Endeavour

22-Apr-2023

Let's explore the word.

'Do. Or do not. There is no try.' Thanks for this, George Lucas. Or as a Medium post put it, 'Yoda [is the] the OG wellness guru'. I'm not even a Star Wars fan.

Endeavour. The name of a ship used by British explorer James Cook to chart New Zealand and Australia, 1769 - 1771. Like a lot of British history, intrinsically linked to colonialism, paternalism, morality.

Not to be confused with Endurance, Shackleton's 1912 Arctic exploration vessel, lost when it became stuck in the ice floes, crushed and abandoned¹.

Endeavour. Linked to industrial work ethic as characterised by Victorian morality. This, in combination with some sense of puritanical Christianity, creates a link in my head about endeavour and piety. Striving.

Endeavour. Productivity, Capitalist mode of production, work force / labour power. Exploitation.

So far it seems endeavour is some combination of effort and endurance. And do Americans really spell it endeavor? Endeavour speaks to effort, to trying, of ignoring the potential to fail over a short or long time scale. All athletes will know the time dilation that occurs with incredibly intense effort. It seems Endeavour can be graphically represented: Intensity on the y axis, time on the x, endeavour being the area under the curve.

It seems to me the area under the curve has a maximum threshold, beyond which results in human suffering. This area under the curve is not the same day to day, year on year.

Relatedly, if we imagine the graph intensity vs. 'time over one day', then a 3D plot can be drawn with (confusingly) another time axis, 'time over one week'. The z axis. A stack of seven intensity vs. 'time over one day' plots can be chunked together to create an intensity vs 'time over one day' vs 'time over one week' 3D plot. Since time is actually a continuous variable, this stack can be converted into a continuously varying z axis representing all time points over a given week, instead of just the average of one day.

Don't worry if you didn't get that last part. In the 3D version, it is the volume under the surface that denotes the threshold for human suffering. Anyway. The point is, the maximum threshold for endeavour for happy and healthy humans varies on a day to day basis, based on the previous days/weeks/months/years of effort. A phrase common to burnouts - 'I used to be able to do this easily'. This phrase fails to take into account chronic workload / intensity over not just the day, but years.

Due to the aforementioned positive associations between productivity, striving, endeavour and piety, endeavour has that nice clean feeling, the feeling you get after a cool dip in a lake or a long, mindful shower. By contrast, burnout feels dirty. Burnout feels like failing, the opposite of endeavour. In reality, it is simply that the chronic workload over time, the volume of endeavour, has exceeded your personal threshold at this time.

What is intensity? It would be naïve to state that intensity is purely a result of work. Endeavour and intensity comes in many forms, may this be work itself, childcare, hobbies, health, mental load^{2 3}. Due to the maximum value endeavour can have before adversely affecting wellbeing, the intensity peaks of each of these should come in waves, or come together for only a very short time before a more restful state is achieved. It took me a long time to realise you don't have to peak in all of these areas at once, and in fact, in the long term, that is not desired.

Back to 'Do or do not'. I hate to disagree with sage Yoda, but I think there is always a try.

¹ Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. Highly recommend this telling of an iconic adventure story. Very male, very white, of it's time - how to do incredibly hard things if the 'easy' things are actually easy.

² See the English translation of this comic by french artist Emma, originally titled 'Fallait Demander'.

³ See also this article, The mental load: building a deeper theoretical understanding of how cognitive and emotional labor overload women and mothers by Dean, Churchill & Rupanner, 01-Nov-2021.