Waiting for Moments That Never Come

I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

Except reality rarely behaves this way.

Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

Career.
Status.
Achievement.
Recognition.
Fame.
Productivity.

We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

Perhaps that has to be enough.