble pub with a signature dish of liver scotch eggs with honey curry mustard. It can be all too seductive to build a life around what other people want, forgetting that it has no real bearing on what it is that we want.

As Rob’s monologue continues:

Rob: Derek, why do you care about these people? They don’t care about you, none of them. They don’t even know you because you haven’t shown them. Every day you wake up and there’ll be less of you. You live your life for them and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself. We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.

This entire scene has stayed with me, particularly the final line: “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.”

Why, then, is it so easy to dismiss them?

The pub is “a terrible investment.”

No one cares about liver scotch eggs with honey curry mustard.

But the thing is, you care. You might care about volcanoes or an obscure poet, or recycling. Or maybe it’s visual art, activism, or learning the sitar.

Some of those things are not like the others. Some are put on a pedestal; some are deemed trivial. But even in their variances, they share one thing: if we dismiss them, if we live our life for someone else, then we lose ourselves. And how can we take ourselves seriously when we can't even see ourselves?

We squander these precious, worthwhile things, replacing them with substitutes, with empty notions of success, with prestige.

We forget what is truly worthwhile comes from within. As the chef Julia Child said, “The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.”

The thing is, it can be difficult to determine the things we care about because we can cover them up in self-consciousness, fear or even the feeling that we already take ourselves too seriously. As

Heather Havrilesky

Ask Polly

writes:

“Moreover, anxious, depressed, avoidant, neurotic, obsessive, circular thoughts might lead you to believe that you already take yourself and your life way too seriously. But these aren’t the kinds of insights or feelings that ground you in your body and honor your higher purpose on the planet.”

I realise that’s what I’ve been doing. But being anxious about something isn’t the same as taking it seriously. As Havrilesky continues, “What these recursive, evasive, sullen, or problem-fixated thoughts do is put you in an agitated state—either an agitated state of actively ignoring or fleeing from your most profoundly important sensations and desires, or an agitated state of fighting against those feelings directly.”

So how do we stop fleeing from ourselves?

For a long while I’ve tried to hold things lightly. It even appears in my bio. Since landing on this word ‘serious’ I’ve been wondering how it might conflict with my committing to holding things lightly.

But I realise the two are complementary. There are some things we need to hold lightly—our anxiety, uncertainty, expectations—to have the space to take the things we care about seriously. Otherwise, our fear just gets in the way.

The thing about taking things seriously is that it has to stem from an incredible lightness. We start with noticing our insignificance—that we are a speck on a speck on a speck on speck—and in noticing nothing matters, we can see that everything can.

To quote a line from BoJack Horseman:

“It’s funny, isn’t it? The things that matter? The truth is none of it matters and the truth is it all matters tremendously. It’s a wonder any of us ever get out of bed at all. And yet, we get out of bed.”

It’s the same question: what gets you out of bed—what are the things you really care about?

I care about love. I care about connection. I care about aliveness. I care about being real and imperfect, even if that looks inconsistent. I care about self-awareness. I care about creativity. I care about freedom.

All this time, I’ve been self-conscious about pursuing what I really care about in case it seems trivial, not realising that the trivial has likely been there all along.

I want to take the things I care about seriously, even if nobody cares.

I want to take the inner work seriously, and get out of my own way.

I want to take my writing seriously, and trust the work is enough.

I want to take what I want seriously. I want to take delight seriously. I want to take doing the thing that feels good seriously.

It’s not the thing we are taking seriously that counts so much as finally seeing the seriousness in such things.

It might be a pub or it might be a poem, but the point is it’s anything but frivolous if we really care about it; if we take it seriously.

As Leonard Cohen said, “You’ve got to be serious about what you do. And you’ve got to understand the price you pay for frivolity or just for greed.”

So take things seriously, rather than trying so hard to be taken seriously. Inhabit your serious life. Remember, we don’t get many things to really care about.