Think of how dumb the average guy
is. Then realise that half the population is dumber than that.
Whilst there is a level of smug superiority in that, there
is also an element of truth. An IQ of 100 isn’t much intellectual horsepower. Not
that great thinking is a prerequisite to all that matters, but by the same
token the invention of mathematics, technological advancement and great art was
probably not produced by the bottom half of the bell curve.
Averages being what they are; gets us cultural norms that
are, well, mediocre. And such is life.
The people who created Facebook as a technological platform undoubtedly
had well above average IQs. The platform has the potential to be and do amazing
things, some of which we have experienced. But consider the average (normal)
Facebook post and social experience. It’s about screaming goats on the one hand
or people gloating about their breakfast on the beach. Or at best it is filled
with vacuous, pretentious, misattributed quotes on high rotation. Despite the collective
smarts it took to create the platform, in practice it turns out to elevate mediocrity
to the norm.
As with Facebook, so with life. Life in general and specifically
the pool of cultural norms that we all swim in is pretty shallow.
Let’s explore a few of those commonly accepted, pervasive
cultural norms that people tend to accept as true and useful, but are in fact
probably not. Your first reaction will be to dismiss the arguments as wrong
exactly because the average person has come to accept them as givens. But I
argue that this has been done without much thought, and would like to offer a
different perspective.
(I don’t expect to change the world’s view and adoption of
those erroneous principles for the same reason Mark Zuckerberg won’t be able to
elevate the average Facebook post into something worth admiring. But one or two
people may think differently about life and what it means.)
Whatever makes me happy.Happiness is an emotion.
Emotions are created in your brain via chemical reactions.
These
chemicals (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins) are useful and necessary in specific
ways. They are triggered by certain behaviours or situations or they can be physically
induced (via drugs).
But like all
chemicals, when the body is over-exposed to it, the body will react by either
rejecting it or becoming immune to it.
If you were
always ‘happy’ the body will require increasing amounts of chemicals to
maintain the same emotional state. Eventually it will reach a level of toxicity
that kills you.
That is not
very likely, but the point is that physically it is virtually impossible to
maintain a state of chemical bliss and pursuing it via drugs or via natural
means. Since it is hard to manipulate life and behave in a way that produces a
river of happy chemicals, people resort to drugs. But ultimately they are
chasing an ephemeral non-reality.
What people
really should be pursuing is a state of meaningful contentment. This is much
harder to achieve. It means doing things that are perceived to be somewhat
unnatural, like living sacrificially. To pursue meaning is also hard work; you
actually have to think about what your life amounts to. It means you have to
work at it. And ‘it’ means serving other people.
Contentment
and meaning comes from denying yourself and living for others.
I did warn
you that it will be counter-intuitive and hard. But the easy, popular belief is
much more palatable and ‘natural’ because it is centred on the self – your own
emotion and your own subjective experience.
If the
popular beliefs were true and correct, then we would have found the ‘recipe’ already.
Billions of people have tried it over many centuries, yet it remains elusive.
That is for good reason, it is a bullshit myth.
As a parent,
if you want your kids to be ‘happy’ make sure (a) they understand that by ‘happy’
you mean ‘content’ and (b) teach them to
be humble and serve others in the first instance.
Or you can
feed them the candy of ‘happiness’ and rot their souls. Your choice.
Don’t judge.
Do you
believe there is or should be justice in the world?
How do we
arrive at ‘justice’ without judging?
You can’t.
That should
put an end to the argument, but somehow I hear it all the time. There is a
popular expression were people prefix an observation with: “No judgement” –
ironically soon followed by a “but…”. What they are trying to do is to say that
they are making a judgment, but they don’t want you to be offended and that
they recognise that you have the right to ‘your’ own judgment and that whilst they
are judging; they are not claiming to be ‘right’. To claim to be ‘right’ is so ‘exclusive’
and offensive.
But without
judgement, you cannot live.
You have to
judge things as being safe or not: Should I cross the road?
You have to
judge whether can do something or not: Can I jump from here to there?
Without
judgment there is no consideration. To be considerate you must consider it.
Without
judgment there is no appropriateness. Is it appropriate to give that kid a porn
magazine?
In a
relativistic, post-modern society, truth
is being sacrificed at the altar of convenience. The reason why people don’t
want to accept judgment as a good thing is because culturally we have evaluated
the relative importance and usefulness of TRUTH and OFFENSIVENESS and we have decided
that not being offensive is more important than being right.
Consequently we
have come to deny that right and wrong exists and that therefore it is
relatively less important to judge. Judgment is now preserved for the common
applications such as the need to cross the road and it is denied for determining
a greater good.
If you believe there is no right and wrong
and that justice does not exist, then not being judgemental is acceptable. That
is where we find ourselves today as the common consensus. It may be convenient
and makes for less conflict (which may be your personal subjective preference
as the better experience) but it also just so happens that it is stupid.
Without conflict, there can be no growth. We need stress and
strain to improve. (Just like exercise – stress and strain – is good for you
physically, the same applies spiritually and intellectually.)
Meaninglessness does not come from being weary
with pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary with pleasure . GK Chesterton
Follow your passion
The overwhelming, factual evidence of billions of people
over millennia is that the career and lifestyle they pursue and achieve is
commonly a function of their background, their IQ, their opportunities, their
cultural background and psychological biases – to name a few.
Some ‘successful’ people claim that what they did was to
follow their passion. Many, many more people who are successful by the same measures
just did what was in front of them and weren’t particularly passionate about
it.
It is not definitive, but it is highly probable that the ‘passion’
followed the success and did not cause the success. If passion caused success,
then there would be many more successful people in the world. Even where
success is ‘self-defined’ and subjective, fewer people claim to be successful than
the many more who claim to be passionate about something. In fact one of the
biggest challenges people claim to face is that they want to figure out how to
make money out of their passion.
There are two problems with ‘following your passion’. One is
that it implies that it leads to success without actually defining success. The
second is that it is universally proven to be true in a small minority of
cases.
What is probably happening is that people hear and read that
you must follow your passion to be successful and then when they are asked why
they are successful, they resort to claiming that they followed their passion.
Firstly, it is commonly accepted so unlikely to be perceived as the wrong
answer, and secondly it affirms their own pro-active role in their own success.
Few admit that success is large a matter of luck. They won’t
admit because they suffer from a well-known psychological phenomenon of ‘self-serving bias’
To be successful, however you want to define it, requires a
few basic ingredients – physical talents and competencies – as well as certain
behaviours, such as hard work. But talent and hard work is not enough. Look at
the world around you. How many people are beautiful singers? How many people
are successful pop stars? (In the case of many – hello Kylie Minogue – talent is
probably over-rated.) The missing ingredient is something more ineffable. You
can call it luck or a blessing or whatever you like, but it is not something
you control and claim as yours.
Just because people don’t want to admit it, doesn’t mean it
is not true that luck is a much bigger factor than following your passion in achieving
ultimate success.
Following your passion is only good advice in as much as it
will mean that at least you will have enjoyed the process of failing – but it
will not make you successful.
Success comes from hard work.
This is the same argument as above.
Hard work is necessary. It is a given for most types of
success except for winning lotteries and the like. But it is merely co-existent, not causal.
But the overwhelming evidence of billions over millennia is
that hard workers simply do not automatically get rewarded with ‘success’.
Look around you and see the hard-working people. Do you
really want to conclude that success comes from hard work? It is self-serving
bias all over.
You can do anything you like, be anyone you want to be.
You can’t.
The idea may
offer you ‘hope’ but it is not true.
In fact,
believing it will only lead to disappointment. You will become that person that
arrives for the audition at the reality show and becomes the joke audition to
features in the programme promo where you are the object of ridicule.
The truth is
you can try anything and try to be anything – within reason. The two operative
words here are ‘try’ and ‘reason’. If you are honest enough to understand that
you are trying and that it is not a given that with enough hard work and
passion you will get there, and you can retain the perspective that you are
trying, you can try as long as you like.
Secondly,
you need to think about it – you need to reason about it. Can someone with your
body shape really be an Olympic Sprinter? If not, then trying to be ‘anything’
is a stupid pipe dream. You can certainly try to be as fit and as fast as you
possibly can, but make sure you apply the filter of reasonableness to your
dreams.
I am not
suggesting you become a quitter, I am suggesting that you bring some realism to
your efforts. You can bet your bottom dollar that the person telling you can ‘be
anything’ is also trying to sell you something that will ostensibly 'help' you
get there.
If you don't know who the sucker in the room is, you are. Don’t be that schmuck.
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