The Cost of Apathy

Author

McCall Moore
August 21, 2024

Hand Drawn (and Hiked) by McCall

Mornin! I’m one month out from hiking Longs Peak and well into the throes of training. I’m feeling excited, nervous, anxious, eager, and all the beautiful emotions you feel before doing something you really, really care about.

None of the training hikes I’m doing have any considerable exposure or technical terrain, they’re just some nice, long hikes that are about the same distance and vert that Longs is. All we need is good weather and a good attitude (ie: slow and steady wins the race) so we don’t twist any ankles.

Coming up on such an exciting goal, I’ve been thinking a ton about goals lately and why I think they’re so crucial to living a meaningful life. Caveat: meaningful is the most subjective term ever — what gives my life meaning isn’t by any stretch of the imagination what I think everyone needs to feel fulfilled.

See you at the bottom!

Backcountry Chronicles

Sunrise over Mt. Blue Sky & Mt. Spalding

Last week, I read The In-Between — a book all about the unexplainable final moments of life that a hospice nurse witnessed throughout her career (cannot recommend it enough). A few days after I picked up the book, I was talking to a friend about hiking and she said “I feel like you’ve faced mortality so head on.”

Which, candidly, was something I’d never thought about. Between backcountry skiing, strenuous hikes, and climbing with serious exposure, the risk of injury or death is omnipresent while we do those things — whether we let ourselves think about it or not. Of course, you don’t set out to get injured or injure someone else, but accepting that possibility involves a level of bravery I’d never acknowledged before that conversation.

More than anything, that bravery adds a level of substance to your life that wouldn’t be there otherwise. When I wake up at 3AM to go on a difficult hike, suffer for 8+ hours on the uphill and (sometimes worse) downhill, just to be able to say I climbed a specific rock, I’m putting energy and effort into my life. And there’s a special kind of energy and effort that goes into something you suffer over.

It’s like the old saying “you can’t have the 10’s without the 1’s”. When you face adversity, whether it be in the physical or emotional sense, that suffering makes the joy afterwards that much better. The 10 feels so much sweeter because you let yourself feel the full difficulty of the 1.

Conveniently, one of my favorite Substack writers popped into my inbox last week with a piece about the opportunity cost of everything. Rather than summing up his writing in my own words, here’s out a quick bit of the piece:

We don't waste time by making the wrong decisions. We waste time by falling victim to routine and not making any decisions. We see this happen two ways: Apathy and Hustle.

The Cost of Apathy

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Wake up at 7:30. Roll out of bed, log on your computer at 8:00. Sit around in your sweatpants, make some coffee. Work for thirty minutes, then mindlessly scroll through social media. Maybe you eat some leftovers for lunch. Maybe you pick something up. Back to the computer til five. Then you hit the gym. Come home and shower. Watch football/The Bachelor/Game of Thrones/whatever. Then you make dinner and go to sleep, because it was a long day!

And then you do that over and over and over and over again.

That was my life for a year or so. It has been many of your lives too. And it's easy to fall into this trap of passive routine. You're doing your job, after all. You're doing what you are supposed to do. So you continue to coast on autopilot. Day after day. How many of those dots can you color in with weeks like that? 20? 50? 100? There's no telling.

That's the danger of an apathetic life, life will pass you by before you realize it.

Imagine getting $10,000 every Sunday, but you can't bring any of the money with you to the next week. Surely you wouldn't waste it, right? You would spend every last cent on whatever you want.

Yet we get 10,080 minutes every week. How do you spend those?

The Cost of Hustle

You had a 4.0 in college and landed a great job out of school. You got accepted to a top MBA program. Your goal is to follow the American Dream: Resume filler job that pays well in your early 20s, top MBA, consulting/IB for two years in your mid-late 20s, pivot to private equity around 30, make as much money as possible. The road map to success.

The roadmap to success is like a weird game of Corporate Candy Land.

I was on the road map to success for a while. The problem was that I never asked myself if I liked playing this game in the first place.

I mean yeah, I would have a made a lot of money playing this game. Hell, I probably could have won the game. But was this a game worth winning?

Here's how this game would have gone: Post-MBA, I would have made a ton of money working 90 hours a week for an investment bank/consulting firm. It's not like I would have any time to actually spend that money. But if I did the tedious tasks long enough, I would get promoted to a position where I would work slightly less hours, doing slightly less tedious stuff, and make more money.

Sure, I probably still wouldn't enjoy the work. But I never cared about enjoyment, fulfillment, or any other irrelevant metric, because those weren't the objectives of the game.

Money. Power. Prestige.

Those were the objectives. I just wanted to win the game. Opportunity cost be damned.

Yeah, I might be miserable. But at least I'd be rich. And people would know it.

Hustle and apathy are two sides of the same coin.

You are either too disinterested to pursue what you want out of life, or too vain to realize you are pursuing short-lived things.

And the opportunity cost of both? Your life.

The thing about life is that you don't get a do over. You don't get to go back. You don't get to reach the mountain top, realize that you can't hold on to those fleeting feelings of success, and try to reset your life. Because those dots in your calendar can't be erased.

Does that one hit? It did for me — and it describes in way more eloquent terms why one of the things I’m most proud of in my life is how many hobbies I have. If that sounds silly, let me rephrase: how many things there are in my life that make me excited to live my life. 

I feel objectively better and more excited about my life when I have a goal. And using those goals as markers for growth over time is one of my favorite ways to measure my life.

For example, here’s some goals I had for myself in 2019 when I lived in New York (paraphrasing from an old journal):

  • Find a cool apartment somewhere below 14th St. that isn’t in FiDi

  • Get promoted at my ad sales job (a job that I legitimately hated)

  • Add more black to my wardrobe

  • Do more workout classes to be skinner (YIKES!)

And here’s some of my goals from 2024 so far:

  • Get my AIARE1

  • Ski 50 days

  • Go skinning before work 2 times a week

  • Draw my next collection for an art gallery

  • Get invited to sell art at another Farmers Market

  • Get more comfortable skiing moguls

  • Hike Longs Peak

  • Hike 3 14ers in one weekend and 5 total this summer

Notice a pattern? Back in 2019, all of my goals had to do with status and physical appearance — and so far this year they’ve all been related to creativity and physical ability. Sure, there’s something to be said about being older and wiser; 24 year old McCall was doing the best she could with the half-cooked brain she was working with.

More than anything else, over the last few years I’ve seen people I love get sick and people I love pass away. 100% of the time, the reason I pursue my hobbies and goals is because I believe that if you’re lucky enough to have a healthy body, you should use it.

Beginnings of a sunrise at Mt. Blue Sky.

Take, for example, the adventure I went on last Sunday. I woke up at 3:20AM, picked up my friend at 4AM, and was at the trailhead for Mt. Blue Sky by 5:15AM. We started hiking just after 5:30, only to get about an hour and a half in and realize the clouds above us looked a lot like storm clouds (despite the clear forecast). We called it, turned around, and made it back to the car in about 45 minutes. Was I bummed to not summit? Sure, kind of, but regardless of the outcome, it was still a far better morning than if I’d slept in and not gone hiking at all.

I saw an insane sunrise, pushed my body, breathed in fresh air at 13,000+ feet, climbed 1,000+ feet of elevation gain, got my heart pumping, and had some beautiful conversations with a friend. All before 8AM!

As I was wrapping up this post, I saw a former coworker of mine post on Twitter about experiences that took their breath away or left them in awe. Their examples were: swimming with great white shakes, seeing the Duomo, and touching the Western Wall.

Of course, it got me thinking about my own awestruck experiences and I was so happy at how simple so many of them were. I’ll spare you the list, but it was essentially any time I’ve seen a sunrise from 10,000+ feet elevation. There’s truly nothing in this world like a high alpine sunrise (and they’re probably so much better because you have to work for them).

I tried to come up with a nice ending for this, but I think the ending to the article I quoted earlier sums it all up perfectly:

The point of life is to live, and living isn’t a spectator sport.

Living means taking risks, pursuing your interests, embarrassing yourself, attempting difficult things, setting ambitious goals, trying, failing, and trying again. Living means pushing your mind and body to their limits, just to see what you’re capable of. Living means fighting back against the inertial forces that draw all of us toward the apathetic life. Living means being the protagonist of your own story, not a passenger whose outcomes are at the mercy of their environment.

- Jack Raines, Young Money

Artiste Break

Not my drawing, but one I love nonetheless.

To Go Snacks

🏅 Looking for art to commemorate the 2024 Olympics? I stumbled upon this designer from Toronto who’s churning out prints and they’re all absolute bangers.

📚 One of my favorite authors, Florence Given, is writing another book: Women Living Deliciously (!!!) Florence wrote Women Don’t Owe You Pretty back in 2020, a book that rocked my 25-year-old-brain in the best way possible. Fun fact: Florence also illustrates all of her books herself which is just about the coolest thing ever.

🎧 If you’ve been on the internet in one way, shape, or form for the last few years, odds are you’ve heard of Drew Afualo. Drew shamelessly calls out misogyny on her TikTok and took to Rainn Wilson’s podcast, Soul Boom, to talk more about it. Give it a listen. Drew’s unapologetic approach to feminism is a breath of fresh air.

🎨 I just really love this print.

See you in September!

- McCall 🌻

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