It ignites the interest of our senses, our base instincts, our egoic selves.
But how often do we question the “good” that has been imposed on us, how often do we really stop and question how much faith we have in a system that has us convinced our natural state, our simple lives, our inner joys…are not good enough?
The next time you make a choice because you are trying to be a “good person,” I implore you to consider that those who commit suicide terrorism believe they are being “good people”—martyrs for their god.
The next time you equate a degree to an education, consider the state of really any aspect of our society—we are absolutely starved for knowledge, and yet the premium on education these days seems to be limitless. There is no amount of debt, disinterest, or complete disregard for actual learning that will stand in the way of people getting degrees and believing their education is complete for their lifetime.
I often look around at older people and wonder how we’ve confused
“respecting your elders” with allowing them to believe it’s okay to stop learning after age 23 and let them sit and fester in the prejudices of the generation in which they were raised.
So we’re handing out empty degrees like candy—degrees that promise success at a steep, suffocating cost—and placating bias and prejudice with a laugh and sigh, because that’s what we’re instructed is “right.”
I’m not saying there’s no value in education; I’m saying it’s the only thing of real value, and we’re falling cripplingly short of actually giving that to the masses. I dream of a day that college grads leave school not believing that their education is only the leg-power to latch themselves on a corporate treadmill for the better parts of their lives, but rather something that has given them the context, the history, the perspective, and the opportunity to learn what makes them tick and flow, how to question everything and discuss anything objectively, to choose the life they want, not adhere to the life that was chosen for them.
Neither Hobbes nor Plato nor Spinoza nor Hume nor Locke nor Nietzsche nor Jobs nor Wintour nor Descartes nor Beethoven nor Zuckerberg nor Lincoln nor Rockefeller nor Edison nor Disney nor countless other game-changing, culture-shifting, brilliant-minded individuals were academics.
The pattern is enough of a trend to make you wonder whether or not a component of their (exceptional) success was that they were never conditioned to believe one thing was “good.” Their ideas were never edited or tailored to the liking of someone else’s. They never had to quell their real opinions in lieu of a grade, and they never compiled other people’s ideas for years and called it “research.”
In Plato’s The Republic, he tells an (oft-cited) allegory of men chained together in a cave, with their backs to a flame, believing that the masterfully
crafted shadows that those behind them were holding up were reality.
Seeing that light, metaphorically or not, is the truest education, mostly because we need not lay eyes on it to understand it. We need only piece together the illusions we perceive to make sense of what is behind us.
And really, at the end of the day, it is not our own illusions that are dangerous, it’s other people’s—especially when we accept them not only as integral, unmoving parts of our (ultimately dissatisfying) lives, but when we believe them to be good. Unquestioningly. Unfailingly.
Nobody ever gave someone permission to be enlightened. No new line of thinking or creative genius was born of what was already acceptable. We associate “acceptable” with “good,” when really, “acceptable” is, mostly,
“staying within the lines someone else uses to control you by” (for better and for worse).
Our lives are not measured by other people’s gods, not their dollars or illusions or business plans. Not their beauty standards or declarations of what’s right and wrong and good and bad and whom we should be on any given day.
It seems the task of the generation (century, maybe) will be radically accepting ourselves in a society that feeds on the opposite. Seeing illusions for what they are, even, and maybe especially, when they are other people’s.
Making kindness cool and humility humor. Forgiving the way things are, knowing the only way to reinvent anything is not to destroy what’s present but to create a new, more efficient model, one that renders the other obsolete.
51
HOW YOU FALL
OUT OF LOVE
with the idea
OF SOMEONE
There are two ways things turn out:
You lose a thing, you replace it with something else, it’s better than what you lost, you’re happy.
You lose a thing, it doesn’t disappear when it’s replaced, not having it becomes as much of a presence as having it was.
You’re told the things you can’t forget about are meant to be in your mind
—the simple aftermath of having loved somebody so deeply: You hold onto a someone and someday that was supposed to be yours.
We are told to believe that not being able to let go of the things we lose does nothing but prove how much we loved them in the first place, and I don’t think this is true.
Living with a ghost, crafting an idea that you need to hold onto—to fill a space or insecurity with—is using the idea of someone to fix something about yourself.
We love heartbreak, and we love putting it on ourselves. We’re more nostalgic for things that never happened than we are grateful and present in the things that are. We start missing things we never had, that we just created in our minds, in this false, alter-reality.
The things that are easily replaced are usually the ones that you haven’t attached existential meaning to. That is to say: They’re the things you don’t rely on to give you a sense of self.
The things that don’t leave your head are not the ones that show you what’s “meant to be”; they’re the things that show you what you’re still not okay with on your own.
You know what unconditional love is? Unconditional love is loving someone even if they don’t unconditionally love you in return—that’s affection without pretense. That’s what we claim we’re after, and yet we can barely grasp the idea.
Most people we enjoy because they’re contact highs. The idea of types and standards are proof that we’re just looking for somebody to play a role.
Heartbreak is the aftermath of when somebody steps out of the very specific notion you had of them. Suddenly, they’re not doing what you think they should be doing and so they are wrong. The inability to detach is holding onto the fact that the package looked so perfect, the pieces seemed to fit, and yet. But still.
Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it all you want, but it’s a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of the day it’s static. It’s memory. It’s a sentence and you can’t change it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says.
A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What will having this love fix?”
What will having this person next to me make me feel better about? What do I need them to tell me? What do I need them to prove? Who do I need them to look great in front of? What purpose do they serve for my ego?