Why I can't stand the word 'driven'

A man named Harry Readford once stole close to 1,000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland and drove them south, down through the Channel Country and along the Strzelecki Track into South Australia - across a stretch of desert the squatters swore no herd could cross alive. Redford pulled it off. A jury even acquitted him, so taken were they with the sheer cheek of it all that they waved the evidence away. The cattle, for their part, walked across a desert and nobody asked how they felt about it. Rolf Boldrewood turned Readford into Captain Starlight in Robbery Under Arms in 1888, and the colony fell for the thief and forgot the herd entirely. Cattle don't get dramatic novelisations, you see. Cattle are only driven. And that word - driven - eats at me. We apply it to each other all the time; but we don't think about what it actually means. Well, it means a fellow at the back of the herd, a stockwhip in his hand, driving in a direction the animals never picked. "Drive" comes straight off the stockyard. To drive a beast is to push it somewhere it would never wander on its own. When somebody calls me driven, I picture a herd. I know it's intended as praise; that's why it shows up in profiles and eulogies and Linkedin exultations and so on. He was so driven. She was the most driven person in the building. Look at the driven founder, head down, half-possessed, etc. But "driven" is a past participle, the passive shape of a verb that can't function without an actor. A door gets opened by a hand. A fence gets built by a crew. A person gets driven by...well, that's the question, isn't it? To take the compliment, you have to accept that something outside of you is doing the pushing and you're merely the load being shifted. It's the preposition tucked inside the word - driven by - pointing back over your shoulder, at a parent, a wound, a rival, a share price etc. Whoever holds the goad picks the route. Give it to a quarterly target and you'll chase the target down. Give it to an old humiliation and you'll chase that instead, for 30 years, until you've nothing left to give. You'll cover enormous ground at speed and arrive somewhere you never chose. When someone is described to me as driven, I watch what they do when the pressure comes off. The driven get restless inside a week and pick a fight with their own calendar. They can't sit still in an empty afternoon, because an empty afternoon has no one in it to run from. The drivers, with their hands on the reins, ease off and look around, then start moving again once they've decided where to go. Readford's herd covered more distance than I ever will. But it never got to say where it was headed. Or whether the walk was worth the dust. $ whois studio-self WESTENBERG IS DESIGNED, BUILT AND FUNDED BY MY STUDIO, SELF. I make tech legible. WORK WITH ME.