How much land does a man need?
On what Tolstoy has to say about clinging to a vision so much we forego our body
This is the Next: the Newsletter, the weekly newsletter that mixes personal essays and social critique, and, where I, inspired by literature, psychology, and all my spiritual practices, attempt to make meaning out of what happens: to me, and to us all.
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I recently came across a parable by Tolstoy, called “How much land does a man need?”
As Rachel Hurn puts it in her article, “the story is simple but affecting.” It is about a man, a peasant, who overhears his wife and her sister talk about the merits of city and country-life. Like his wife, the peasant is sure country life is best: “a peasant’s stomach is lean, but lasts long.” But he is aggrieved that they have too little land. And, he says out loud, “If I had plenty of land, I’d fear no one—not the devil himself!”
Except that the devil is hiding behind the stove, and having heard him, decides to tempt the peasant onto a path of compulsive desire.
Pahóm, the peasant, first borrows money to buy more land. He then raises cattle and grows corn. Soon, he has become prosperous, but even so, his desire for more land drives him to action.
He sells his lands at a profit, and moves to a new area where he can buy vast tracts for low prices.
It doesn’t matter how much land he manages to collect. Eventually, he grows dissatisfied.
Then, one day, he learns about a community, known as the Baskhírs, who live on a fertile plain by a river and will sell land for almost nothing. When he gets there, bearing gifts, their chief explains that they sell land by the day.
For the minuscule price of a thousand rubles, Pahóm can have as much land as he can cover in a day of walking, as long as he returns to the starting point before sunset.
That drives him to the ultimate compulsion. The next day, Pahóm starts walking, but the further he gets, the more land he sees that he could seize, so he walks and walks, faster and faster, until he exhausts himself so much trying to come back by sunset, that as soon as he is back in front of the chief, he collapses. A stream of blood flows from his mouth, and he falls dead.
How much land would he need? Six feet: the length of his grave.
I only realized what my chase really stood for the day I saw, on a nature walk, a perfectly green, perfectly healthy, perfectly perfect leaf that had fallen to the ground. So much perfection, and yet, it had fallen. So much perfection, and yet, it was on its way to die. We think perfection will save us. The truth is, it won’t.
The price of being so caught up in the mind is that one stops feeling the body
This parable made the subject of an article in The New Yorker titled “An economic lesson from Tolstoy,” published by Nick Romeo on January 16th, 2024.
There is, indeed, a way to read this story as a story with a moral lesson about the economy, and, most importantly, about economic policy. But the story could also be read as a psychological tale of a man so disembodied, he is willing to literally lose his life in pursuit of land, far-away land, land that he is imagining, more than actually coming in contact with.
Because, let’s face it, if you substitute land for recognition, how many of us would be Pahóm?
In 2017, when I went back to Google on a full-time contract for the second time (I first joined the company in 2011), I told myself that, this time, I was going to get promoted.
I had left in 2015, after three and a half years in the company working in roles that felt sometime tedious, and like they were slowly gnawing away at my soul (sometimes, I loved them, too.) I knew, when I left, that a promotion wasn’t even in the cards. And yet, I kept overperforming.
At one point, I remember telling a friend, around drinks out at a pub on a sunny summer evening, that I no longer felt like I could intuit where I was heading. Throughout my teenage and young adult years, my gut had spoken to me: there was the time I was offered a tour guiding job in Norway, and I just knew that I had to take it. There was the time I received an offer to start in fifteen days at an org I had applied to twice. I was fifteen minutes away from Milan Malpensa airport, and on my way to Australia where I planned on… backpacking? Having fun? Figuring myself out? I said “no” to the job and yes to my trip. I just felt it was the right decision.
But by the time I had been in Google for two years, my gut feeling was gone. So, I couldn’t ask myself why a promotion meant so much to me, or what drove me to overperform again and again. I was like Pahóm: in the grip of a compulsion.
The compulsion was towards perfection, and a promotion was, to me, as elusive and as shiny as the Baskhírs’ land. I only realized what that promotion really stood for the day I saw, on a nature walk, perfectly green, perfectly healthy, perfectly perfect leaf that had fallen to the ground. So much perfection, and yet, it had fallen. So much perfection, and yet, it was on its way to die.
A promotion meant I would not be left out. A promotion meant I was better than, and because I was better than, I would be loved, and I would not die.
Pahóm, in Tolstoy’s story, wants to be better (off) than most.
He wants life to be easier.
But he doesn’t listen to the messages his body is sending him about what he really needs. As he is striving towards land, his body is longing for rest, and yet, he does not listen.
Thus, it was real grace when, in 2018, some six months or so after joining the company, I was told I had not been promoted. Had that been the case, I would have felt proud, I would have gone out to celebrate, and, shortly after, I might have fallen back into the trap of pursuing the next promotion.
But I didn’t. That day, I took out my journal, and worked out what had given me joy in life. What had been worth doing without the promise of a promotion, and regardless of the recognition. I journaled about the things I had done, not just aiming for perfection, but “feeling in the moment.”
And I looked around and realized I didn’t actually need the fancy job, or the fancy house, or even the recognition. I needed the gut to make myself happy: the wisdom to tune into my body and into the now, not in order to envision and reach some far-away land, but of feeling my feet anchored to the ground, and of listening to my intuition about what should be my one, next step.