Channel Your Big Grasshopper Energy

You don't always have to be the industrious ant.

Do you know the fable about the ant and the grasshopper?

It’s a morality tale about the virtues of hard work and the dangers of idleness. In the version I learned, the ant is virtuous and industrious, toiling throughout the summer to store up food for winter. The grasshopper, meanwhile, spends the summer singing and dancing, only to find itself starving come winter. It begs the ant for food, but the ant refuses and leaves the grasshopper to die.

I was a kid when I first heard the story, and I was horrified, not by the callousness of the ant, but by the possibility that being like the grasshopper — that is, enjoying life too much and failing to plan for the future — meant you could literally die a terrible death, no one would help you, and not only that, you would deserve it.

(Dear adults with anxious children in your lives, I beg you, treat them gently.)

The message I grew up with — and that society constantly reinforced and rewarded — was to be the ant. Always, always be the ant. Work so hard it hurts but don’t ever complain about it. Delay gratification until some unknowable moment in time when you’ll finally deserve nice things. Live only for the sake of your future survival. Definitely don’t let yourself enjoy anything too much OR YOU WILL DIE AND IT WILL BE YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT! Ant = survival. Grasshopper = death.

What a fucked up message for a kid to learn!

I bet a lot of you learned it, too. The machine of late-stage capitalism kinda depends on most people believing and internalizing the message that you get what you deserve, and if you’re struggling in any way, you are obviously a lazy immoral failure who just hasn’t work hard enough and definitely doesn’t deserve any help. (Systematic oppression? Gilded Age-level inequality? Denying individual rights because they don’t fit a toxic narrative of white supremacist patriarchy? THAT’S SOCIALISM!)

Whew. I guess I’m feeling pretty spicy about this. It’s deeply personal for me. I spent years of my life in such a state of anxiety about my future that it was extremely difficult to enjoy the present — get the grades, get the scholarships, get the job, pay the bills, save more (always more), or else you’ll be homeless and dead when (not if) disaster strikes. And I thought that was normal, healthy even! I thought I was supposed to be terrified for my future, because if I wasn’t terrified, how would I be able to work hard enough to prevent the things I was terrified of?

I don’t know about normal (a lot of weird shit passes for normal in our culture), but this mindset is definitely not healthy.

It’s taken me a lot of inner work and therapy to accept — truly accept with my heart, not just my head — that there is another way. That the grasshopper is just as valid as the ant. They both have things to teach us.

So this summer, I’m experimenting with ways to channel my grasshopper energy. To remind myself that I don’t have to be the ant all the time. I can be the grasshopper sometimes, too. I can — nay, I deserve to — sing and dance and create with abandon.

You do, too.

You don’t have to give up on the ant. The ant is important! But in a society like ours, I’m willing to bet that you spend a lot of time — maybe too much time — being the ant. So what would it look like to channel your grasshopper energy?

What would it look like to invite more joy, pleasure, presence, and FUN into your summer days? What would it look like to write a poem, make some music, scribble a doodle, bake cookies, go to the park, or get up and dance just because it sounds fun?

Your ant will still be there when you’re finished.

Here’s to Big Grasshopper Energy. Go forth and dance.

P.S. Here’s something I find darkly hilarious: versions of this tale have been around for thousands of years, and in one version, the ant is actually a bad example. He used to be a farmer who wasn’t satisfied with the fruits of his own labor, so he stole crops from other people and hoarded them for himself. As punishment, the gods turned him into an ant, but he still kept on stealing. The moral of THIS story is that it’s easier to change your appearance than to change your character.