Are You In Flight From Yourself?
● Balancing Being and Doing as a Creative ● Freelance life ● Filming in the desert ● ● Nietzsche ● Why busyness masks a deeper escape ●
"We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life, because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself."— Nietzsche
Dear friends,
I am sitting on a flight to Dubai. It struck me moments ago that if I was to write my newsletter this week, I would need to start it right now. Ahead, in the Middle East, is a busy stretch of work, pulling me out of a period where I've felt in balance—one of those times when you are working with life, and life is working with you.
It's a peculiar aspect of freelance life that while you have stretches of equilibrium, there are also other times when big projects knock on your door, and you must accept that that most fragile thing—rhythm—will be disrupted for a while.
The older I get, the more important this fragile rhythm becomes. Perhaps it's an antidote to having lived rootlessly for much of my twenties and thirties—and the degree of anarchy that accompanied my life back then. However, one thing my years in rock 'n' roll and the subsequent ones making documentaries did teach me was to get comfortable in disruption.
This week, I’m exploring the paradox of control—how letting go and embracing disruption can actually fuel creativity and resilience.
Let’s dive in.
Jim
p.s We had some amazing news this week when the Podcast went to #3 in the Goodpods Productivity Charts! I have no idea why its popping up in the productivity charts, but am very chuffed it’s just two behind Tim Ferriss!
Thank you for all the support and if you have a moment to rate and review it is hugely appreciated.
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
Erich Fromm
1. The Paradox of Control
Here's the paradox I want to explore this week: while we want to control our lives, often the yearning for this control stems from a terror of its opposite — being out of control. The paradox, then, is that the only way to a true sense of control is to get comfortable with being out of control. And that's not an easy task, as it requires letting go of that desire for an existential foothold—the certainty that comes from having an orientation point in life.
When, in Hermann Hesse's great book Steppenwolf, Harry Haller realises "at the last you have to take the whole world into your soul, come what may," he indicates that at some point on our journey, you have to stop picking and choosing reality and instead let in the whole world—not just as you want it to be, but as it is.
I have witnessed in myself and in others that this longing for control often masks our unwillingness to acknowledge the greater human questions: of our mortality, frailty, regrets, or the weights from our own history that we still carry.
John Lennon once said he had never met anyone who was not a bundle of pain. Though I think John was projecting his own psychological makeup here, I do believe that many of us live in flight from our pain.
It returns to Nietzsche's great observation made at the dawning of modernity: everywhere we are in flight from ourselves.
2. Breaking the Spell of Daily Mania
I stumbled on this quote while reading Oliver Burkeman's brilliant Four Thousand Weeks, which I first devoured while living in my campervan for a winter in Scotland. I discovered it at just the right time—when I was thinking over not just my own life but the question of life itself. In this brief period of stopping after so many years of intense work and action, I finally broke the spell of the daily mania as indicated by Nietzsche's quote.
It was a time of confronting so much of what I had lived through, of ceasing this endless flight in the busyness of everyday life and choosing to actively deepen my relationship with nature and to encounter my own feelings about the human condition.
In some ways, my life remains an outcome of that trip and the paradoxical realisation it left in me—that though I wanted to deepen myself as a human being, there was also much I wanted to get stuck into in the realm of life itself—as a human doing if you like.
3. Being vs. Doing
A friend's father once told me, "Jim, a man's forties are the engine room of his life."
While my time in the Scottish outback centred me on life’s heart, I realised I wanted to be in the heart of life itself. This became not only my quest on returning but also the reason to throw myself into whatever came next—including, incidentally, this newsletter.
Despite this being a time of doing, there is one thing I am certain of: I am no longer in flight from myself.
Of course, our spiritual and psychological growth is never linear, and I am forever caught between being and doing.
I understand that to become a true whole—whatever a rounded human being is—one has to reach a point where this seeming eternal clash between being and doing finally truly conjoins, converges, and assimilates.
However, just as I realised that I never wanted to drift so far from Nature again—as I had done before my winter in the van—I also realised upon my return that my work was not yet done.
It may sound dramatic, but in some ways, I feel my life was partitioned by that journey—there was the version that existed before, and the epoch which began after. This beginning only emerged out of the decision to decisively stop what Nietzsche termed this flight from ourselves.
4. Ending to Begin Again
What a paradox—that to begin again, something must come to an end. And to end something, you have to stop. To mark a full stop. And so, my beginning started with this realization:
I no longer bought into the modern mantra that we are only what we do, as if doing itself is a route to salvation. Nietzsche speaks of fleeing from ourselves, linking it directly to the emerging obsession with doing for its own sake—as if action alone were the highest value.
You can spend your whole life climbing a ladder only to realise at the top of that ladder that you placed the thing next to the wrong damn wall. This is the painful realisation behind some corporate careers chosen because the yearning for success was more important than what had to be sacrificed for its pursuit.
The idea that we can do it later can sustain us for a certain period. But what we fail to factor in is the cost of the sacrifice.
Though many people do many great things later in life, there is also the reality that the down payments of youth, hunger, energy, late nights, and maniacal ambition come at a steep price.
That is, in the line from Liam Gallagher—you only get to do it once. At the last, all of us enter a Faustian bargain with our life choices—and one of the only guides we ever get is that of our own heart. Only it knows when we are doing things for the right reasons.
"Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother."
— Goethe
The cost on us is often less the physical toll our work takes, but rather the spiritual toll when day after day, month after month, year after year, we choose an expedient reality over the desperate risk that comes with pursuing what matters most to us.
Either way, this question—of whether we are in flight from ourselves or not—is framed by our relationship with what we do and how we want to be.
5. Who We Are vs. What We Do
I believe that who we are comes first, with what we do as its byproduct. Yet, how often are we introduced to someone only to be asked what we do before anything else?
In a status-driven society, we’re often compelled to impress, where the interest is less in who we are and more in whether we might be useful to the person asking. In certain conversations, it can feel less like an exchange and more like being scrutinized under a microscope to determine your place in the social hierarchy.
Whenever I sense this, I take great joy in offering no empirical clues whatsoever. It’s fascinating to see the ungrounded effect it creates when you confidently choose not to play the game of hierarchy, labels, and social categorisation
For years, I defined myself through what I did, but my journey has now led me to a gentler mantra:
I am who I am, not what I do.
While who we are and what we do are intertwined, it’s clear that we’ve traded much of our capacity to be for a relentless drive to do.
Goethe’s words, "Talent is nurtured in solitude but character formed in the stormy billows of the world," remind us that life isn’t just about balancing an inner life with outward expression; it’s about actively choosing to let one support the other.
When we fail to make this choice, we divide ourselves. And that’s when the Tollman comes to collect.
6. Confronting the Challenges Ahead
As I think of the challenge ahead in Dubai, I realise that part of my own adventure this week is to let go of my recent balance and to prepare for 3 a.m. starts and 40-degree shoots in the desert. When I land, there will be four hours in the hotel before we set off for our first dawn shoot.
My challenge now is to shift from how I like life to be—which includes enough deep rest to be at my creative best—and to gather up the deeper resolve to bring my best to life itself, even when I am exhausted, underslept, and jetlagged.
I know from the past that when you are in challenging circumstances, the one thing you can rely on is the stillness of your inner voice.
As someone who experienced terrible panic attacks for over a decade, I understand this profoundly. It was, in fact, the discovery of this voice—far below the place from which the panic attacks emerged—that helped me to root out the source of my anxiety and finally uncover what lay beneath.
Though, like anyone, I can feel exhaustion or the icy chill of anxiety creeping up from its glacier, I know now that there is an "I" that exists beyond even my own physical strength.
7. Beyond Physical Strength
Because here's the thing—you can only rely on your physical strength to a certain degree. At some point, it will be tested beyond its breaking. And when it wanes, it's in this arena that you start to learn about the potential voice in you.
In the week ahead, I will look to this voice, especially when I feel irritation when something goes wrong—which it will—or the impatience you feel when you are working closely with people and everything needs to be on point.
What helps you in these times is not your physical strength but your spiritual resolve.
The problem is, though, that you learn little about your spiritual resolve when you live in the massacre of the modern attention span and its sibling, the deep sense of fragmentation that accompanies you when you are split into shards by living a multi-tasked modern life.
Namely:
Doing everything. Experiencing nothing.
You are there—not here.
8. The Tyranny of Busyness
I believe we have made ourselves over-busy, obsessed with productivity routines, and tyrannised by to-do lists precisely because we use them as avoidance tactics—from facing what emerges out of that dreaded oppressor—silence.
And yes, I mean not so much the silence itself but the Self we encounter when we surrender to nothingness.
To some degree, I think we are all aware of this—that we have made ourselves distracted to the point we can hardly focus on anything without finding ourselves fiddling around, for a reason we can't quite fathom, with our smartphone.
Yet while we know we are distracted, we never seem to ask why we are distracted.
And for me, when I look at how it manifests, both in myself and in the society around me, we all tend to find ways to blame entities outside ourselves.
Yeah, it's Silicon Valley, it's TikTok, it's Tinder, it's WhatsApp, it's Notion, it's Instagram, it's another spam email from Tony Tucker's manager asking us to come on his podcast for 5,000 dollars.
In his quotation above, Nietzsche cuts through the bullshit:
"Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself."
The Buddha echoed this sentiment eons before:
"Haste comes from the devil."
9. An Internal Conversation
The reason I am meditating about this on the flight while the charming gentleman dribbles while snoozing next to me, is that I am in permanent conversation with myself on these subjects—that is, in particular, the relationship between what I want to do with my life and how I want to be in my life.
Interestingly, before I started writing this, I felt something I rarely feel—I felt oppressed by my own need to write this newsletter,
I thought to myself, "Well, you could just let it go this week, Jim!"
And yet in tandem, I like the discipline of shaping my thoughts and experiences each week. I have felt much clearer in myself since I committed to writing as a discipline.
In particular, I feed from both the intellectual challenge of breaking down the abstract into a communicable form, and from the exchange that I have with people through doing it.
Helping others by working through my own pain points not only helps me in facing my own challenges but also binds meaning to tough times.
There is no driver like the act of giving—it's just that getting to a place where you really want to give for the sake of giving is deep work and asks you to undergo many ego deaths.
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
—Lao Tzu
10. The Value of Discipline
And so back to why I'm sat here writing this as I fly eastwards.
Many of us live too trapped in our heads nowadays, and there is something in the act of both writing and sharing which breaks down this knotty sense of alienation that so many of us feel.
And yet, you can also feel trapped by your own intentions and goals too.
When I am in my usual weekly rhythm, this newsletter is something living and breathing for me.
Yes, on the one hand, it is a discipline, but it is a discipline that helps me grow, educates me, and uplifts me.
I have not written about it before, but I had a long journey in psychoanalysis—a journey which first saved my life in a time of great mental peril and then after helped me grow deeper roots into what my analyst Bruce called "the potential true self."
There were many peaks and troughs on that road because psychoanalysis is not a linear journey—and neither is our spiritual growth for that matter.
How we grow and how we exchange with the world is our own journey to make. For me personally, the point of fulfilling my journey in therapy was a deeply significant juncture. One of the things you confront at the end of therapy is how you deal with the end of therapy itself, and in turn, how you deal with the world again, but on new terms.
Yes, you take what you learn in the process with you, but, as Joseph Campbell writes, though you can take guidance and what you learn with you, each of us must make our own contract with life.
In my experience, that contract is never fixed and being ever written—and to stay in conversation with yourself, whether with the highest highs of inspiration or in the desperate tussle with the dragons of the deep, is part of that living contract.
It took me a long time to enter a healthy sense of adulthood, and one of the curiosities you realise is that health in adults is far rarer than one might have imagined when one was a child.
Again, I turn to Nietzsche: "Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself."
The reality is that staying healthy takes work—a work that continues every day. That is one of the reasons that I started writing my diary when I completed my therapy—and it is the reason that I write this newsletter both as an act of love but also as an awareness exercise.
Therapy was a discipline too. I didn't always feel like going. But I was, without exception, always bettered after each session.
It’s similar with writing.
It's part of the process of how I stop being in flight from myself—a time in the week where I can grapple with that week's challenges, think over something I've read, or share something that has inspired me.
Part 2: Flying Over the Iranian Coastline at 780 km/hr
I am now on the flight back home, and how funny to reread all that I was writing on the way over.
Since writing this meditation on the realm of being, I have been exclusively in the world of doing.
In fact, things were so intense with work for the last week that I rather enjoyed a holiday out of mind. There is a certain peace that comes from exhaustion—not the exhaustion of computer screens but the feeling that all your energy was emptied into this day and into the service of an idea beyond yourself.
That is one of the reasons that I love my work, even though there are times it disrupts my own creative aspirations, rhythm, and momentum.
There is something freeing about giving yourself in service of another. Yes, of course, you are getting paid, but I am not talking about the financial kickback here.
I'm talking about the decision to go all in on whatever you are doing.
To say to oneself that the point of my existence in this moment is to serve this idea to the very best of my abilities.
Even though there is a nobility to this as an idea, it is, of course, hard to enact in practice.
We want to do the things that we want to do, and not the things we have to do.
But in my experience, every aspect of life acts as a training ground. When I give myself over to someone else's story, to someone else's dream or vision—and to completely surrender my own life to the manifestation of that task—there is a strange exchange that takes place, one that is far more significant than this week's paycheck.
11. The Exchange of Giving
It is in that giving to something totally, that I bring something back.
Often, what I bring back to my life is far more powerful than what I could have learned or achieved by focusing solely on my own work and projects.
Some values are hard to describe because they defy measurement—and sometimes even naming. Yet to write is to confront this abstract beast, to wrestle meaning from the whole, despite its resistance to being defined.
It is something, though, about interchange.
Whatever our story is, it will never exist in a vacuum.
It follows then, that it will only ever be articulated and formed through how it interacts with life.
And this is part of the tension nowadays.
We find it harder to surrender into the things we don't want to do because we want only to cling to the things that we do want to do.
"Wash the plate not because it’s dirty, nor because you’re told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next."
—Thich Nhat Hanh
12. The Cosmic Paradox
The paradox is that to do what you truly want, you often have to tackle things you don’t. So, it’s essential to bring commitment, tenacity, and resolve even to the tasks you’d rather avoid. By investing fully in these, you build the skills and resilience that make you better at what you love. Ultimately, what you want to do is shaped by how you approach what you don’t want to do—so you might as well give it all you've got!
Okay, internal rant over, and luckily no one is looking at me as I type this like a madman trying not to spill my coffee on my now once again dribbling neighbour. Sleep well, buddy!
Now the reason why I write all this is that just because our lives are busy does not mean that you cannot develop your relationship with your inner voice.
Doing does not have to contravene being.
Both will always be in a dance with one another. The trouble we often have is that, unable to do more of one than the other, we feel stuck—as if life is blocking us from moving toward that inner picture of the world we all carry within, however ill-formed it may be.
13. Embracing the Unknown
The truth of all this is that, as ever, I am also in part berating myself here.
Before I left, I was feeling a degree of resistance towards the task that lay ahead of me.
With it too, a degree of doubt.
It doesn't matter how often we do something; often when we dive into the unknown, we feel unattached.
Questions arise:
Am I good enough?
Will I do a good job?
Will this be the time I'm finally found out?
In my experience, these demons, though they lessen, will always accompany us to some degree in our working life.
Even Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest footballer of all time, is frequently sick before he plays.
It could even be argued that he is the greatest of all time because he is sick every time before he plays!
Because most of us are trying like hell to repress our demons. And yet, we find, when we give them voice, they are not coming to torment us but to challenge and improve us.
What are they saying?
Perhaps what they confront you with is the very thing you need to hear!
And this is the thing—while the voices of self-doubt may never leave you, you do learn how to converse with them better.
The skill, really, is learning how to dance with them.
I know now at this point that the demons will appear, that I may feel anxious the night before a shoot, or before I go on stage.
But I know something else in parallel too.
That my highest value is to give the best of myself despite my limitations.
Contrary to the modern assumption that this can only achieved by doing as much as possible, this is rather an ethic of the spirit.
You are going to have problems.
You are going to have fights in your relationships.
You are going to mess up a job or be found wanting at a task.
But these things do not define you.
They are just things that happen, even when you are trying to do your best.
14. Giving Your Best
If you can work at doing your best, over and over and over, despite your limitations, despite the vagaries of circumstance, something starts to happen.
Your life starts to tick upwards.
You may not achieve your ambitions, goals, or even the financial stability you hope for.
But you progress in the area of Unnaming that I faltered before while trying to name it earlier.
It is the growth of your spirit and the way that you participate in the world.
Over time, the world starts noticing this too.
I've found this in my journey as a filmmaker.
I never went to film school or had a lesson or tutorial. All I knew after I lost my deal with EMI in 2013 was that my life depended on learning a skill—and fast.
Though I was still amateurish in my film and photography, I knew I had an eye.
And so I went out and started making stuff, and the more I made, the more people noticed, and the more people noticed, the more they started thinking, "Hey, I really like this stuff; maybe he could do it for me too."
I started getting calls, and I started saying yes to everyone.
And every single time I went on a job, I suffered bad from imposter syndrome.
Why?
Because I had zero fucking clue what I was doing.
But it wasn't about what I was doing.
I was getting hired because I knew how to feel.
I could feel the inner life of what I was shooting. I knew how he, she, or it felt. I could feel its inner life, that it possessed a story, and that all that mattered in my life during that moment was trying to coax it out of itself.
The damn white balance was terrible. Frequent times a client would ask me a technical question, and I'd feel my guts fall out because I knew and they knew that I had no clue what I was talking about.
But two things happened.
The first was that every time I went back on set the next time, I would always know the answer to the question I had been asked last time. And the second was that the fact that I was serially winging it somehow started connecting with my clients.
In a German market saturated with filmmakers who had gone to film school and who would charge thousands on pre-production, meetings, and storyboards, I started getting known as the last-minute-guy.
“Call the Scottish dude, he will fix it, ja!”
If something was ill-planned, under-budgeted, or had to happen last minute, it was me that the companies called. The paradox is that I carved out a niche by being the guy who was entirely comfortable living in chaos.
There wasn't one shoot, even till this week, where I wasn't googling something I didn't know. I didn't realise it then, but I had made life my educator and had stumbled upon two critical realisations.
The first is that the only thing that matters is the human heart, and that means how people feel—or are helped to feel—in front of the camera.
And the second is that inside every project is a story or a dream longing to be realised.
I existed in those times only to facilitate those stories and became their caretaker. That I considered a privilege, and that was why I kept getting booked.
15. The Uptick of Life
So the reason that I relay this story is because it is my evidence that if you bring your best to something, your life will uptick in its vapour trail.
I have never made a website for my work because every single job I have ever been commissioned to do came through recommendations—that is, people speaking to people, not me selling what I do at them.
I always had to hustle in music, never in film.
As I look back on my last week in the desert, I think of Nietzsche's words.
I didn't take flight from myself, but I did take flight from my own life for a while.
Because you have to lend yourself out to life if you want to ask life for something back in return.
In the desert, I felt an encyclopedia of emotions.
The startle as the alarm went off at 3 a.m.
The desperation of the rush to make call time.
The unholy happiness when my client was there, exhausted as I was, but waiting with a coffee for me and a smile too.
The knowledge that it was my job as director to make everyone feel safe in the task ahead, even if, as ever, I was not always safe myself.
The anxiety that when the truck took a wrong turn, we would miss the sunrise.
The happiness of my connection with Nishan, our 4x4 desert dune driver, who winked at me as if to say: "Don't worry, Jim, I'll get you to your sunrise"
The gruel of trying to get the pianos into position as the great valley hid in its blanket of blackness.
The rush of trying to get three cameras ready in the dark while dawn cast its cadmium first glow over the distant mountains.
The exhilaration as the sun burst over their peaks, vast and ancient and surprised to be met by two pianists celebrating its arrival.
Later, as our unit shifted to its next location, my shirt now drenched by the unrelenting heat, I found myself thinking back at how unlikely it is that I should ever be here, but so grateful that I was.
Maybe Nietzsche didn't have it all right after all.
16. Finding Orientation
All of us are trying to make our way, and yet none of us know how to make our way, especially at the start.
And when we do, we have only some foggy idea that whatever dream we happen to have in our chest will find a way to realise itself.
But of course, reality has zero concern for the fixity of our plans and makes no guarantee that any of them will work out—irrespective of our drive, our energy, or our resolve.
Along the way, you will lose sight of yourself at times.
But you can fix your course.
You will experience pain that you never would think that you would have the strength to bear.
But you will also heal.
The strange thing is that, after losing your course enough times and trying again and again to course-correct, and after experiencing pain that feels completely out of kilter with what your actions deserved, you realize that, beneath it all, you've gathered something you never expected.
It is the knowledge that no matter how in flight you may be, you have found your own point of orientation.
It never existed on the outside; it was just that we set up our whole society to believe that it did.
And so if you feel a bit lost, or in flight, don't worry.
That is part of the path of finding that deeper orientation.
It is how you find that deeper orientation.
I know that it feels hard, I know that it feels unending, I know that it feels like you will never find the sense of belonging you yearn for.
But the very point of that lostness is that it teaches us to orientate not in that outer dream but in our inner reality.
Not as something abstract and out there, but as something living, ever becoming, and in you.
That IS you.
And the more you get a hold of that You-ness—through the courage to get a little lost—that's when things start ticking upwards.
First in yourself, and then, in my experience, on the outside too.
And yes, the world might break you again, and it is part of our condition that we are mortal, frail, and impermanent.
But what doesn't break is the discovery of that inner housing, or rather, the foundational core of that housing.
Over time it becomes curiously indifferent to the vagaries of the world, because the world will always be as the world always was—desperately beautiful, painfully random, and gloriously indifferent.
You will never control it, and the more you do, the less you will be able to, and the less you are able to, the more you will feel out of control.
And that is its way of telling you:
You have to let all that go.
And at the last, surrender.
17. Surrendering to Life
You surrender by the choice to give back as best you can, despite your limitations.
Do that, over and over and over, and not only do you leave the best of what you have in the world, but you are uplifted by the very environment you helped create around you.
That is the symbiosis in all things.
The link between what we give and what we get.
With love, dear friends, and remember—to be in flight does not always mean you are in flight from something—rather, you very well may be in flight towards something. Surrender to those winds; there is good stuff out there for you, and you have no idea what life has in store for you.
Jim
iPhone Snaps from my shoot with Queenz of Piano
Love love love this in its entirety Jamie!👏👏 Thank you!🙏😍