A college degree tells you surprisingly little about a person. Human resource personnel who hire workers like to say that it shows you can commit to something big and follow through. To this I would respond, have you ever joined the military? Have you ever washed dishes at a restaurant? Have you ever cleaned toilets? Pauper’s work isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes more sacrifice and more grit than practically any other job.
Having a college degree tells me you could afford to go to college. Maybe that’s because you were smart enough to get a scholarship. Maybe you got a sports scholarship and got passed through all your classes unfairly. Maybe you were a spoiled frat boy who drank and fucked your way through 4 blurry years of fun and made D’s on half your classes, and the only reason you got that high of a grade is because you cheated. I don’t know. The fact that you have a college degree doesn’t necessarily tell me anything. I don’t even know what you learned. Every college. You could have gone to a worthless school where you didn’t learn anything. You could have had bumbling teachers who spent all semester talking about themselves. You could have majored in music, and while I would admire your musical talent, that wouldn’t have anything to do with what kind of a person you are. Some of the dumbest people I’ve known have had college degrees. Some of them even had doctorates.
2. By your rank
You could be a judge who is called “your honor,” a military officer who is called “sir,” a clergyman who is called “father,” a doctor is called “Dr.” or a CEO who commands the subservience of everyone who works for you. I don’t care what your rank is because rank is a social construct awarded by people, who are generally fools. Your rank doesn’t tell me anything about who you are, but if you rub your rank in other people’s faces that tells me immediately that your self-worth is based on the opinions of others and the meaningless symbols they give you. Even if you’re the pope or the president. That doesn’t mean anything to me. You may have proven to your followers that you deserve respect, but I’ll judge you on more than your rank.
3. By your own level of confidence
How great you believe yourself to be is rarely indicative of your greatness. Likewise, an inferiority complex doesn’t necessarily reflect inferiority. The perfect example is gangstas who drive flashy cars and wave guns around. Nobody displays more confidence than a gangsta rapper, but few people are as petty and ignorant as gangsta rappers. On the other end of the scale, great scientists and artists can be extremely hard on themselves and have a low opinion of themselves even though they’ve accomplished more than most people ever will, but it’s their humility that gives them room to grow and motivates them to constantly improve themselves and their skill. Granted, some people create self-fulfilling prophecies by telling themselves they’re strong, capable people or weak, pathetic people. But your opinion of yourself (in and of itself) doesn’t tell me anything about you.
4. Your talent in any one skill
So you’re a great musician, painter, soldier, CEO or medical doctor. Great. Good for you. That tells me that you’re passionate or at least dedicated to one thing, but that’s all it tells me. You could still be the world’s biggest asshole. You could also be a great humanitarian. Your personality could be anything and everything. Just because you’re the best at what you do doesn’t tell me if you deserve respect or pity.
5. By your age
Growing old doesn’t necessarily reflect growing up. Some of the oldest people I know are some of the dumbest people I know. There was a time when growing old was a sign of strength and success. Now growing old is easy. There was a time when growing old gave you the power to beat younger people until they feared and respected you. That time is gone as well. Now you have to earn respect by being a good, intelligent, driven, wise person, and that doesn’t come automatically with age. That’s something you have to work on, and that’s something the young can accomplish as well as the old.
6. By your wealth
There are a lot of ways to make money. Some involve intelligence, a good work ethic, sacrifice, and tenacity, but owning wealth is not mutually exclusive with success, intelligence or integrity. You can be a mean, stupid screw up and still become wealthy, especially if your parents were wealthy and well connected. In fact, some studies suggest that the more wealthy you are the more likely you are to be a heartless bastard. After all, the only way to get money is to take it from someone else. Thus, the formula for success in a capitalist economy is to pay your workers as little as possible while charging your customers as much as possible. This means the world’s richest men are the world’s best thieves.
Every billionaire is guilty of this, but when judging barely rich people you have to look at them on a case by case basis. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a lot of ways to become poor, and being a virtueless bastard is only one of them. The quickest path to poverty is to be born to poor parents in a country where wages are as low as possible while the cost of goods and housing are as high as possible and the cost of higher education is so expensive it creates a glass ceiling. Regardless of what chance of financial success you’re born into, professional success is not the end-all purpose of human existence. Jesus and Buddha were penniless, and both of their philosophies centered around how much more important it is to be a good than to be rich and powerful. If you’re going to judge the success of a man’s life, wealth and power are not the primary criteria.
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.
Style is a virtue, and any virtue taken too far becomes a vice. There are people who are so obsessed with style and vanity that it negatively impacts their ability to achieve the rest of life’s important goals, but there are also those who are so obsessed with austerity and self-suppression that it affects their lives just as seriously. Humans need to define and express themselves. Our DNA compels us to the same way it compels us to want sex, and just like with sex, too much or too little causes us to go a little crazy and screw up other things in life.
Before you can understand how much style is healthy, you need to understand what style is. That’s a subjective question that everyone has to answer for themselves. I’ll give you my philosophy, and you can use that as a sounding board.
The dictionary defines style as:
a particular kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form, appearance, or character
a particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode of action or manner of acting
3.a mode of living, as with respect to expense or display.
Anything that has style has a unique set of attributes that all have something in common. You are a unique individual. For the entire gigantic history of the universe, there will only ever be one of you. You’re basically a one-in-infinity phenomenon. You possess a unique set of attributes that all have something in common. That’s something to celebrate, and by nurturing your uniqueness you can make yourself more elegantly unique.
You’re a canvas, a piece of art, a flower that gets to choose its petals. You’re a work to be completed. That’s an opportunity and a responsibility. Abstaining is not an option. If you don’t exercise that instinct, it shuts down, and then you shut down. Prisoners held in solitary confinement, who have all their basic needs met, but no way to define, express or experience themselves, quickly go mad and can even die. Elderly people who are allowed to decorate their rooms live longer than people who don’t have any control over the style of their environment.
Your style is the sum of your identity. It’s your signature on the universe. It’s the expression of who you are. It’s what you probably hope will exist after death. The less of it you have, the less of you there is to exist. The more of you have, the more real you are.
Think of your style as the grain of sand that The Childlike Empress holds in her hand at the end of The Never Ending Story. Your mind is an entire private universe. If you don’t decide what you want to wish for, and then make that wish, then your universe will be empty at worst or a thoughtless imitation of someone else’s at best.
In order to live your life to the fullest, you need to know what you want out of life. In order to know what you want you need to define who you are. Once you have a philosophy and a refined list of likes and dislikes, your internal universe will compel you to project it onto the external world. By consciously defining the external objects in your life such as your clothes, furniture, decorations, vehicle, vocabulary, vocations, behavioral idiosyncrasies, and music, you not only validate your existence, but you create a feedback loop to further define your internal universe.
Whether or not you put any effort into defining yourself, your subconscious will do it automatically, but to fully experience the benefits, you need to make a conscious effort yourself. Instead of buying whatever clothes, furniture and decorations are cheapest and quickest to get, sit down and think about what style of objects reflect who you are as a person. Project your mind onto the world by the things you surround yourself with. As you grow and your identity evolves, periodically update your surroundings to match your internal changes.
There could be some higher philosophical or theological value in creating evidence that you exist, but even without that, defining and expressing yourself is the only way to give your life personal meaning. Fulfilling your subjective purpose is the only thing that’s going to make you feel fulfilled or even just have fun. If the nihilists were right, and life really is one big, empty, pointless existential dilemma, the least you can do with your short time here is enjoy yourself. In order to do that to the fullest, you need to explore what’s fun to you. The alternative is to be basic, and a basic life is a life unlived.
Personality tests aren’t 100% perfect, but understanding your personality type will give you a whole new level of self-awareness. The first thing it will do for you is give you permission to have all the quirks that make you different from everyone else. It will also help you identify your innate strengths and weaknesses, which will help you understand how to navigate life using your unique mental toolkit. There are companies that offer full spectrum personality and aptitude tests that will tell you more about yourself than you ever thought there was to know. If you’ve never taken one of these I strongly recommend it. Unfortunately, they can cost hundreds of dollars, but it’s worth it. If you don’t have that kind of money you can take free tests online and then research your personality type online. Below are a couple of links to free tests.
If you’ve never summed up the purpose of your life in a brief statement then you can’t prove that you know what you’re doing with your life. Even if you have a vague idea, if you’ve never stated it then you don’t have a solid compass to guide your actions when life gets complicated. I’m not saying you have to know the definitive answer to the question of the meaning of life. I’m just saying that you need some kind of direction, and the better you articulate it the better you can follow it and improve it.
3. Your top 5 goals in life
Having an overarching theoretical purpose in life is nice, but there’s not much point unless you have a plan on how to achieve that goal. If you’ve never articulated what exactly you want to accomplish in life then you’re just going to waffle through life like a lost explorer slashing through the jungle with no direction hoping to randomly stumble upon the promised land.
4. Your 5, 10, 20 and 30-year plan
Life takes a long time, and you can accomplish a lot in one year, but some goals take decades to achieve. The more completely you have your life plan mapped out the more likely you are to achieve your goals. This doesn’t mean you can’t be spontaneous or change your plans repeatedly. In fact, as you grow your plans should change, but you should still have a plan. It will help give your life and actions meaning, and having a clear plan will mitigate the hopelessness of floundering through life haphazardly.
5. Your 5 greatest strengths and 5 greatest weaknesses
Taking a professional personality/aptitude test will pretty much answer this question for you. Regardless of whether or not you take one you’re still going to change as you grow. Thus your strengths and weaknesses will change. The better you understand your evolving mental skill sets the better you can adapt your approach to life to them.
6. The 5 biggest turning points in your life
Who you are today and where you’re going in life was shaped by who you were previously and what happened to you in your past. The better you understand your past the better you can make sense of the present and the future. The best way to understand your past is to tell your life story to a professional therapist and get their feedback. If you can’t afford that though, you at least need to understand that your life is like a billiard’s ball. It moves in a set direction until an equal or greater force acts against it and changes its direction. Studying the turning points in your life will help you understand how you got to where you are today. That knowledge will empower you to take control of your destiny instead of getting knocked around by external forces until you fall into a hole.
7. Your 5 worst and 5 best memories
Something relatively traumatic has happened to everyone, and you carry the memory of those events with you to this day. If you never identify those experiences and confront them they will haunt you and cripple you for the rest of your life. Part of growing up and making the most of life is dealing with past traumas. I strongly recommend exploring those experiences with a professional therapist, but if you can’t afford help you’re still responsible for making the most of your life. You can’t fix yourself if you don’t identify what broke you.
On the other side of the coin, life is more majestic than it is tragic. Despite the bad things that have happened to you there is immeasurable beauty in life. Pinpoint the best parts of your life and carry those in your pocket so you can pull them out and bask in their warmth on the bad days.
8. Your top 10 moral guides (5 good and 5 bad)
Most of the human population claims to believe in one of the mythologies invented by our primitive ancestors. So when you ask them what their moral code is they just point to a religious book and say, “That.” But most people don’t follow even half of their religion’s moral code. They cherry pick the rules that conform to their modern cultural values. Even then they still break those whenever it serves their purposes. Effectively, most people don’t live their lives according to a concrete moral code. They just waffle through life fulfilling their base desires and reverse engineering excuses for their actions along the way. This approach yields chaotic results. This doesn’t mean that everyone should write their own religion or double down and make a more concentrated effort to live according to the primitive values of our blood-thirsty, chauvinistic, uneducated ancestors. But you will find it incredibly useful to articulate (and improve upon) a list of the top rules that define the difference between right and wrong.
9. The 5 pieces of advice you would pass onto the world
When I was 18 I asked every adult I knew what single piece of advice they would pass on to a young person just striking out into the real world. None of them had a coherent, premeditated answer. None. That’s when I first realized the majority of the adult world has no idea what they’re doing and are just making it all up as they go along. That’s no way to go through life, and it’s not fair to the younger generation. Boil down the lessons you’ve learned in life into at least five pieces of useful advice for yourself and the rest of society so that we can all live wiser, happier lives.
10. 5 things you’re going to teach yourself
Knowledge is like a superpower. After you graduate from school nobody is going to be cramming superpowers down your throat; it’s up to you to seek out and consume knowledge yourself. If you haven’t identified what you want to learn you’re not going to seek that information out. So put a lot of thought into that and articulate what you want to know. You may want to start by asking yourself what the most important information a human being can know is.
The Wise Sloth 