Defining Yourself

The  March 28 issue of Newsweek includes an article by one Roz Savage about how divorcing her husband and quitting her job to row across the ocean transformed her life of mundane existence into a life of meaning and value. I was amazed. It was all I could do to keep my jaw from hitting the floor. I have read some incredibly shallow and self-centered things in my life but this has to be near the top of the list for the 'most self-centered' award.

I hope there is more to her story than meets the eye in this one page article. Her brief recounting of how she graduated from Oxford, became an investment banker, got married, and found herself in a meaningless existence is not by itself surprising. I have a low view of the investment banking community anyway. Careers that have more value to the world than that are plentiful, so she could easily have changed career path to something more useful. What the issues were in her marriage are not stated, but she barely mentions the marriage as if it were little more than a trifle. She seems to indicate that the only reason she wanted out of the marriage was to avoid the risk of being defined as a wife. One has to wonder why she married in the first place. She clearly was making lots of life decisions without much reason for any of them.

What amazed me most, though, was that she viewed rowing across the ocean as a more valuable investment of her life than things like marriage and contributing to society. What she wanted was a life 'filled with spectacular successes and failures' and to define herself by whatever was left when she got rid of anything else that might be connected to her, things like a job and a husband. She clearly sees the ultimate value in life to be defining herself; never let her be defined by something outside herself, like maybe her Creator. God forbid. So having now found found her true self, she 'thanks her lucky stars' since she would certainly never be caught thanking God.

How strange. I hope she lives through her 'spectacular failures' long enough to understand how truly impoverished her self-defined values really are.