The other day I was listening to a podcast of Ideas from CBC. The speaker they had on was talking about personal worth. According to him the current globalization of the world is leading to a worse state of personal worth. Apparently, so he says, in the past our worth was materially based, and so if we wanted to be worth more to our community, theoretically we could work harder and make ourselves better. However, now we’re moving towards a celebrity culture. We all want to be stars, but we all can’t be stars and for most of us no matter how hard we work, we never will be stars, and this is a bigger hurt to us than what people have experienced before (with feudalism and plagues and abject poverty.)

I was recently reading Robertson Davies’ “The Cunning Man” and he was talking about a character who was quite skilled at her art – but not so skilled as to be “talented.” He called this characters’ doomed life constantly striving for recognition even though she would never get it as “a special kind of hell.”

I’m not sure I agree with either of these assesments of human limitation, but I do agree that the pleasure is not in the striving, it is in the hoping. Where there is striving with no hope, there is just pain.