Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Thing of the Good Life – The Marginalian

We live in a bipolar era – on the one hand, the suspicious finger of canceling culture and the other with politics; on the other, the zeal to appoint people, real people with real human lives, as national saints who were expected to give us endless comfort, inspiration, and encouragement. Both cages demean the person incarcerated, ignoring the diversity of their personality, the complexity of their human experience. All the while, our cultural myths of success bring a happy life out of the crosshairs of success.

Of all the problems that require our constant vigilance and courage, these three—ambition, suspicion, and worship—threaten modern life the most, because insidiously, more than anything else combined.

I've never heard anyone talk about their performance more clearly and harmlessly than chef and author Samin Nosrat in his interview Yo-Yo & Friends: In Conversation About Creative Living.

“Who works best is not always understood,” wrote Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz. With his smile of the sea and the burning of the sun, Samin has been serving food for twenty years – he has served millions, a model of conscientious objection in the war of criticism that destroys the spirit of modernity. He also faced the struggle, the surprise, of being considered a “bringer of joy,” who is expected to play that role while going through a difficult inner darkness, the tension between wanting to be helpful but also needing the freedom to experience grief itself—not the effective suffering and trauma of the competition that is rewarded in our time, but what is wanted inside, secret, and does not show anything of the soul and pain.

In trying to find a way to “be true and be true, and share the beauty with others,” Samin found himself pondering how he came to be the way he is:

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been so much grief and sorrow and loss in my life, right from the start. I have had to resolutely base myself, almost as a means of survival, on beauty and happiness, on love and friendship and nature and beauty, in order to succeed. And that's what I want to put out into the world.

And yet he found himself drained of happiness, puzzled as to how this could be possible considering how much he had worked in his life:

What happened was that I spent my life in pursuit of the good, with the mistaken belief (perhaps unconsciously) that if I achieve the right combination of things, that will make me feel good, make me happy, and make my parents proud of me. And then, somehow, I achieved all the things I set out to do – and more – and it drained the life out of me… There was emptiness inside me – I did all these things, I held up my end of the bargain, and it didn't work. Now what…

I just had to sit and be in that pain.

Burnout is often our best catalyst for change. But for Samin, that pain collided with another, bigger and more powerful, until the two met in a revelation that changed his life. Just as he crouched there in the darkness of the burn, his father suffered a severe brain injury. As he was dying, they had difficult conversations they had never faced before. He shows:

Above all, seeing him die in that way made me face my death directly and made me feel clear that time is very precious and that the way I used to look at life… And I realized, oh no, no, no – there is no making money: You have to use it as you go.

Echoing Annie Dillard's sentiment that “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” she adds:

That redirected me to this idea that every day is my life… Every little decision I make — that's what I do. And I have to be happy… And, in fact, all kinds of boring and low parts of my life, where, if I just make small shifts, I can have a good life.

Couple this piece of Yo-Yo & Friends – which includes five more interviews about the creative life (including one with me) – with the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers on the three elements of a happy life, and we revisit Mario Benedetti's “Happiness Defense”.