obligation vs compulsion

musings on following the muse

Hesiod And The Muse, painted by Eugène Delacroix. Featuring ancient Greek poet, Hesiod (8th century BCE) and the Muse that inspired him to write his poetry

Something I realized recently (today) is that the thing I am most excited for when I wake up in the morning is getting up to write. I move through my morning with an unfamiliar speed and energy, accelerating me towards what I’m doing right now: staring at this screen and watching characters flood each line with the contents of my mind. There’s something romantic—something intimate—about watching my thoughts emerge into something tangible. The contours of my ideas becoming clearer through the delicate touch of my fingers on the keyboard. It’s like I’m getting to know myself again, spending time trying to understand my mind.

This is what we do when we talk to other people: we ask them questions and analyze their answers. And yet, we rarely do it with ourselves. We wait for others to ask us questions, let them analyze us, and then consume their analysis as if it was our own. But why wait for another person to comb through your psyche? There is a whole world for us to discover in our own minds. So, sitting down at this keyboard to sift through mine has been a true joy.

I also feel this distinct sense of compulsion to be doing this work. I’m intentionally calling it compulsion and not obligation. These are two distinctly different forces—like a push vs. a pull. Obligation requires you to push yourself to do the thing: get up from what you actually want to do and do the obligation, instead. Compulsion is a much more natural, somewhat erotic force, where you feel like you must do that thing. The force calls to you in a very personal, almost transcendent way, where it feels like you would be doing yourself a disservice by not listening to its call. 

Who’s call? You might ask.

Answer: the muse.

Compulsion is the muse seducing you. Compulsion is the muse saying: come play, come see what we can create together. The muse is begging you to look at her, spend time with her, get to know her, communicate what she is trying to tell you to the world. Compulsion is the muse, personified.

So: obligation is duty—something you have to do. And compulsion is the muse—something you want to follow.

getting to know my muse

I have only recently started focusing on writing full time, and I was telling my mom how for the first time in my life, I finally understand the classic cliché that the key to happiness is to enjoy the process, not just the destination. Beyond seeing this pasted over classic stock images and hung up in half of the college dorm rooms I ever walked into, this phrase never really stuck for me. I mean, I intellectually understood it, of course. Enjoy what you’re doing, not just the result. Seems simple enough. But I didn’t experientially or emotionally understand it until recently. I would try to brute-force-apply this principle to my life. I would try to make my duties seductive, enjoyable, amusing. I would try to convince myself that my duties were the call of the muse when they were clearly not. I was trying to enjoy a process I didn’t actually enjoy, trying to trick myself into getting to the destination. Like: lighting a candle and buying myself a snack for the library so I’d “enjoy” studying when the material was mind-numbing. Like: attaching little dopamine hits by completing small tasks on the way to the final product of something at school or work to massage enjoyment into the process.

Of course, none of this worked. You can’t feign the call of the muse. It’s like trying to convince yourself you are interested in someone you simply aren’t into. No matter how badly you want to feel attracted to that person, the pull is either there, or it isn’t. You can’t manufacture compulsion. So, these efforts were all just some sort of intellectualization of the quote—some Type A-esque urge to make a process enjoyable, when it simply wasn’t.

But now that I am actually enjoying the process, I realize what people mean when they say that the most successful people in any field are those that find joy in the journey, not just the destination. The outliers are the people that would be reading about, thinking about, working on the thing that is their profession, whether anyone was asking them to or not.

I have always believed that it’s nearly impossible to win against someone who genuinely enjoys their craft if you don’t, but I’ve only just understood why. Because brute-force-doing-something is a dutiful response. An obligation. I have to wake up to go to work. I have to get this done. I have to work out. I have to read this. I have to go to training. Replacing “have to” with “want to” (not by doing Mad Libs in your brain, but by actually replacing the feeling) is a shift so powerful you can hardly stop the force it generates. A genuine “want to”—a compulsion—is like a magnetic force that is pulling you towards something. It takes active effort to resist it. Whereas a “have to”—an obligation—requires you to take yourself away from a pull you feel to something else, and begrudgingly do the thing you have to do.

A compulsion makes you feel uncomfortable until you listen to it, until you follow the muse. It’s not a discomfort of guilt or obligation, but the discomfort of trying to contain something that is bursting at the seams of your psyche, trying to get out into the world. The muse torments you until you follow it.

The forces of obligation and compulsion are like night and day. You can easily tell—if you look closely—who is driven by one vs. the other. This distinction is clear in others because we can recognize the same one in ourselves: we know how we relate differently to things that captivate us vs. things we do because we need to get them done. One is done with excitement, glee—love, even—and the other is done with a dull urgency that cannot be mistaken for sincere compulsion.

Everyone I am inspired by is someone whose work stems from a place of compulsion. A place of: I can’t rest until I bring this thing into the world, until I listen to my muse, until I follow this powerful compulsion. I am most inspired by people who do the thing that they are best at and enjoy doing. The thing that only they can do. I’m inspired by people who do something so important to them that they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they didn’t do it. Conversely, people that rub me the wrong way are those who operate their lives from a place of obligation. From a place of “I need to, because I should”. “Should” doesn’t move mountains. Compulsion does. 

So, for the first time in my life, I’m doing something where the process of doing it excites me more than anything else I could possibly be doing. I genuinely want to be sitting here and writing about art, creativity, the muse, duty, obligation, and talking to you! The reader! I want to be talking to you more than anyone else in the world right now. And fuck, that just feels awesome.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop listening to finance and investing jargon swimming in the air behind me between two men on a coffee break, pretending to be interested in each other’s personal lives, while they try and schmooze up the hierarchies they are operating in (one just said to the other: that job is yours if you want it… if you work hard and ask for it, that job is yours.) And there is this sense of ease within me, stemming from knowing that I don’t care about the social-professional gymnastics they are performing on each other. I can just sit here and stare at my screen and focus on getting words on the page. I can indulge myself in this process that I enjoy more than anything else: writing. Watching my thoughts twist and twirl into different permutations until they please me. Listening to the muse, staring at her, drawing her out with my words. 

It is euphoric to exist in this process. And because it’s such a joy to exist in this process, the outcome will hopefully turn out to be decent, as well. But it’s not the desire to generate a good piece of writing that motivates me. It’s the pride I take in making the final product beautiful, so you can see the ideas as clearly as I do. It is the joy of creating the art itself that keeps me staring at this blinking cursor. A desire to show you, the reader, what I see, in high definition. Without pixelation or confusion. I want to show you what the muse shows me. I want to show you what I see in my mind.

And I can only do that if I enjoy the process—if sitting here and throwing words on this page is more enticing to me than anything else. Because it is when the work itself is more seductive than the rest of the world that one-of-a-kind work gets done.

In short: greatness comes when you do what only you can do. When you follow a pull so strong that everything else feels like a waste of your time. Greatness comes when you follow your muse. Because behind the muse lies the destination, and that is why the cliché is so true. It’s the process of following the muse that makes the journey so enjoyable.