The Crazy Diamond Shines No More

Like a lot of men my age, I've always liked Pink Floyd. I like the psychedelic tone, the bizarre lyrics sometimes revealing deep meaning or tortured insights into the human condition, as well as the melodious, varied textures of the music. Most of the music's appeal comes from late addition and now lead man David Gilmour. But the tortured, deep lyrics (as well as a lot of the nonsensical ones) came from Syd Barrett. And Syd Barrett died recently. This got me thinking some morbid thoughts, motivated in part by having a funeral to attend tomorrow.

Syd Barrett was the epitome of the artist tortured by unseen demons who did not have to be there. Pink Floyd at its peak was a popular, profitable, and critically-acclaimed band. After its first few big hits, it was clearly destined for its place in the pantheon of pop music -- maybe not as big as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but on the same scale as its contemporaries the Who or Led Zeppelin. Yet Barrett simply could not handle all the success. He withdrew from the limelight, eschewed the rock-n-roll lifestyle, did lots of drugs, and engaged in a wide variety of bizarre, self-indulgent behavior like shaving off his eyebrows. (This, in turn, inspired one of the more visually arresting images from Pink Floyd's The Wall.)

One of the attorneys at the firm mentioned this problem a few days ago: "How much success can you handle? When you have too much, you'll start destroying yourself so you don't have it anymore." The Wife also mentioned recently that a lot of people don't want to have money and success, and that they do things to prevent themselves from having that kind of life. Syd Barrett was obviously like that. I don't know if that's a Freudian way of looking at the human psyche or a Jungian one -- but it is a school of thought so pervasive as to constitute the conventional wisdom.

This got me thinking about myself -- I've tried to have success in my life, but I don't seem to have it yet. In the context of my own career, I'm no Syd Barrett, but then again, I haven't exactly become David Gilmour, either. I've not done badly, but I've had some big stumbles, too. I don't begrudge any of my peers their success, but it feels like a lot of success has passed me by. I could have bought real estate a long time ago and rode the bubble up to present-day market values; that opportunity has passed me by because I made different choices. Many of my professional ventures didn't work out as well as I would have liked, like starting my own firm and relocating to a more affordable part of the country.

Don't get me wrong, Loyal Readers. I've much to be grateful for and I know it. Like I said, I'm not a Syd Barrett, turning into a recluse in the face of plenty. But if it's true that people create their own realities, if it's true that we all eventually become what we want to be, then am I now what it is that I unconsciously wish to be? That is an uncomfortable thought and it feels sort of defeatist. Why haven't my previous paths led me to the places I consciously wanted to go? What will happen with the new path I'm on now? I want to do more than tread water the rest of my professional life. At least, I think that's what I want.

The cruel twist on the Protestant work ethic that "some people just don't want success so they sabotage themselves" is so pervasive in contemporary thought that people react emotionally when that notion is questioned. I wonder, though. Maybe people think this about the world because the idea that success and failure is really just random, or powered by forces so large and chaotic that they may as well be random, is too unacceptably terrifying to contemplate seriously. Maybe Syd Barrett came to the conclusion that it really was all chance and chaos instead of choice and creation, and rather than risk a catastrophic fall through the vicissitudes of random happenstance, he chose to opt out and at least keep some measure of self-control over his own fate.

We'll never know now, other than what clues we can glean from the oft-confusing lyrics to the music he wrote in the sixties and seventies. I'm not a believer in the afterlife and I don't think if there was one, Syd Barrett would be in a happier place. Rather, I think we can ask ourselves whether he wound up the way he did because of chance or choice. The question has real implications, most of them unpleasant.

If you are successful because of choices you have made, then how do you know if you're going to reach a point where, like Syd Barrett, you suffer from an irresistible impulse to destroy everything you've created? If you are unsuccessful because of choices you have made, particularly at an unconscious level, what can you possibly do to change those choices in the future? And if your success or lack thereof is the result of factors beyond your control which are effectively random, what can you really do to change, control, or even guide your fate?

What's important here is to come up with the honest answer, and not the one that simply feels good.