Down to Earth Syndrome

Image from Perseverance rover (NASA)

How to accommodate acceptance and ambition? At 43, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady has 7 Super Bowl victories and is primed to go for 8. You’ve seen them, the achievers who are never satiated. Once you’ve climbed Everest the only thing you can do is to Free Solo or sign up for Virgin Galactica. Naturally outer space has limitless possibilities for the striver. In l969 Neil Armstrong famously stepped on the moon. Now it's not out of the realm of possibility that a human being could land on Mars and simply put his keys in his car aka rover. Only mortality constrains the aspirational mind. Can you be a person who's happy with what you have and still desire more? It’s a basically oxymoronic idea. You can’t appreciate when you're consumed by the gnawing ache at having somehow having missed out or failed. One of the axioms of the romantic sensibility is that what doesn’t exist or has yet to be always lords it over that which is plainly visible to the eyes. Romantics may be great lovers, but they don’t possess the stuff of normalcy. Routinized everyday relationships, lacking in the thrill of conquest, are paradoxically the mountain they have to climb. It takes a certain investor discipline to sell GameStop when it's crowd sourcing to ever greater prices. On the other hand, if you become content and overly complacent, you run the risk of becoming so small-minded and miserly that you end up losing everything. You may have noticed that the majority of so-called “down to earth” people are not rocket scientists.