I’ll go on about the same dilemma (it starts here): process or result — and to begin with, I’ll test my own conclusion for strength. There you are sitting on the toilet: what’s more important, the process or the result? A counterexample if there ever was one. And it happens the other way around too: you’re on vacation — what result can there even be, besides going back to work. Basically I mean that often you can mark, quite unambiguously, whether process or result prevails. But those were trivial examples I gave above; people rarely stumble over them.
In practice the examples are harder, say work. You’ve been at the same job for 10 years: what do you like — the salary (the result), or the tasks you solve (the process)? Well, clearly it depends a lot on who’s asking, but suppose you’re asking yourself. Answered? I’ll venture that you had one more option: fear of losing the job, even though you like neither the tasks nor the salary. Yes, that’s how it is — so why are you doing all this, why are you spending your life on all of it? Remember, when you were little, what you dreamed of; they hadn’t yet had time to spoil and refine you, hadn’t yet had time to fit you as cogs into a mechanism built by others.
The education system, piled high with plans and standards, erases the differences between pupils, killing individuality; the media reformats little personalities, turning them into cogs that produce and consume. How much does a person need? Five loaves and two fish, that’s all — but no, you also need the neighbor to have only four loaves! Culture is built to hold up the wrong people as examples. Seemingly, what’s so bad about Schwarzenegger being a positive action-movie hero? The problem is that uncle Vasya from the next stairwell doesn’t look like Schwarzenegger, and he, by the way, working all his life, doing physical labor at a low-paid job, raised three children. He’s the hero, and he doesn’t need the muscles. But is it profitable to lift a Vasya like that to the top? Probably not.
Pessimism again, somehow. Offer an alternative then, you’ll say — and there isn’t one, no alternative. But there is an understanding of all this, a deep understanding of human nature, of the circulation of labor with all the hobbies, jobs, KPI, confidence in tomorrow, willpower and little pleasures which of course are deserved, and if undeserved, then condemned. Hey, where are you, Adam?
Adam is all of us: it’s us being called, and we’re hiding, just like that first one, in the garden. So then, we’d better start reflecting on where we are, why we do what we do — and maybe we aren’t doing what we want, not what we dreamed of? It’s never too late to start that kind of reflection; we just mustn’t be afraid that it might turn out the path that brought us to this point is not at all what we want. That’s the scariest part, but a necessary one if we want to understand what we’re doing, to understand which process we’re in. Often the process yields a result that is commonly accepted and “good,” “right,” but in fact it isn’t: in fact we’re serving our complexes, which make us take the dominance of the commonly accepted for what we desire.
So it comes out just like with that job from the beginning: you don’t like the process, and the result — in fact — you don’t even want. Well, tell me, who in their right mind would get plastic surgery? Why? So there would be more likes than the other young lady whose nose from nature happens to fit the beauty standards better? Better to think: where do such complexes come from? But that’s more about the result; now suppose the result is justified, but you don’t like the process — then what?
Say the result is to lose weight. Not in order to please and collect likes, or to be better than… But simply because extra weight harms health, which is quite justified. But you don’t like the process of dieting. Diet or not? The choice is yours, of course, but I wouldn’t, because that result isn’t worth tormenting yourself. But if you like, say, lifting weights, like running, like cooking tasty and wholesome things — then do that, and as a bonus you’ll get the result. And over time hobbies may change, and you’ll stop eating well and put the weight back on; well, there’s nothing terrible in that either. What’s terrible is when people suffer on a diet, wreck their health with pills and then gain the weight back: that way there’s neither process nor result, only indulging your complexes.
In the Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo has a famous line: “The way of the samurai is found in death.” Sounds grim, but its essence lies elsewhere: service is valuable in itself, with no regard for the fruit. Let me put it more plainly still: a samurai has no goal, only a path.