The other day on the Utah Fly Fishing Facebook page I came across this article from Hatch magazine. The author recounts a story in which he’s asked whether you should tie a fly on at the car, or wait till you get to the water. His answer is that you should tie your fly on at the car. Then the author presses a more fundamental issue: Why ask questions like this at all? In fact, he argues, the question itself is a kind of mistake, because it misses the big picture. Here you go:
There is no right way. There is no wrong way. Just listen to your heart and do whatever makes you happy. Here’s a news flash. It’s 2021. We don’t fish to feed our families. We don’t journey to the Beaverkill or the Deschutes or the Green to acquire a cooler full of piscatorial protein. We don’t fly fish to catch more permit than the bait guys, or bigger bass than the gear folks. We’re not brain surgeons, or rocket scientists, and we’re not eliminating disease, or eradicating hunger, or creating a new energy source that won’t microwave the planet. Not while we’re standing knee deep in a trout stream, we’re not. There’s only one reason to fish with a fly rod, and that’s because you enjoy it. So figure out what makes you happy, and then do it.
The author holds that the question is a mistake because it misunderstands the true value of fly fishing. The question assumes there is a fact about how to go about fly fishing, but the truth—on this view—is that you should do it however makes you happy. And the author has a nice argument for this conclusion. I reconstruct it as follows.
The value of fly fishing must be either as a means to some other end, or else it must be to make you happy.
The value of fly fishing is not a means to any other end.
So, the value of fly fishing must be to make you happy.
I understand the argument’s appeal. It seems very plausible, as the author suggests, that premise (2) is correct. Fly fishing doesn’t solve global warming or make us rich or powerful or help us survive or anything of the kind. So it seems not to serve any instrumental purpose. Premise (1) says that the point of fly fishing is either instrumental or else for the sake of happiness. If we’re not doing it as a means to something else, it must be because we enjoy it. What else could it be? If you aren’t doing something as a means and you don’t enjoy it, why do it at all? So it’s tempting to think premise (1) is also true.
However, I can’t help but feel like we’ve gone wrong somewhere. True enough, many folks out on the water are there to have a good time. I have no quarrel with that. But what about the fly fisher who is out there in the rain or the snow or a driving wind, whose rod guides are freezing, who keeps casting with chapped lips and numb fingers? What about the people who have hiked miles, slept on the ground, sheltered under trees during summer showers—only to find that their high mountain lake had frozen out over the winter? Or what about the kids who are out on the lake at dusk on a Friday getting bitten by mosquitos when all their friends are hanging out at a barbecue?
The crux of the issue is that the people who really seem to get it—the ones who deeply appreciate the value of fly fishing—are often the ones who don’t seem to be having a good time. More than that, they don’t even seem to be thinking about whether they’re having a good time. They’re too focused on the tasks at hand, too engrossed by the activity itself, for that thought to even come up. You might say this is just a case of delaying gratification. The seasoned fly fisher puts up with the rough trails, cold water, and elements in order to promote happiness in the end.
I’m dubious. Are we to think of the devout fly fisher as calculating (implicitly?) all the happiness that will result from a final triumph, and incurring the costs that will promote enjoyment overall? You can go down that road if you want to, but I don’t think you'll arrive at understanding. To me it sounds like special pleading on behalf of a favored theory.
Consider instead—at least for a moment—the possibility that premise (1) is false. It is not the case that the value of fly fishing must either be instrumental, or else directed at making one happy. Think about it this way. Sure, happiness is great. But happiness is just one kind of emotion that humans have, among many others. Are we really to think that the only non-instrumental, self-regarding final end humans can have is their own happiness? What would limit us to the pursuit of that one kind of emotional experience to the exclusion of others?
Here’s a different idea. We sometimes aim at happiness as a final end, but we aim at other stuff as well. One thing we aim at is what we might call achievement. We value accomplishing things that we care about, even if that accomplishment doesn’t always line up easily with the promotion of our own enjoyment. The great painter might anguish over their art and the novelist may feel mired in stress and uncertainty mid-project. Same goes for the fly fisher. We don’t always enjoy achieving our goals, but that’s ok. It doesn’t make them less valuable, including to us.
So what are we after, then? I don’t have a full analysis of achievement, but I think it has something to do with how events fit together in your life. Summiting a mountain is paradigmatically an achievement. The outcome you accomplish does not arise from nowhere; it’s the product of long and hard effort. My neighbors and I hiked Kings Peak a while back. All along the way, we kept talking about how we might just turn around. We might get to one of the false summits and just call it good. Of course, we didn’t do that. Along with everybody else on the mountain that day, we kept going till we arrived at the top of the state. It’s just what you have to do, whether it’s making you happy or not.
My point is that the value of the achievement derives not from the mental states one experiences upon its realization, but from how the outcome relates to the events that precede and follow it in a way that makes sense as a kind of story. I think the dedicated fly fisher is after something like achievement, rather than happiness. And success as the fly fisher takes some of the same ingredients that it demands from the painter or writer or mountain climber: focus, preparation, work, etc. That’s why the original question made sense, after all. Should you tie on a fly at the car, or out on the river? This is a question about strategy. The details don’t matter that much for present purposes, and in fact the author’s original answer is correct. (You should tie a fly on at your car; thinking otherwise falsely inflates the significance of fly choice, and second guessing your fly will distract you from more important considerations.) Anyway, it wasn’t a bad question.
Back to the argument. The problem with premise (1) was that it assumed that any action had to be either motivated by happiness or some instrumental value. That would be true only if there we could finally value nothing besides our own happiness. But that is false. In fact, we can attach final value to a variety of things.
So much for fly fishing. Now I turn to Utah’s (other) most populous religion. The Latter-day Saint tradition conceives of individual agents as not only surviving their own deaths, but as existing prior to their own births. The trajectory from pre-mortal to mortal to post-mortal existence is labeled the “plan of salvation.” For the most part, this is conceived as helping locate oneself on a kind of cosmic map. Seeing the universe across time, we can point out mortal life with a soteriological “You Are Here” marker.
But I think the divine diagram is not the most important takeaway. Rather, imagining ourselves on a grand eternal journey helps us realize how we should think about the value of any given event along the way. Events whose provenance includes exercises of our own agency have a different kind of value than those which merely happen to us. Compare hiking to the summit with getting deposited there by a helicopter. Knowing whether you’re happy when you survey the world below you doesn’t do all that much to settle how the experience will have value in the story of your own life.
If salvation is about seeing who we really are, rather than seeing through a glass darkly, then it seems to me that we do better by thinking about it as a process extending between the final temporal limits of our agency—past and future. Am I saying that only the devout fly fisher, and not the casual angler, is saved? Well, no. But you should still have a fly on before you get to the water.
Beautiful! Love this statement: "Rather, imagining ourselves on a grand eternal journey helps us realize how we should think about the value of any given event along the way."