Money makes the world go ’round. Money is power. It might not be able to buy happiness directly, but it buys comfort, security, and freedom, which yield happiness. Poverty buys stress, anxiety, hopelessness, poor quality food and slavery, which will make you so miserable it will shorten your life.
Mind-altering substances are expensive and addictive. The more you use the more you will want to consume and the more you’ll need to consume to achieve inebriation. If you become a full-blooded addict you’ll end up spending a very significant portion of your income on mind-altering substances, and that will severely reduce your options in life. If you have any hopes and dreams in life then stay sober, because addiction is a very heavy chain and ball around your finances.
2. No hangovers, withdrawals or cravings
Euphoric chemicals are called “euphoric” for a reason. They will cause you to feel levels of pleasure unattainable through sobriety. Though you may begin your descent into addiction by chasing euphoria, your motivation to get inebriated will inevitably transition to fleeing hangovers, withdrawals and cravings (all of which are extremely painful). The benefit you get from temporary chemical-induced euphoria won’t be worth the cost of perpetual discomfort.
3. You’ll make more clear-headed decisions
Inebriation is effectively temporary retardedness. While under the influence you can’t speak, walk or think at normal, sane levels. The more time you’re inebriated the higher the chances you’ll make bad decisions like sleeping with the wrong people, breaking laws, ignoring responsibilities and treating other people poorly. If you want to make the most of out of life you need to make the best decisions possible every day. Addiction prevents that from happening.
4. You’ll be more able to overcome the problems that drive you to inebriation
Some of the most important issues you need to confront rationally are the problems that drive you to drink and use drugs in the first place. Inducing temporary retardedness won’t make those problems go away; it just sweeps them under the rug until you sober up again, and the longer they’re left unresolved the worse they’ll get.
5. Your life won’t be plagued by the problems that come with addiction
Addiction will make you poorer, more stressed and less able to deal with life’s challenges. These problems will cause even more unnecessary problems that you’ll need to deal with. If you’d never started down the path to addiction those problems would never have happened, and once they do start piling up you’ll be less capable of dealing with them if you’re broke, stressed and incoherent.
6. Your brain will work better, which will improve every aspect of your life
Euphoric chemicals don’t just hamper your ability to think coherently and logically. They damage your brain and take their toll on your subconscious thought processes as well causing mental deficiencies you’re not even aware of. Your identity and reality are defined by your brain. If you throw a monkey wrench into your brain then you’ll lower the quality of your life and your reality forever even if you can manage to hold down a high paying job and not run off everyone important in your life.
7. You won’t be a burden on the people you love (and who love you)
No man is an island. The things you do (and don’t do) affect the people in your life. Living with an alcoholic is like living with a special need’s child. In saying that I’m not trying to disparage addicts or special needs children. I’m just pointing out that they do add another level of responsibilities and burdens on the people closest to them. I’m also not implying we shouldn’t help the people in our lives who have special needs (such as managing addictions). I’m just saying, if you don’t have to inconvenience your loved ones then you shouldn’t.
8. You’ll have more meaningful relationships with the people you love (and who love you)
Living with someone who is too inebriated to walk, talk or think effectively is like living with a Neanderthal. It’s difficult to reach and relate to someone in that state. Likewise, when you’re inebriated you can’t connect with your loved ones on a lucid level. Inebriation puts up a wall between you and your loved ones that limits your ability to experience each other’s true selves, and that’s missing out on the best part of life.
9. With good health comes better feelings
Pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong, and addiction is agonizing. Good health allows your body to function properly, and if you take care of yourself then your body will reward you with free euphoria.
10. The future will always look bleak when you’re killing yourself
Life is daunting, especially if you’ve had a traumatic past and/or a stressful present. Addiction is harming yourself to medicate yourself out of fear of feeling pain. The cure for fear is hope. If you have hope for the future then your anxieties will fade to your peripheral vision. As fun as euphoric chemicals may be, you know they’re killing you. That will always make the future bleaker even if you don’t fully articulate the fact to yourself. Sobriety isn’t always easy, but it opens doors that lead to greener pastures.
At some point in your life you’re going to have the opportunity to do mind-altering drugs like tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, heroin, meth, crack, etc., and you’re going to have to do the cost/benefit analysis to decide whether or not you should do drugs. Some people would tell you that you shouldn’t do drugs because drugs are bad, and if you do drugs then that makes you a bad person who deserves to be punished accordingly. That philosophy is vague to the point of being useless and doesn’t address any of the subtle realities of drug use.
People don’t do drugs because they’re bad, and doing drugs doesn’t make you a bad person. Doing drugs certainly doesn’t warrant punishment. So what does cause people to use drugs? The number one cause of drug use is the fact that life sucks. Life doesn’t suck because existence is an inherently pointless and painful experience. Life sucks because the world our elders designed for us is inhumane, and countless people suffer from poverty, abuse, and abandonment as a result of the faulty systems that control our lives. If you grew up in a loving, nurturing household where all of your needs were taken care of, then good for you. You’re less likely to get addicted to drugs because your life is full of experiences and opportunities that make life enjoyable and fulfilling. But if you grew up in a broken home and got stuck working as a disposable wage slave at the bottom of a heartless corporation with little to no options for career progression, then the cost/benefit analysis of doing drugs will look more tempting to you.
The harder your life is the more tempting and gratifying drugs will be, and if you live and work with broken people who are trapped under the glass ceiling, you’ll be more likely to make friends with people who have discovered that habitual drug use helps manage their own pain and anxiety. No matter what strata of society you come from, the people most likely to offer you drugs will be your friends. A creepy looking stranger in a black trench coat probably won’t walk up to you and ask you in a raspy whisper if you want to buy some dope. More likely you’ll see your friends having a good time using drugs and you’ll think to yourself, “I want to have that good of a time too.” And your friends will be more than happy to share their drugs with you because they care about you and want you to have a good time too.
An interesting thing about drugs is that they don’t affect all people the same way. While your friends may be having the best time of their lives while on drugs you might get a mild kick or even get sick from it because your body processes the drugs differently. If you experiment with drugs a few times and find that they make you feel absolutely amazing then you need to be extra cautious about using them again. If drugs don’t do much for you then you may be able to use them recreationally from time to time without ever becoming an addict. Just be careful about judging people who use drugs more often than you, because their situation is very different from yours.
Drugs are dangerous because they damage your health, and they’re addictive, but the most dangerous thing about drugs is that they’re fun. They’re more fun than reality. When you feel happiness or pleasure you’re feeling the effects of chemicals in your brain. Drugs affect your brain in ways that make you experience levels of happiness and pleasure greater than is possible to achieve through sobriety. When adults tell children not to do drugs because drugs are bad and children go on to use drugs and discover how absolutely wonderful drugs are, then those children are likely to lose regard for the opinion of puritanical adults and continue on with their drug use unprepared for the dangers ahead of them.
It takes time to get addicted to drugs. The first 1-100 times you use drugs you may not be an addict. You may just be enjoying the moment, but over time the addiction will creep in, and you won’t notice it’s there until it’s too late. So if you’re going to experiment with drugs you need to be vividly aware that you’re not just enjoying the moment. You’re courting addiction, and once your body becomes dependent on drugs you won’t be able to just quit any time. You might be able to quit, but it’s going to be painful…and not just the one time you decide to quit cold turkey.
Habitual drug users tend to start out using drugs simply for the sake of experiencing euphoria, but as you become addicted your body craves the drug all the time the same way your body craves food, water or sex. When you don’t have it you get this unexplainable sense of hunger for the drug, and your brain will want it so bad that it will help you make excuses why you should spend more money to get more drugs. This sounds dramatic, but the way it feels to fledgling addicts is deceptively commonplace. There’s just a thought in the back of your head that says, “Hey, a cigarette or beer or joint or line would sure be nice right now.” Then your brain answers back, “What the heck? Let’s get some more.” Then you do.
At the same time as this is going on your mind is also getting accustomed to experiencing an unrealistically euphoric reality. So normal life becomes boring and dull, which makes you want to do drugs more often. Then, the more drugs you do the more damage you do to your organs and deplete your vitamins. If you damage your organs long enough and starve your body of essential vitamins you won’t be able to experience the fullness of sober reality anyway. In fact, you’ll start developing minor aches and pains that will motivate you to do more drugs to erase those pains. And since you’ll feel like you’re starving when you don’t feed your body’s addiction then the nature of your habit will gradually change. Instead of using drugs simply to chase euphoria you’ll use drugs to run away from the pain of withdrawals. You’ll tell yourself sobriety just sucks, but in reality, you’re making sobriety suck.
The longer you do drugs the more likely you are to come to the “logical” conclusion that if life is extra fun while you’re high then why not just be high all the time? Then you’ll be happy all the time. Technically that’s true, but the prize comes with many costs. If you’re a wealthy trust fund baby who will never have to work a day in your whole life then spending your life as a self-destructive hedonist is your choice. You’re going to die someday anyway. Whether or not you live a long, sober life or a short, euphoric one is an interesting philosophical question, but your addiction might not amount to more than that. However, if you’re from the working class then the consequences of addiction are far more serious.
Long before you develop health problems from your addiction you’ll suffer the consequences of having to pay for your addiction. Legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco are priced as high as possible and taxed as high as possible on top of that. Businesses price their goods high so they can make as much money off of killing people as possible, and governments make sin taxes as high as possible to discourage substance abuse (supposedly), but an addict will pay whatever they have to in order to cope with home much life sucks, ward off withdraws and feel euphoric.
Doing anything every day becomes incredibly expensive very quickly. Doing drugs every day requires you to set aside a significant percentage of your income. This means you’re going to have to sacrifice something else in order to free up room in your budget for drugs. At first, you might not go out to eat as much or buy as many new clothes, but the more addicted you become, and the more substances you become addicted to, the more money you’ll have to budget for drugs and the less other things you’ll be able to do and buy.
As I said earlier, life sucks for billions of people in this world through no fault of their own. They’re victims of a heartless economy, and they’re victimized most at work. We grow up in a world where the average worker is paid as little as possible to do as much work as possible while being treated with as much indignity as is it takes to get workers to meet their quotas and please their customers. Living like this our entire lives we take it for granted that this is the natural order of things and anyone who doesn’t like it is ungrateful and lazy. People who use euphoric drugs know how good life can be, and they know they don’t need to climb to the top of the corporate ladder to make their dreams come true. They don’t even need a fancy house or new clothes. All they need is a case of beer, a bag of weed or a needle of heroin.
Drug addicts tend to become disenchanted with the promise of a lavish retirement after a lifetime of being treated like shit at work. After using enough drugs you may even come to the conclusion that since you’re not going to live to old age you don’t need to save for old age or impress petty, sadistic bosses. The fact that your brain is skewed sideways from so much drug use it becomes easy to justify decisions you would have found illogical when you were sober, and since you’re feeling euphoric all the time, you don’t feel the consequences of rash decisions the way you normally do. So the more drugs you do the more likely you are to give up on traditional career paths and simply find whatever work will cater to your drug use. Ironically, most of the jobs that don’t care about your employment history and don’t make you take drug tests are inhumane minimum wage jobs that don’t offer benefits or retirement options.
So long-term drug use increases the likelihood that you’ll end up broke and working at a shit job. This will make you want to do drugs more, and since you won’t want to do anything during your free time unless you’re high you’ll spend more money on drugs. And since you won’t be able to function normally while you’re high you’ll tend to just stay at home and do drugs, and that will become your life. The scariest part is that you won’t feel bad about this. In your mind, you’ll have reached Shangri La, but to the outside observer, you’ll be a poor junky living in a sparse house who wasted your potential.
That’s a worst-case scenario. There are billions of people who have used, are using and will use drugs who won’t end up anywhere near that point. But the ideal life is nowhere near that end of the spectrum. I’m not saying that nobody should ever use drugs. When done in moderation you can experience majestic highs without selling your soul for it, but every time you use drugs you need to be aware of the fact that you’re warming your feet at the gates of hell.
You probably live in suburbia, where you wake up every morning on an old mattress. You get out of bed, put on your work clothes and an old pair of shoes. You make breakfast standing up in your kitchen, and sit at a table to eat it. Then you sit in your car and hold your hands on the steering wheel and drive to work, where you spend all day doing the exact same thing you did every day before. Then you sit in your car and hold your hands on the steering wheel as you drive home and spend the better part of your evening sitting on a couch or at a desk.
If you hold your body in the same positions all day every day, and you perform the same motions with your limbs all day every day, it’s only a matter of time until the muscles you overuse get tight and knotted, and the muscles you use less, atrophy. When that happens, your tight muscles will pull and hold your skeleton in a contorted position that your atrophied muscles are powerless to prevent. Your body will try to correct the contortion by tightening other muscle groups in an increasingly counterproductive attempt to straighten your body. The longer this goes on, the worse your muscles will hurt.
Simply varying your daily routine can reduce muscle strain and prevent muscle pain… but there are only so many different ways you can sit in a chair, hold a steering wheel or perform your job. For most people, it’s impossible to completely avoid repetitive stress injury. You can minimize and treat it though by varying your routine and following the rest of the advice in this list.
2: You need to buy better shoes, pillows, and mattresses.
Your brain is constantly figuring out how hard it needs to tell every muscle in your body to flex in order to keep you from just falling to the floor like a puddle of jelly. Your brain also constantly figures out which muscles it needs to flex in order to hold your body in a position where you can walk straight with your eyes level.
When external factors like cheap shoes, a cheap bed, or a serious injury tilts the posture of your skeleton off balance, the muscles in your body automatically tighten/loosen to hold your skeleton in a way that allows you to walk forward with your eyes level despite whatever factors are throwing your posture off.
Another way bad posture can cause muscle pain is by creating an imbalance in your fascia. Every individual muscle in your body is basically shrink-wrapped in a stretchy film called fascia, and every group of muscles is wrapped in an additional layer of fascia. Where two muscles meet, their fascia connects. These bags don’t flex like muscles; they just passively conform to whatever shape they’re stretched in.
If your skeleton is tilted off balance, in the same way, every day, eventually your fascia is going to get over/under stretched around the muscles you over/under use. These awkwardly stretched/stressed bags are going to pinch your muscles, causing pain. And since all of the fascia bags around your muscles are ultimately connected, that means stretching the fascia in the top of your body can pull the fascia at the bottom of your body, causing pain in a completely separate location from where the real problem is. The longer your fascia conforms to bad posture, the more it sets and becomes tougher and less pliable. That will reinforce the bad posture that’s stressing your muscles and causing you pain.
You’re going to spend half your life in your shoes, and the other half in your bed. If they don’t support your body ergonomically, you will develop muscle injury and pain. So spending money on a good bed, good pillows and good shoes will bring you more happiness than buying pretty much anything else that costs less than $1,000.
“You are either in your bed or in your shoes, so it pays to invest in both.”
3: You need to stretch more.
Each of your muscles is made up of millions of fibers that are about as thick as a strand of hair. Muscle fibers are made of living cells that consume food, generate energy, die and need to be replaced. Each fiber is also made of thousands of microscopic chambers that contain moving parts that latch onto each other when injected with calcium and release when the calcium is drained. When you strain your muscles, they become inflamed, which can constrict the microscopic chambers in your muscle fibers and cause them to seize up. This will trap the calcium being used to activate the machinery in your muscle fiber chambers to get trapped there, which means that fiber won’t be able to relax. To make matters worse, since your muscle fibers are living cells, they’re always producing waste, and eventually, they all die. If the chambers of your muscle fibers are damaged and locked up, your body won’t be able to flush out all the cellular poop and dead cells. All the toxic debris in your muscles will cause inflammation and pain to the surrounding areas.
Simply stretching your muscles can do a lot to un-jam the dysfunctional compartments in your muscle fibers. Probably more important than that though, stretching lengthens the constricted fascia around your muscles that is pinching and suffocating them.
Taking yoga classes could be one of the best things you ever do for yourself. If you’re just not going to do yoga, you would probably benefit from doing some simple military stretches daily. If nothing else, make a point to stretch your limbs out like a cat when you get out of bed. Every little bit helps.
4: You need to exercise more.
Every organ system in your body is intimately connected. The healthier one of them is, the healthier they all are. The sicker one is, the sicker they all are. Exercise makes all of your organ systems healthier. The healthier your heart and circulatory system are, the better your body can send oxygen to your muscles, remove waste, repair itself and fight disease. The better your bones are, the stronger of a connection your muscles will have with your bones. If the pulleys that are wrapped all around your skeleton aren’t firmly attached, you’re going to have a wobbly pulley system, and something is going to tear eventually. If your respiratory system isn’t working well, you’re going to have a hard time getting oxygen to your thirsty muscles. If your digestive system isn’t working well, you’re not going to be able to get energy to your tired muscles. I’m not saying exercising will cure every problem in every organ system. I’m just saying, if you want to avoid pain, you should be exercising.
When you work out your muscles, it immediately stimulates blood flow in your muscles, which helps flush in things your muscles need and flush out things they don’t. It also breaks up stagnant tissue, preventing fibrous tissue build, and it stretches your fascia, which prevents it from hardening. Of course, exercise makes your muscles grow, and the stronger your muscles are, the less likely they are to hurt after doing simple physical activities. When all of your muscles are strong, then the ones you overwork a little too much won’t have such a disastrous effect on weaker opposing muscle groups. Then your muscles will be able to hold your skeleton straighter, and you’ll never experience the chain reaction of connected muscle groups seizing up to correct each other’s bad posture.
There are several trillion cells in your body, and several billion of them die every day. All the cells in your body are replaced every few months. Your cells are about 78% water, and everything they do requires water. In order to feed all your healthy cells and flush out your body, there are about 100,000 miles of tubes crammed in your body that circulate about 5 liters of blood through your body about 50 times a day. Your blood is about 92% water, and your kidneys remove about 2 liters of waste-water from your bloodstream every day in the form of urine.
Your entire body is about 60% water, which means you’re basically a walking waterfall. If you don’t drink enough water, the micro-machinery in your body won’t be able to grow to full size, function at full capacity, feed, clean or rebuild itself properly. This negatively affects every cell in your body. To put it in perspective, dehydration is worse for your body than smoking. I’m not saying that drinking water will cure all your health problems. I’m just saying, if you want to avoid pain, you should be drinking water at least every two hours, and about 2 liters of water every day.
6: You need to improve your diet.
The human body is more complicated than the Internet. It’s made up of reproducing, regenerating cells that perform millions of unique actions that require different nutrients. Bones build themselves with calcium, and muscles use calcium to contract. Most of your cells use protein, and all your cells use glucose for energy. Antioxidants keep the atomic structure of your cells stable. This list could go on for thousands of pages. The point is, eating healthily is responsible for a reason. Your body is a complex machine that requires specific types and quantities of nutrients to operate efficiently. If you don’t give your body what it needs, it won’t work correctly, and it will create pain to alert you to the problem. If you do eat healthily, every organ system in your body will work better and be more able to overcome any pain-inducing problems within its self.
Your muscles and skeleton are designed to work best at your optimal body weight. An unhealthy diet that puts on unnecessary weight will naturally strain your bones and muscles. Eating healthily will help you lose weight and improve your organ system functions better than dieting or exercising alone. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to exercise. It just means that until you’re eating healthily, you won’t be able to achieve and maintain your ideal body weight or enjoy all the benefits of having healthy organ systems no matter what else you do. If you’re already eating healthy and you’re not losing weight, talk to your doctor about what else you can do achieve your health goals. If you choose to drink sodas and eat fast food every day, understand that it’s only a matter of time before you develop muscle pains. If you accept that, then that’s your prerogative. It’s none of my business how you choose to live your life, but I (and your doctor) really think you’d be happier if you fed your body more of what it needs and less of what it doesn’t. That’s all I have to say about that. Do with it what you will.
7: You need a massage
Massage isn’t just for rich, spoiled spouses who want to be pampered. Almost everyone in the world can benefit tremendously from massage. I would go as far as saying that it’s as important to see a massage therapist as it is to see a dentist. Massage relaxes and lengthens your overworked muscles and tones your underworked ones. It breaks up adhesions and lengthens your fascia. It stimulates blood flow, which helps nourish and clean your muscles. It also stimulates lymph flow, which increases the speed at which your body removes toxic material from your body. Just the simple act of a compassionate human touch has positive physical effects on your organ systems. Plus, it’s emotionally rewarding and stress-reducing. Most importantly, your massage therapists can identify over/underworked muscles in your body and work with you to develop a plan to help you avoid recreating the same muscle pains in the future. If your muscles are hurting, you should seriously consider seeing someone who is professionally trained and licensed to fix muscle pain.
You are what you think. You are what you know. The best way to gain knowledge and improve yourself is by reading books. Furthermore, the books you choose to read reflect your values and goals. If someone can tell you every book they’ve ever read you could paint a pretty accurate picture of that person’s mind without knowing anything else about them. When I go into someone else’s house who I barely know the first thing I do is look for their bookshelf. If they don’t have one that automatically tells me something about them. If they do have a bookshelf then the books they choose to keep in their house will tell me more about them.
2. By the television shows you watch and the music you listen to habitually
In the same way, books fill and shape your mind, so does television programs and music. The entertainment you choose to put into your head also reflects your values. However, if you told me one movie you’ve watched or one song you’ve heard I couldn’t discern much about you from just that. There could be any number of factors that led to you absorb that entertainment. However, if you all you watch is mindless sitcoms every single night that will tell me a lot about you, not just by the fact that you enjoy mindless stimulation but that you’re not spending your time doing other more intellectual or humanitarian activities. If you never watch documentaries that will tell me you don’t value seeking out knowledge as much as someone who does. If your entire album collection is rap music I could probably predict that you spent an irresponsible amount of money on your car and shoes. If all you listen to is Christian music then I could predict that you’re a Christian. If all you listen to is country music I could predict that you probably have an oversimplified and codependent view on love. If all you listen to is rock and roll I could predict that you value autonomy but express that value in how much you base your identity to rock and roll culture.
3. How you react to inconveniences
No action is an island. The way you behave in one situation is how you’re likely to behave in similar circumstances. If you freak out when you can’t find your shoe I can accurately predict that you’ll freak out over other meaningless inconveniences, and this is a sign that you have poor conflict management skills. I wouldn’t date you. If you treat your waitress rudely at a restaurant I can bet that you’ wouldn’t take my feelings into consideration in the future. If you gossip to me then I know you would gossip about me. If you fold under pressure like when you’re traveling abroad then I can predict that you would fold under pressure in other extreme situations. Granted, extreme situations are rare in life. So this won’t affect whether or not I’d choose to have you as a friend, I wouldn’t promote you at work if the decision was up to me.
4. By your philosophy on life
If you can tell me your philosophy on life then I don’t need to judge you. You’ll have told me everything I need to know about you in order to understand you. If you don’t have a philosophy then I’ll I know you’re wandering through life aimlessly and are prone to relatively volatile behavior and are swayed by social influence. I can count on one hand how many people I’ve met with a philosophy. If someone tells me their philosophy on life is a one-line, vague answer like, “Love everybody,” then I know that not only do they not have a philosophy but they’re deluded. They may tend to think they’re right about things they know nothing about. If they say, “Kant once said…” or “Nietzsche once said…” then I’ll know that they get all their ideas from other people and don’t think for themselves. At least, they don’t think outside the intellectual paradigm they’ve been handed. Furthermore, they’re likely to be so sure of their intellectual supremacy that they’ll refuse to listen to contradicting ideas and will even condemn anyone who does for being intellectually inferior. Is this a brash over-generalization? Probably. Is it accurate more often than not? In my experience, yes.
5. By the questions you ask and the extent that you try to answer them
The amount of answers to life’s questions you understand is directly proportional to the amount of questions you ask. If you never ask questions or devote yourself to answering them then I’ll know you’re an ignorant person who accepts the status quo and will likely defend it. If the only questions you ask are, “What car should I buy?” “What’s on TV?” or “Who’s going to win the World Cup?” then I know that you’re a mindless consumer whore. You might be fun at parties, but your usefulness in life and to other people is on par with the entertaining distractions you can buy at the mall. If you ask questions about politics, psychology, economics and foreign cultures then I can predict that you’ll be an extremely useful and interesting person to have in my life.
6. By what you spend your money on
Money is a metaphor. A thousand dollars represents anything you can buy with a thousand dollars. It also represents the amount of time and work you’ve put into earning those dollars. So when you buy something with money you’re trading time and work for a good or service. You’re literally trading your life away. You’re practically paying with blood. So the things you choose to buy directly and immediately reflect your values. They show what you would trade your life for. If you buy a pointlessly expensive car then I can tell automatically that your life is empty. If you buy books then I know that you value growth. If you buy herbal supplements then I can tell that you value life. If you buy vacations I can tell that you’re adventurous.
1. It reflects a lack of understanding of reality.
It doesn’t matter how much you know, how clever you can think, how successful you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve experienced… you don’t know anything about anything. You don’t know what set the universe in motion. You don’t know what all has been happening for the past 4.7 billion years or where the atoms in your body have been in that time. You don’t know the meaning of life or the secret to creating it. You don’t know how backward your culture is. You don’t know what the leaders of the world are doing. You don’t know what anyone else in the world is thinking. You don’t know how all the technology you use every day works, and there are places in this world you wouldn’t survive a day in. You might have mastered a skill, but you’re only good at a handful of them. There are libraries full of things you don’t know. If you walk around congratulating yourself for how smart you are then you have a flawed perception of reality. Your perception of yourself obviously doesn’t take into account the fact that you don’t know shit about shit.
2. Conceit is obvious, and others will look down on you for it.
While you go around viewing yourself as a golden god everyone around you will view you as a fool, and they won’t want to get close to you or do things for or with you. Not only will they look down on you for overestimating your importance, but they’ll look down on you for being too thick to realize that everyone thinks you’re a fool.
3. Conceit is a waste of time.
Being conceited requires you dedicate a certain percentage of your brain power to thinking about how great you are and analyzing how inferior other people are to you. This takes time, and you only have so much time each day to think about who and what you are, where you’re going, how you’re going to get there and what you’re going to do. In between all that you also have to think about how to navigate your way through your daily routine, and at some point you need to take a break from thinking and just enjoy the experience of being here now. If you want to make the most out of your life you need to use your thinking time wisely, and thinking about how much better than everyone else you are is a waste of time. The cost/benefit analysis doesn’t add up. Sure, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling out of it, but it’s a sadistic, short-sighted pleasure. There are greater pleasures in the universe, and there’s more important work that needs to be done for the sake of humanity than patting yourself on the back all day.
If you really did something worth patting yourself on the back for you accomplished it not by thinking about how great you are but by applying your mind to the task in front of you. If you did that and accomplished something great, and now you’re patting yourself on the back about it all day, then you’re not applying your mind to doing more great stuff. If you’re not moving forward then you’re stagnating and regressing. That will still happen even in an ivory tower.
4. Conceited people are untrustworthy.
You might be a well-credentialed, professionally successful person, but if you’re so conceited that it shows then that says something about the way you look at life. That says something about how you treat people. The only way to get conceited is to obsess over yourself. Anyone who is conceited is the center of their own universe. You can bet that people like that will almost always put their wants and needs before anyone else’s.
There are about 7 billion people in the world, and there’s more on the way. You only have a short amount of time to find the best people out there to spend your fleeting, irreplaceable life with. Conceited people don’t have what it takes to become true best friends. So as soon as you see someone with their nose up in the air, write them off. They’re not the friend or ally you’re looking for, and if you do end up tangling your lives together then don’t be surprised when it turns out you can’t count on a conceited fool to get your back when you’re in a tight spot.
5. You end up hating yourself with the same level of intensity as you love yourself.
Conceit stems from self-obsession. Your narrow mindedness might blind you to a lot of your flaws, but eventually, you’re going to fail to live up to your own unrealistically high expectations, and you’re going to know it. And since you’re so obsessed with your perfection, and you’re so hard on others who fail to live up to those standards, you’re inevitably going to treat yourself the same way. Conceited people beat themselves up worse than anyone. So anytime you see someone making a spectacle out of patting themself on the back, you can be sure their other arm is secretly stabbing their self in the chest. That obsessive self-abuse isn’t mature, responsible or laudable.
Beating yourself up is irresponsible because it has negative real-world consequences. Making the most out of your life requires good mental health. You have to be able to think straight and approach life’s challenges with confidence and concentration. As you overcome bigger and bigger challenges you need to keep the presence of mind to enjoy life along the way. Riding an emotional roller coaster where you praise yourself blind and then beat yourself up can only hold you back from fulfilling your potential.
The more you beat yourself up the worse you’re going to feel awful, which is a travesty in and of itself, but long-term anxiety will yield a whole new batch of psychological problems. Conceit is like a drug. It makes you feel good for a little bit, but if you do it too much you risk losing yourself in a downward spiral of misery. So if you ever catch yourself being conceited, stop yourself.
It’s impossible to overstate how important knowledge is. The sum of your knowledge shapes your personality and abilities. So having an encyclopedic amount of knowledge in your brain will truly make you a stronger, more complete person. However, being smart doesn’t warrant being conceited, because being conceited about your intelligence is shortsighted and illogical on multiple levels.
There’s more to know about life than your brain is capable of comprehending. Bragging about being the smartest person in the room is like an ant bragging about being the smartest ant in the hive. All it proves is how little you really understand about life.
Even if you know that you don’t know everything, you may still be tempted to feel better than other people if you’re the foremost expert in your field, but that just means you’re great at one or a few things. Most people are really good at one or two things, and everybody knows about all sorts of things that you never will. Being really good at something doesn’t make you any better than anyone else. All it proves is that you’re doing something while you’re alive, and you were supposed to be doing something anyway. So bragging about knowing something is jerking yourself off for doing the mandatory minimum.
By all means, strive to become a genius. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, but how far you’ve walked your path doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. The person next to you is just another animated pile of stardust, on their own, private quest to figure out what the heck they’re doing here. If you’re smart enough to understand the value of life you wouldn’t place others beneath you because of their IQ level. You would treat everyone with the full respect and appreciation that a living, breathing, conscious animated pile of start dust deserves.
2: By how less smart you are than everyone else
If you’re not academically inclined, don’t judge yourself contemptibly. You don’t have to be as smart as anyone else to justify your existence. Your worth is not determined by your test scores or anyone else’s. The value of your existence stems from the fact that you’re in a unique position in all of space and time to do something that nobody else can do: become you. You don’t need to match other people’s success. You just need to find what interests you and learn what you can about it for your own personal sake.
3: By the size of your bank account
Money has no inherent worth. It’s a symbolic medium of exchange that represents whatever it can be traded for, which is almost everything. Since money is so powerful, the more of it you have, the more people will love, forgive, respect, worship, fear and obey you. If you have enough money to effectively wield the power of a demigod, and people are always treating you like one, eventually you might start identifying as one.
If you don’t have any money, and you have to work like a slave for a rich boss who treats you like a subhuman creature, you might start to feel like a subhuman creature. If you spend long enough unable to afford good food, housing, clothes, transportation or leisure, eventually you may forget or just stop believing that life could be any other way. After you get used to living like a subhuman, you might start to identify as a subhuman.
These assumptions are shortsighted though, because while money affects what you can do in a monetary economy, it doesn’t affect what you inherently, fundamentally are, because what you are, is a mind with a body that grew out of an inexplicable spinning wad of atoms. You’re a phenomenal cosmic miracle mystery, the existence of which raises profound questions and possibilities. The root of your value extends all the way back to before the big ban, but money is just dust in the wind.
While having money/debt can’t define what you are, what you do with it does. Your spending habits are your choices. They’re based on your values and are indicative of your prime prerogative. If you choose to spend your life jerking yourself off over how much money you have and hoarding overpriced designer widgets, instead of solving the world’s problems, you’re going to look like a fool to whatever created you. If you do choose to use your money to solve the fundamental problems facing humanity, there’s no telling how far your actions will echo.
4: By how much power you have over other people
If you live long enough, you’re going to find yourself in a position of authority over someone else. You’ll have the power to inflict real-world consequences on that person if they don’t obey you, and you’ll be able to point to real-world reasons why your authority is justified. The longer you spend in a position of authority and the more authority you have, the more you’ll get used to it. Eventually, your brain will just take the social hierarchy you and everyone else lives by for granted. If/when that happens, you’re likely to assume that you really do deserve power over people… and that the people beneath you deserve to be controlled by you.
The fact that one person can control another has no bearing on the intrinsic worth of either person. We’re all equal. Our ancestors just taught our elders to teach us customs that stratify humanity into tiers where certain people have control over other people’s lives. These customs don’t reflect the intrinsic nature of reality. They’re just the rules of a game that people made up. Authority is a social contract between equal beings deserving of equal respect.
5: By how much power other people have over you
If you live long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself at the bottom of a pyramid-shaped authority structure. Often times the people with power over you will force you to perform gestures of subservience to them like bowing, saluting, addressing them as “Mr.,” “Mr.” “Sir,” “Ma’am,” “Your Honor,” etc. If you get used to treating other people like they’re a higher form of life than you, then eventually you’re likely to start believing it, which is why these customs were created in the first place, to subjugate the subjugate-able. When your superiors have the authority and resources to threaten, punish and control you, it seems all the more real that they’re more than you. But like I said in the previous section, the power structures around you are made up. Your position in society doesn’t define your intrinsic worth.
Make no mistake though, you can’t just go around telling your parents, bosses, and police that their authority is a fraudulent pyramid scheme, and you don’t have to obey them. If you do that they’ll draw on the real world resources available to them to punish you in a very real way. And sometimes they should for your own good. So, sure, fight the system if it’s doing more harm to you than good, but understand that you have to play by the rules to survive. Just try not to let it get you down. You’re worth more than your superiors say you are, and they’re not worth as much as they think they are.
6: By your beauty or lack thereof
Beauty isn’t a force of nature woven into the fabric of the universe like gravity, space or light. It’s an idea that exists nowhere else in the universe except the neurons of animals’ brains. It’s not even an original idea. It’s an instinct that was preprogrammed in our brains as a rote survival mechanism. So, on a lot of levels, when we look at something in awe, lust or disgust, it’s nothing personal. You shouldn’t be too flattered or offended by preprogrammed knee-jerk selfish reactions that happen in the brains of tiny animals.
Tiny animals we may be, but we’re still important. If you cut the integumentary system off of a human and look at what’s under our skin, you’ll see a machine so complex it defies all explanation. The design of the human body is as complex as the design of the solar system we live in. Your body is a force of nature strong enough to conquer light and gravity, which in my opinion makes you worth more than a star, more than a galaxy.
On the cosmic scale of things, it’s a non-event if someone (including you) likes or dislikes the way your integumentary system looks. Your base worth is already infinitely valuable. So anyone’s opinion of your is already irrelevant.
Granted, it’s hard to stay optimistic when people call you ugly names and treat you like you’re worth less than them. All I can say is, try to keep in perspective what’s happening and what’s truly important. All that really matters is that you achieve your life goals. That’s how you earn a more personally meaningful life. People’s opinion of you is just one rote side-detail you pass by on the highway of life that leads to your dreams.
7: By your age or lack thereof
The fact that you just happened to be born before or after someone else has no bearing on the intrinsic value of either person. Being old may give you authority/responsibility over younger people, but that has no bearing on the intrinsic value of either person either. Your personal experiences/accomplishments have no bearing on anyone else’s life other than your own. Nobody owes you anything just because you were born before them and did stuff while you were around. You don’t owe anyone older than you any more honors than they owe you. We’re all equals on different stages of the same journey. There’s simply no sane reason to conclude that the chronological stage of one’s journey has any positive or negative effect on the worth of a separate being.
Without comparing yourself to others, you might still judge yourself for being too young or too old. If you do, you might want to take a camping trip and rethink how you define your self-worth. People are like trees. Young and old trees don’t suck more than adult trees. They’re all just trees that, when placed next to each other make a beautiful forest. Granted, it’s hard to be so optimistic when you’re getting spanked by your parent or staring at the wall of a retirement home thinking about how you don’t have any time, friends, family, money or energy left. The truth is, sometimes life sucks. That’s the cost of living. Luckily, your comfort level isn’t synonymous with the value of your life.
8: By your success
Being successful is useful, and you should feel proud of your accomplishments. However, having success doesn’t change what you are any more than having money, beauty or authority does for all the same reasons. Success isn’t a force of nature. It’s a perception that doesn’t exist anywhere else except in your mind, and your idea of success is different from everyone else’s. So if you believe you’re successful, it’s only because you’ve achieved your personal goals. That doesn’t mean you’re worth more than the day you were born or that you’re worth more than anyone else who hasn’t achieved what you’ve achieved.
Also, just because you’ve achieved something doesn’t mean the thing you achieved matters. There are a lot of people out there constantly succeeding, yet constantly failing to achieve anything meaningful in life.
9: By your failures
It’s easy to view your failures as proof that you’re incapable, inferior, defective, and worthless. But again, this is just your perception. The goals you’re failing to achieve may not even be important, and you might be beating yourself up for failing to live a counterproductive lifestyle.
Any goal you want to achieve requires mastery of some skill, and the only way to hone a skill is by practicing. Only by doing things wrong can you learn how to do them right. There’s really no such thing as failure. There’s only the learning process. So if you’re failing at something, that means you’re on the path to mastery. Granted, it might not feel like you’re mastering anything if say, your marriage fails and you lose your house, but your tragedy will teach you lessons that could have prevented your loss if you’d known them earlier. Look, no sports team gets to win every game, but the only way to win after a loss is to keep playing and apply the lessons that cost you so dearly to learn.
Suppose you did screw up big once or twice or a thousand times, and you learned all the lessons you should have from those mistakes… but you still feel guilty for screwing up so bad in the first place at all. If that’s the case, your heart is in the right place, but your perception is shortsighted. You wouldn’t have made the mistakes you made then if you knew the things you knew now. Since you didn’t know the things you know now, there’s no way you could have made the right decisions then. You hadn’t experienced enough of life to know the right thing to do, and the only way you were ever going to learn about life is by experiencing it unprepared. Sure, if you screwed up, then on some level, that’s bad or else it wouldn’t need to be corrected, but on the cosmic scale of things, failure is growth.
10: By how much you’re mistreated
The subconscious processes in your brain tend to associate the way you’re treated with your self-image. That’s just human nature. Maybe it’s a design flaw, or maybe there’s a higher purpose. We don’t know. However, we do know that if you take a pair of identical twin babies and raise one in an abusive house and another in a loving house, the one in the loving house will grow up with higher self-esteem. So the difference isn’t the individual, it’s the environment.
You can only base your perception of reality on what you’ve learned from your environment, but even though you’re a product of your environment, you’re more than that. You have the capacity to consciously build on what you’ve learned. So if a lifetime of abuse has left you feeling depressed, you should see a mental health professional and learn the facts of life that weren’t handed to you by the people you ended up surrounded by. One of the things a mental health professional will likely teach you is that when people are abusive, they’re usually just projecting their own fears, traumas, stresses and negative self-image. In other words, people don’t treat you according to who you are. They treat you according to who they perceive you to be, which is a shadow of who they see themselves to be.
11: By what ancient mythology says you’re worth
Humans have invented thousands of religions, but none of them pass every test for truth. They all contain scientifically inaccurate claims, speculation, contradictions, absurdities and moral values that reflect the cultures that produced them. There isn’t one single religion that humans could rediscover and recreate exactly the way it was originally written because they’re all based on the personal experiences, values, prejudices, misunderstandings, and speculations of the original authors.
Every religion humans have ever created contain enough evidence to fit the definition of mythology. Sometimes mythologies teach us that God loves us, but they tend to also teach us that we don’t deserve to be loved by God. They tend to teach that we’re sinners who need to atone for our evil ways. Often times they teach us that humans can be divided into the righteous and the wicked or the high caste and the low caste. These claims can’t be backed up with empirical evidence. They’re just ideas created by people who don’t understand their place in the universe. I’m not saying that I understand our place in the universe, but I do know that you shouldn’t base your self-worth on any belief system which passes the mythology test.
Confidence is defined: “a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.”
Self-confidence is defined: “a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgment.”
Do those definitions describe you? Or would you describe yourself as more of a weak, scared, directionless, lonely, worthless failure who is spending your life sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else get what they want, all the while wondering how and why everyone but you seems to have life figured out and possesses the direction, drive, strength, and confidence to make the most out of life? If so, that’s okay. On one level, it’s a sign of mental health.
Everyone is born lost, weak, scared and confused, and nobody ever learns the true meaning of life. Nobody ever gets it all figured out. Nobody really has any idea what the hell we’re doing here. So nobody can prove that what they’re confidently doing with their life is right. The most confident people you’ve ever seen could just be confidently failing at everything that truly matters and making a fool out of themselves in the eyes of God or the cosmos or whatever. I’m not saying that anyone with any shred of confidence is wrong. I’m saying that humility is sanity, and the goal of becoming more self-confident can’t be to cultivate dogmatic faith in your perpetual supremacy because that would just be delusional. So if you feel a little lost, you’re just being realistic.
Another reason you shouldn’t blame yourself too much for being insecure is because you’ve been indoctrinated to feel inferior and set up to fail by your culture. Your school raised you to assume that if you don’t excel at bureaucratic testing, you’re not worthy of having a good job and thus a good life. Your economic leaders, who don’t pay you enough to live like a real human being, constantly remind you that if you’re not a millionaire it’s because you’re lazy and not worth a dollar. Your bosses teach you that you deserve to have to follow orders. Movies and sitcoms lead you to believe that if you’re not as beautiful and funny as your favorite fictional heroes then you’re barely a real person. Commercials brainwash you to believe that you’re incomplete, and the only way to complete yourself is to buy things you can’t afford with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like. And religions teach you that no matter what you do, you’ll always be a worthless, unenlightened, selfish sinner who doesn’t even deserve the love of your own creator. When you grow up with the whole world telling you that you’re worthless, then your lack of confidence isn’t evidence you failed at what was expected of you; it’s evidence you succeeded at the task you were groomed for.
You were born unprepared, and before you could even get on your feet, the world pushed you down. So your insecurities aren’t completely your fault. However, if someone pushes you down and you don’t do everything in your power to stand back up, it becomes your fault that you’re still down. You’re a product of your environment, but you’re not bound by your environment’s definition of you. The key to freeing yourself from all the self-defeating beliefs the world has planted in your subconscious isn’t by cultivating and exerting raw strength of mind and willpower. When you do that, all you’re really doing is temporarily denying what you already believe about yourself. Your perception of your worth is never going to change until you change the criteria you’re basing your perception of your worth on.
Your objective worth isn’t defined by what people think of you, your rank, your success rate, your body fat percentage, the number of people you’ve slept with, the size of your sex organs, the money in your bank account or the clothes on your back. We’re all inherently, equally, infinitely valuable because we’re all cosmic miracles. You’re the rarest, most elegant, most powerful, and thus the most valuable thing in the known universe. Nothing you can ever do or not do can possibly change that by even a fraction of a degree.
And as long as you can think and move, you can solve almost any problem. You can grow out of any shortcoming as long as you set your mind to the task and never give up, but first, you need to believe your potential is limitless because you’ll only let yourself go as far as you believe you can. That self-assurance comes naturally when you stop defining yourself the way your primitive culture tells you to and you start seeing yourself for the cosmic machine you truly are.
To this you might reply, am I really that great? Are any of us really that great? After all, you said yourself, we’re all lost, which can be interpreted to mean we’re all failures. And on the cosmic scale of things, we’re all just pond scum festering for a brief moment in a far corner of the universe. We’re just biological waste that floundered briefly, died meaninglessly and was forgotten immediately. So why should anyone be proud of that?
You should be proud of what you are, because you’re part of something bigger than us that’s truly amazing, and the brevity of life makes our existence infinitely valuable while also rendering our fears and failures ultimately meaningless. You’re not an outsider looking in on the universe. You’re part of the grand design, and you should be flattered to be a part of it all. The mysteriousness of life isn’t cause to give up and loathe ourselves. It’s an invitation to explore and be awestruck.
Having said all that, life isn’t just a rosy theory. It’s a cold, hard, stressful place full of brutal consequences. If life keeps kicking you in the teeth, the reason isn’t because you were destined to fail. It’s just that your education is incomplete. You weren’t born as a fully grown, self-actualized, confident, mature adult, but you were born with everything you need to become one. However, unlike aging, personal growth doesn’t happen automatically. Every step you make on that journey has to be done consciously, deliberately and consistently.
If you want the fruit of life, you have to climb the tree of life to get it. If you want to reach the Promised Land, you have to cross a mountain first. The journey isn’t easy, but it’s manageable. You just have to take it one step at a time and never give up. If you’re scared of even starting, the good news is that the longest journey begins with baby steps, and you don’t even have to believe in yourself to take those steps. You can hate yourself, but if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll just walk right out of the darkness despite yourself.
The other good news is that the journey doesn’t actually have an end. Success and failure in life isn’t black and white. It’s not a matter of whether or not you reached the finished line. The way life works is, the more you grow, the better life gets. The less you grow, the worse life is for you. Every step you take is winning. The only question is, how much of your prize are you going to claim?
If your body is unhealthy, your entire reality suffers. You’ll have less energy. You’ll have less motivation, which is just as well because you’ll be less mobile. You’ll have more aches and pains, and you’ll be more prone to depression. If you want to live life to its fullest then your body needs to be in optimal working order. Trying to build confidence while maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle is like walking an endless journey with your feet tied together. If you’re guilty of this, you shouldn’t hate yourself. This doesn’t change your intrinsic worth. You’ve already suffered the consequences by not feeling as good as you would have if you were taking better care of your body.
Everyone should recognize that everyone is equal regardless of their health and hygiene. However, our brains are hardwired with instinctual shortcuts that manipulate our subconscious and make us sexually attracted to healthy bodies. For right or wrong, better or worse, the reality of the world we live in is that the healthier you are, the more positively people will respond to you in general. The less healthy you are, the more negatively people will respond to you in general. Even if you’re the epitome of unhealthiness, there will still be people who will love you dearly, but life would have been a lot easier for you in general if you’d been physically fit.
You shouldn’t judge yourself and beat yourself up for being unhealthy. That’s not doing yourself any favors. That’s like making a wrong turn while driving, and then stopping the car and spending the rest of your life living under an overpass abusing drugs and alcohol to numb the guilt and punish yourself for making a wrong turn. This is only as big of a deal as you make it.
If/when you are physically fit, you shouldn’t be arrogant about it. Your physical fitness is good for you, but it doesn’t make you better than anyone else. But you do deserve to be proud of yourself. Your responsible behavior has rewarded you with a better functioning body to enjoy life with longer, and it looks good. It’s a lot harder to be depressed and insecure when you can look at your good looking body in the mirror and feel proud of yourself. For better or worse, right or wrong, you’ll also find it much, much easier to flirt with the opposite sex when you look like you take care of yourself. You’ll also naturally have more confidence when talking to the opposite sex, because you already know you have what they need.
2: Educate Yourself
You’re not your clothes. You’re not your rank. You’re not your age. You’re not your skin color. You’re not your nationality. You’re not your penis size. You’re not your khakis. You are your mind. Everything you’ll ever do or say is defined by what’s in your mind. The way you grow and get better at anything is by learning. I can’t stress this enough, knowledge is the key to everything. If you’re not learning either from a book, a video or experiences on the streets, then you’re not growing. If you’re not learning then you’re stagnating. If you never learn anything, you’ll just stay a lost, confused, helpless child your entire life. Tragically, it takes just as much time and effort to stay stupid as it does to grow up. You have to do something every day for the rest of your life, you may as well do what makes you stronger and your life better.
The more you know about everything the better you’ll be at everything, but probably the most important thing you can teach yourself is how to solve problems. Anytime anything goes wrong in your life it’s because there’s a problem. The better you are at solving problems, the less problems there will be in your life, and the easier it’ll be for you solve them and move on. If you don’t know the first thing about problem-solving, then you shouldn’t be surprised if your life feels like one long string of problems. It’s not because fate is out to get you. Fate gave you the tools to solve your problems. You just need to use them. The better you get at solving problems, the more naturally confident you’ll be, because you’ll know that you have the ability to solve whatever problems life throws at you.
3: Know Yourself.Define your wants. Define your values.
If you have no idea who you are, what you believe, what you stand for or what you want out of life then you should feel directionless, because you are. It should also come as no surprise that you feel insecure about your self-worth because your perception of reality has to be based on something. If you don’t consciously define yourself then your environment will subconsciously define you by default. That’s when you end up basing your self-worth and life goals on what bullies, celebrities, and corporations tell you.
You don’t have to live that way. You can effortlessly and confidently stand up for yourself against all the naysayers in the world, but before you can stand for or against anything, you have to know who you are and what you believe. You have to understand your strengths to appreciate them, and you have to understand your weaknesses so that you can work within them. If you believe that you have to eliminate all your weaknesses before you can be confident, you’re wrong. Nobody in the world can succeed at everything, and nobody should. You just need to figure out what’s important to you and then figure out how you can achieve your goals using the gifts you have. Once you know what you want, and you’re firmly on the path towards getting it, then it becomes irrelevant how anyone else feels about you. You’re already making a B-line to where you want to be. There’s nothing anyone can tempt, threaten or distract you with. When nobody has any leverage over you then you have no reason to fear them, and you don’t have to work up the strength to stand up for yourself.
The first step every single person on the planet should take on the path to self-discovery is to complete a professional personality/aptitude test. Do an internet search for life skills or professional development centers in your local area and find one that offers personality/aptitude tests. They’re not exactly cheap, but it’s the best investment you’ll ever make in your life. It’ll tell you things about yourself that you never knew. It’ll show you that your quirks aren’t failures; they’re what make you unique. They define your beauty and what you’re good at… and what you shouldn’t waste your time pursuing. They point the way to finding your own personal happiness. That’s priceless.
Once you have a rough idea of who you are, what you’re capable of and what you want, then the next step is to further explore who you are by doing more of what you like and less of what you don’t. Go out and find people who are like you, study the things you’re interested in, experiment with new hobbies. As you do these things you’ll further refine who you are and what you want. The clearer the path before you comes, the less strength it takes to stand up for yourself and follow your own path. You won’t have to stress over picking or justifying which fork in the road to take. The way will just be clear to you, and you’ll find yourself confidently running towards your destiny.
4: Love yourself.
You’re never going to allow yourself to improve your inner-self or your external circumstances if you hate yourself because you’ll have no motivation to succeed. In fact, a negative self-image becomes your motivation to destroy yourself, and your low expectations for yourself inevitably become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t love yourself then your future always looks hopeless no matter how good your life is. When you love yourself, then the future always looks hopeful regardless of what’s going on in your life. When you love yourself for who you are, your confidence is inherently tamper-proof. It won’t matter when you fail or someone treats you badly. If you base your self-worth solely on the fact that you’re an amazing, elegant, beautiful miracle then you’ll experience all the negative events in your life, not as soul-crushing mini-apocalypses, but as learning experiences at best or the cost of living at worst. But the more you love yourself, the less you even notice life’s little grievances, because you’re too busy celebrating life.
Many people who hate themselves were abused, abandoned and unloved at some point in their lives. If you’re one of those people, understand that it’s natural to respond to abuse and abandonment by feeling depressed and insecure, but I promise you that there’s more to you than what you’ve been led to believe. You deserve to love yourself. I can’t convince you to love yourself in a few paragraphs, but a licensed mental health professional can walk you through the steps of healing your emotional traumas. Therapy might be expensive, but healing your wounds will make you happier than buying new toys or doing more drugs. Seeking help isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of resourcefulness. It may be scary, but it doesn’t cost anything to have a consultation with a therapist and find out what kind of help is available.
5: Acknowledge your successes, and practice accomplishments. View failures as practice, not apocalypses.
If you have access to a computer and are smart enough to understand everything I’m saying then you’re not a failure. Your mind (and thus your potential) is already greater than most of the people who have ever existed. If you have low self-esteem, you’re not giving yourself enough credit for all the little, accumulative successes in your life. You’ve done many great things, and you’re blessed in many ways. But don’t take my word for it. Write your own gratitude list, and try to make a habit of taking time to be thankful for the good things in your life instead of focusing so much on the bad things. The more acutely aware of your strengths, successes, and blessing, the more naturally confident you’ll feel. The more obsessively you count all your perceived weaknesses, failures and setbacks, the easier it will be to feel depressed.
If you’re having difficulty thinking of 5 things you’re grateful for, don’t worry, that can be fixed, but the only way your list is going to get longer is for you to take action and succeed at more things. Big successes are built on little successes. You don’t have to change the world today to feel good about yourself. Seek out little things you can do to improve your life. Find little challenges for you to conquer. Accomplish whatever is within your ability. It’ll give you something good to feel about today, and you can be confident about the fact that you’re moving forward… even if you fail at everything you attempt.
Failing at accomplishing a goal is only failure if you don’t learn anything from your experience. If you do, that’s not failing. That’s practice. You’ll never become an expert at anything unless you fail over and over again. If you keep practicing and allowing yourself to “fail” without beating yourself up over it then eventually you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t. Then succeeding is just a matter of going through the steps you’ve learned. Then young people will look up to you with admiration and want to know your secret to success.
6: Simplify your life, and don’t set yourself up for failure.
There’s not enough time in our short lives to experience and master everything. Succeeding at life can’t be a matter of doing, having and being everything. That would be impossible, but you have to do something. You’ll experience the most meaning and happiness by doing, having and being what matters most to you, personally. This requires you to define and work towards your goals, but it also requires you to eliminate distractions and obstacles in your life. If you live in a madhouse full of toxic people who bring you down, and you spend three hours every day stuck in traffic listening to mindless radio stations on your way to a job that you hate, then of course you’re going to be stressed, disoriented, impatient, frazzled and generally not your best self. You can’t be your most confident when your life revolves around coping with drama and misery.
The solution to your gridlocked life isn’t to buck up and work harder and complain less. That’s just becoming better at drudgery. The solution to your problem is to eliminate avoidable problems in your life. This may require you to move, change jobs, change companionship and/or change your purchasing habits. These kinds of changes can be intimidating, and they shouldn’t be made flippantly, but if something is holding you back, then you’re just setting yourself up for perpetual failure by keeping it in your life. If you choose to keep creating the conditions for failure then there’s nothing else I can tell you to help you build confidence other than, “Stop doing that.”
7: Understand that courage and confidence aren’t mutually exclusive.
One summer when I was a teenager I visited a lake with tall cliffs around it that people were jumping off of into the water. Enticed by adventure, I climbed the cliff and stood at the edge. As I looked down at the water, my legs felt weak, and my stomach roared with butterflies. I wanted to jump, but I was terrified. So I stood there for five long minutes searching my soul for the courage to leap. As my friends taunted me, I knew I was running out of time to prove I wasn’t a coward, but I hadn’t found the right thoughts to get me over the edge.
Finally, it dawned on me that it didn’t matter if I found the right argument because even if I did, the end result would be the same: My brain would stop chattering long enough for my feet to move forward. In that moment I realized all I had to do was shut my brain up for one second and act. So I did, and I jumped off that dizzyingly high precipice. I accomplished something that took significant courage without using courage. Once I got over the initial fear, I climbed back up the cliff and jumped again. The second jump was almost as scary as the first, but it took a lot less time to execute. The next summer I was doing backflips off the cliff fearlessly. That’s how overcoming fear works. You learn to believe in yourself by doing the things you never believed possible.
8: Don’t invent excuses.
You’re the only enemy standing between you and self-confidence, and the strongest weapon in your enemy’s arsenal is excuses. There’s no argument you anyone can use to beat an excuse because excuses are logic-proof. They’re based on circular reasoning and create self-fulfilling prophecies which validate their premise. All of your excuses may sound perfectly logical on paper. They may look justified, but they’re based on the flawed assumption that you’re a passive victim of life who isn’t in control of the most powerful machine in the known universe.
Your excuses may help give your life structure and explain away all the bad things that happen to you, but they’re not really doing you any favors. They’re imaginary boundaries that you made up and exist nowhere else in the universe except your mind. They only limit those who make them. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have an excuse for everything, and those who don’t have to make excuses. Neither of those types were born that way; they both chose to be.
If you’re lucky enough to be born into the right family at the right time and place you can achieve professional success while still being a whiny, co-dependent, indignant, incorrigible little bitch. You can get pulled through life kicking and screaming and have a place of success set up for you despite yourself. If you’re born into the wrong family at the wrong time you can have every advantage in the world stolen from you. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be born into poverty and oppression than prosperity and freedom.
That’s unfortunate, but that’s life. The universe doesn’t owe you an ass wiping, and even if it did, you can’t count on the universe to give it to you. Part of growing up is realizing that ultimately you’re the only person who is responsible for ensuring that you survive and make the most of your life. No other human truly owes you anything, and even if they did, you owe the world more than that. You stand on the shoulders of giants, and you owe a debt to everyone who played any role in creating a world where you don’t have to dress in loincloths and hunt rats in caves for dinner.
The goal of life isn’t to come up with the most valid excuses for why you failed. If you want to make the most out of your life and there’s a valid reason why that’s not possible then it’s your responsibility to beat the odds. Death doesn’t care about your excuses. You’re a walking, talking cosmic supercomputer. You’re designed to solve problems, and if you’re good at reverse engineering excuses then you’ve already proven how clever and resourceful you are.
You’ve got one life, and it’s your responsibility to prove the excuses wrong and make the most of your life and the world you’re going to pass down to the next generation. You don’t have to be old to understand that. If/when that lesson sinks in then you’ll be firmly on the path of maturity. Regardless of your age or position in society, if you’re a sniveling, selfish, spoiled coward then you’re immature.
2. Figuring out you don’t know shit about shit.
Humans are brilliant for the first few years of our lives. As children, we’re painfully aware of the fact that we don’t know a fraction of the information in the universe, but before we’re even out of high school, we convince ourselves we’re smarter than everyone who doesn’t think exactly like us. Then we get a few years older and realize how stupid we were in high school. Then we laugh at high school kids for thinking they’re smart while we congratulate ourselves for being smarter than them. Then when we’re elderly we laugh at mid-life adults for how arrogant they are and congratulate ourselves for being wise old men. If we lived to be 150 we’d undoubtedly look back at 80 and realize we didn’t know shit about shit then either.
No matter how much we learn we’ll only ever know an infinitesimal percentage of what there is to know. No matter what we accomplish, we’re still just a microscopic speck of dust on a slightly bigger microscopic piece of dust on a slightly bigger microscopic piece of dust.
You grow up a little when you figure out that life isn’t a pissing contest. It’s a maze with no beginning, no end, no warning and no instructions. So humility isn’t so much of a virtue one needs to exert effort to maintain, as it is the common sense response to acknowledging how hopelessly naïve you, and everyone else, truly is.
You knew this when you were a child. Hopefully, it doesn’t take you too long to figure it out again, because it really puts your life into perspective and helps you make the most of it.
3. Realizing all the adults in the world are lost little kids living in their own private self-centric fantasy world just like you.
You were born lost. You were raised on archaic, obsolete customs invented by monkeys. All of humanity’s greatest heroes evolved from butt sniffing monkeys, and we’re still very close to that branch of the family tree.
Granted, humans sent a robot to Mars. We’re some pretty clever monkeys, but at the end of the day, all the congressional blue banners and tailored designer suits in the world don’t change the fact that the world is run by monkeys (of all colors) who have access to apocalyptic weapons.
But we’re not told that as kids. We’re told adults are a higher form of life than children, and our leaders are approved by God. And kids grow up believing that…to varying degrees.
Think of the world like an amusement park roller coaster ride. Some kids will ride any roller coaster with absolute faith in their safety because they know that roller coasters are marvels of human engineering, and they’re tested regularly by professional safety inspectors. Other kids will ride the ride but be terrified the whole time the roller coaster will fall apart and kill everyone on board because they noticed the wooden beams look rotted and the amusement park doesn’t hide the fact that it’s maintained by disenfranchised alcoholic carnies.
In the real world, sometimes amusement rides break and kill real people. The world isn’t run by the cast of “Full House.” The world is run by arrogant monkeys with more money than they know what to do with and access to the best drugs in history. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start choosing which rides you go on a little more carefully and stop putting so much faith in the carnies.
4. Reading a book on a very important topic.
Want to be mature? Then read a book on a very important topic. If you don’t know how to read then the most mature thing you can do is learn how to read. The fact that older people already know how to read doesn’t make them better than you. Fate just gave them an earlier start. And if they haven’t read a book on a very important topic lately then no matter how many books they’ve read previously…you’re being more mature than them right now if you’re reading and growing while they’re stagnating mentally.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do. There’s only one correct answer to the question, “Have you learned more about something very important lately?” If you answer “yes” then you get a maturity badge for today. If you answered “no” then you get a badge of shame. That’s how growing up and getting smarter works.
5. You think multiple steps ahead.
In order to behave like a mature adult who is making the most of your life, you first have to think like a mature adult. Mature thinking involves observing the world attentively, analyzing it objectively, breaking it down logically and drawing conclusions from supporting evidence. This requires looking outside your little bubble and thinking multiple steps ahead.
Think of life as a big chess game. We’re all competing for resources, chasing after our own personal goals, bumping into each other as we get in each other’s ways. Sometimes it may feel like we’re just drifting through life, but we’re drifting through a global waltz. Some people are so aware of the global dance they’ve identified and are tracking patterns in our movements and profiting from predicting where we’ll drift to next. At the very least, they can see trouble coming a mile away because they’ve read the writing on the wall, and they won’t be there when disaster strikes.
The point is not that we should all be market analysts. The point is that if you’re not thinking about where you’re headed in life and planning multiple steps ahead then you’re a hapless pawn. Mature people don’t drift through life. They plot the shortest distance to the Promised Land. If you’re 12 then this means you should be figuring out the most efficient way to master your classes and utilize your free time. If you’re 42 this means you should be advancing the limits of human knowledge and achievement.
6. Devising a life plan.
Thinking multiple steps ahead is a useful tool for solving day to day problems, but it’s also necessary to accomplish the specific responsibility of creating your 100-year plan.
Yes, spontaneity can be a virtue, but so can foresight. Someone once told me “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” That can be true at the same time as spontaneity is a virtue.
Look. You’ve got one life to live. You have a better chance of accomplishing more if you plan ahead. If you already have a plan, great! You get a maturity achievement badge. If you don’t have anything mapped out then you get a badge that says, “I’m lost, and I don’t care.”
7. Choosing your passion and dedicating yourself to it.
If you don’t figure out anything else about your life then the least you could do for yourself is find your passion and dedicate yourself to it. If you never identify your passion then what the hell are you doing with your life? You’re just going through the motions of life until you die and get replaced by the next automaton.
It’s irresponsible to spend your life doing things you’re not passionate about. You’ve got one life. You’ve got one chance to choose how you’re going to spend it. The goal of life isn’t to survive it. There ain’t no surviving life. The goal is to be here now making the most of it by doing the things we’re most passionate about…not just because that’s the most enjoyable way to spend one’s life but also because it’s the closest thing to immortality we may get. The way we spend our lives is how we go down in history. Maybe after the past gets flushed down the drain of time it comes out somewhere on the underside of the universe where it’s stored on faded, dusty cosmic microfilm that just sits there untouched for the rest of eternity.
Do you want to go down in history for eternity as the guy who sat there with his thumb up his ass while he played devil’s advocate his entire life and never grabbed life by the balls and threw an existential touchdown pass for the record books?
The universe didn’t go through 13.75 billion years of trouble bringing you into existence for you to sit here with your thumb up your ass or to settle for demeaning work at a boring job. I’m not saying to quit your job tomorrow and sink your life savings into a backyard oil wrestling league. I’m just saying, if you’re not doing what you want to them what the hell are you doing here? What’s all the sacrifice for if you’re just going to die unhappy and unfulfilled?
8. Refining your style.
You’re probably not going to get your face carved into a mountain, and even if you did, that mountain is just a speck of dust on a bigger speck of dust. That carving is going to get erased by time in a twinkle of an eye. Nothing you ever do will last for eternity. But you do have this moment right now. Life is like a piece of falling dust caught in a sunbeam for a moment. It’s brief and meaningless, but it’s your moment in the limelight. It might even be an audition. Strike a pose.
Despite all reason or likelihood you exist, and for some reason, you didn’t get to choose what you are, but you can choose who you are. You’re born with a microphone in your mouth announcing to all of history eternal who you are, and nobody warns you that as long as the clock is ticking the microphone is on. Is eternity going to hear you mumbling lame excuses or singing your ballad?
Why would you be here if not to be you? Think about it.
Being bland and cold and boring makes you look scary and authoritarian and adult. But that’s just because dead, lifeless robots look like that. It’s not really mature. It’s just dead and lifeless and scary looking.
9. Creating and correcting your philosophy on life.
Before you can plot out your life plan or personalize your identity you’re going to need to figure out what you believe about life and death. Growing up we’re told that only prophets and geniuses get to decide that, but it turns out that we all have to live our lives and suffer the consequences of our actions and inactions on our own. So since you’re ultimately responsible for living your life and making the most out of it you need to figure out what you believe and why. And you should really write it down just to be sure you really believe in something more concrete and useful than a few overgeneralized fortune cookie quotes.
Once you figure out what you’re doing here and express what that is and why then you can spend the rest of your life doing that meaningful thing you decided would make the most out of your life.
You’re going to patch together your own philosophy on life anyway. The only question is whether or not you’re going to be conscious of it. If you’re not conscious of it then you’ll likely end up basing your life on a hand full of random beliefs pushed onto you by other people who want to control and exploit you. If you don’t put an exemplary effort into figuring out and correcting your life philosophy you’ll end up like a FOX NEWS junky; even if you’re successful enough to buy a yellow Hummer you’ll still be a tool.
10. Defining your personal ethics.
You’ve got to learn more than 10 rules to navigate your way through life. There are rules for everything. There are rules at school, at work, on the road, in our banks, on our televisions, on our iPods. God never said, “Though Shalt not run at the pool.” But more people believe that than believe you should be able to get a refund if you purchase a wife who doesn’t please you.
We barely get any ethics from religion, and nobody believes every rule written in any religious book. For the most part we make up our own ethics. We patch together commandments other people told us. We filter that through our prejudices and experiences and subconsciously weave together the real list of rules we use to guide us through life.
If you just drift through life on autopilot you’re going to end up with a flotsam pile of ethics that you’re probably not going to follow yourself. You’ll just spend your life feeling guilty for doing things you don’t understand why you keep doing.
The difference between right and wrong is not the forbidden question. It’s actually the first question on the test. If you want to spend your life right then you need to figure out the difference between right and wrong, a task complicated by the fact that everyone in the world has a different answer. But that just means it’s all the more important for you to ask the hard, forbidden questions yourself.
11. Expanding the limits of human knowledge and achievement.
I’m not impressed by the Jeopardy champion or the guy who beat a supercomputer at chess. I’m not impressed if you can sell 42 used cars in a month. I’m not impressed how many clients you have. But I’ll be impressed if you expand the limits of human knowledge by say, solving an unsolved mathematical problem or finding the cure for cancer.
Glen Beck is a very successful family man by Utah standards, but from a cosmic perspective, his life will have meant far, far less than Carl Sagan’s life. That’s because Carl Sagan spent his life expanding the limits of human knowledge and achievement while Glen Beck spent his life sensationalizing disinformation to exploit gullible people’s fears for his own personal gain.
12. Helping other people.
Have you helped anyone lately? If so, that’s mature of you. If not, that’s immature of you. If you’re helping someone then you can take credit for behaving maturely regardless of how old or accomplished in the ways of the world you are.
Sometimes life isn’t complicated. This is one of those times. It’s mature to help people.
13. Coming to terms with your past. Finding absolution for your sins and regrets.
Old people act sanctimonious and demand respect, but they all messed up somewhere, and so will you. Everybody makes mistakes. We even feel guilty for things that weren’t anyone’s fault or that just don’t matter. Guilt, remorse, and regret are human emotions that appear across cultures and religions.
If you look at the mythologies humans have invented you can see patterns in how humans view guilt, remorse, and regret. We’ve come up with some pretty elaborate rituals to process those emotions, but at the end of the day, we’re just dancing monkeys wishing away an existential dilemma we’re not smart or brave enough to confront directly.
How do you deal with your regrets? Part of growing up is figuring that out. If you don’t have any regrets yet then congratulations. In the meantime, it would be mature of you to get a head start on figuring out how human beings find absolution when the need arises.
That’s not going above and beyond expectations. That’s the bare minimum you have to do to survive. Even if you have a good job, that just means you can afford to buy yourself more crap you don’t need. I’m happy for you, but that only guarantees you’re accomplishing the bare minimum of your own personal responsibilities required to survive. You may as well give yourself a parade for not being in jail or not committing suicide.
2. You got promoted at your job!
The world operates under this assumption: Society makes up the economy’s workforce, and through social Darwinism, the alpha members of society are destined to rise to the top of the corporate ladder; one way or another, the best, smartest people work their ways into the highest positions in every organization. So if you ever meet anyone who has a better job than you then you can just assume that they’re better, smarter and just all around more alpha than you.
The problem with that philosophy is that human beings aren’t tactical wolves, they’re butt-sniffing monkeys. There are a billion ways to get ahead in the world. Acting/thinking like a mature adult is just one of them, and not many people take that route because it will get you in trouble with the butt sniffing monkeys you work for as often as it will help you. At any rate, the mundane task you get paid to do to stay alive is not the purpose or measure of life. It doesn’t reflect the total sum of your character. It’s naïve to believe that rank always equates to maturity.
3. You got an award!
In the bureaucratic world we live in, someday you’re going to get a piece of a paper from someone saying how great you are. They’ll give one to you every couple of years you stay in school. When you get a permanent job you’ll get at least one per year. If you do any volunteering you’ll pick a few up, especially if you make sure everyone knows how selfless you are. You can even get a world famous award for putting a ball in a hoop over and over and over like a lab rat. Awards are a dime a dozen. The only thing they guarantee is that somebody likes you, and you feel the need to let other people know that you feel the need to impress other people.
That’s not impressive. That’s not mature…on multiple levels. That’s great if you got an award, and I’m sure you put a lot of effort into earning whichever one you got, but that’s not a milestone of maturity in and of itself. And mature people don’t gloat over their achievements privately or publicly.
4. You got married!
As a child I imagined getting married was like leveling up in a video game. Or your wedding clothes were like a cocoon that you spent the day in, and the next morning after a night of cosmic sex you emerged a new, upgraded human being. After all, if that’s not what happens then what’s all the fuss about?
The fuss is about convincing ourselves we’re cosmic creatures taking part in a cosmic ritual when in reality we’re just butt sniffing monkeys reinforcing the behavioral standards set by our butt sniffing monkey ancestors.
Great. So you decided to commit to spending the rest of your constantly changing life with another constantly changing person you just happen to want to rub your genitals against right now. You believe you’re fulfilling some God-given mandate by signing a piece of paper printed out by a bureaucrat who charged you $300 for that piece of paper. You think tomorrow you’re going to glow in the mirror because that piece of paper will change you who and what you are inside overnight?
And you’re going to love the other person forever. That’s beautiful, but it’s a conflict of interest to take credit for selflessly sacrificing yourself to the person you’re going to get to rub your genitals against every couple of days for as long as you give them everything they want and don’t piss them off. I’m glad you could come to a legal agreement with another human being that allows you to swap resources for sex for as long as it’s convenient for both parties. That would be clever except it’s what everyone expects you to do.
Getting into an archaic legal contract with another person after being pressured to your entire life doesn’t make you king of the world. It makes you unoriginal, and if you bought a diamond ring it also makes you a sucker for paying thousands of dollars for a worthless rock, and it makes you complicit in the human rights abuses being committed by the diamond cartels. That diamond ring is not an indicator of maturity either.
5. You had a child!
Parents act like they had to carry a ring to Mordor to have a child. Granted, pregnancy is hard, but getting pregnant is neither difficult nor novel. Everybody has sex. Having sex without a condom doesn’t make you better than anyone else.
If you had a child before you were financially secure, then you screwed up. You shouldn’t get to take credit for being an adult for making an irresponsible decision that is going to cost you your life’s dreams and force you to raise a human being in a less stable home than you could have if you hadn’t messed up. If you had a child before you were prepared then the existence of your child is a badge of your shame, not your maturity.
Even if you had a child on time, that’s not a sign that you’re mature. That’s just a sign you better get hurry up and get it together.
6. You kept a child alive for 18 years!
If you had a child then you better keep it alive for at least 18 years. Bragging about that is like bragging about not burning down your house for 18 years. That’s the least you can do. You only get to take credit for doing your best. If you had your child before you were prepared then you didn’t do you best. If you didn’t read every single child psychology book they sell on Amazon.com then you didn’t do your best. If your child is a screwup, then you didn’t do your best.
If you’ve ever said something like, “I don’t know what went wrong with my child. I did my best to raise him/her. Some kids are just born unreachable,” that really means you were a bad parent, and you’re in denial because you can’t accept responsibility for your failures. You’ve always been immature, but since you’ve spent so long asserting your superiority based on your title as a parent, you’ve blinded your ego from recognizing your obvious flaws.
You can impress stupid people by telling them you’re a parent who did their best. A mature person will just raise their eyebrow at you like Spock.
7. You have the power to command and punish others!
As long as you put an average amount of effort into not being an idiot, then at some point in your life, you’ll be handed authority over a group of people younger than you. It’s just going to happen. And if you want to go out of your way to make it happen, you can pick a career field that leans more towards command than others. As a matter of fact, you only need a G.E.D. to get a job as a police officer. It’s not hard to get in a position of authority, and it’s even easier to yell at people whose only two options in life are homelessness and taking your abuse.
8. You hurt other people.
We’ve all got monkey brains with monkey brain cortexes. Sometimes it feels good to hurt other monkeys, but civilized modern, mature monkeys control themselves and find intellectual ways to work around hurting others. They certainly don’t take joy in hurting others or go out of their way to do it.
Everyone who hurts others thinks it makes them the alpha pack member. It doesn’t make you the alpha pack member. It makes you a waste of animated stardust.
Religions tend to promise that if you follow a strict moral code you’ll get to go to a paradise after you die. That moral code tends to boil down to never having any fun or experiencing any pleasure. Implied in that ascetic moral code is that the more free and happy you are the worse of a person you are. Thus, the more cold and rigid of a person you are the better you are, and you should be sad and remorseful all the time anyway for all the bad things you did in the past and know you’re going to do in the future.
Being silent and miserable makes you look serious and mature, but what’s the point in growing old if it’s just to bemoan and regret the time we spent here? Devoting your life to asceticism is as immature as devoting your life to rain dancing. There’s no point. It just wastes all the time you’ve been given to make the most of your life.
10. You’ve proven yourself obedient and faithful.
Obedience and faith are the two best traits you can ask for in a slave. As much human history and culture revolved around the use of slaves it’s not surprising that obedience and faith are held in such high regard. It’s been written in a billion books and pounded into every poor person’s head that it’s mature to be obedient and never question the people who were born before you to richer parents.
Modern psychology politely disagrees. It’s not mature to turn your brain off because it’s not healthy or productive to turn your brain off. It just makes you a slave.
11. You dress professionally at work and wear designer clothes in the evening.
Smart people in professional circles will tell you that “the clothes make the man.” And you can prove this by doing an easy, fun experiment. Dress up in a sharp, casual suit and go run errands around town. Then shave your head and put on some sweatpants and a stained Looney Tunes T-shirt and go run some more errands around town.
When you dress sharp, fortune seeks you out. When you dress sloppy, you repel fortune. There are a thousand psychological reasons for this that marketers understand better than the rest of us, but it all boils down to us being gullible monkeys. We’re so gullible we’ll even trick ourselves into believing we’re more alpha simply by dressing more alpha. And if we keep up the lie long enough, sometimes the lie ceases to be a lie.
For some people though, wearing designer clothes is just covering a turd with gold paint. If your conscience is fine with spending thousands of dollars on an outfit while people are dying in the streets from starvation then you’re probably a gold-painted turd.
12. You’re older than someone else.
When I was a child I was told to respect my elders. Nobody ever told me why because it went without saying that the older you were the more respect you deserved.
That’s simply not true. There’s no rational justification for that rule. Nobody owes you anything for staying alive. You were supposed to be doing that anyway, and everyone else who is alive has been doing just as well at staying alive as you. You don’t get extra points for being born before someone else. Everyone has equal worth in the universe.
You can be an old dumb ass. You don’t deserve respect just for being old. And if you did truly deserve respect you wouldn’t have to ask for it, much less try to demand it.
The Wise Sloth 