HUCK Magazine - Paddle Against the Flow: Lessons on Life from Doers, Creators, and Cultural Rebels

Copyright 2015 by The Church of London Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-3806-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-4615-7 (epub, mobi) Designed by TCOLondon

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By Douglas Coupland

Cue image of Nathan, age 47, emerging from an alcoholic fog in a puddle of his own vomit mixed with thirteen binders of uncollated tractor sales reports and a dozen dead Nespresso capsules.

How did I get here? He asks. How did this become my life?

What happened to Nathan is that he didnt take advice. The problem with advice is that nobody ever takes it. And then they learn lessons the hard way, experience great suffering, and look back on their lives and say, Man, I should have taken that good advice back then. Yes, that is correct. You should have.

Young people are especially bad at taking advice. This is because they have a protective coating surrounding them called youthful cluelessness or obliviousness or blankness but the net result is that they dont take what is often staggeringly good advice. Instead they wing it and go out in the world, have one disastrous experience after another, and suddenly theyre forty-five and its all over.

One of the things all young people learn as they become older people is that advice is actually a very good thing. Advice is probably actually the very best thing of all, because advice saves you time. If you ask anyone over fifty, which is more important, time or money, they will always tell you, time. You can always make more money, but you cant get back time thats been lost. Its gone.

Cue image of Jennifer, 49, staring at a frozen dinner entre rotating within a microwave in her suite in a short-term executive lodging complex beside Interstate 90, awaiting a call back from Sheila in accounting to tell her if she can claim a parking ticket in her expense report. (Answer: No.)

The point is that theres no point in giving advice. Advice is only ever taken long after the point it was needed, acknowledged alone in a dark room at three in the morning at the age of forty-seven with a finger of Jack Daniels remaining in the bottle. So then what do you offer people instead of advice? The answer is you try to inspire. Inspiring people is far easier than trying to give earnest advice, especially to people in the post-pubescent phase of neural wiring which makes them especially susceptible to powerful inspirational words. Behavioral psychologists generally agree this is the case because nature needs young men and women with pliable minds who can be made to go off to battle and willing to place ideals ahead of their own lives. You never see thirtysomethings or fortysomethings going off to war. Theres a reason for that. They know that inspiration is a tool and a trap.

So what we have in this book is a great big pile of advice and inspiration that function both as tools and as traps. But the thing is, this advice comes from artists, and the thing about artists is that from an early age they knew they were different, and they knew they were never going to make it in the real world, and they knew they had to somehow create their own reality. This is a very hard thing to do. The numbers are terrifying. So if youre going to be inspired by anyone, be inspired by people who have been, Im guessing, exactly where you are now, wondering if they can ever fit into the world in a way thats meaningful and creative and sustainable over decades.

Cue an image of Kyle, 50, at his brother-in-laws fiftieth and theres a shot of Kyle painting something on a canvas when he was twenty-five. The brother in-law makes a fart noise and everyone laughs and there went Kyles life.

My hair went white at an early age it runs in our family, so I was expecting it. But the thing about your hair going white is that suddenly people expect you to be wise, and out of nowhere, a few years back, I started getting invited to address graduating students as to how they might live their lives. What do I know? But I figured it out.

The one thing I know to be true in the world is that you, if youre creative, have to know what it is you enjoy doing. Most people dont know this. Its amazing how many people go to the grave without knowing what they like doing. I suppose this is how nature ensures there will always be people to man the counter at the local DMV. But the point is that if you know you like making shoes or candles or snowboards, no matter how much the world changes, youll always be interested. Contrarily, if you launch a career doing something you dont really like, then even if youre successful, you wont feel successful, and youll be contemptuous of your success.

Advice and inspiration: loaded ideas. But listen to what the people in this book have to say. Theyve been in your shoes and theyre not here to waste your time. Theyre here to save your time, and that is, in practical terms, the greatest gift one human being can give another.

Doug

A light went on when I first heard this comment. Followed by the comforting thud of things falling into place.

Wed spent the best part of a decade acting on instinct, finding stories we wanted to hear about, talking to people we admired, making a magazine we could believe in and would want to read. At some point over the years we sat up to find ourselves surrounded by like-minds people who made the effort to seek out new sources of inspiration, curious enough to question the familiarity that surrounded them, bold enough to build something that challenged what they knew.

A community had sprung up all around us, connected across cultures by a reassuring wink. It didnt have a defined face or name there were photographers, artists, writers and filmmakers; skaters, punks, hip hop heads and activists; people who had day jobs but spent their lunchtimes plotting something bigger, and wide-eyed independents whod already made the leap. Most of them cross-stepped effortlessly between all of the above, making things fueled by their passion, fueling their passion with the things they chose to make. They were doers. People who made something happen because they had the urge to make something happen.