Yitron Is Everywhere

This post is in many ways a post that comes mid conversation. It takes months of discussions  for granted, and is mostly a tool to share the development of my thoughts in this area. Nevertheless, I decided to share it on my blog.   

One of the main themes of Sefer Kohelet is the futility that we find in our pursuit of yitron. 

Yitron is not an easy term term to define. Literally, yitron comes from the root word of יתר which means more. The pursuit of yitron is the pursuit for more. Not more in the quantitative sense of a greater amount, but more in the sense of a qualitatively better life. It is our search for yitron that is the source of many of our frustrations, our belief that something more in life awaits us. 

I highly recommend taking a look at the first two chapters of Kohelet to get a sense of what the pursuit of yitron looks like. Just click on the link and it will take you to the Hebrew with English translation. 

Kohelet: Chapter 1

Kohelet: Chapter 2

Shlomo Hamelech shows us that if our aim is yitron, then everything will be futile. It cannot be found in wisdom, or wealth or pleasure, or productivity. Rather than pursuing yitron, one must accept his lot; to be שומח בחלקו is all that a person has. Shlomo Hamelech is warning us that if we constantly pursue more, we will constantly be left frustrated. Everything will feel futile.

A Breakthrough in My Understanding

When I read a review of Adam Phillips’ “Missing Out" on Brain Pickings, a whole new dimension of yitron seeking opened up to me that I had not previously internalized.

What reading that piece made me finally realize is that our search for yitron does not just affect our decisions of what to pursue, but it colors all of our mental experiences.

Phillips writes:

“The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives — even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available”

We spend so much of our lives thinking about the lives that we could be living because we believe that yitron exists in one of those lives and it is only accidental that we haven’t attained yitron yet. As soon as we switch over to a “better” life, yitron will be waiting. 

Our Regrets: “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.”

Our failure to be someach be chelko doesn’t just express itself in what we pursue, or in what we fantasize about, but in how we view our past. We blame our inability to achieve yitron on past mistakes and decisions that steered us off the proper course. 

When we are someach be chelko, we stop regretting our past or wondering how things could have been different because we are satisfied with how things actually are. 

Ourselves:  “Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage.”

Our search for yitron isn’t limited to our experiences, but to what kind of person we want to be. Consciously, we know we will never be perfect, we will always have conflict and frustrations. But there is an unconscious part of us that sees yitron in our potential; We can become someone with yitron, who doesn't get frustrated, who isn't insecure, or scared or drawn after false ideas. And that is so dangerous because it makes ourselves into hevel, and our lives a perpetual falling-short. 

To be someach bechelko is to truly internalize that we will never remove our conflicts, desires, insecurities, and personality defects. We will always have things that bring us unhappiness.

What Drives Our Search for Yitron? 

What is the source for our constant pursuit of yitron? Our inability to be someach with what we have, of who we are, or what we experiences? When I read Adam Phillips I wondered whether he provides an approach for thinking about this question as well. The approach consists of two factors. 

Factor 1: 

“Because we are nothing special — on a par with ants and daffodils — it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with — and hopefully enjoy — their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done: first, ideally, we are made to feel special; then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not… When people realize how accidental they are, they are tempted to think of themselves as chosen. We certainly tend to be more special, if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives.” 

It is our natural default setting of being the center of the universe, driven by our perception and reaffirmed through our childhood that we are made to feel special. In childhood, we are raised as special; we are the center of the universe. Every desire that we have is immediately satisfied as soon as we cry out.  As we grow, reality stops treating us as the most important existence. But our own psyche never lets go of the idea that we are a special existence. The search for yitron is searching for the validation that our existence is unique. To be someach be chelko is so challenging partially because it is an acceptance that we are nothing extraordinary. There is no special fate that awaits us but only the mundane pleasures that everyone around us also partakes of.

Factor 2: 

“So it is worth wondering what the need to be special prevents us seeing about ourselves — other, that is, than the unfailing transience of our lives; what the need to be special stops us from being. This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life — the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life — the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives; and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek.” 

Once we realize that our time in the world is limited we become obsessed with maximizing the years that we do have. This maximization of our time becomes our search for yitron. In our limited time we try to cram in a millions of lives lived, experiences had, lessons learned, and people known. But in this charge towards maximization we place such a great burden on the moments that we do have, constantly worried about whether we are living our lives to the fullest, that we are unable to just be someach be chelko because we could always be doing more.

In other words, the beginning and the end of the human being may be the source for our constant search for yitron. At every moment we are confronted with two losses, the loss from our childhood standing as the singularly important existence, and our loss to come, our mortality and nullification of existence. 

We search for yitron because we cannot cope with these two losses. In doing so we lose out on the opportunity to be someach be chelko.