Happy Monday
One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
On July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin became the second person to walk on the Moon. He came home a national hero, did the ticker-tape parades, met heads of state, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And within a few years he was working at a Cadillac dealership, drinking heavily, and going through his second divorce. He later wrote that the depression felt like being trapped inside the image of himself that everyone else could see. The line from his memoir that I keep going back to is this: “I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume. There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into.”
The guy who walked on the Moon came back to Earth and couldn’t figure out why he was miserable. And the answer, which took him almost a decade to get to, was that he’d built his entire identity around what he could achieve, and once he’d achieved the biggest thing a human being has ever done, there was nothing left to hold him up. He got sober in 1978 and spent the rest of his life talking about it, and the thing he kept saying was that he was more productive and more at peace after recovery than he ever was at the peak of his astronaut career.
Bear Grylls described almost the same experience when we talked a few weeks ago, and the episode title says it all: Why Making It Nearly Destroyed Him. Bear was the youngest Briton to summit Everest at 23, served in the SAS, hosted Man vs. Wild for a decade, sold over 18 million books. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the success started eating him alive. He said something that reminded me of Aldrin immediately, which is that you cannot build your life on your identity of work because ultimately it’s not going to be there. Your career will change, the show will end, and if your whole identity is built on those things, you’re in trouble when they do.
The thing I keep thinking about is how different their stories ended up. Aldrin didn’t have the language for what was happening to him. There was no framework in 1969 for a hero who comes home and falls apart. He drank for a decade before he figured it out. Bear caught it earlier, and I think the reason is that he was willing to say out loud, while he was still at the top, that what everyone admired about him was the same thing that was breaking him. Most people can’t do that. Most people hold on to the identity that’s hurting them because it’s also the identity that the world rewards, and letting go of it feels like losing the thing that makes you matter.
Quote
“I have many frailties and shortcomings, but I am now a far more productive person than I ever was at the peak of my astronaut career.” — Buzz Aldrin
He said that after decades of being defined by the Moon landing, and he meant it.
Question
If you took away your job title and your accomplishments, would you still know who you are?
Listen
Bear Grylls: Why Making It Nearly Destroyed Him. Bear has done things that most people can’t even imagine, and the conversation I expected was about resilience and toughness and surviving in the wild. The conversation I got was about how the fearless persona almost cost him his mental health and his closest relationships, and what he actually did about it. He’s one of the few people I’ve talked to at that level who will actually say this stuff out loud.
Read
Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin called the Moon’s surface “magnificent desolation” and then realized the phrase described his life back on Earth just as well. This is his memoir about the years after Apollo 11, and it’s one of the most honest books about achievement and identity I’ve ever read. He wrote it because he wanted people to know that reaching the top of anything doesn’t protect you from what comes after.
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— Scott