This is an autobiography of a person you've quite possibly never met whose experiences might not be that interesting to you. Maybe, with any luck, you'll still find something of value here.
More precisely, they need to start showing receipts.
Let me explain by way of an anecdote.
I remember when I competed in my first powerlifting meet and posted the results on the Full Contact Runner page, someone reached out to me about training. He said he wanted to compete, and I was only too happy to offer advice. The thing is, he asked me how much I benched in competition, and I told him.
To which he replied, “Is that all?”
Look, I don’t take things like that personally, but it was off-putting. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like helping him out all that much because of the I-can-feel-better-about-myself-by-making-someone-else-feel-worse energy that started to come across in the conversation.
At no point did I ask what his bench was, because it didn’t matter to me at all, but he couldn’t help himself; he eventually volunteered the information. “I lifted 275.”
My reply reflected my waning interest and belief: “No, you didn’t.”
He doubled down and said he did, to which I simply repeated, “You didn’t.”
See, I explained to him that he didn’t have to go onto a stage in a skin-tight singlet in front of an audience, sit on a bench surrounded by spotters and judges, and put up a technically clean lift under a time constraint, so his lift didn’t actually exist.
It only mattered to him and his chosen god, but outside of that? It might as well have been a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to witness it.
When I asked him to send me video of his lift, he went radio silent. That was 2018, and I still haven’t heard back from him.
But the conversation stayed with me, mostly because I don’t understand the masculine need to lie about fitness accomplishments.
And social media is a cesspool of this type of thing.
Not a day goes by that I don’t find myself reading a post or watching a video from someone who is clearly lying about something they most definitely didn’t do.
It aggravates me to no end, deadening my enjoyment of these platforms whenever I encounter it. I can’t stand this particular brand of insecurity or the drivers behind it.
I think it’s because of my time at Panther Gym.
I know, I know…it always comes back to that grimy basement gym and all of the wonderful humans who made lesson learning more important than myth making.
That’s because Panther Gym had all sorts of fun accountability mechanisms built into it that were as essential as the heavy bags and weight plates.
You couldn’t just make up stories about your physical fitness accomplishments there because you’d get fraud-checked in real time.
You couldn’t lie about how far you ran because we would take you for a run. You couldn’t lie about how much you lifted because we would work out with you. You couldn’t lie about how many fights you’d had because sparring was constant, what with a ring not ten feet away from your lying mouth.
It kept us honest as coaches and trainers, but more importantly, it kept YOU honest as an athlete.
Even now, Panther Gym still has one of the most honest social media feeds out there. Check it out. It’s a nice respite from all the fakery.
I like to think that’s a holdover from the old days, but I also think boxing attracts people who want to learn the truth about themselves. The best sports do that.
And when you’re honest with yourself, lying to others for social media clout stops making sense. The best people get that.
But that guy who lied about his bench press?
He isn’t an outlier. He’s symptomatic of something larger: a fundamental shift in how the digital world rewards claimed ability more than demonstrated ability.
Men who feel invisible or undervalued offline can manufacture visibility online through selective storytelling, metrics, and self-mythology.
It’s not always malicious; sometimes it’s a survival mechanism for significance.
But over time, it builds an inflationary economy of credibility: Everyone’s the strongest, toughest, or most disciplined, and that arms race makes authenticity feel like weakness.
You know why? Because most men live in quiet ongoing comparison.
They feel they should be more: stronger, richer, better fathers, better partners.
When they fall short, they lie not so much to deceive others but to protect themselves from exposure.
It’s less “I want to fool you” and more “I can’t let you see how much I’m failing at being the thing I was told to be.”
So they falsify. They amplify.
They curate their lives in service to a need to be seen as more than the sum of their broken parts or failings.
They lie about trivial things that are overvalued by other men to establish a hierarchy by way of status theatre.
Men who haven’t had to earn rank through real performance still crave the respect those hierarchies once offered.
Hell, maybe they even earned that credibility at some point in the distant past and want the respect they deserved at that time to go on in perpetuity.
But it doesn’t. Nor should it.
“All glory is fleeting.”
Cope.
They miss the old hierarchy because they were part of it.
The new hierarchy is unfamiliar and unwelcoming.
Worse, it doesn’t care about their past laurels.
So, falsified intellectual or physical capital becomes a currency of status.
Engagement becomes “proof” of value.
But deep down, they know the difference, and that cognitive dissonance drives exaggeration.
And because there’s no corrective circle, not only do men lack accountability, but they foster subcultures that actively tamp it down.
No authentic gym culture, no significant elder mentorship, no peer-to-peer checkpoints.
The lies ossify.
They become foundational.
Accountability used to be built into male communities: gyms, jobsites, churches, and even locker rooms.
When men stopped inhabiting shared physical spaces of struggle, accountability became somewhat optional.
And the internet, being frictionless, made avoidance effortless.
Now, a man can posture indefinitely without a feedback loop, a sparring partner, or precise correction.
Men don’t hold other men accountable because it helps prop up the whole system of performative masculinity, grindset bros, and hustle culture.
Meaning is displaced by theatrics and slogans.
Physical truth, or what the body can or can’t do, used to be a moral compass for men.
It oriented them in the world:
“This is what I can lift, fight, run, and endure.”
Once that physical truth became an online declaration, the self became abstract.
Men can simply invent “selves” they can live with whenever the mirror shows a reflection that isn’t quite as flattering as the carefully selected words in a well-timed social media post.
It might not even be a cover-up for the purpose of personal gain.
It could just be loneliness: a truly oppressive social isolation borne by a lack of positive male connections that hold them accountable when semantic drift becomes a character trait.
They say one thing but mean another, all in service to a carefully constructed male identity.
They lie because the truth feels smaller than what they were told a man should be.
The man they were supposed to be.
The aspirational figure of masculinity.
That NEVER existed in the first place.
Stone lifting made something clear to me that should have been self-evident from decades of working out and competing in sports.
I suppose it’s something I already understood implicitly, but stone lifting gave me the articulation, the verbiage.
I would like to share it because, much like all of my personal and professional endeavours, I am always seeking the benefit to others in what I do.
Not in a didactic or pedantic sense, though; I don't want to alienate anyone.
More so in the interest of helping those who want to be helped and possibly see something in my actions or beliefs that resonates with them.
As in, "This benefited me in this way, so it is in that spirit that I share it with you."
Essentially, it comes down to a recently learned lesson:
Strong people get injured trying to get stronger, but weak people get injured because they’re not strong.
Stone lifting is such a perfect modality for this lesson. Each and every stone acts as a teacher and a guide.
The main reason for this is that you can’t fake stone lifting.
Either you can get it off the ground, or you can’t.
The stone doesn't actively resist you, but it can't assist you in your attempt. You either have enough base strength to even start the pull, or you don’t.
And once you do have that strength, you enter a new world where the margin of error shrinks.
You’re now capable of moving objects heavy enough to tear skin, pull muscles, strain tendons, or ruin your day if you’re even slightly off in the process.
But the difference between "slightly off" and a successful stone lift is almost nonexistent from a “did you, didn't you” perspective.
You won't know until you try and the risk won't be known fully until the moment its over.
Maybe not even then.
That margin of error I referenced is only as broad as it needs to be and not a fraction greater.
It reminds me of something I heard many years ago about taking on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, in that to successfully complete it:
"Anything more is not necessary. Anything less is not acceptable."
Stone lifting exists in that exact space. You find yourself not interested in the stones you know you can lift, or in the stones you have already lifted. You are always going to seek out the stone that stops you, or makes you pay a toll to hoist.
It's in that recognition that you realize how much strength asks of you because strong people will push and pull until something gives.
Strength invites heavier loads, higher intensities, and riskier thresholds because being strong is only as satisfying as it is useful.
Weak people, by comparison, often break before they start.
Not because they’ve pushed too far too soon, but because their baseline wasn’t high enough to withstand the demands of the attempt in the first place.
It's not a moral failing, but it is a failure. It's limiting in clear, definable terms that can leave one feeling somewhat diminished. It can be demoralizing.
To be clear, weak or strong doesn't mean better or worse; as in, a person’s worth is based on who is stronger or weaker. It can, however, raise a question of utility.
However, how useful one is based on how strong one might be is very much context-dependent. But it's better to have it in reserve and not need it than to need it and not have it, no?
Strength comes from many places and takes many forms, but I also think that the root of all strength is a matter of how willing one is to test oneself against seemingly immovable objects.
Words like "always" and "never" are like yelling into the void from the top of a mountain.
Except you're the void, and you're not yelling so much as whimpering.
Few words are as disempowering or negating as always or never.
When someone says, "I will never be able to do this," they're not considering that circumstances may change or that there may be different ways to approach the situation.
On the other hand, saying, "This will always be a problem," shows that the person isn't considering the possibility that the problem may not be permanent…
Or that it can be solved or at least mitigated with time or external sources of assistance.
In both cases, the person is being inflexible and not taking into account the full range of possibilities that can unfold with acceptance and the removal of definitive language like always or never.
This type of perceptual fixedness doesn’t help anyone when it gets used, least of all the person experiencing it.
So it’s better to recognize it and avoid it than to accept it and allow it to rule your life.
But this sad state of affairs is shockingly common in everyone from your favorite barista to your family physician and anyone in between.
That includes you and me.
And it’s something to be guarded against, in ourselves and others.
But why do people fall into these “always” and “never” mental traps?
Part of it is because people often don’t consider the limits of their knowledge in open-ended terms.
But also because people don’t know what they don’t know or even when they don’t know it.
This kind of thinking, in either instance, is a sign of overthinking or underthinking.
Those approaches close off any additional consideration by way of stern absolutism that is embedded in words like never and always.
Once always or never get used, overthinking or underthinking take over and mark points of no return.
And maybe that doesn’t matter if all we’re doing is shouting into said void.
Voids don’t have directions, and points of no return are mostly meaningless.
It’s the kind of existential drift that people experience when they feel like they can “never X” or “always Y” when X and Y aren’t really “always” or “nevers” in the truest sense of the words.
Few things are, but accepting them as such makes them so.
So now we’re in a directionless void, past a nonexistent point of no return, and disoriented as we drift into nothingness.
That’s what happens when perception runs into definitive non-conclusions like always and never.
It’s like drawing a sea monster on a map of the ocean and writing, “Here be monsters.”
Never, always, and words like them are the cartographical equivalent of a hand-drawn Kraken on a nautical map.
And that’s why it’s important to avoid using absolutes and to consider a range of possibilities for a more balanced and realistic perception.
Absolutes set us up for failure because the world is too complex and unpredictable to be accurately described by such black-and-white terms.
We're closing ourselves off from growth and change when we say, "I will never be able to do this…"
And implying that a problem is somehow immutable when we say, "This will always be a problem."
Neither is helpful.
Not in the short term and certainly not in the long run.
Overthinkers may use these signifiers as a way to feel a false sense of control…
While underthinkers may use them to avoid deeper contemplation and remain entrenched in their narrow view of the world.
Both overthinking and underthinking are reductionist approaches to understanding the world, as they both involve simplifying complex issues and reducing them to a single perspective.
This reductionism can be problematic because it fails to consider the complexity of reality, leads to a distorted understanding of the world, and can have consequences in decision-making and problem-solving.
Instead of using absolute terms or phrases, it's important to approach the world with an open mind.
But not so open that our brains fall out.
We’re still responsible for our thoughts and feelings, and we have a sense of purpose when we start with intentionality and form our worldview from there.
In service to a growth mindset (in the specific) and an agile mind (in the general), find solutions to overthinking and underthinking by stripping away the language that facilitates both.
In other words, never say always and never say never.
Let me ask you a question before we start: Do you hate social media or do you hate your friends?
Or, more specifically, what your friends post?
Because that's what I find to be the issue I have with social media. Seeing a side of my friends that I don't like, plain and simple.
If I go on social media and feel bad, how much of that is caused by what is being shown to me, and how much of it is because of what my friends are posting?
The platforms can really only show me what I choose to follow, right? Be it businesses, sites, pages, groups, and friends. Hating how I feel after going on a platform says less about the platform itself and more about the quality of the posts I'm seeing.
It's a little like how people who are stuck in a traffic jam will always complain about the other drivers, not recognizing that at the moment they're making that complaint, they're not "in" traffic—they are traffic. They're essentially complaining about themselves.
If I'm on social media complaining about social media, I'm really complaining about myself; specifically, what I choose to follow or engage with while I'm on it.
Or, more to the point, I'm not "on" social media—I am social media, and that makes me part of the problem.
And, yes, social media has numerous issues, especially Facebook, most of which are related to privacy and security breaches and exploitative practices on the part of the companies.
That's all there, but come on, that's not what's affecting your mental health and wellness after you scroll your way through your feed.
It's all the assholes you're friends with or following.
You don't stay up late at night fuming over Mark Zuckerberg's reptilian conquest of humanity through the Book of Faces.
You stay up late at night because your idiot friend just posted about something he knows nothing about but, thanks to a YouTube video, now considers himself informed enough about the topic to disagree with the foremost experts in the world.
That right there? That's why you hate social media.
I know that's why I hate it.
I realize that my relationship with social media is a little more complex than the simple binary of love versus hate, and yours probably is, too.
My first mistake is seeing social media as communication platforms that are meant to enrich the human experience.
They're not. Not at all.
It's not one-to-one or even one-to-many communication, as we usually understand these concepts.
It's directionless cultural homogeneity that is flattening the human experience by removing mechanisms of cooperation or even collaboration in the pursuit of freedom of expression.
That's the first thing I had to come to grips with as I considered why social media made me feel bad about myself, the world around me, and life in general.
The second thing has less to do with the failings of social media for deep communication purposes and more to do with the connection it purports to provide.
A disclaimer of sorts:
A lot of what I'm going to talk about is based on my experiences with Facebook, but not exclusively so.
It's just that Facebook is where I clarified much of the vision I had for what I'm going to say in this essay, or more precisely, how I came to the conclusions I did through my experiences on that specific site.
Other social media platforms are not exempt from my overall critique just because they're not being named directly.
It's just that Facebook is more recognizable to more people based on user volume alone, and it's the one that's inclined to see people connect in a way that most closely resembles how friendships develop IRL through shared interests or familiar connections.
That gives it a little more promise than many of its competitors. It's the one thing Facebook does better than most.
Still, it's a hollow process compared to the analog version of meeting someone in a place through joint interests or doing an activity that appeals to both parties and leads to bonding.
It's just that, as superficial friendship-forming processes go, it's better than many of the alternative connection-building platforms out there.
X, nee Twitter, is guilt by association in that two people are probably equally prejudiced against the same out-group, Instagram doesn't know what it is anymore, and users are united by their confusion, TikTok is spyware posing as a fun distraction that brings people together to get hacked, and LinkedIn is a spam farm where everyone is helping someone make something with nothing to show for anything.
See what I mean? Every platform has its issues. Facebook is just the easiest one to explore these issues with because of its ubiquity and scope. It's everywhere and does everything.
So, if I say Facebook, I'm using it as a catchall term for social media in general, in all its dumpster-fire glory. The problems endemic to one are often endemic to all. It's a matter of severity at this point.
The singularity is that they're all bad for us in a general sense if not strictly managed.
I just wanted to clarify that before getting into the main topic of negative social media experiences; more to the point, negative social media experiences brought about by the people we call our friends on social media.
That's the key point to all of this.
Our so-called friends.
I went through a phase where I would accept every friend request that came my way. I often did this because the friend requests I would get came from "mutual friends," as it's called, or, on occasion, from members of Facebook groups that I was also a member of because of common interests.
I've always tried to screen requests by asking these mutual friends about the person in question, but I was relatively easygoing about whom I'd say yes to.
What I learned in time is that my social media experience reflects my social media connections. The less I enjoy the platforms I'm on, the more likely it is that I'm connected to people I shouldn't be. I should have scrutinized these connections before just haphazardly accepting them.
That's really not the platform's fault.
That was the driver for me as far as enjoying social media less and less as friends or connections accumulated, and I found myself confronting the thoughts and feelings of people whom I didn't much like upon further exposure.
I often accepted friend requests or connections from people I would, it turns out, avoid in real life based on the rhetoric they were espousing in their daily posts, even if they were friends of friends.
Within one or two posts from these folks, I'd know unequivocally that I didn't really think all that highly of them. Accepting their request to connect was a mistake, and I'm the one who made it.
Not Facebook and not Mark Zuckerberg.
Worse than that, though? I'd stay friends with these people even after I realized that I didn't really like them, or at least how they represented themselves online.
All because it felt better to keep them than get rid of them, even though I couldn't really articulate why.
Maybe it was the friend count, or maybe it was the social-validation feedback loop. Either way, I let the whole experience ride when I really should have been more discerning.
It was as if my success in life depended on my ability to stay connected to all of these people. It's a trap that way, but one that is actually a choice we make. Or, more often than not, don't make.
Why do we remove that choice just because of the medium?
It seems like we stay connected to people we really don't like all that much based on the posts they make or the comments they share more often than we excise these same people from our feeds for the same things when the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of doing so.
You know you really don't like this person, but you belong to the same martial arts club or play the same sport or share a career path, so you remain friends with them. Yet, outside of those narrow domains, there is nothing to really bind you together.
Maybe these people are really not worth knowing. Maybe they're actually assholes who use social media to say and share things they would never talk about or do in an analog setting. It's a bait and switch.
That's ruining the whole social media experience because it keeps us connecting to people we don't want to be associated with at all. That's brutal.
Part of it is because Facebook really doesn't want you to unfriend anyone. None of the social media platforms do. Think about it.
Facebook, specifically, offers all sorts of alternatives like unfollowing them but remaining friends, so-called "snoozing" them so you can take a break from their assholery or hiding the post that you don't like with a quick click of a button.
That right there should give you pause.
It did for me.
When Facebook or any social site tries to slow you down when trying to assert your preferences about the connections you have, there's something corrupt and unseemly about the whole process.
When I realized that these platforms wanted me to stay connected to people I didn't like, I started disconnecting from people with little to no warning.
When Facebook started showing me people I had previously unfriended in friend suggestions, I started blocking those same people so that Facebook couldn't do that anymore.
It shouldn't be that difficult. It is, though, because there's more money to be made in keeping everyone connected.
It makes the advertising easier and the marketing more manipulative, both of which allow for greater profits.
I've been asked why I bother to unfriend or block people by others, especially mutual friends who might find themselves in the awkward position of being asked why Ryan unfriended so and so.
I don't always have a satisfying answer for them.
I have an honest one, though: I don't like assholes.
Sure, if they're bullying or trolling, they deserve to get unfriended or blocked—that totally makes sense to most people.
But what's the point of unfriending or blocking people who aren't necessarily being bullies or trolls, just assholes hiding behind a keyboard and spouting off idiocy.
What if they're just annoying?
To me, that's enough. It should be enough for you too.
I mean, what's the threshold if it's not that? Do we have to wait for them to post a manifesto and threaten people before we decide that, hey, maybe it's time to move on from this person?
I ain't waiting that long. This person is making my social media experience negative enough without letting it get to that point.
Does that make all of social media negative?
No, it doesn't. It means that I need to take some control of what I let into my life on social media or anywhere else.
I think it comes down to something I have been telling people for years. The friends in your life are not there to make you happy. That's not their responsibility nor is it a good practice to always be seeking happiness from external sources that are notoriously unreliable.
That's not what I'm saying here when I stipulate my "no asshole" approach to curating my friends list.
I measure the quality of my relationships based on whether they make me unhappy or not. I'll take care of my happiness, just don't ruin it for me and we can remain friends. Make sense?
But if I go on social media and see that a friend is posting about things that are just dumb and that's making me unhappy? I just unfriend them now.
I don't mind disparate or diverging opinions. Those are important to a well-rounded worldview. I don't even mind being friends with assholes under the right circumstances given that we're talking about ethically-centered assholes.
I get that everyone has their beliefs and values, and we're better for the diversity. To a point.
And a fair question to ask is who am I to make these judgments about any of it?
How am I in any better a position to decide who's an asshole and who isn't and what's to be done about it?
The answer is complex and comes in two parts: a "me" part and a "you" part.
I'm the end-user that the social media platforms want to advertise to—I'm the one who voluntarily opts into a system that mines my data and online activities for profit so that it can attempt to manipulate me with tailored marketing campaigns.
That's bad enough, so why should I put up with a bunch of assholes masquerading as friends too?
I shouldn't.
You shouldn't either.
No social media platform is truly free, and that's well and good. Capitalism is a thing. I get that the convenience of what is being offered comes at a privacy cost to us all.
Some of us are good at resisting it, and some of us are victims of every sponsored ad, data-pulling quiz, and tracking app disguised as a game that gets suggested to us.
If that's the case, though? I want to be surrounded by good people, meaningful connections, and positive influences.
I want my digital environment to be one that I benefit from by way of empowering and supportive connections while fending off corporate interests from every other facet of the experience.
If I have a friend on my list whose posts make it into my feed as they troll people in the comments section of a news article, I have to ask myself what the point of staying friends with them is.
I don't want to see that type of content.
I certainly don't want to be friends with someone who participates in random arguments on the internet and goes out of their way to antagonize others in comments sections.
I can understand the impulse but can't condone the actual act.
I find it even more repugnant when it's about a topic that I know my friend has zero expertise in.
Are we really letting people get away with this type of online behavior because of friendship?
Because that's sad.
It makes me unhappy when I see it.
And the one thing I ask of in a relationship is not to make me unhappy.
Also, nobody is changing the world for the better by arguing online with strangers.
I see enough of that from a friend and I just cut them loose from my feed.
Why stay friends? I deserve better.
I mean, we all do.
I once shared the following quote on Facebook: "You must find the courage to leave the table if respect is no longer being served."
It remains true, but especially so on social media.
People who show up in your feeds with a barrage of argumentative or cynical observations are doing nothing for your health and wellness other than eroding whatever level of equanimity and enjoyment might have existed before their arrival.
It's not just about serving me or even you respect, either. It's about serving respect to the world at large and the people in it.
That's what everyone gets wrong about that quote in my opinion. They just apply it to themselves and their feelings, which, fair enough.
But it works even better as a filter for everyone in your circle of friends.
You should be willing to leave the table when respect isn't being served to ANYONE.
Because a friend who will disrespect strangers online will inevitably disrespect you.
Haters gonna hate. Trolls gonna troll.
Maybe not to your face. Probably behind your back.
But disrespect you they will. Assholes can't help themselves.
Social media seems so vast and it seems to encourage people to say or do things they wouldn't do in a room full of people or one on one.
The internet and the socials on it seem like this unfathomable expanse that goes on forever and is seemingly populated with every human being in the world.
That expansiveness and the diffusion of accountability it fosters make people braver behind their keyboards than they would otherwise be in real life.
It's the difference between swimming in the ocean when you know there are killer whales in it and swimming in the pool at SeaWorld with Tilikum.
The water is infinitely deeper in the latter, but the danger exponentially increases in the former.
The infinite deep is intoxicating for some people. They avoid the pool because they know how dangerous it is, but the ocean provides an escape that the pool doesn't.
It offers avoidance by way of reduced proximity to seafaring mammals or people who will bite your fucking face off because of your bullshit.
The feeling of being part of this massive collective that allows you to communicate near-instantly with people from all over the world is also something that appeals to us as social animals, even when we're using these platforms to be antisocial.
When you're not on it or using it, it can feel weirdly dehumanizing and ironically disconnecting.
It's not so much #fomo as it is the sense that you're living on an analog island in a digital ocean. You're not experiencing a fear of missing out because you don't even know what's happening.
Applying the "one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch" philosophy to social media is all well and good, but social media often feels more like apple juice than apples.
And if I poured a teaspoon of piss into a glass of apple juice, I'm pretty sure you'd pour it all out and go thirsty instead.
That's where I was with social media. Tired of drinking piss-flavored apple juice.
I left Facebook a couple of years ago, as much to start my YouTube channel as to take an analog break from the digital grind that social media represents.
The moment I deleted Facebook, I instantly felt like a burden was lifted.
I also deleted Instagram, Twitter, and TikiTok completely, as well as social fitness sites like Strava and MyFitnessPal.
It was a legitimately welcome break from each and every one of them when I did.
I realized shortly thereafter, though, that the platforms weren't entirely the problem. The friends were. The connections at the heart of the social media experience.
That was a sobering realization. It changed my entire perspective on social media. It eventually led to my return.
I'm back on Facebook because it has its uses, but my contact curation has changed to reflect a new perspective on digital social connections.
I want my experience on social media to be positive. Or, at least, not negative.
To that end, I'm going to enjoy the experience by removing that which makes it less enjoyable.
Friends.
I'm getting rid of as many of them as I can.
As an extension of the quote I shared, I would also leave the table if enjoyment wasn't being served.
I wouldn't hesitate to leave or end a friendship that made me feel slighted in any way, shape, or form.
Staying on a social platform and suffering through the posts of people I don't like is a ridiculous notion.
It's like Stockholm Syndrome as the layperson believes it to exist, or learned helplessness in the face of people hijacking my joy or eroding it to nothing because I let them.
The problem isn't social media if I don't have a positive experience in the face of these considerations.
The problem is my lack of boundaries.
My inability to enforce those boundaries is another problem.
An unwillingness to remove negative influences, in the form of people or content, is why the whole endeavor feels like a negative downward spiral.
It can be, sure.
It doesn't have to be, though.
I started 2021 with 330 friends on Facebook, down from around 400 in 2020.
I was at 250 as I entered the last quarter of that year.
By New Year's Day of 2022, I was well under 200.
As of this writing, I’m closing 2023 at 188 friends and hoping for fewer before 2024 arrives.
My goal is to achieve a total that aligns with Robin Dunbar's number and to make those the best quality connections I can maintain.
That will be a result of me leaving the table, so to speak, because respect and enjoyment are not being served.
This goes both ways, too.
See something from me on Facebook or social media that you don't like or that hurts your feelings? You should unfriend me.
We probably wouldn't get along in real life, so why stay connected to me on social media?
I'm definitely going to unfriend you if I see something that bothers me enough to lower my enjoyment of social media.
Besides, you'll be helping me reach my goal of reducing my friend count by unfriending me on Facebook if we're currently connected there. Thanks, buddy.
Sure, it gets a little more complex when the person you're unfriending is an actual friend in real life, but even then—friendships aren't meant to last forever.
Society has this oddly romanticized view of friendship as a somehow unending result of two people sharing an interest at some point in their lives.
That's nice when it happens, but it's not guaranteed.
Some people don't evolve as they age and some people do. You can't expect the latter to stay friends with the former as interests and intellect diverge.
It's okay to outgrow people—even people you used to like.
Friendships end. It's healthy when they do.
Or, as in social media, people you didn't really know when you first became friends turn out to be people who need to be unfriended.
That first impression was enough to give it a try, but that's not exactly a lot of effort when you think about it. There's almost no due diligence there and that can create friction.
It seems to take very little to prompt a friend request from one person to another. Overlapping participation in a sport, hobby, or career can be all it takes to feel a connection to someone.
Ding. Friend request sent.
Okay, fair enough.
But if you're willing to send friendship requests so readily, then you must be equally willing to remove those people when it's clear that the relationship is less than superficial in value or worth.
And if it's making you unhappy, it definitely needs to end.
Your friend count isn't a reflection of your worth as a person, but it could be affecting your self-worth.
It's certainly affecting how you feel about yourself, social media, and the confluence of both, as well as the effects that ripple through your day-to-day living that are both obvious and hidden.
That's your "friends" list, and it's an insidious reducer of equanimity and joy.
Start reducing it and see if you don't suddenly have a better relationship with social media...and yourself.
As is typically the case with social media and the society it reflects, people have taken the idea of goal setting and bastardized the concepts of process versus outcome based planning.
Process is all well and good; it needs to be respected or you will fail. Outcomes need to be equally respected or, yes, you will fail.
The process is not more important than the outcome but I can see why people often think it is. I just finished reading an article about outcome based goals that compared setting them to praying or wishing. If I could have punched the author in the face through my monitor, I would have punched them twice.
Outcome based goals are everything that INFORMS process, with process being a series of steps that allows for the likely success of an attempt.
If you think the highest performing athletes in the world aren't setting outcome based goals, you're lying to yourself. Gold medals, world records, winning, and all manner of outcome based goals are being made by Olympians and professionals all the time.
The reason this pisses me off to no end is because good people fail in achieving lifelong goals due to this overemphasis on process over outcome.
Your coach, personal trainer, mentor, or teammate telling you not to worry about outcomes and only focus on the process is telling you half, at best, of what you need to know. Going into anything with only half the information you need is more like praying or wishing than focusing on outcome based goal setting ever will be.
The worst type of advice to follow is incomplete advice. You wouldn’t try to put a puzzle together that was missing pieces, would you? So, stop taking advice that is neither complete nor useful in the aggregate.
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
People are uncomfortable around their equals; most much prefer hierarchies. Never is this more evident than in martial arts. It's hierarchal by dint of belts and ranks, and participants like it that way.
I would go as far as to say they crave it.
Is it a microcosm of society? In some ways. Diffusion of responsibility and social loafing are both very real psychological phenomenons that have ramifications outside of martial arts circles, to be sure, and are both well studied and understood.
Both effects are likely complicit, directly and abstractly, for the general sense of awkwardness in a room full of equals (in any domain, not just martial arts). When you're in charge, you know it; when you're not, you're aware of it.
When you're not sure? Well, that's an unusual feeling.
Or maybe not "unusual" so much as uncommon.
It's often said that if you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. Pithy, but pointless. You could just as easily say that if you're the dumbest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. It would be just as instructive, which is to say not very.
Seek out a room in which you are surrounded by equals. Horizontal relationships, not vertical ones. Find the people who are better than most and be better with them, at your own pace, not in their wake or ahead of them.
I went backward with my writing. Initially, I only shared it with the internet; I didn't even have Facebook when I started blogging.
I shared posts with friends, usually only close friends, for feedback and support, but I simply let my work rest in the digital ether.
The more friends that read my work as years went by, the more feedback and support I seemed to receive. More importantly, the essays and articles I wrote seemed to fulfill what was the ultimate goal of almost everything I produce: they helped people.
I couldn't have been happier with both of those outcomes. Helping people and getting read are both kind of important to authors in any medium or format. In the interest of helping those people who I considered my friends, I started posting more of my essays on social media and uploading to my site less.
I went backward.
What I thought would happen was that my friends would share my posts and that would build my readership. It didn't. Instead, friends didn't share or even react to a lot of my posts. Facebook makes it easy to take content for granted.
It also makes it easy to take people for granted.
I feel taken for granted.
At least my writing does.
That needs to stop. It’s going to right now. How?
Simple.
No more social media posts.
I’m not deleting everything or getting rid of my profiles. Why bother? All I need to do is turn on two-factor authentification and scramble the passwords to make them less hack-worthy, then log out and that’s that.
Also, I’m not going to stop posting in the strictest sense of the concept; I’m just going to keep it limited to links to my work instead of simply sharing it openly. The friction I thought I was eliminating for people so more of them would get to read my content is now getting a barrier applied.
Mostly because a lot of you have failed as friends.
It’s true.
It’s also ok.
I know some of you read my articles and essays or view my photos and videos on occasion because I find out during random conversations or posts. I just don’t understand why you don’t step up and help me build those projects. It just seems weird and more than a little duplicitous.
You’re just not that good a friend and I’m comfortable with that. Most of you aren’t and I’m comfortable with that, too.
I realize how salty this whole essay sounds, but don’t take it that way. I needed to learn this lesson and I appreciate it; you have gifted me wisdom and that’s always a cause for celebration.
But the days of me freely posting on social media about how to improve your health, wellness, fitness, performance, training, business, relationships, or lifestyle? That’s over.
It will still be out there. You’re just going to have to subscribe or follow to get it.
Because many of you failed as friends, and I’m done even making the effort to connect with you first when so many strangers have connected better and more often.
People Who Live in Glass Arenas Shouldn't Throw Stones
I like deconstructing quotes. They are often misattributed, misworded, misguided, or misused. I like setting things right when I see any or all of those happen.
The following quote from Theodore Roosevelt is a good example of those last two observations. It’s often simply referred to as “The Man in the Arena” and has been cited by many, from Nelson Mandela to Richard Nixon. Maybe you are already familiar with it, but just in case you’re not:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Rousing, yes? Makes you feel like you can take on the world. Nice work, Teddy. You wrote a humdinger of a speech. Well, more likely an aide acting as a speechwriter did, but who’s keeping track at this point.
It’s actually only a small part of a larger text. 8743 words if I’m not mistaken, of which this oft-cited piece of rhetoric contributes a paltry 140 words. Less than 1% of the total text.
It’s basically a Tweet.
I can almost guarantee that nobody quoting this paragraph knows much about the context it was delivered. They probably don’t care, either; it serves a narrow focus and that’s good enough.
Apropos of that narrow focus, the utility of this quote comes from its criticism of critics. Irony notwithstanding, this a useful tool to have when people say things about you that you don’t like.
It helps if you’ve actually accomplished something, or at least attempted to accomplish something, but the quote works like a cross brandished against vampires. It’s meant to stave off anything even remotely unflattering about you or something you like. I mean, Miley Cyrus has it tattooed on her so it must have power, right?
The power to protect fragile egos. Most definitely.
See, criticism isn’t a bad thing. Name anything you love and I bet that it exists thanks to criticism. Here are a couple of easy examples that might appeal to some of my readers:
1. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu created due to criticisms of Japanese jiu-jitsu not working for smaller practitioners who needed to be able to fight from their backs more effectively.
2. Heavy metal music created due to criticisms of rock music becoming soft and corporate at the time.
3. Mental health programs created due to criticisms of sanitariums and asylums and the inhumane and dehumanizing practices used on patients.
4. Marriage rights for same-sex partners created due to inequalities in hetero versus homosexual relationship rights.
5. Voting rights for women and minorities created due to gender and racial inequalities imposed on large segments of the population.
Should I go on?
Because the list of things we have today that are vast improvements over what came before all did so because of criticism.
“Man in the arena” or not, we owe a lot of high-quality innovations to the critics who weren’t afraid to say “You can do better. I can do better. We can do better.”
Which was ultimately the point of the speech in its entirety. Not the snippet that everyone knows as the “Man in the Arena” but the entire 8743 speech titled “Citizenship In A Republic” that Theodore Roosevelt gave on April 23, 1910, in Paris.
Also, it was never meant to be directed at criticism. It was an attack on cynicism.
Cynicism.
Not criticism.
In fact, it’s a better speech if you replace the word “critic” with “cynic” and read it that way.
The cynic doesn’t count.
They’re less than zeros.
However, the critic does count.
The critics challenge the status quo. They might not innovate on their own, but they prompt innovation from others. The world moves forward thanks to criticism.
Attacking critics with this quote is misguided and a misuse.
It’s an especially heinous misuse when someone trots it out because a critic got into that person’s feeling box.
It’s a deflection, not a counter. I always find that a little sad when I see it used for those reasons. Partly because the point of the speech, in its entirety, is that a nation is only as strong as its average citizen; it’s a takedown of individualism and a call to strengthened ties within a nation. (It’s also a bit of a love letter to France, but I’m not going to get into that part.)
I feel like I’ve already given enough information here to make my American readers dizzy and everyone else a little bit circumspect in the use of this quote the next time someone says something critical. Criticism has most definitely made the world around us better. Try to remember that critics aren’t the problem.
Cynicism is.
And I can’t think of anything quite so cynical as repurposing a great quote to suit the needs of your moment because you don’t like what someone had to say about you or your beliefs.
That’s an empty defense and, as Roosevelt said in the very same speech, “Woe to the empty phrase-maker...”
P.S. Here is the full speech. The full speech, that is; not just the part you like. I dare you to read it.
Citizenship In A Republic
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at a time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West.
To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race.
The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way.
The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity.
The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.
To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World; but it can developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this is where I speak to-day.
It is a mistake for any nation to merely copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we a great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours - an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people - represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness.
But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed.
The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.
You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected.
Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.
There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.
They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are.
The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most important lesson is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership im arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the "freemasons of fashion: have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision, French prose, had turned toward France for aid and inspiration.
How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charlemange when the lords of the Frankish hosts where stricken at Roncesvalles. Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship.
Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character - the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education.
But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution - these are the qualities which mark a masterful people.
Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference.
But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision. In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises.
There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this is whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be "Yes," whatever the cost.
Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses in is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.
The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune.
If the failure is due to the deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves form the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. Character must show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state.
The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public.
It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life.
That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often the case- why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences.
It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life.
It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and their can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them.
Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts - the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money touch I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy.
So it is with the orator.
It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that gift at all, and must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives.
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He cna do, and often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief.
All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience.
The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations. In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that the ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient.
There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependant upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others.
It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly.
It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown.
It makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader.
If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many other must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if only exhibited in the home.
There remains the duties of the individual in relation to the State, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on the free government in a complex industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.
The closest philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things.
Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others.
Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body of politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases.
This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closest philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment.
Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be a slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.
The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne.
The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immortality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud.
Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):
"I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant.
They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all - constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere."
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.
We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then.
But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it. Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for recreating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded examination.
On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject it.
There are plenty of good men calling themselves Socialists with whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it, without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ.
But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country in the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so he does not wrong his neighbor.
Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the most to be the persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgement awarded them according to their conduct.
Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy.
The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield.
The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have.
The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic.
There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of and oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest.
The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience.
A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western Unite States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on a round-up and animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found.
One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy started to put on the brand.
I said to him, "It So-and-so's brand," naming the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: "That's all right, boss; I know my business."
In another moment I said to him: "Hold on, you are putting on my brand!" To which he answered: "That's all right; I always put on the boss's brand."
I answered: "Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don't need you any longer."
He jumped up and said: "Why, what's the matter? I was putting on your brand."
And I answered: "Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me."
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.
So much for the citizenship to the individual in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other States, with other nations.
Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in.
In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man's sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation.
So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nations neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him.
I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealing with other nations, any more than he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account. We speak of international law; but international law is something wholly different from private of municipal law, and the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience as regards to the other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first formative period.
As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must be of necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesman, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes.
It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doings from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations.
We believe that our ideals should be so high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting.
You and I belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us.
But it would be more than that.
In the seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom of strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever with the leaders of mankind.
France is one of these nations.
For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing of the time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it.
You have had a great past. I believe you will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
If you click on the "..." at the top right of a Facebook post, you will see options. One of those options is "Turn off notifications about this post."
When ad hominem remarks or circular reasoning arrives in a thread, I stop engaging and select that particular option. Yes, even on my own posts.
I do this because I know that the appearance of either of those faults on the part of one or more people contributing to a thread is the death knell for any further intelligent debate or consensus.
Each represents a ceiling in the intellectual capabilities of those who employ them and it is not worth the effort to continue engaging. Not unless you are in a paid position in which it is your duty to do so, which I am not.
Those people have reached the heights of their abilities and you will be wasting your time and energy debating down to their level of understanding.
Just move on.
It is not about feeling superior to any of those people; truth be told, they garner more sympathy from me than derision. It is, however, about realizing that you cannot win everyone over to your side of the debate no matter how many facts you provide.
Those people often have more interest in being right than in being corrected. It all becomes tinged with desperation as they cling to ideas that should be abandoned, honorably, and replaced.
That does not happen enough of the time and is something philosophers have pondered for much of human history. One of my favorite quotes on the matter comes from Tolstoy; to wit:
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
Recognizing that, I take my own advice: I move on.
Because though I might have sympathy for their limits of understanding, my empathy is reserved for those who want to be better and not those who simply want to be right.
I started writing to inform people. I continue to write to inoculate them against misinformation. What I am realizing is that I cannot type fast enough to keep up with all of the mesmerizing bullshit that exists, even just in my own circle of influence.
I contemplated e-suicide the other day--just deleting all of my material from the internet across every single platform. No more social media. No more blogs. No more, period. The question became a matter of mathematics.
What if one sentence from one post improved one person's life? Would the effort be worth it?
I decided that it would. So here we are.
But I cannot compete with memes; in this regard, the internet is undefeated.
I am running through an intellectual battlefield performing triage on people suffering from all manner of injuries, from idolatry to dogma, all of which seem to have an inexhaustible well to draw upon.
I, however, do not. My creativity is finite, as is my patience. I find it easier at this stage to simply block, ban, and delete people rather than continue battling with those who demand agreement, not understanding, in these debates.
Like the aforementioned triage, I need to focus on those who are not only worth saving, but can be saved. They have to be able to ask, when confronted with new information, if it is wrong or they are no longer worth the effort.
My effort. This effort that you are reading right now. Saved from what, you might ask? To be honest, I am not even sure; I just know it when I see it.
I do not fault the internet for making people ignorant; people were given to ignorance long before the internet was invented. That is not even the worst thing that can or does happen.
The worst thing that can happen is letting your idols rob you of agency...or for dogma to take away your growth as a person. In either case, you become less; sometimes by degrees, sometimes entirely, but less than who you were or could have been.
It is the loss of potential that makes me so sad when I see it.
Blind allegiance has never created positive outcomes in any society. Remember that the next time you are about to share a meme that sounds pithy but is full of misinformation.
That does not make you loyal. It makes you a puppet; it dehumanizes you into a sharing tool for their agendas. It makes you a pipeline for someone’s ideas and strips your identity away.
Smart people fact check.
Smart people withhold uninformed comment.
Smart people do not take the contents of a meme as some unquestionable writ from the universe.
Because being made ignorant is not the worst thing the internet can do to you. The worst thing it can do is turn you into an unquestioning meme delivery system for someone else.
Above all else, smart people remember that they are people first.
I definitely have more questions than answers. I do not have the answers; some days, I feel like I have no answers. Those are bad days. I feel like I am not only letting myself down, but you as well.
I do know how to research topics. I do my best to synthesize that information for myself and my circle of influence. I want us all to succeed or, at least, have opportunities to succeed.
But I do not have all the answers. I wish I did. I would share them with all of you all of the time. Because that is the one answer I do have: solutions shared are sustainable solutions.
If you have answers but keep them to yourself, you are part of the problem. I do not want to be part of the problem. I want to solve problems, not create them.
Especially when it comes to my life. Because if I am busy creating obstacles for myself, I am not going to be much use to you.
The ability to think about thinking is the bare minimum you should seek in mentors and collaborators. Metacognition is the key that unlocks biases.
Choosing your leaders and peers based on that ability and that ability alone will ensure you choose the right ones regardless of field, mission, career or vocation. Everyone else is, at best, a pretender or, at worst, a charlatan; testing will expose them all and time will reveal the fraudulent lives they have lived.
Metacognition is what stops people from constantly needing agreement in disputes when what they need more than ever is understanding of alternate points of view.
Agreement can only occur if your biases align. Understanding is bias free.
You can understand without agreeing. You can agree without understanding.
But if you seek to understand before you agree, you won’t simply agree with everything you hear just because it comes from a perceived “authority” or “expert” or person with command over your attention for whatever reason that might be.
Understanding is the gatekeeper of intellect. Agreement is the barrier to insight if you choose what you agree with based on figures and idols or your own familiarity with a topic and the beliefs therein.
Thinking about thinking is the only thing that will free you from your biases. In the process of developing that ability, you might even free others of theirs and make the world a much better place.
There is a good chance that I will have to fake a great deal of my personality just to function.
The person I truly am at my core will have to be hidden so that the people around me do not feel uncomfortable.
The person I will act like will be able to engage in the small meaningless talk that allows us to all get through the day with a minimal amount of authenticity during our social interactions.
I will trade connection for expedience for fear of being found out; for fear of being discovered; for fear of being branded an emotional fraud.
I know that who I truly am is unlikable for many around me.
I spent nearly 15 years of my life in a career that required me to exercise a great deal of restraint. Not simply physical restraint, but a kind of mental restraint that is at once exhausting in the moment and demeaning upon reflection.
It is difficult to explain how much of a toll it takes on you. It is like listening to someone explain something, but he or she stumbles around choosing the right words and you just want to correct the person so you can move on...but you don’t for fear of perceived insult.
So you listen to the speaker, knowing exactly what word should be spoken next, but withholding that knowledge to maintain the illusion of a command structure or pecking order; as in, the people in superior roles are the superior thinkers.
That was not my experience at all, though; they seldom were and often did more harm to collective critical thinking than anything, as if stupidity was viral and they infected everyone in the vicinity with their limitations.
I have worked for some stupid people, in the traditional sense of the word, who never should have been in the positions they were in. Positions of decision making and leadership that ultimately made the organization dysfunctional on a scale I had only seen in works of fiction.
Truly incompetent human beings in real positions of authority over others where life and death and safety and danger were all considered metrics of success. The realization of that is frightening.
However, that organization rumbled along at a meandering pace regardless of the lack of competence and, on occasion, outright incompetence that permeated much of workforce.
It maintained a slow output that matched the dimmest member of management, not the brightest; mathematically, that makes sense but realizing that does nothing to offset the philosophical malaise it creates to those who see it. After all, rate of production cannot exceed the lowest production input.
Slow people produce slow results, even more so when in positions of approval. It seemed that 80% of the meaningful work was being done by 20% of the laborers, recognized or not, while the other 80% were essentially filling roles and ranks but deluding themselves into thinking they were part of the 20%.
They weren’t.
Not even close.
Speaking that truth, though? Career immolation. Corporate memory is long and does not favor truthfulness. To legitimately call people out for incompetence would have sounded a death knell for any further aspirations, which is precisely why it was so easy to leave in my example.
I could only personally refrain from criticism so many times and I once I reached that limit, it was over.
I am glad to be away from the whole endeavor now. It has been freeing in ways I never could have expected, not the least of which being that my writing has become a focal point of my life in ways it never could have before lest it be used against me.
The current climate where I was assigned is one of bottomless dread and unceasingly low morale. I receive near weekly reports that it is not the same as when I was there and that it continues to worsen. Sad.
With my separation, though, came not only freedom from a type of organizational tyranny that favored the weak over the strong, but something else. I no longer had to vet or redact my beliefs for risk of offending some higher ranked or senior member who could very well hold sway or manipulate matters in a way detrimental to my career and satisfaction.
So now, years removed from that specific career, I largely say what I want and when I want, especially when others are clearly wrong or proffering something that I see as unsound or unfounded, such as in martial arts circles or the fitness industry.
You know what I have noticed in that time? It was not just my former organization that had problems; it is everywhere.
The difference is that now, I no longer care. Nothing about my future is dependent upon the favor of someone in a position of authority over me because nobody has authority over me. I am my own supervisor.
When I publish something that offends the sensibilities of some precious snowflake in the martial arts or fitness communities of which I am a part of, it matters to me not at all. My days of inauthenticity to remain in favor with people who cannot accept me for who I am are over.
Those days are especially over for people in my life who cannot hold two contradictory thoughts in their minds without feeling the need to erupt in esoteric and nonsensical ramblings in defense of something I have already made my position known on. I truly do not care how you “feel” about my stance, especially when you are so clearly wrong as to be blind to other possibilites.
If they are unable to cope with that, they should probably look at their own authenticity or leave my circle of influence completely. Because people like that? They poison your career, your life, and your dreams.
You need to defend those like an alpha would protect its pack. If it happens to you and nobody is there to advocate on your behalf, then be your own alpha and tell the critics, “You are no wolf, and this is the land of wolves now.”
That is a great line; one worthy of committing to memory. It particularly resonates if you choose authentic expression in your life over currying favor with dullards.
Just be your own alpha. Move forward. You will only leave behind the things that were holding you back. The so-called “friends” it costs you will be replaced by something much more reliable.
Authenticity.
With that as your guiding principle, you can do nearly anything because you will be strong and sure enough to do it alone if need be.
"Gnothi seauton" is an ancient Greek idiom and one worth knowing. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let's start with a lesson in problem solving; to wit:
Macro analysis can solve macro problems. Micro analysis can solve micro and macro problems. Granular analysis can solve granular, micro and macro problems.
Macro problem solvers cannot solve granular problems; they often cannot even see a granular problem until the issue scales upward.
Micro problem solvers can often see granular and macro problems, but might not be able to solve them; these people know there is a missing link, even if they cannot articulate what it is.
Granular problem solvers see all of the issues, but are often overwhelmed; the term "paralysis by analysis" is fitting. They can also create issues that might not even exist but have potential.
Is one better than the other? Only situationally.
Macro problem solvers are not stupid or limited. These are not your "if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" people. Those are not problem solvers; those people are obstacles to all three tiers of problem solving. Macro problem solvers create the robust solutions to robust issues; however, this can make them appear overly reliant on immediate action and esoteric explanations.
Micro problem solvers are not slow or incapable. They may be less action oriented than macro problem solvers and less analytical than granular problem solvers, but in their moderate approach they strengthen vision and can often bridge two or more views. They are not negotiators and directors, but they are communicators and editors; however, this focus on understanding can make them appear weak in their support and often uncommitted on a course of action that does not have the majority.
Granular problem solvers are not detached or distracted. They may not have action-oriented leadership or loyalty-based followership traits and attributes, but they are hive thinkers in a way that connects emotions to outcomes for those who listen to them. Granular problem solvers seem to specialize in minutiae because they see solutions there; however, they tend to have solutions to problems that might not even occur and that can make them frustrating to deal with because of an overemphasis on completionism.
Much of these categorizations are a product of a growth or fixed mindset, and may even have a genetic component. But everyone thinks they have a growth mindset, mostly because everyone suffers from an inflated opinion of themselves; they will do anything to protect their self-image and self-esteem, including lie.
To that end, labels matter little and what becomes important is knowing yourself on a level others might never reach. In that way, "know thyself" is the only tier of problem solving that matters because, without it, you are of little use to anyone else. People who lie to themselves will share lies with others.
Invention is a difficult process. So much so that most people will never embark on it. The only thing more difficult is reinvention; it is definitely the greater challenge. It requires a schema that few possess and fewer still cultivate.
I know people who consider themselves intellectuals who have fallen into a trap of examination instead of exploration. They mistake pontification for wisdom. This is the danger of faux intellectualism that comes from an unwillingness to challenge the borders of personal beliefs after they have been created.
Constantly reinforcing old paradigms in a cycle of mental self-preservation only maintains the illusion for these people. It is sad to witness, especially in those capable of so much more.
We all have an internal compass and a map of our journey to the point we find ourselves in present day. You can detail that map as often as you want, but there are no new lands to be discovered there. You need to move beyond the lines you have created and, often, that means leaving the old maps behind in search of the undiscovered.
You might find nothing.
You might find everything.
That is the duality of exploration and the difficulty of reinvention. It is also the reward of both.
Someone shared fears with me yesterday, then apologized today for "a moment of weakness." The apology nearly broke my heart because I didn't see weakness at the time, only vulnerability.
Vulnerability is not the same as weakness.
Never confuse the two.
Ryan Lawless Untapped @ryanlawlessuntapped - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
