Realings

The world’s a rough place… getting rougher.

Most of the blame usually goes to shitty behavior. The bad feed on good, exploiting trust and generosity, making themselves stronger while leaving the better worse.

Don’t get me wrong: this fucking sucks. The once open-and-honest closing themselves after being burned is high tragedy. It hardens hearts and darkens souls. It makes life less.

But there’s something else. Something worse.

Something more subtle but way more poisonous.

…

Doing good’s usually not great.

It tends to be rewarded badly… if it’s rewarded at all.

It goes unacknowledged at scary rates. A lot of good acts are met with… nothing. Not even a quick “thank you.” Just… whatever.

A lot of times it’s worse than nothing. A lot of times people become aggressively entitled – once shown kindness they expect more and better of it. “You did this for me, now you should be willing to do that because c’mon you’re a good person right?”

…WTF? No. Wrong reaction.

But that’s not the worst thing.

The worst thing is minding the social power gap. Having to carefully meter out just how much good you give to others to maintain attention and balance in a relationship.

The sad truth’s that doing for others is socially dangerous. Making more effort signals you feel you need to do more to be worthy of the relationship. Calibrated good is great, but too much is seen as weak and supplicating… it doesn’t take much before respect is lost, boredom arises and entitlement ensues. Whoever makes less effort in a relationship has more control.

In the professional world, too much goodness means becoming a work dumpster, handling the overflow other less-agreeable employees aren’t willing to do (and contrary to popular belief rarely leads to raises or promotions). In the friendship world it means making more effort while getting worse treatment. In the romantic world, too much goodness (especially too soon) means the other person gets bored and either disappears or pays the wrong kind of attention.

In other words, good’s a slippery, booby-trapped slope. You don’t wanna be a dick… but you definitely don’t wanna be a chump.

Sad.

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Let me get out in front of it:

“…But you don’t do good things for reward! You do them because it’s the right thing to do and trust fate to pay it forward!”

…I mean, really?

Telling this to people whose good has gone unacknowledged or badly-rewarded is essentially telling them to just deal with it and blindly hope for better. It’s cold comfort that rightfully makes people think twice about future sacrifice for others. It’s not wisdom – it’s insanity.

You don’t do good things for reward, no… but they should be rewarded. Validating and rewarding good is the best way to encourage more of it – not fake pats on the emotional back.

And obviously you can’t always expect perfect one-for-one reciprocity… but you should expect equivalent reciprocity over time. Not having that’s a toxic relationship dynamic that socially poisons the person on the wrong end of the power balance. On net it puts more bad than good into the world.

FINALLY: The REAL Problem…

Let’s be honest:

It looks good and feels great to have others do for you without doing for them in return. It’s a pillar of ego and baller culture – “It-just-came-to-me-cuz-I’m-awesome.” The more others do for you without you doing for them, the more power and influence you show, which impresses more people, which increases your power and influence. There’s a reason subjects come to and bow before royalty…

…and this is the primitively dirty, dark psychological motivation behind a lot of fucked-up behavior that passive-aggressively bleeds others for the power position.

So let’s go ahead and spend some time pondering the wisdom of this… maybe try to grow out of being impressed by or rewarding it.

We want what we can’t have. It’s in our nature.

But that ain’t great programming.

Just because something’s scarce doesn’t mean it’s valuable or worth pursuing.

Value exists independent of scarcity – something scarce can be valuable, but isn’t always. And something can be incredibly valuable and not be scarce.

Unfortunately our feelings tend to confuse the two. And the really fucked up part’s that if something’s not scarce enough, if it’s too-easily gotten, we usually get bored and overlook or dismiss its value.

Enter “I-don’t-know-it’s-great-but-I’m-just-not-feelin-it” – ah the sound of something beautiful dying.

The animal part of us craves the emotional rush of the chase. A voice from the deep compels us to only pursue that which flees. Having to fight and suffer for things puts lightning in our blood and fire in our loins. It makes us feel alive.

Sometimes this is really good – it leverages our primal instinct to push us to new heights. Evolution put it there for good reason.

But sometimes it’s really, really bad – costing us things we actually need in our lives simply because they weren’t hard enough to get.

Take the social games we play with each other as an example. They’re based on various combinations of things like withholding, selective approval, subtext, partial truths, misdirection, etc. – all principles of controlling scarcity designed to elicit emotion and investment.

It’s well-known these games do way more harm than good. They force us to carefully meter-out the openness and good we give each other in order to guard ourselves and maintain social power. Whoever cares less and follows the law of least effort wins. Ugh.

…But knowing something and understanding it are two very different things… and the space between them’s vast.

It’s why we so confidently say playing these games is immature and stupid in thoughtful conversation, then immediately start playing them the second our blood’s up. We know… but we don’t understand.

So it’s up to each of us to be really honest with ourselves here – is something scarce because it’s actually valuable, valuable just because it’s scarce, or is life just giving us something we need that we should embrace?

…I’m sorry Denise.

YOLO BABY!

You only live once, so go fast and keep it movin’. Each clock tick compels you. Idle time’s wasted time. Always be climbing, never be satisfied. You can rest when you’re dead.

Cool, worthwhile people are in constant motion and always crushing it.

Only boring, lame people don’t abide by this infinite ambition. They’re the unwashed masses who lose at life by being unexceptional, content… normal. How sad.

If you don’t stand above you sulk below. If you’re not first you’re last.

….

Yeah… no. Not at all.

That’s horrible. And wrong.

It forces anxiety on every moment and shreds psyches. It creates artificial urgency and makes us feel inadequate in the process. It fuels the obscene classism and runaway wealth inequality that’s made so much of history the raging dumpster fire it’s been. And it keeps us from focusing on the really important things in life.

We have the power to change this, but to do it we have to change the way we understand, and value, ambition and success.

Sure it goes against our base psychology and challenges human nature itself, but hey fortune favors the bold. Plus let’s face it, human nature needs some work. 😬

I know it’s a moonshot. I doubt anything I’m about to say will change anything. Still, it needs saying. Things aren’t good – we’re reaching a breaking point. We need to try something else if we want life to get better.

So let’s start with a new rule: we shouldn’t automatically look up to people with ambition or achievement, and we shouldn’t automatically look down on people without them. We need to understand them in context.

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First, a key distinction. There are 2 different types of ambition: ambition of purpose, and ambition of placement.

Ambition of Purpose is what moves you. What you freely, excitedly pursue when you don’t have to worry about anything else. It’s love-driven – done purely for its own sake. Whether the people you care about or things that speak to you, it’s the good stuff. The sources of passion and meaning that feed your soul and make you whole. What makes you feel really, truly alive.

This is NOT about Ambition of Purpose. We should always be connecting with people, bettering our presence and deepening ourselves. These are the roots of fulfillment and the keys to living our best life.

…unfortunately, for most of us, ambition(s) of purpose don’t pay bills or run logistics.

So this is about Ambition of Placement – what’s pursued for money, power, security, status, attention or access. Unlike ambition of purpose, ambition of placement is fear-driven – done to not suffer… to have enough of something.

Because it meets our basic needs, it gets most of our attention. It’s why when we talk about ambition we usually mean ambition of placement. It’s near-impossible to achieve or enjoy higher-level fulfillment if we’re wanting for food, shelter, safety, social access, health care or other basics.

This stuff’s also way easier to see. A nice place in the right neighborhood, prestigious job, cash to burn and status are all shiny social proof – things everyone wants and envies. We’re animals – our instinct screams from the deep that life’s a bestial competition where whoever has the highest status and biggest/nicest pile of stuff wins. That’s how all other animal life works, so “that’s just the way it is.” Our stuck-in-the-jungle evolutionary psychology at work.

… But other animal life’s also a brutal, desperate existence. It may be cool for primitive creatures whose only real goals are staying alive and making babies, but, and I can’t believe I actually have to say this, WE shouldn’t be OK with stuck-in-the-jungle thinking. Like, at all. We’re a lot more advanced than other animals… we shouldn’t be benchmarking our being against theirs. We can do better. We need to do better.

So let’s try something new.

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We need to understand that ambition’s expensive. And by expensive I don’t mean money – I mean life currencies: our time, our energy and our attention.

These are precious, limited resources.

Whenever we decide to be more ambitious, we’re forced to spend more life currency. Going after more means having to do more… which means a thinner spreading of our ourselves across each new obligation.

People are very finite, very imperfect beings – we can’t give real, quality investment to much before things go sideways. Over-investment in even one thing (like a job) can easily ruin us for others. And many different things need certain amounts of currency in order for us to get the most out of life.

We live in a fast-moving time of nigh-fanatical optimism where it’s just naturally assumed that being more ambitious and doing more is always better than not. That if you just want-it-and-will-it hard enough and budget every second of your time correctly, you can do everything endlessly, constantly advance and eventually have it all.

Not true.

Ambition’s far more expensive than we care to admit, and we’re not as endless as we like to think. We need to start acknowledging these realities for what they really are.

Ambition always looks awesome on paper, especially in American media. But most of its practical, day-to-day realities are pretty boring and often pretty brutal… kinda the opposite of awesome. And it’s not a 50/50 sorta thing…it’s more like a 95%+ boring and ~1-5% awesome thing. We live in the day-to-day… not the highlight reels we see on TV and social media.

We’re plagued by over-confidence, taking on too much to look good. We’re living life in distracted burnout – constantly late for the next thing and not fully present. The obsession with having it all and winning at all costs is killing us. It’s a lot of why we’re so stressed out, cranky, depleted and depressed so much of the time.

More isn’t always better – often, it’s actually worse. We have to make careful choices with our currencies – and we need to understand ambition and achievement in context of their costs.

In other words, is the juice really worth the squeeze? Because often, it’s a wash, and often, it’s not.

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In order to understand this, we need to look at how ambition affects the achiever’s life as a whole – not just the shiny, outwardly-visible part.

Education – Many high-ambition pursuits require hardcore schooling, which requires huge investments of time, energy and attention during the most-formative years of life. This means less opportunity for the random, fun exploration and socializing that not only makes the best memories but also teaches the street smarts and organic social skills formal education either can’t or won’t. These things are the most important part of adult success in everything… basically of life in general. Most academics (especially the STEM subjects) strengthen the left brain at the expense of the right… which tends to stunt social development and numb emotional awareness.

Advanced education’s also wildly expensive. It saddles graduates with mountains of debt it’s taking longer and longer to pay off… if they ever do. This means they have to work that much harder to service that debt. As time passes the costs of education increasingly outweigh its benefits.

…and that’s just the prerequisite. Once the fancy opportunity’s gotten, it has to be exploited. And standout success means standout sacrifice of all currencies.

Time – Time is life’s most valuable asset, and prestigious/high-ambition pursuits almost always dominate the pursuer’s time. Long work hours are bad enough, but now the lines separating work and personal life are blurred. Often work follows wherever they go, looming over and inserting itself into what’s supposed to be free time. Having control over our time is really important. If work’s always there and what little free time’s left gets sunk into errands and recovery, the person’s life isn’t *really* their own. They’re essentially an indentured servant in a gilded cage, living for vacation and retirement.

Energy and Attention – These long hours often require an intense, shifting, unending mental focus and emotional discipline which amounts to an ongoing assault on both head and heart. Worse, there’s often little (if any) margin for error: one mistake or missed piece of information can easily cost hours of additional work, serious money, their job, career and/or reputation. It’s the psychological equivalent of tap-dancing on a tightrope – a huge level of ongoing stress that continuously drains energy and diminishes presence.

The typical result is a “there-but-not-there” state of being – a kind of mental fog that, while the person may be physically-present at something, means they aren’t mentally- or emotionally-present. Just showing up isn’t enough – people need leftover energy and attention to be able to really experience and enjoy things. Over time living without this leftover currency ruins social opportunity and damages mental health, emotional stability and general well-being.

Thinking and Feeling – What’s more, most high-ambition pursuits condition people into a sort of “work machine” mentality – to think in terms of the specific, technical knowledge they use to do their job. While this is good for their job, it’s usually really bad for compelling, connective social interaction. People deal with tedious logistical things enough as it is… they don’t want to hear about them in their free time. They want their mood elevated and emotions spiked, and talking about work and life maintenance rarely does that (usually the opposite – they suck vibe out of the air).

Human Ugliness – The more high-stakes something gets, the more competitive it becomes. The more competitive something gets, the more false pretense, passive-aggression, politicking, gaslighting, manipulation, lying, cheating, end-running, backstabbing and other behind-the-scenes lesserness comes with it. The more human ugliness you experience in isolation. The saying “It’s not personal, it’s just business” is a contradiction-in-terms – betrayal in business directly (and strongly) affects the personal. Living in these circumstances darkens a person’s world view and worsens their behavior – you can’t stay positive if continually exposed to negative.

All of these are serious, life-shaping costs that deeply affect different people in different ways. It’s just really hard to see most of the time because people hide it to look good… which is its own painful, lonely burden.

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2 PIECES OF SOCIAL GAMESMANSHIP TO BE AWARE OF:

(1) Some claim their ambition of placement IS their ambition of purpose. That what they’re doing for security and status is exactly what they’d freely choose to do if they didn’t have to worry about anything else. That they don’t mind its huge costs because their money-maker and life’s purpose are one-and-the-same.

Take this claim with a HUGE grain of salt. When you look closer and learn more about the person you find it’s rarely (like, Purple-Unicorn-rarely) authentic, persistent truth. Most high-ambitioners grind themselves away on things they’d rather not being doing to get the rewards they offer. The rest, even when they like what they do, live in drowning saturation (think King Midas – in the beginning he loved gold more than anything, but at the end all he really wanted was a sandwich). Ambition of purpose and ambition of placement are rarely compatible with each other.

(2) Many claim that they can handle demanding tasks more easily and effectively than other people. That because of their superior ability they can effortlessly win at lots more things than others without it phasing them… the implication’s being they’re better than most.

Again, boulder-sized grain of salt here. When you look closer and learn more, you typically find they’re nowhere near as winning as they’re acting. They’re like a duck: calm on the surface, but furiously paddling underwater (which isn’t healthily sustainable). They front to make it look like they’re doing it all, but in reality they’re usually frenetically working on mostly one thing while paying dime-deep (if any) attention to the rest. They’re almost never as centered, well-rounded and in-control as they’re trying to appear. Remember: crushing it takes a lot, and human currency is limited.

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TO BE CLEAR – I am NOT trying to demean or condemn high-ambition pursuits or the people who pursue them. Wanting success isn’t a bad thing, and demonizing ambitious/successful people is stupid and achieves nothing.

What I’m trying to do is give perspective to the nature of ambition and achievement. Rather than being automatically impressed by and envious of the money and prestige of someone’s position, look at that success (and what it entails) more deeply. Realize that standout success is dearly-bought, and that there shouldn’t be an automatic respect for and worship of it. Ambitious, successful people make choices with their lives that, like any other choices, come with certain benefits… and certain drawbacks. They shouldn’t be seen as better or worse than average joes – only different.

What really matters is the quality and social grace with which we do our jobs. Whatever you do, do it well and make interaction with you easy and pleasant. Whether a barista or a lawyer, people should be always be respected and appreciated if they handle their responsibilities well and are pleasant to interact with. Period.

*** It’s the social, emotional value we give ambition of placement that’s at the heart of what keeps classism, wealth inequality, corruption and other lesserness alive and thriving. It’s why no political system has any chance of ever solving any of these problems without us first changing the way we think about and, more importantly, feel about money, status and achievement. ***

I want people to not just know, but understand it really IS our passions, our presence, and our connection to others that matter most. And that we have to not just know, but understand this in order to become better than we are.

In order to evolve.

Feelings first, thinking second – it’s how we choose our people.

And it’s why elevating mood is everything.

It’s the root of all legit social skill and the ultimate goal of all good interaction.

It’s what draws one to another. Fuels all friendship and romance. It’s even important for professional growth (which is weird since that’s supposed to be where a logical, businesslike focus wins).

Think about the best, most-alive times of your life. What do you remember most about them?

How you felt.

Making feeling makes meaning. And getting better at it’s the fastest way to a better, more meaningful existence.

Much of life is maintenance – mundane shit required to keep the lights on. Necessary, but not compelling. We spend more than enough of ourselves living for logistics – burning our precious free time talking about them is a sad, sad waste.

So don’t do it. Instead, focus on making people feel more, stronger, better feelings. Stimulate, comfort, challenge and intrigue – it’s the most direct step we all can individually take towards making the world a better place.

Whenever I hear someone blurt out the phrase “I’m multi-tasking!” I instantly lose respect for them.

It’s proof their attention’s spread too thin to handle all they’re taking on. That they’re over-booked and over-stimulated, which means they’re over-confident and under-delivering. Which… sucks.

The sad truth is that most people aren’t all that attentive or detail-oriented. If someone doesn’t give something their full attention, it’s just about given they’ll miss key things. And they’ll miss more with each splitting of their focus (even when they insist otherwise). It doesn’t take many splits (often just one) before quality suffers and things stop working well… or at all.

“Multi-tasking” is euphemism-ese – a shiny way of saying they’re doing a lot of things less-well than they should be done. It’s a sacrifice of quality for quantity.

And even with the very few people who can multi-task well, it’s like them burning a candle at two (or more) ends – they can only do it in bursts before they fuck up, break down or burn out.

Right now this happening on-scale. Perpetual distraction means the moment we’re actually living gets only fragments of our focus. Attention shapes reality – and not focusing on the moment creates a shitty reality.

Someone “multi-tasking” while you’re waiting on them, after they’ve agreed to be in your presence, is wrong. They want to hang out… but not enough to pay attention to you? No. It’s disrespect and a breach of human decency that shouldn’t be tolerated. Next ‘em and instead invest in people who show they value your company – not ones who hold it hostage.

Having lots of things going on is fine… but doing them while others are waiting on you is not. At all. It’s a vicious passive-aggression that embodies ego, entitlement and greed. It’s bad humanity.

Sure, some allowances should be made – there are times in life when multi-tasking’s unavoidably necessary (especially with legit emergencies). You don’t want to chuck a long-standing partnership out the window if someone occasionally needs a minute to finish up a conversation.

…But this should be the rare exception, not the rule. Multi-tasking’s born of bad – of bad luck, bad planning, cheapness, desperation, uncalibrated ambition, over-excitement, the list goes on. It increases stress while decreasing quality. It’s never desirable – you do it when there’s no other choice.

Dedicated focus and clear, full communication are keys to bettering things. If you commit yourself to something, give it all of you. The world will be better for it.

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Most people tend to have teeny, tiny lil’ attention spans.

They only can take in bits and clips of things before they get bored or distracted by something else.

Part of this is basic human limitation. Most people can’t process or contextualize much before their brains overload and tap-out.

But on top of that things now are moving so fucking fast that even the sharpest can’t adequately process them. Combine inherent limitation with this furious speed and you have a perfect storm of social disease…an attention span epidemic.

What’s worse, many people, driven by hubris or dark magic I don’t know, use that dime-deep exposure to then confidently share their un-nuanced, largely-ignorant judgments about what’s “right” with the rest of the world.

…WTF?

No.

These are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[Fist-bumps Shakespeare, then tells MacBeth to lighten up]

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion… but that doesn’t necessarily make those opinions any sort of realistic or valid.

New Rule: If someone TL;DRs (“Too Long/Didn’t Read”s) something but then adds some kind of opinionated comment to it, that opinion doesn’t count.

Yeah I said it.

TL;DR as a standalone comment is valid. Brevity is the soul of wit, and over-writing is a common flaw of authors. Saying a piece of writing needs to be streamlined is fine (and probably true). Saying the most with the least is writing’s true art.

…But if you can’t be bothered to at least read all of something before making your thoughts on its contents available for everyone to see, you have less than no business making your opinions of it public.

Until you fully-read and at least legitimately try to understand something, shut the fuck up about it. Seriously. You’re an insult to thought and evolution.

Let’s up the quality of public discourse. Its lack is stoking moral absolutism and destroying civility. Like I said, a social disease – one which typically leads to bullet-based problem-solving.

Let’s stop the devolution.

A predatory tactic for “winning” arguments is the aggressive interruption of the other person before they can finish their thought (or sentence). This is commonly followed by an emotionalistic, childish badgering of them into submission, disengagement or hostility.

Use of this tactic means that the conversation isn’t actually a conversation – it’s rhetorical bullying. A dark-age show of psychological force meant to manipulate and dominate. A non-physical form of violence which creates the need for its physical form.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The disturbing frequency of aggressive interruption reflects an ongoing degeneration of dialogue… and by extension of civilization in general. Fueled by a perfect storm of epidemic immaturity, unjustified confidence, inadequate attention to detail and a fanatical/nigh-psychotic competitiveness, the stage is set for something truly terrible.

Interrupters by their very nature cannot be wise or right any meaningful portion of the time. Their childish over-excitability causes them to consistently miss critical masses of information that would otherwise allow them to have any sort of complete, contextualized, enlightened understandings. Their interruption of others marks them not only as socially-diseased, but as some of the last people in the world anyone should ever listen to or take seriously.

People who argue by interruption are and need to be recognized as socially dysfunctional. They should be isolated from society and matured, educated in the tenets of listening, patience and reciprocity. Until that happens they represent real, fundamental threats to social stability and ultimately evolution itself.

These are the people who need cancelling. This is behavior we need to grow out of ASAP to create a better world.

New rule: if someone is constantly interrupting and badgering the person they’re in a discussion with, their opinions are invalid and the discussion is over until they calm down and grow up.

Most of our fun and authenticity comes from the stuff we’re not supposed to be doing.

Standout memories rarely revolve around responsible, “smart” things like studying hard, paying bills, working long hours and using logic. They’re born of envelope-pushing, risky, emotion-stirring things. Most of what makes meaning and shapes us as people happens when we’re outside the box, pushing limits… not doing the safe, sensible, “smart” thing.

It’s weird because society constantly shouts at us that this sensible stuff is what “wins” in the end. That if you’re “smart” you’ll preempt life by trying to get out in front of it. That by sacrificing enjoyment of the present to improve your potential future things will eventually just all work out on their own, and when they do you’ll end up better off than most. That this thinking is somehow wisdom – the natural end point of maturity after enough life experience.

…But not really. That’s one-dimensional thinking. It’s not that it’s wrong per se… but it’s not really right. It ignores stage of life context and skips a lot of important steps – the ones that create a fully-realized individual who’s more than simply the sum of their work and knowledge.

The sensible approach is great for the logistics & requirements parts of life. Obviously you gotta take care of business to pay the bills and fuel the fun. But this stuff is merely life’s enabler. It sets the stage, but it isn’t what delivers the performance.

There’s a legit danger here. Only having your business handled without delivering the performance = boring = social death. This is the sad fate of millions who’ve made the mistake of over-emphasizing the logistical parts of their life. They’ve checked every box society’s told them to, so on-paper they’re great. Yet often something’s just… missing.

What’s missing is their ability to be truly present in the moment. The realness and depth that viscerally draws other people to you regardless of wealth or status. The street cred that comes from walking on the wild side.

The real value-add of a person to most other people is their ability to create fun and stimulation at any time, in any place and under any circumstances. This usually comes from the accumulation of entertaining stories and a deep, honed social skill set resulting from the fun experiences that created those stories. And most of these come from vice-fueled adventures.

Think about it: Would you rather go to a dinner or party where people talk at length about their jobs or logistics like errands and home maintenance? Or a dinner/party where people are talking silly-but-mood-elevating nonsense and interspersing it with crazy stories that involve emotion-stoking, thought-provoking details?

Exactly.

There’s a reason a majority of characters in media are colorful, flaw-focused characters. Media’s produced by the entertainment industry, and the core purpose of all forms of entertainment is to elicit emotion. Good, safe behavior tends not to do that.

So goes social value in real life.

Most of us are trying to do way too much, way too fast.

So much of our lives are spent frantically jumping from one obligation to the next, just trying to keep all our plates spinning. There’s little (if any) room in this for reflection or enjoyment – it’s all we can do to get our shit done. It consumes the best of our time and attention.

There seems to be some sort of weird societal fetishism for this kind of frenetic busy-ness. A warped “understanding” that always being in motion and constantly trying to do more are somehow implicitly noble things that automatically signal you as worthwhile and make your life better.

Bullshit.

Being THAT busy is a problem. A serious one.

Productivity’s one part of life… not all of it.

People need free time and calm to reflect on themselves and their lives. Time to play back events to see if they come to different (and better) conclusions than they did in the moment. Time to ponder who they are in relation to what’s happened. Time to breathe and actually enjoy the fruits of their labors (or else figure out why they aren’t).

Time to hear themselves think… and feel.

You’re not going to meaningfully grow as a person living life late for the next thing. That’s juggling – light-touching a bunch of things without paying quality attention to any of them. Your focus is always distracted by what’s coming, so it’s never fully in the moment. Quality and presence in the moment are what give life meaning.

Living like this isn’t living. It’s existing.

Your relationships will suffer. You won’t be able to meaningfully evaluate what happens to you. The only thing that’ll get your quality energy is your work – and work without greater context makes you a hamster on a wheel. An indentured servant.

Make good time for reflection. Make sure you live… not just exist.

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

Yeah…no.

Not at all.

And, interestingly, directly contradicted by the same man who said it.

The wrongness of that thinking empowers the wicked while hamstringing their victims – it makes being bad OK as long as you go first. It’s the proactives of bad that need more scrutiny and judgment… not the reactives.

Whenever someone does something bad to another, the canned “wisdom” is something along the lines of “don’t stoop to their level, don’t retaliate…just be the ‘bigger’ person and let it go. Just you wait: people like that get their comeuppance/the universe tends to unfold as it should/blah blah blah.”

First, that’s blatantly untrue. Some assholes get their comeuppance, sure, and gosh darn it does it make for inspirational storytelling. But many, many more not only get away with bad behavior, but are richly rewarded for it. Human history would look very different (and a lot better) if this weren’t the case.

Second, the “logic” of this statement is self-defeating.

It says to not retaliate against someone who’s wronged you because one of their past misdeeds will eventually come back to haunt and make them pay for their bad behavior. But that means that one of the people affected by the shitty person’s bad behavior will decide they’re not OK with just letting it go – that they’re going to take action to punish that bad behavior by channeling the anger and frustration it’s forced on them back onto its original source.

…Which means the entire crux of the strategy is that one of the aggressor’s other victims eventually WON’T the “bigger” person. 🤔

Following the “wisdom” of just letting it go when wronged forces a victim to internalize the resulting frustration and anger, making bad feelings that aren’t their fault their responsibility. And it forces this undeserved, ongoing pain onto the wronged while protecting their aggressor(s). It’s toxic – like not removing a burst/septic appendix.

Worse, if that undeserved pain and frustration don’t get constructively vented (and they rarely do), they build up to a point where they hurt too much to keep bottled up inside, eventually exploding onto an innocent bystander. This leaves two innocent victims confused and damaged… again while the original source remains unredressed.

This is shit rolling downhill in the worst of ways – the equivalent of telling the wronged to swallow acid and smile. It’s backwards morality – wrong, counter-evolutionary thinking that’s the opposite of what it should be.

Forgiveness may be divine, but it often makes the world worse.

Mind the gap.