Nonexistence (The Other Half)
We always ask someone what they did today, but we never ask someone what they didn’t do today. We seldom dare to venture into this daunting infinite, this formless potential, this confounding and dark realm of negative possibility—not what we do, but what we don’t do; not what we say, but we don’t say; not what we should do, but what we shouldn’t do; not who we are, but who we aren’t. It is an unendingly compounding list of the nonexistent, for which—even with all the time in the world—we could never possibly muster the mental fortitude to conjure up all the reasons to justify such nonexistence in the world, the people around us, or within our very own state of being. Sometimes, there is nothing to be said, and nothing to be done. But that tells as much of a story about what has been said, and what has been done.
We have no choice but to delve into such a disquieting, mystical realm if we are to at all make sense of our true nature. Who someone is or was, or what someone did or does, constitutes a superficial understanding of their identity and proclivity as an individual. If we do not understand who they weren’t and who they choose not to be, what they didn’t do and choose not to do, and why, we cannot truly understand another human being. And these components of identity are seldom elicited through the presentation of self within society; the average small talk, conversations between acquaintances, a social media bio, a resume, a job interview, or the awkward first date all seem so glib because of the shallow understanding of individuals derived from solely focusing on what is, who we are, and what we’ve done. It only tells half of the story of the human condition.
We can only truly claim to know someone if we’ve spent the time to observe them navigating through these endless torrents of possibility and circumstance. We better understand someone’s social life not only by understanding why they are friends with their friends, but why they aren’t friends with everyone else they came across in life. We can better understand someone’s belief system not only by seeing why they believe what they believe, but why they rejected everything else they could have believed. We can better understand someone’s motivation not only by knowing what their dreams and desires are, but why they couldn’t derive inspiration from anything else. We can better understand someone’s degree of mental fortitude not only by acknowledging their fears and insecurities, but all the reasons why they aren’t afraid of or insecure about everything else.
Perhaps actions undone leave a greater legacy than our actual accomplishments.
Perhaps words unspoken resonate louder than those spoken.
Perhaps what isn’t tells us more than what is.
Freedom
When ostensibly the most salient questions in our lives pertain to our purpose—the very justification and prime motivator for all of our actions and reason for existence in the first place—why are we doing such an abysmal job at informing people on how to find it? We evade giving direct answers to others regarding such questions because we feel as though the magic of possibility and the prospect of writing our own stories is a greater privilege than informing each other how to best live. We often glorify this freedom to decide for ourselves our fate; it constitutes this proverbial endeavor of individualism, carving our own path in life and assigning our own personal narrative to our struggles and joys alike. This is undoubtedly a hallmark of Western culture—one of the great privileges of living in a democratic, free society, where no one, not even your friends or family, can ultimately dictate the story and purpose of your life. But when we leave people to their own vices and merely expect them to just figure it out themselves, we inevitably end up with four distinct categories of people.
The first category of people are those that avoid the question entirely. They are unquestioning pawns within hierarchies and perpetually rotating cogs within industrial societies. For a variety of reasons, whether it’s their own personality traits (their conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, etc.), or the prevailing cultural norms, they live out their life and perform their role within society without much thought and question into the purpose of their existence beyond that apparent role.
The second category of people are those that are unsure of their purpose and resort to the conclusion that the purpose of their life is to merely be happy and achieve personal “success,” whether self-perceived success or ubiquitous success in a particular realm of society. So it’s not surprising to see that methodologies of tackling the uncertainty of modern life that resemble hustle culture and the sigma male grindset proliferate in the contemporary world. Many of them recognize just how inhospitable, unforgiving, and downright absurd the society around them is designed, and their solution to such a problem is to capitalize on the system to work against itself for their selfish gain. Because personal happiness and success are the ultimate achievement, these individuals rarely heed to the long-term consequences of their actions outside of personal gain. They are willing to sacrifice almost anything—their social lives amongst family and friends, their leisure activities, the environment, the welfare of other human beings or animals, and even their own physical or mental health—to achieve this end. While not everyone takes the hustle to such a severe extent, in the end, selfishness will still dictate the trajectory of their lives.
The third category of people constitute the undetermined; when left on their own, it is the lingering threat of complacency within an insipid life that prevents them from doing the work that matters. They are those that have the conviction that they’re meant to do something more important with their lives, but the persistent doubt and the deep-seated fear—fear of disapproval, fear of change, fear of commitment—that undermines them from taking the leap forward to do what they truly believe in. They’re more afraid to confront the uncertainty than they are afraid of living a life unfulfilled. Often, these types of individuals are far more prone to fall into depression and suicide from their ever-present existential doubt.
The fourth category of people are those that, without much external guidance, feel a natural compulsion to explore the unknown, confront the daunting darkness and uncertainty that prowls on the road ahead, and undertake a profound introspection to discover what it means to truly live. But here’s the problem: we have to stop relying on this minority to be the sole instigators for the change we so desperately need to adapt to this constantly shifting, chaotic world. We need to stop using them as a crutch when our established systems and conventions cease to work, when malevolent forces in our world seek to use the exponential growth of technological development against humanity, not for it. When very real evil abruptly arrives at our doorstep, conspiring to undermine the very peace and prosperity we take for granted in our insulated, gilded societies lined with privilege, we need to be prepared.
I think we can all agree that we don’t need more cogs, because the industrial education systems that we’ve designed have already overproduced this type of individual far beyond measure; the demand for this type of individual in the current state of the world is at an all time low. I think we can also agree that we don’t need more hustlers who take advantage of other people and maneuver their way around systems of the societies we live in, or more people that are mired in existential doubt and end up living inconsequential lives, crippled by depression, or, worse, dead by their own hands.
“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.“
— Viktor Frankl
When we believe freedom is not the means to an end, but the end itself, we carve up an intricate excuse for the dereliction of our duty as fellow humans to guide each other along. Freedom is not enough. It is important, but we need to stop glorifying it when hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, are lost, misguided, disillusioned, or complacent with such freedom. When we are blatantly neglecting to directly teach each other and our future generations what it means to live a meaningful life and what it means to do meaningful work, we shouldn’t be surprised why there aren’t more “peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers.” We shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, that there’s a mass shootings and homicides occurring every single day, that suicide rates remain at a staggering level, that bloody wars continue to be waged around the world, and the persistence of a myriad of other problems within our societies that we’ve failed to adequately address since the dawn of the industrial age.
We need to stop expecting everyone to just “figure it out.”
We can do better to design a society and formulate a culture where we are transparent about what it means to live a life with meaning, intent, and purpose. We can build a culture where we are proud to both celebrate and emulate those who have made the world we all live in, a better place to live in.
Games
It’s no surprise why a sense of purposelessness pervades our modern day society. When we design systems nested within even more complex systems, when those systems depend entirely on other systems, when we play countless minigames to win a bigger game, it can be incredibly difficult to realize what we’re even doing, to grasp what it is that we’re even trying to achieve.
When the food we put in our mouths is no longer the same food we grew or gathered, when most of our social interactions are deprived of direct communication and consigned to lifeless text or audio, when we no longer need to trust the people beside us to merely survive, when the rewards or achievements that we attain are not wrought by our own hands, but abstracted and mediated by intricate social constructs hierarchies, when we try to piece together the disparate fragments of our actions and consequences, we so easily become lost. We are prone to losing our sense of direction navigating this labyrinth where we ceaselessly twist and turn to make sense of the world, vacillating between social convention and personal intuition.
From elementary school, to college, to work and career, to relationships, we play games. We play the standardized test minigame where we learn to master the art of rote memorization and implement test-taking techniques. We play the college application minigame and the resumé building minigame, where we try to prove our commitment to the game and show that we’re following the rules. And it goes on. The networking minigame. The interview minigame. The job minigame. The friendship minigame. The relationship minigame. The dating minigame and the dating app minigame within that minigame. It never ends.
And it isn’t hard to realize that these games aren't fair. r/outside is an entire Subreddit dedicated to poking fun at these inane, ridiculous games we seem to play in our lives—some notable titles of popular posts:
“TIL [Today I Learned] that the Somalia server is set to legendary difficulty.”
“Feedback to Devs: Increase the lifespan of companion class ‘Dogs’”
“PSA: DO NOT TAKE THE EXTRA CHROMOSOME PERK AT CHARACTER CREATION”
“My best friend quit the game”
The game of life is undoubtedly rigged. There are different rules for the game for different people. There are players who were arbitrarily given a head start. There are players that somehow have access to more content. There are players that have no choice but to play the game at hard difficulty. So we have no problem with those who hack, cheat, and hustle their way into beating this absurd game of life.
But we often forget that there are many that are forced to play the game against their will, or not play it at all; for them, this doesn’t seem like a game at all. Grew up with negligent, irresponsible parents? Tough luck. No parents at all? Too bad. Part of a minority in an intolerant nation and a victim of systematic oppression or persecution? Short and ugly and trying to find a partner? Suffered a traumatic experience like sexual assault or a horrific accident that will leave you mentally scarred for life? Have an incurable disease or condition that will impair your ability to do just about anything for the rest of your life? Oh well. Many don’t have the privilege to play this game at all; those enduring abject suffering and injustice do not even possess the capacity to leisurely contemplate the absurdity of life in the first place. It is not possible to gamify life when you’re grappling with death itself, when the constant pain and suffering becomes so severe that ignoring it is no longer an option.
A video spontaneously popped up in my YouTube feed last month, which gave me an introduction to nonduality. At its essence, it is the belief that the notion of the self or the broad concept of consciousness as a whole is illusory—that there is no division between a subject and an object, no distinction between the physical and the metaphysical, as the physical matter of the universe and the notion of being itself all constitutes an interconnected, ultimate reality. While I’m not entirely sure that I agree with the means by which non-dualists deconstruct reality, I can recognize its efficacy as one of the many tools that have been used to achieve “awakening,” or the means by which we can detach our perspective from the emotional commitments of our present lives and extricate our direct involvement in this game of life.
There were many moments in my life (especially when I listened to the featured song of this post) where I entertained these thoughts and inched closer to this elusive concept of awakening—not in the exact form of nondualism, but rather this broader revelation that within the grand scope of the universe, within the incomprehensible scale of time and space and the unfathomable chaos out in the cosmos, perhaps, nothing really matters at all.
The opening chapter of Ecclesiastes, the book of the Bible closest to my heart, exemplifies this exact feeling:
“Futility of futilities,” says the Preacher,
“Futility of futilities! All is futility.”
What advantage does a person have in all his work
Which he does under the sun?
A generation goes and a generation comes,
But the earth remains forever.
Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;
And hurrying to its place it rises there again.
Blowing toward the south,
Then turning toward the north,
The wind continues swirling along;
And on its circular courses the wind returns.
All the rivers flow into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full.
To the place where the rivers flow,
There they flow again.
All things are wearisome;
No one can tell it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor is the ear filled with hearing.
What has been, it is what will be,
And what has been done, it is what will be done.
So there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one might say,
“See this, it is new”?
It has already existed for ages
Which were before us.
There is no remembrance of the earlier things,
And of the later things as well, which will occur,
There will be no remembrance of them
Among those who will come later still.
It is this idea that my existence—all my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my joy, and my suffering—is more insignificant than a blade of grass is to a field, than a grain of sand is to a beach, than a water molecule is to an ocean, than a speck of dust is to the Earth, than an asteroid is to a galaxy; it is the feeling that if I take a moment to glance at my hands, hone into every sensation and every thought of being, begin comprehend this nature of consciousness and subsequently take a step back from it, I can experience true freedom. I can experience a life liberated from the constraints of the rules of the seemingly endless games that we play in our day to day lives. All our stories of the human condition—stories of pessimism and optimism, lamentation and celebration, ambivalence and reminiscence, unity and discordance, indignation and justice, shame and confidence, anger and forgiveness, conflict and resolution, frustration and catharsis, life and death—it all ceases to be. Everything just is.
Without a distinct mindfulness, however, we can use nondualism or any form of spiritual awakening as an excuse to give up and as an excuse to hide. To view it all as some sort of a sick cosmic joke, an irrational absurdity, a senseless, futile battle against the entropy of the universe—this is a trap. We need to use it instead as an impetus to leap forward—to use it to equip ourselves with the freedom to do the work that really matters for the people that care.
If more of us could just learn to let go—to not heed to the endless distractions, to not blindly obey the rules of the game, to not play the game solely to win the game—we can recognize that if we fail this test, if we’re rejected from this college, this job, or this person, or if we lose money or status, the world will still go on regardless. We could learn to recognize that all the games and minigames that we play—our material possessions, our conceptions of social status, our transient feelings and desires—perhaps matter a lot less than we are compelled to believe.
We can remind ourselves that most of the decisions we make in our privileged, gamified lives are not as risky or life-or-death as we might make them out to be. But those whose lives are on the brink of life or death, whose lives are inundated with suffering and enveloped by pain and hardship, they are beckoning us to take that leap. No—they are begging us to take that leap.
We can do so much more to help those in need. And we have to stop believing that we can’t.
Discipline
Discipline and consistency are undeniably important. Discipline is an exercise of free will because it is the act of detachment from the whim of our emotions. It is a choice to work out, brush our teeth, and take a shower tomorrow not because we feel like it, but because it’s tomorrow. It is the act of liberating ourselves of the decision of whether or not to do something in the heat of the moment because we’ve already made that decision—because we’ve already found the resolution to commit to a certain path weeks, months, or years ago. Indeed, as Seth Godin would teach us with The Practice, or Jocko Willink would admonish us with Extreme Ownership, how we act determines the way we feel far more often than how we feel determines the way we act.
But all too often neglected in this pursuit of discipline and consistency is the courage to ask why. Discipline and consistency only exist in regard to a specific course of action, and deciding which course of action to take may be just as difficult or more difficult than actually undertaking it on a day to day basis. When we live in a society where complex systems are nested in even more complex systems, and when these systems are solely designed to serve other systems, we can so easily lose sight of what actually matters to us as human beings. Perhaps the most important question we have to constantly ask ourselves in this intricate modern day society is: what is it for? Only when we understand the root purpose of a given endeavor can we begin to answer what it is worth having discipline for.
What is school for? Is it meant for me to cultivate my understanding of the world and its people and to make better decisions as a member of society? Or is it merely a means for me to get a job?
Then what is work for? Is it merely to attain financial security or status? What role does your work play within a particular system? How does it serve society as a whole? How does it serve you as a member of that society?
What are those systems and innovations even for? Is it meant to grant us convenience and save us time? Then what is the time for? What are we doing with all the time that we saved?
If we choose to suppress these questions, we choose not to truly live. If we blindly choose to have discipline in doing anything, we not only end up being slaves to these systems, but we perpetuate these abhorrent, oppressive constructs that take advantage of the human propensity towards cultural conformity. There is no shortage of people with discipline. There is no shortage of consistency. The truth is, discipline doesn’t matter if we don't take the time to ask why we choose to do what we do; in fact, from a certain perspective it can even be pernicious.
We understand the circumstances people need to fall into depression, suicide, and resort to crime. We understand the dynamics that have directly led to the death of hundreds of millions because of war, disease, poverty, and the unbridled growth of technology. We understand the factors that cause the deterioration of mental health and the overwhelming sense of purposelessness that is so pervasive. What we don’t understand is the deeper why—why these systems exist, why these cultural norms exist, what purpose we want them to serve, and what we really value as human beings—and we cease to have the courage to fight the status quo, even if we know it’s wrong.
We have plenty of people that are doing a very fine job maintaining these seemingly innumerable, infinitely complex systems within our society. We have plenty of people that clearly believe in the current cultural status quo—a certain path of life and a certain way of life—and are very dedicated to ensure that our future generations persist with it. What there is a shortage of is people with discipline and the courage to ask why.
Why do we chastise those who quit for having a lack of discipline? The people that quit are often just trying to ask why. If we haven’t already sorted out the why, the discipline will never stand the test of time. It needs to be forged with self-doubt, with failure, and with the anguish of uncertainty. Quitting allows room for us to explore. It allows us to constantly recalibrate our outlook on life—what matters to us, what brings us joy or contentment, what makes life even worth living.
The path of life is inexact; there are no easy answers. Constantly quitting and an endless pursuit of a perfect opportunity can be just as detrimental to the course of your life as maintaining discipline and consistency in something that you might realize is ultimately not worth the cost. What we can do is decide to promulgate a culture where instead of chastising those who give up, we can learn to encourage others to ask the right questions. We can promote a form of discipline that is not necessarily constrained to a specific task or line of work, but is linked to our unending quest to understand ourselves and the people around us, to play our part in formulating a culture we can be proud to share, and to know what truly brings us fulfillment and happiness as human beings.
Authenticity
In recent years, I’ve been noticing just how pervasive self-help content has become within social media, primarily centering around this notion of self-love and authenticity.
Choose yourself. You matter so much more than what others think.
Protect your own energy and self-worth.
Embrace who you are and show up as you are.
Get rid of everything and everyone that isn’t serving you anymore in life.
But what does it even mean to be authentic? Do we understand which part of ourselves in particular we’re even being authentic to? Is there some essential, inherent part of yourself that is irrevocably and undeniably “you,” disparate from any external influence? Can such a concept even be possible to clearly define and thus express to others? What is our intention when we desire to be authentic? When we’re all clearly a product of our individual circumstances—circumstances that we have no control over—why are we presupposing that we are special in some way? What are we trying to get people to understand about us and our story, and why?
No one can claim to be completely authentic within a social context. We consciously and subconsciously alter our self-presentation depending on the social context, who we are speaking to, and our emotional state at that moment. Do you present yourself the same way you do to your parents as you would your closest friends? What about your coworkers and acquaintances? What about your bosses or your teachers? What about a stranger on the street? So if we’re going to decide to be “authentic,” we need to ask ourselves who is the audience of such authenticity and to what extent they are receiving the most authentic version of you, whatever you may have defined that as. If we’re presenting a different version of ourselves to every type of person in our lives, can we still even define that as authenticity?
The notion of authenticity—this endeavor to become completely honest and transparent with yourself and others about who you are—very quickly becomes blurred and disfigured in practice. While honesty with the self is indeed a vital step in improving as an individual, it is completely wrong to think that it is the only step; if we’ve truly looked at ourselves in the mirror and our introspection has made us aware of our underlying inadequacies and shortcomings as an individual, we also have to recognize that we have to do something about it. When we tell others to merely “be themselves,” “protect their own energy,” and “embrace who they are,” we are asking them to be complacent. We all have our own vices that we are not proud of. But giving up and merely accepting those vices as integral or essential to our very nature of being is an act of cowardice; we come to a conclusion that allows us to hide. We can’t put the tyrant away, but we can learn to put it somewhere.
By necessity, most of us end up evolving as individuals over time. As a consequence, any presentation of authenticity is ephemeral. Our perceptions of the world and thus our values and beliefs change because our circumstances change; as life progresses, we are forced to overcome challenges and constantly reconcile who we are with the people and the world around us.. The fact of the matter is that if we strive to be genuine or to be authentic—if we choose to commit to this intractable, selfish persistence of our character traits over time, regardless of the ever-shifting circumstances—we hamper our ability to adapt and interact with the world dynamically and thus generously. We need to be well-equipped to serve others in the best possible way, even if it means changing ourselves.
When we squander our mental energy idolizing and chasing this elusive state of authenticity, we divert our attention away from what actually matters; we fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of all this self-help, self-love, and self-affirmation in the first place. Because there's far too much emphasis on self. Instead of this futile, selfish endeavor to get everyone around us to understand who you are or who I am, we should strive to understand who we are.
Instead of being preoccupied with whether or not we have a unique voice and “sound like ourselves,” we can focus on how we can do work that matters for people who care. We should together acknowledge what roles we each play within these social circles. We should recognize our potential as individuals and as a group and what change in the world we’re capable of effecting, whether altruistic or malevolent. We need to discern what we truly want, not only for our own lives, but more importantly for each other, because none of us can walk this journey alone. None of us should ever blindly follow convention. But if we’ve all figured out that we’re heading towards the same destination already, then we should proudly walk alongside those people, in whatever version of ourselves that allows us to best contribute.
The best version of yourself or myself is within ourselves.
Death
“The more important the project we take on, the more difficult it is to find certainty that our work will succeed before we begin.
We can begin with this: If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success?
The first step is to separate the process from the outcome.
Not because we don’t care about the outcome. But because we do.”
— Seth Godin, The Practice
I am not afraid of death.
This notion of regret—what we could’ve done differently in the past, or the fear of not achieving what we could’ve achieved had we still been alive—simply doesn’t bother me.
I have no regret because the mistakes that I’ve made were themselves the reason for my change to become self-aware enough in the first place to understand myself and my emotions, to break free of my impulses and desires, and to be able to extricate my consciousness from my mere existence on this Earth.
I have no regret because there’s no reason thinking I could’ve done better, when the fact of the matter is that I didn’t.
I have no regret because I am grateful for all that I’ve ever done, all that I’ve never done, everything that I know and don’t know, everyone that I once knew or never knew.
the suffering of dark times and the elation of happier times,
the indignation towards vile injustices and the anger in my heart,
the disillusionment, the dread of the vapid and the misery of lingering complacency,
the loneliness, the yearning for love and connection, and being able to finally find comfort and solace,
I have no regret because I am grateful for the very fact that I am able to partake in this experience of what we call life—to be endlessly fascinated by my very existence, every second that I continue to breathe.
If tomorrow a meteor wiped me off the face of the planet, or if I died from a horrific car accident, who am I to both predict such an event and prevent it from happening in the first place? Whether it’s God or merely fate and the weight of circumstances that determined that it’s my time to go under, then so be it. If it’s decided that I no longer need to contribute to this world, then let it be.
The culmination of my life up until this point is learning to separate the outcome from the process, the destination from the journey.
It is realizing simultaneously that I’ve done my best and that I can always do better.
It is to constantly live a better life because of my past, not despite it.
It is to understand that because uncertainty in the process of life is profoundly embedded as an integral part of each of our stories as human beings, we have no reason to constantly fight against it, regardless of success or happiness, and all the more reason to embrace it.
I am not afraid of death because I have decided to have courage. This is the courage to understand what change my existence in this world is capable of effecting, whether good or bad. It means that in order to to stand up for what I believe is right, it requires that I first understand wrong at its most profound level; it requires that I am willing to comprehend the most abysmal of all evils, the most morally bereft and reprehensible acts done by humanity that has taken countless lives, and understanding that each and every one of us are all capable of replicating such horrors if we do not confront the shadow self that resides deep within all of us. Having courage means that I am willing to look the serpent straight in the eyes—to come to terms with the harrowing notion of death, the very state of not existing, itself—and still be able to do what we have to do in this world, to live the life we’re meant to live, whatever that may mean.
And so I decided to undertake a project, indeed, of utmost importance and of diminutive levels of certainty. And I will let it be conveyed to you through a vow I wrote for myself on a dark, lonely night in December last year:
I will fight for what’s right to my grave.
I will never compromise my integrity or the well-being of others under any circumstance.
I will stand up and advocate for not only those who endure injustice and oppression,
but also those that silently strain against the invisible chains of their captive mind.
to elevate our consciousness and perspective and ground ourselves to the lowliest among us.
It is to fight a battle against an absurd, unjust world,
to bring purpose and meaning banal existence,
to sing for the unsung heroes and the undeserving alike,
to be the poet that captures the very essence,
the underlying theme of everyone’s stories
And if it means losing everything, so be it.
What would you still do, if you knew you would fail?
The Fragility of the Church
I have absolutely no sympathy for the churches that have lost a significant chunk of their previous attendance or have fallen apart completely the past several years because of the pandemic.
Why should I? When for themselves they have wrought destruction by creating an unhealthy dependence on the church as an institution?
When for decades upon decades they have fostered a malignant growth of complacency? When every day that passes, we delude ourselves into believing that things are okay? When instead of taking upon it ourselves to bring upon radical change, we’re fine with everything being a perpetual “work in progress”? When we’re fine with the fact that church has become an isolated bubble, where the reality of life outside rarely pierces through undistorted?
When words like “fellowship,” “family,” “brothers and sisters in Christ,” and “the body of Christ” are thrown around meaninglessly while countless individuals—those that once toiled to find meaning and purpose—have long given up on their faith and already left the cold embrace of church?
When they have bastardized the very concept of love?
Love is never used lightly in the Bible. It recalls moments of absolute despair, an unfathomable suffering, of death and of life, exemplified by Jesus, who endured an unending sacrifice and a harrowing, cruel death none of us would even contemplate inflicting even on our enemies. Yet we throw this term around as if we have a modicum of this kind of love, when we can’t even talk to each other and have a genuine conversation—to supersede anything beyond the status of acquaintance. When we’re supposed to demonstrate this archetype of unconditional love to the rest of the world, it’s simultaneously incredibly easy to find communities outside of church that surpass it in group cohesiveness, individual involvement, and commitment towards its members.
Why is this? It’s because we live and breathe by our social norms; most of us understand that people are defined by the predominant culture and circumstances of their upbringing. But we also know that the characteristics of this culture do not align with those laid out in the Bible. Yet we don’t renounce it, and we don’t fight ourselves enough to fundamentally change ourselves in any meaningful way. And so it subverts our ability to form genuine friendships with others as Christians. When we try to push Christian ideals and the Bible’s teachings onto others’ beliefs, the stark reality of discomfort—the societal norms that have taught us not to invade people’s personal space and project our definitions of right and wrong—creates an internal dissension.
Thus the struggle of the contemporary Christian is not a question of life or death, not a fight for freedom against persecution, not the toil against hunger or thirst, not a spiritual battle for heaven against hell. It is instead a vapid battle against a looming nihilistic belief that none of us even matter, against social norms and established conventions, against ourselves and one another in a inconsequential mental battle towards finding any meaning whatsoever in our daily lives. It is a battle in mustering the willpower to have faith in connecting the sparse dots of lessons learned from a text written millennia ago and somehow amalgamating them into a coherent message that we dare relate to the bleak reality of modern life. The greatest tragedy of Christianity in the 21st century is the failure of the institutionalized church to adequately confront this existential conundrum.
This is about a cultural obsession with order, obedience, comfort, and convention in a context where we simultaneously uphold a figure that was not remotely characteristic of any of these things whatsoever. Lest we forget that Jesus came here not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. His life was literally about waging war with every established convention and social norm so much so that it got him crucified. Where is that same spirit? Why is it that saying something controversial—in the pursuit of truth and progress—grants nothing but social ridicule? Why is it, like we once did to Jesus, that we alienate and ostracize those that try to challenge our established beliefs?
There’s little evidence in the Bible that necessitates an orderly Sunday service, elders that define and make the decisions for other people, and conformity to established conventions imported from our societal context. But instead, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence of a kind of love that is not even remotely achieved in our current conception of church. The more we dig, the more we realize that our church culture barely resembles anything representative of Jesus’ teachings.
Despite this seemingly unshakeable, obstinate adherence towards this model of the church as an institution, because of the pandemic we were finally forced to change. Maintaining commitment towards this institution—now without the obligation to physically attend—became untenable. Without the self-affirming routine of attending Sunday worship and service alongside friends and family, many unsurprisingly drifted away from the church, and thus, a meaningful Christian life as a whole. Most simply didn’t know how to live out this Christian life outside the archetypal church context. The pandemic is a demonstration of both the fragility of the institutionalized church and the fragility of the Christian who is dependent on such a system; they irrevocably fail to survive when the status quo—the aforementioned cultural obsession with order, obedience, comfort, and convention—finally falls apart.
Jon Ngan asserts that the recent pandemic should teach us that instead of haplessly urging everyone to come back to church and to return to the status quo, we should sustain each other as individuals to become the church ourselves. It is the notion that perhaps the church was never designed to be an institution in the first place, such that when catastrophic events seek to fragment and disperse us, Christians can still persist unperturbed. We can be well-equipped to live out our calling in society—where our work matters and where we spend most of our time. So instead of this strange vacillation between societal and biblical norms that is so characteristic of most interactions between Christians, learning to interpret ourselves as the church can integrate our beliefs into a meaningful practice.
We can learn to dispose of our preconceptions about the Christian life and dismantle the idea that our calling is confined to the walls of a building.
We can learn to approach people with empathy—not with a narrative.
We can learn to understand the nuance in the progress of an individual—not assume that they are broken and in need of fixing.
We can learn to finally and truly love, as Jesus would have. We can learn that it’s not about isolating ourselves in exclusive communities, but it’s about walking together—both as individuals and as his creation—united in a communal journey to find meaning and purpose.
If there’s anything the Bible says, it’s that while it may be our human tendency to perpetuate the mistakes of the past—our failure to understand each other as one and the same, our tendency to focus on selfish, short-term gain, our proclivity to succumb to our impulses, our persistent desire to return to the status quo amidst change—it is that same humanness that God granted us that enables us to seek for the divine, to seek for something greater, to change the world and each other for the better.
Prayer Requests
I will not challenge the efficacy of prayer as a placebo or a self-fulfilling prophecy. For many, either the act of prayer itself offers the psychological comfort to solve your problem, e.g. the countless “miracles” of people’s health conditions being suddenly ameliorated after prayer, or it grants you the determination and clarity that you need to move on in life and take action.
But isn’t it selfish, if not naive, to have prayer requests? What do you even ask for? It seems to me that the only reasonable prayer is the one that asks God to carry out his will. Why ask for anything else specifically when we have such a poor, biased understanding of ourselves and who we truly are, when we fail to understand what we truly want and what we truly need from an objective standpoint, and when we cannot even begin to comprehend our calling and our purpose here on Earth? Why pray for something that you can’t ascertain the actual importance of within your life?
Why pray for good grades so we can get into a “prestigious” college, when to break free from the chains of those societal obligations might be just what we need?
Why pray for our sense of purposelessness and for relief in a drought in our spirituality, when this discomfort might be precisely what we need to realize our vices and inadequacies as a means of making progress as individuals?
Why pray for greater cohesiveness and enthusiasm in our churches, when what we need to do is dismantle the institution of church entirely, recognizing that it’s only a machine for pandering to the masses and conforming to the prevailing social norms?
How can we pretend that God answers to us on a whim? If it doesn’t cause you to be complacent and relieve you of taking direct action in your life, it sustains an absurd delusion about God and the world.
Is it his will when he supposedly answered your prayers and grants you a 4.0 GPA, and when he didn’t answer the prayers of the grieving, bereaved parents of a five-year-old child who abruptly passed away because of health complications?
When he supposedly answered your prayers to give you a lucrative job or business opportunity, and didn’t answer all the billions of people throughout human history that have been ruthlessly murdered or that have hopelessly perished from famine or disease? Why did he not heed to their frantic cries for help—begging on their knees to be delivered from abject suffering—when he so intently listens to you grousing about how difficult life is as the top one percent of anyone who has ever lived?
Do we really think that God is so oblivious to choose prosperity for you and insurmountable hardship for everyone else? Do we really think that God is so arbitrary on who he decides to go out of his way to help?
I am not convinced that being a Christian requires us to delude ourselves through the act of prayer—to pretend that God will give us what we want or what we selfishly think we need merely because we asked. I am not convinced that God is that naive and petty about his own creation. I am not convinced that we need blatantly ignore the daunting reality of this world solely for this ritual to preserve our faith.
We need to wake up.
Stop praying for money, status, reputation, or material possessions.
Stop praying for fulfillment or happiness.
Stop praying for your lack of motivation or purpose.
Stop praying for an end to our suffering.
Stop praying for all the things that our fallen brethren have also desperately pleaded for, but were never remotely close to attaining.
By making it a game about requests—the act of using God as a crutch, as the primary means by which we invoke change within our lives and the grander scope of humanity—we not only selfishly entitle ourselves to receive undeserved privileges, but we also destroy whatever merit God had as a creator. We consign him to be a capricious, temperamental actor in determining the fate of a human life. When the request is granted, we praise him and remember his grace and generosity. When the request is denied, we turn a blind eye, altering the narrative and falling into delusions to maintain this conception of God as a fair, altruistic actor and enforcer of justice.
But we don’t have to play this game. Let us close our eyes and speak to God if we are so inclined, but lest we dispense of our responsibility we have in determining the fate of humanity. Lest we continue to assign this delusional narrative to our circumstances—this notion that there must be a reason for anything that happens to us—when there is no such narrative.
God does not give us what we want. He does not give us what we need, either. Life is neither fair nor absolute. The world takes its own course. We can write all the stories we want and attribute purpose to our suffering and our joy alike, but nothing—not even God himself—will change the inalterable torrent of time and circumstance. Don’t make it seem God has done something when, perhaps, he didn’t do anything at all.
Oppression
Let’s again continue with the premise that we are the product of our circumstances, that is, the notion that before reaching a certain age at which we possess the degree of self-awareness and emotional maturity to break free of those circumstances, we have no free will in determining who we become. Think about the specific events surrounding our upbringing—our parents, our teachers, our friends, the culture that they instill within us, the values that they impart to us. Think about what seems “right” to you.
They teach us that wealth, status, and hard-earned privilege are at the center of a prosperous life. They teach us that the leaders of our government and the design of capitalism create space for our prosperity. They teach us that there is a set path towards that prosperity—go to school, go to a prestigious college, get a respectable job, have a family, then retire And of course, which schools and colleges are to be considered “prestigious” and which jobs are to be deemed “respectable” will be predetermined by the culture we live in.
They teach us that hard work, perseverance, and diligence is the key to success, which means that, in school, the most optimal course of action is to spend the majority of your waking hours of your youth memorizing the textbook, jotting down only the things that will be on the test, and toiling away at countless standardized exams that are designed to determine your future through a letter or a number grade. It means that, on the job, you follow directions, do your job only as instructed, and understand that if you cease to work as designed, it’s not an issue because you’re an interchangeable part, a replaceable and disposable cog within an industrial system.
And to psychologically bind us to these norms, they teach us that obedience and conformity is good. They teach us that we should feel inadequate if we don’t have the same wealth, status, and privilege that others have, and that we should strive to have those things at any cost. They teach us that challenging the status quo and deviating from the worn path of life is reckless and dangerous. They teach us that asking too many questions is a form of insubordination. They teach us that quitting is for losers and the undetermined.
We would never outright urge people to not think for themselves. We would never explicitly tell them that they can’t choose to walk their own path. We perceive that such directives are cruel, unjust, and characteristic of the oppression of the communist and fascist totalitarian regimes of the past century.
But if we understand the implications of these social norms that prod the vast majority of the population to invariably walk a predetermined path, without question of its design or purpose, what is this but oppression of a different design? What is this but psychological oppression?
What gives us the right, from the onset of personality formation, to indoctrinate our future generations with these values and ideals, when specifically those values and ideals work to hinder their individual freedom? When they blind them from achieving their greatest potential as a human being because they believe that their mere purpose in life is to serve capitalism and serve the societal status quo, to avoid the shame and ridicule that is the consequence of deviating from the norm? When these values cause them to settle for less and believe that just because no one specifically chose them to make any significant change in the world, they should sit back and live a selfish life? When the system seeks to create grave inequality and artificial scarcity for all the “good” jobs and all the “good” schools, allocating undeserved privileges for those that have unwavering dedication to this predetermined path, while the rest are punished?
Indeed, no matter what we choose to teach our children and no matter how we design our society, human beings are wired to emulate. But we have the capacity, each as leaders of our current generation, to change what they emulate.
Racial oppression—the segregation and discrimination of African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics—was a problem in our country for centuries before the civil rights movement. More specifically, the cultural norms that defined the attitudes towards race were the problem that enabled those abhorrent institutions. Today, while racism is still an issue, on average the tolerance and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity is far greater than it has ever been. But this wasn’t because we necessarily did a better job at parenting now versus the parenting of the past. It wasn’t because we offered a racial diversity class to every US citizen born after 1970. It wasn’t because we were able to dissolve the racism from those who were already racists to begin with.
It’s because of the courageous acts of a minority of the population that caused the entire culture to shift, and thus, over time, what future generations observed about the world ultimately changed. It’s because those future generations observed that sharing bathrooms, classrooms, and restaurants with non-white people was normal. It was normal to see them in positions of authority as individuals equally as capable of making a positive difference in our world. It was normal to see them as our friends, classmates, and coworkers with whom we could share the joys of life with.
If we can swallow our pride and muster the courage, we can—united as human beings and undivided by our tribal tendencies—collectively determine which parts of our culture are holding us back and which parts are spurring us forward. We can decide to break free of our oppressors and spurn the profligate way of life of industrialism, the narrow-mindedness and irrationality characteristic of most of our arguments, and the complacency that looms over a banalized and trivialized existence brought upon us by a negligence and refusal to ask, let alone answer, what truly matters for humanity.
This is how we change the world.
Ad Hominem
A while back, I came across a YouTube short. At first, I thought there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about it. She is speaking—not even anything I would regard as complaining—about the disadvantages of the upper middle class compared to those in the highest echelons of society. The main lesson of the video was simply that money grants you ever-increasing freedom to take risks, but it can also change our perception and shield us from facing the daunting realities of life and the lessons learned from suffering. Nothing unreasonable or controversial, I thought. Honestly, it’s good advice for those that come from a background not constrained by a lack of money.
But after watching her subsequent apology, as well as witnessing the deluge of outraged comments attacking her character, I realized what was going on. People were absolutely incensed with the fact that as a member of an already highly privileged class of people—someone who had purportedly regularly taken business flights around the world, graduated from an Ivy League school, and has several million subscribers on YouTube—she had no qualifications to speak about a lack of privilege.
Let’s take a step back and imagine this. Let’s merely change the premise of the video—no changes to the content, tone, or phrasing of the voiceover whatsoever. Imagine that instead of a Korean woman cooking a luxurious Japanese curry in an upscale apartment in Seoul, the video portrayed a black woman cooking a burger in a dilapidated house on the fringes of Chicago. Suddenly, the video doesn’t seem so controversial. But all we did was change the apparent identity of the person speaking. The argument is exactly the same, except now instead of the top 1% of society discussing the privileges of the top 0.1%, we have the top 10% discussing the privileges of the top 1%.
It is clear we are obsessed with questioning who is speaking, and not the ideas themselves. But we forget that in order to advance ideas and make progress as a society and as humanity, we have to learn to avoid the trap of the ad hominem—the inability to extricate the idea from the person speaking about the idea. Whether it’s the asinine presidential debates we’ve had in the past or the average job interview, it’s evident that far too many of us are guilty of weighing our personal impressions of someone over their actual merit. We constantly fall into this trap, but we’ve done a terrible job at calling each other out for it.
To what extent and through what method should those more privileged help the underprivileged without being supposedly “tone deaf”?
Is it required for anyone speaking from a position of higher privilege to a person of lower privilege to demonstrate their humility before discussing anything remotely related to hardship?
At what point can we define someone to be “qualified” to complain or even speak generally about a particular struggle?
The truth is, if we draw this absurd conclusion—the dangerous notion that if you haven’t experienced something yourself firsthand, you are not qualified to talk about it—then we play an equally absurd game. In this game, you can endlessly go down the rungs of the privilege ladder in human society; if the top 1% of society are not qualified to speak about how life is harder for them than the top 0.1%, but if I’m in the top 10%, am I now qualified to complain about the privileges of the hyper-rich? If I am living just barely past the poverty level in the United States, am I qualified to speak about the struggles of being poor when simultaneously there are many people in Africa that live in flimsy shacks with dirt floors, barely muster enough food for one or two meals for them and their family, have no access to clean drinking water or any healthcare whatsoever, and have a life expectancy of less than forty? If we’re continuing with this inane train of thought, all those berating her in the comments section—those claiming they “have it hard” when the fact that they possess the time and the capacity to watch videos and comment on YouTube automatically puts them among the most privileged of human beings to ever exist—can seem equally as tone deaf.
We cannot demand that someone should have experienced hardship firsthand or sympathize with it before speaking about that hardship. This is an incredibly dangerous path for us to take. If it doesn’t directly undermine free speech, it sabotages our ability to connect with people of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds than our own. Out of impulse, we try so hard to make a point; we want to ridicule someone for being entitled, tone deaf, and insensitive, and make it absolutely clear to everyone else. But making a point doesn’t do anything.
Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.
This is the fundamental pitfall of a great deal of identity politics and precisely what is wrong with our political climate today. As Jonathan Haidt argues, instead of focusing on what we have in common as humans to unite us towards a communal cause, we fabricate a common enemy to rally an angry mob.
It’s the rich people that are the root cause of all problems. It’s the white privilege and an oppressive patriarchy that perpetuates all societal ills. It’s the liberals. It’s the conservatives. It’s the corporations. It’s the clueless and out of touch baby boomers. It’s the lazy and entitled millennials and Gen-Zers.
If we choose to play this game, it never ends. But we can choose not to play it.
I wholeheartedly agree that many of those in the upper strata of society can often speak with a sense of entitlement, and they could probably do a much better job at giving back to those less fortunate. But this is a symptom—not the issue. The more mental energy we expend trying to denigrate and rip apart the dignity of those more privileged than us, the farther and farther we get from uniting us as humanity and discerning the nuances that are necessary to understand how to fix our fragmented society.
The truth is that our only common enemy is our ignorance.
It is our arrogance to ignore the fact that complex problems require complex thinking.
It is our failure to acknowledge that in order to solve these problems, we must humble ourselves to do the intellectual heavy lifting through diligent study and civil discourse.
It is our tendency to oversimplify because yes—it’s very easy to point our fingers at the rich and say, “everything would be so much better if they just shared some of their billions of dollars with the rest of us.”
It is our inability to empathize—to look at another human being and have the patience to recognize that, if we can understand them for who they are and help them “embrace a new story about themselves,” they can equally be part of the change that we want to make in the world.
The Cost of a Human Life
It was estimated that over $20 million was spent extracting the 33 miners that were trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident. That's over $600,000 per life. How many millions of dollars were spent trying to devise ways to save three astronauts in the Apollo 13 mission? How many millions were spent trying to save the 47 lives that were aboard the FV Alaska Ranger? To rescue the 24 hostages held in the Iranian embassy in 1980?
If you have any semblance of a moral compass, you'll have likely told yourself by now, "there is no price for a human life."
Ostensibly, we have no problem spending an enormous sum of money to save human lives. We tell ourselves that putting a price tag on human lives is immoral. But I want us to consider this notion from another perspective.
If tomorrow we decided to start taking all the vehicles that aren't public transportation and commercial vehicles off the road, in an instant we have the opportunity to save over one million people that die from automobile accidents each year.
But we tell ourselves, "that's too much."
We ask ourselves, "How will people get to work? How many billions of dollars will we lose?"
We tell ourselves, "We can't just shut down the entirety of human civilization for the sake of a couple thousand people per day."
But when will we say enough is enough? Where do we draw the line?
Can we define one million deaths as negligible? Do we convince ourselves that those are “unavoidable” losses, as the necessary cost to run an industrialized society?
What about ten million deaths—now is it too much?
Whether we want to admit it or not, that in order to strike a balance between maintaining convenience within society and not inflicting an egregious degree of mass murder, we put a price tag on human lives.
The truth is, we do have the resources to change things if we really wanted to. If we have the capacity to produce nine million cars in a year, enough gas to fuel a hundred million of them each day, and the labor and resources needed to pave and maintain hundreds of thousands of square miles of roads and parking lots, we also have the capacity to redesign cities where people aren’t forced to drive cars to go about their life; we have the capacity to accommodate safe walking and biking, to provide convenient access to daily necessities without the need to drive, to greatly improve the efficiency of public transport in those cities, and to invest in the development and implementation of self-driving vehicles, which are infinitely safer.
But we don’t believe it’s possible, and, like many other glaring problems in our society, we turn a blind eye when we’re asked to change.
What about the countless individuals that take their own lives every day?
that are unjustly murdered each day from homicide, gang violence, and wars?
that perish from lung cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening conditions?
When will we together, as a society, admit that we're doing an abysmal job at looking after each other's mental health?
at ensuring every neighborhood in our nation is free of poverty, crime, and injustice?
at organizing healthcare and disseminating knowledge about what a healthy life looks like?
Instead, we like to look for cheap solutions.
Here, have a useless suicide hotline number that we'll advertise en masse to people that have already lost their faith in society because we're too lazy to actually tackle the leading root causes of suicide, to call out the bad actors among us that are responsible for deteriorating our mental health and cluttering our lives with backwards, oppressive social conventions regarding personal responsibility, work, and happiness.
Here, let's promote anti-violence demonstrations and protests instead of doing the hard work of dutifully educating each other as citizens and ensuring we all have access basic necessities in life so we don't have to have a reason to kill each other over it.
Here, let's allocate some of our money to fund cancer research programs, diabetes centers, and programs to help alcoholics and smokers because we're too infatuated with capitalism to rebuke the fast food, alcohol, and tobacco corporations that, unbridled, will addict the general populace to its death for an extra penny.
Here, let's legislate a few traffic safety laws here and there and promulgate defensive driving techniques to help drivers anticipate and be prepared for dangerous situations while we simultaneous churn out millions on top of millions more cars every year, pave ever more roads and parking lots for those cars to clog up, destroy the planet in the process, and perpetuate an overly car-centric society that makes it inhospitable and inconvenient for those that don't drive and downright life-threatening for anyone that does drive.
No, I'm not saying any of these solutions are inherently bad or unproductive by design. But all of them are band-aid solutions to treat the problems deeply ingrained in the design of our nation.
Why is it that we have no problem spending millions to rescue a few individuals that were inopportunely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we're not willing to save millions in the act of ceasing to drive cars or protesting against careless urban design and the profligate greed of the automobile industry? It's because a rescue mission doesn't challenge the status quo. It's seen as a noble and brave demonstration of the human spirit.
But radically changing the way we govern our nation and design the fabric of our society? To shift our mindset to learn how to cooperate with each other as citizens? To alter the culture and norms we live and breathe by? To give up the luxuries and privileges we have accrued over decades of progress? Absurd.
We will preserve the status quo at almost any cost, even if the cost we're discussing is the human life.
Moving On
All too often, within discussions of our past histories, I constantly hear this phrase: “I’m over it,” “I’m past that now,” or “I’ve moved on.” But what do we really mean when we say this?
The legacy of a crumbled relationship that can no longer be pieced together, an argument or disagreement with a friend or coworker that created an irreconcilable emotional rift, an egregious failure that led to acute shame and embarrassment. These things change us, whether we like it or not.
This mode of thinking goes hand in hand with the hackneyed mantra of “everything will be okay” that reflects the same mindset of just wanting the pain and suffering to end, and nothing more. We’ve preemptively decided that “okay” or “fine” is the easiest and most convenient escape from the emotional trauma. For most people, being “over it,” means forgetting about it. If we’ve already escaped that pain, why go back to it?
Because we are excessively fixated on merely escaping, we seldom take the time to reconcile how that event has shaped who we are today—how it shapes our decisions and how it has influenced the way we perceive the people and the world around us. Contrary to popular belief, truly moving on doesn’t mean you don’t think about the painful memories anymore. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; we unknowingly allow that past pain to continue to shape our future. And we have no idea whether it’s working in a positive or negative way.
Maybe a toxic relationship you’ve had in the past is causing you to be cynical or avoid intimacy. Maybe that horrendous mistake that you made caused you to avert risk in your life entirely. Maybe heavily falling out with your manager and impulsively quitting influenced your work ethic and perceptions of your future bosses.
We can't move on from the past if we don't understand how our past circumstances have shaped our present and future self. We concede defeat and allow the world to take its own course, and all we've assigned ourselves to do is react to whatever life throws at us.
We concede what minimal free will we had to begin with. No matter your stance on the degree to which we have free will, I think we can agree that at least the first two decades of our lives—give or take depending on the person—is purely defined by the whim of our circumstances. It’s very well understood in the psychology of personality formation that the complex interplay between an individual’s genetics and their environmental circumstances. Our socialization begins from the initial interactions with our parents, and then those shared with siblings, family members, friends, classmates, and teachers. We not only learned to conform to the existing social norms and cultural zeitgeist, but, more importantly, depending on the nature of that socialization and the events that happen in our lives, we start to form our conception of the world—our ever-morphing definitions of right and wrong.
Should you share that toy with your preschool classmate? Should you pay attention in class instead of doodling in your notebook? Should you study for that big math test tomorrow? Should you ask that person out to prom?
If you can even remember your answer to these questions you’ve probably asked yourself in the past, think about why you made a particular choice. Think about why it seemed right to you.
Did you honestly meticulously weigh the pros and cons of a particular decision? Did you rationally analyze whether or not your process of logical reasoning was sound, or if the evidence you were using in that reasoning was relevant? Did you consult your friends, parents, teachers, and coaches and have an extended discussion in order to acquire unbiased outside perspectives? Do you really think you did any of that as a fifteen-year-old, let alone as a toddler?
Or did you just do what merely felt right?
And then when we consider the scale—just how many of these irrational decisions we've made for ourselves in the past, thus creating an unquantifiable amount of personality change over the years—what free will is left, then? Yes—we made decisions when we were a toddler and a teenager alike, but we made those decisions under a decision-making faculty we had no conscious effort in producing. The truth is, until we have the self-awareness, the courage to confront the harrowing parts of our past, and the mental and emotional fortitude to understand it, free will is an illusion.
If we neglect to understand this complex interplay between ourselves and circumstances, we are making a choice to perpetuate this powerlessness and passivity that defined our youth.
If we think that “moving on” is fundamentally about forgetting the past, not reconciling the ways in which it has shaped us, we thus concede our free will.
Do we wish to navigate a chaotic world, where everything seems to happen with no rhyme or reason, or can we hope for something better?
With trial and tribulation, we need to constantly recalibrate. We need to stop thinking “moving on” is what we need, when precisely what we need is to stay where we are and look at ourselves in the mirror.