The world is your oyster. But…
A surprising and timely reminder
Hey folks
When I say, “the world is your oyster,” what do you think about and how do you feel?
Do you think of the great open road and all of the possibilities that lay in front of you? Are you spurred on? Emboldened? Does your mind turn to long-distance adventures in the great tropical rainforest cities of Southeast Asia, or the sleepy sheep-studded hills of Scotland or Patagonia? Perhaps you think of your hobbies, your passions, your work, or your intellectual pursuits taking you deep into the melting pots of culture, along the corridors of power, through the canons of art and science, and into history books and family legends. Or, do you think of choosing to spend the whole day by yourself, by the river towpath or on the supermarket aisle, on a train or in your car? Do you think about the sea or the sky? Or sand or space or snow? Do you hear the voice of your mother, or that teacher who was always so nice, or that character you love in that film or that book, patting your arm and building you up?
I'm trying to give you a whole bunch of varied and evocative images in order to make you feel as expansive and free as possible. I really want to make you connect with that proverb as emotionally as you can.
But only so I can surprise you all the more with the revelation that it's only half the story. Because, it turns out that the full and untrimmed phrase, which comes from Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, goes, “The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open,” which basically means that whilst there is unprecedented freedom and opportunity out there, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. We'll need to pack some steel. And we'll need to pry open with callused fingers many a sea-dwelling mollusk if we're really going to carpe that diem. So don't get it twisted.
When you think about the full phrase, it makes more sense why Shakespeare chose the oyster as his metaphor. He wanted something that held mystery but was tricky to contend with. An object that contained something special, filled with potential, but was also slippery and stubborn and made you work hard to gain its prize. Now I finally understand why Transport for London named their travel card after it. Yes, of course, you can whiz from Greenwich all the way to Notting Hill. But you'll have to pay through the nose for it, and contend with overcrowding, gum on seats, delays, and increasing numbers of sods playing loud music on their phones.
Shakespeare was making his wisdom explicit: that the things worth having require hard work. Nobody needs to write any more about that; it's self-evident in everything from our health to our careers and our relationships. But what I find most interesting is the disappearance of that all-important second clause. Normally, it's the bad news and the warnings and the horror stories that travel the furthest and stick around the longest. And I would have expected Shakespeare's original phrase to have stood resolutely through the tests of time. But that hasn't been the case. Somewhere along the line, we opted for the amputated, less conclusive version. And now we go around telling each other that the world is ours for the taking.
I worry about that. I worry about comfort and luxury and ease and convenience. I'm scared that it's going to make me a lazier, less courageous, less ambitious, more depressed person. I once heard that, in a very general sense, therapists have a choice to make about the clients they will work with: they have to decide whether they'll treat poor clients or rich clients, and the number one problem rich clients bring to them is, “How can I make my children more ambitious?”—the implication being that richness breeds comfort and comfort breeds laziness. Or maybe it's even more pernicious than that. Maybe comfort breeds a lack of identity or a lack of purpose. And it’s that which ultimately causes listlessness, lethargy and indolence.
In any case, it scares the living shit out of me. So, when I came across the oyster phrase—when I saw that we’d conveniently shortened it and trimmed off the hard work part—I felt it was a sign of something worrying in our culture: that we're all getting too soft; that progress has made the world too easy, too comfy, too convenient; that choice has ballooned and become an expectation.
You can afford to eat out every single night if you want. The problem is no longer when to go out but where. You couldn't possibly try every restaurant in London, Paris or New York. And the normalisation of having dinner out has diluted its original novelty.
You can now afford to travel widely too. And transport infrastructure and interactive crowdsourced maps make it easier than ever. Again, it's no longer a question of when to go—not a question of when you can save up or when you can get time off—it's just a question of where. And how. And why, to go.
Choice starts as an aspiration but ends as a curse. And all the while, the obstacles, the friction, the delayed gratification—all of the qualities that elicit resourcefulness and perseverance and lead to skill, competence, confidence and self-esteem—start to be viewed mistakenly as problems instead of the invitations and blessings that they really are.
And don't even get me started on the swipe-fuelled dating apps. Or YouTube’s freedom-flooded search bar and Auto-play. Or the bottomlessness of Instagram. Or refreshable Pinterest feeds.
Don't mention the bifurcating school curriculums. Or the ceaseless specialisation of our faiths, philosophies, institutions, and job functions.
Spare me the variegating gender pronouns, relentless life-coaching mantras, self-help ideologies, and the pro-this and pro-that policy proliferation.
Turn off the TV so I don't have to look into the eyes of the Medusa-like streaming services, and lose any more precious hours trawling through lightless tunnels of look-alike thumbnails that all promise three-, four- or five-star-rated productions with any actor you like, pitched as either Sci-fi, Spy Action, Stand Up and/or Satire.
Even exercise, even good old-fashioned running or jogging or whatever locomotive activity gets your blood pumping, even that is no longer safe from the spectre of choice, mediated as it is by the quantified self movement, and instrumentalised by cynical profiteers and well-meaning FitTech founders alike, who seek to deliver us from ignorance and infirmity by furnishing us with an ever burgeoning suite of tools and tactics for measuring, tracking, sharing, and competing (even if it's only competing with ourselves) over blood pressure, step summation, strides, squats, stumbles, and sit-to-stand ratios.
“The world is your oyster” sure as hell feels like an adage for the ages, the rallying cry of the indulgence generation. But I'm as scared of wealth as I am of poverty—of time wealth, economic wealth, freedom wealth, and choice wealth. Because, it ultimately dislocates me from one of life's most fundamental principles, the very principle that Shakespeare and those who canonised his phrase tried to get us to bear in mind: that the obstacle is the way, that strength builds from resistance; that creativity is catalysed by constraints; and that yours is the earth and everything that's in it, sure, but only if you fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
Rant over, see you next time 🙃
Harrison x
⬥
Want to read some more? My writing’s grouped by:
And you can read how this blog can help you here →
I’m with Dominik. Reading now for the second time. Such important and essential perspective. I found myself in much of what you wrote and I didn’t like it. Thank you for the awareness - I can now choose to alter some of my approach to things and my way of being. 🙏
Wonder piece. I think reading it once wasn’t enough.