The biggest lie of all

Image by stux from Pixabay

“You are fine just the way you are”. That’s a message that I have heard many times in my life. If I interpret the message in the most positive way I possibly can, it would be something like this: You shouldn’t try to be someone else. Motivation, value and happiness must be intrinsically driven. You should follow your own dreams instead of someone else’s. This is true by definition – If you don’t live your own life, you will live someone else’s. There is an optimal way that we can lead our lives, and this path is different for every one of us. Every road is unique. However, if we look beneath the surface of all these infinite roads to potential value, we can discover a “meta-road” that is valid for all of us. A way of living that reduces unnecessary suffering to an absolute minimum. That is the proper way of looking at the world. From the deepest possible viewpoint. This proposition also requires a value structure with a clear direction “up” and “down”. The existence of such a value structure is self-evident to anyone who was studied history, especially the most horrible acts of the 20th century, which can act as proper reference direction towards “down”. If you follow the “meta-road” in the opposite direction, you will discover a way of orienting yourself in the world that will maximise unnecessary suffering. And that is precisely what happened in the Holodomor, in Nanking and in Auschwitz.

There is a saying regarding knowledge, that it is like a balloon and the air you blow inside the balloon are the things you have learned (i.e. knowledge). The more you learn, the larger the balloon gets and consequently, the surface area of the balloon increases. But the area of a sphere does not increase linearly, it increases exponentially. If you were standing inside the balloon and looking on its surface from the inside, you would clearly realize that the surface grows faster and faster. And the surface area you see, represents all the things you haven’t learned yet, that you now become aware of in the process of growing. The takeaway is that the more things you learn, the more things you realize that you haven’t learned yet. And this should make you humbler. If your balloon is very small, it is easy to criticize the world, because from your point of view most things are obvious. You can only see few things that you haven’t learned yet. But the larger the balloon gets, the more nuance you will introduce in your life. The size of the balloon would thus be analogous to “wisdom”.

My objection to the saying “You are fine just the way you are” is that it can be used to justify stagnation, which in the long-term equals degeneration. This is the negative interpretation, which unfortunately seems to be more prevalent to me. Our world is not static. It is dynamic and the pace of change is now accelerating faster and faster than ever before in history. It is like trying to stand still on a treadmill when someone is increasing the running speed. If you don’t run, you will fall. And you don’t fall “up”. You fall “down”. Let’s use the balloon analogy to analyse the saying. We just need to replace the word knowledge with “self-improvement”. The more you work to improve yourself, the more areas in your life you will discover that needs improvement. And just like the volume of the balloon, the potential value that you can bring forth to the world increases exponentially! Just like compound interest, it is insanely powerful. If your life is miserable, your balloon is very small. But even that has a brighter side: There are very few things visible to you, that you can do to improve your life. And that at least makes the choice of where to begin easier. By blowing a little air inside the balloon – any air will do – you will discover additional areas that needs improvement. Start by something simple, like making your bed when you get up in the morning. If you can’t attend to the little things, rest assured that you are absolutely powerless to do anything about the bigger problems in this world. Except making them worse than they already are.