You can just do... many things

Polypragmosyne and making more decisions

I don’t remember when I first encountered the now infamous phrase, “You can just do things.” but I do remember the way everyone used it nonstop as a kind of epigraph after an achievement or as a passepartout for any possible problem that didn’t have an immediately obvious solution.

It is great advice, or rather, an advice wrapper that hides a simple yet impractical observation. On the one hand, YCJDT acts like a universal permission giver to those who, for reasons unknown other than the cultural hegemony of consensus uber alles and meekness, require permission to live their lives or more specifically, fulfill the innate desire of the organism. But on the other hand, the phrase begs the question.

It assumes that everyone knows what’s in the black box that is your mind, and so it implies that what’s missing is the casual realization that hey, you can just do things, you know?

Semper Agentes (Busybees)

The words polypragmosyne and apragmosyne denote the two different types of man; the man always doing things and the man doing nothing. An obvious observation from Victor Ehrenberg is that the Greeks had no word for someone in between. That highlights something important about the individual’s psychology; there’s indeed praxis, action, but in the same way there’s justice one can be either just or unjust. It’s a quality bestowed by one’s character rather than stemming from the conditions of their life or situational happenstance that will make one appear as such.

The current translation of the word polypragmon is truly abhorrent. It instills a prosaic, trifle meaning to the word, very much antithetical to the original, but with great care to describe the Anglosphere’s attitude toward the world and their next-door neighbor: meddlesomeness.

No, I’ll continue using the real meaning because I think it’s the closest thing to the origins of the phrase in question. And for that reason, it gives us insight as to why repeating said phrase like a mantra will only strengthen the quality of effortful action.

See, when they say you can just do things, usually they mean you can do this one thing. That’s how the the semantic is structured: I did this difficult task, you can just do things.

There’s a ghost note that echoes silently, but the message is clear; I don’t usually do things but I did that thing with great effort, overcoming my usual nature and surprising even myself. But like we’ve established, this doesn’t make you polypragmon. Your action is still attached to external circumstances that might or might not stir your desire with enough force to propel you toward a momentary, ecstatic self-overcoming.

But the quality of polypragmosyne permeates your entire being; if you want to do this one thing, you have to do many things. More than that, you need to become the man who does things all the time. Nietzsche talks about Achille’s or Hector’s “action” as if the action of Hector was Hector himself, completely swallowed by his nature, having no other choice but to insist upon himself. In the case of Odysseus, his nature is polypragmon and polytropos. It takes no effort for Odysseus to be Odysseus.

You can indeed just do things but it means you’re an apragmon that happens, on occasion, under the right conditions, to do things. There’s an enormous difference between these two states.

The mechanism behind the YCJDT is advertised to be conspicuous and automatic as if you’re perfectly omnipotent of your unconscious and its influence on your mind. However, you’re constantly tasked to pull the thread out of the tapestry of chaos and weave a kind of order and then call that which remains in front of you reality. This reality is but an accumulation of choices that might appear random, giving rise to the sense that you could’ve done anything. Hence, the following:

Instead of just doing things, it’s more important to do more and many things. To do many things you need to make more decisions, to make more decisions you need to find what you value (and what you value depends on who you are).

The middle part is the lever. I propose that “make more decisions” should replace the “you can just do things” because it contains an active ingredient that needs to be ingested.

Making more decisions turns you into a man who does more things, a variety of things, simply by the nature of his being. Making more decisions also makes you lucky since you’re exposing yourself to a larger volume of opportunities. Making more decisions makes you energetic because your qi flows smoothly up your spine and through the Mingmen point, the gates of destiny, of power and vitality.

Believe or don’t believe the last part, keep in mind that there’s a transcendental effect, a divine gift from a higher part of you, that can only be accessed when you place faith in your ability to navigate reality on the level of moment-by-moment passing of time. All decisions strengthen your willpower by shedding away habitual reactions that possess your nature and dictate, unconsciously, how you allot your existence.

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My grandfather traveled, worked, trained, and studied until he was 92 years old. He never took drugs. He was always asked what did he eat, how did he manage stress, what kind of lifestyle he led. Every time, he’d give a different answer, more absurd than the previous one.

He confessed to me that throughout his life he was held by an unknowable, terrifying desire to “see things through”. To become committed to what’s in front of him, to worship what he was at any given time, like it was his duty to do so. Not to merely hitch his cart behind a horse but to grab the reins and gallop until the horse collapsed. This intensity was silent, a mystery even to himself because it required no awareness to notice, and so it possessed him like a private, intimate God.

The bottomless pit of energy he had access to gave structure to his entire life, until he was spent and satisfied.