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In an age of fleeting posts and sparse hobbies there is an all familiar hunger to endure everything, to be everything and to do everything. And while there is nothing sinister per se in ambition for a full life, something has changed in what we ask of ourselves. We have lost the individuality of life and of the self.

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The evidence is in the way we describe ourselves, with a biography now a list: sourdough baker, reader, founder, traveller, amateur pianist, someone who is ‘really into’ HYROX. Each item a small flag planted as a territorial personality indicator, and few last very long. The hobby is taken up, photographed to be announced, and abandoned in roughly that order and roughly the speed it took to start. The abandonment rarely feels like the loss it is, as the next hobby is waiting. The point was never the HYROX, but being a person who has completed one.

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It is not a new ambition to want to try everything, where the Renaissance gave us the uomo universale, the figure who could paint, fortify a city and write a sonnet before supper. But that ideal was built on depth. Leonardo's notebooks, instead of being samples, are decades of obsessive, unglamorous attention to water, to anatomy, to the flight of birds. What we have inherited is the silhouette of the polymath without the patience that made one.

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The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a name for the condition we have drifted into. In his work The Burnout Society, he argues that we have moved from a world of ‘thou shalt not’ to one of ‘yes, you can’. The old disciplinary society was policed by prohibition: the factory, the barracks, the rulebook. Its replacement runs on achievement and positivity, and its most effective overseer is the self. Nobody forbids us from resting. We simply feel that to rest is to fall behind a version of ourselves who didn't. Han's unsettling claim is that we have become both the exploiter and the exploited, and that we experience this as freedom. That is why the hunger feels so ordinary and hard to resist. Nothing external is demanding that we be everything. Social media supplies the comparison, but it wouldn’t exist without us supplying the verdict. Every acquaintance's highlight reel becomes an unlived option, and every unlived option begins to look like a failure of nerve. If it is possible to have done it, then not having done it starts to feel like a choice we got wrong.

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Existentialism taught that we are condemned to define ourselves through our choices, and Sartre meant that as both burden and dignity. But a choice means something because it excludes. To choose one thing is to refuse a thousand others, and the refusal is what gives the choice its weight. The everything self wants the dignity of choosing without the cost of refusing. It keeps every door open and so never walks through one. The result is not a rich life but a thin one, a surface area very large and very shallow.

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Attention is where this shows most clearly. Simone Weil thought of attention as a discipline close to prayer, a kind of patient waiting on the thing in front of you. It cannot be performed at speed, and it cannot be divided indefinitely. To know a thing well, whether a poem, a piece of music, a trade or another person, means staying with it past the point of novelty, into the stretch where it stops flattering you. Most of what is worth having lives on the far side of that boredom. A life organised around avoiding it will never arrive.

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None of this is an argument for narrowness, or for a grim vow to pick one thing and stay loyal to it. People change, and a hobby dropped honestly is not a moral failing. The question is a quieter one, about what our enthusiasms are for. Are they ways of attending to the world, or ways of describing ourselves to it? The first kind grows more interesting the longer you stay with it. The second kind needs constant replenishment, because it was only ever an advertisement.

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It may be that the cure for being lost in the self is a smaller self: one that is willing to be unfinished, to be mediocre at things for the pleasure of them, and to let a few commitments run deep rather than many run wide. There is relief in that and a person who has stopped trying to be everything is free.

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Image credit: Navy Times