What if I just offer the small gifts I have to the world and let that be enough… What if I embrace my limitations and stop railing against them. What if I never really amount to anything when I grow up… What if I never build an orphanage in Africa but send bags of groceries to people here and there and support a couple of kids through sponsorship. The ever-present angst over a life that is less-than-fulfilling remains the plague that afflicts every generation. “Not-enough-ness” is mankind’s existential groaning for righteousness. What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted. What if I am mediocre and choose to be at peace with that?…what if I just don’t have it in me. What if I all I want is a small, slow, simple life? What if I am most happy in the space of in between. Such is what writer Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui divulges as she wrestles with the law of excellence and significance: “You gotta get downright funky if you wanna make it.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I guess I just don’t have that in me. If you want to be rich and extraordinary (extraordinarily rich?), “you gotta get real doggish,” he says. That was one of Harvey’s points of emphasis in his sermon. “The cult of productivity,” writes David Zahl, “has taken captive its polar opposite, turning repose itself into a venue for scorekeeping and self-justification” - into a stage for forging my own extraordinariness. They function to allow you to rest more efficiently and methodically, so as to get through the daily hindrance that it is. Sleep trackers and apps and monitors and white-noise machines, etc., are themselves thinly veiled productivity enablers. It’s an obstruction - one that must be overcome in order to “make it.” Such is why many of the latest technological innovations all involve capitalizing on sleep. As if it is nothing more than a cumbersome interruption to production and accomplishment. Though many wouldn’t explicitly admit to such an ideology, many of us function as if sleep is a curse. In this seculosity of productivity, there’s no room for slumber. In Harvey’s sermon, the poor are made rich only by more intense effort, more zealous enthusiasm, and those who are successful subscribe to the Atkin’s Diet of sleep. Rich people don’t sleep eight hours a day. He talks about his past, which is a true rags-to-riches tale, but laces it with a dosage of dogged performancism. In one segment, Harvey attempts to motivate his audience towards becoming rich successful and achieving their goals in life. Some might say “motivational speaking,” since this series of clips that are uploaded to his official YouTube channel all come with the moniker “Motivated.” But he uses the Bible. Recently, though, I stumbled across Harvey’s newest vocation: preaching. Comedian, maybe? ( Quick Wikipedia search.) Yep, comedian. Honestly, I don’t know how he got famous, either, I just know that he is. If you asked the average millennial who Steve Harvey is and what does he do, the vast majority would tell you about his run as host of the daytime gameshow Family Feud. Steve Harvey is one of those pop-culture personalities so associated with his later-in-life career that his rise to fame is all but forgotten.
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