So, Month 2 of the year of responsibility is drawing to a close. I don't want to turn this into a status update. Instead, I want to write about something that I have been thinking about a lot over the past couple of weeks. I don't have my thoughts completely organized, but that's why this a blog, not a paper/article/book, right?
I guess that the question that I have been thinking about is this one: "How do we keep trying?"
Obviously, now I have to explain what I mean by that. What I mean is that, when we are young, we are full of hope, and dreams, and imagination. As we get older, that optimism and idealism is replaced with confusion, skepticism, and hopelessness.
How did this happen? When did all of our dreams die?
Maybe some people remember a specific day, some monumental tragedy that happened to them that erased their faith in the world and killed every dream they ever had. I think that most people, however, can't point to one event. What happens is that we have all of these dreams, all of these great things that we think that we can do. Then, one day, we try to do something and we fail. Not something monumental, just something small. Maybe it was a bad grade, maybe we struck out in baseball, maybe we tried to ask someone out and they rejected us. When that happens, we always ask "why did that happen?" That's what human beings do, that's what makes us human (I recently learned that it's called attribution theory in Psychology). So, something bad happens, and we can explain it one of two ways, either there is something wrong with the world, or there is something wrong with us.
In general, most people try as hard as they can to believe in a "just world" so usually we try to find something wrong with ourselves before we give up on the hope that there is order in the world.
Personally, I am one of those people that always thinks that there is something wrong with me before I think that there is something wrong with the world. It isn't that the world isn't fair, it's just that I' m not smart enough, or not strong enough, or not tall enough, or I didn't try hard enough, or I wasn't disciplined enough, or I didn't listen well enough, etc. Tons of people are like this.
In some cases this is ok. If the reason that we failed really was that we didn't try hard enough, and, by figuring that out, we try harder next time and succeed, that's great. But, what happens when we tried as hard as we could, or the reason we failed really just wasn't our fault? What happens, is that every time one of those little failures occurs, we believe in ourselves just a little bit less. Our dreams die just a little bit at a time. We may not have what it takes to be the president, but maybe we can be a senator, and when that dream dies, a state representative, and when that dream dies, a city councilman, and so on and so forth until our dreams become something manageable, or just die out completely.
Every time that these things happen, they hurt. That's the question we are talking about here, "How do we keep trying once we have tasted failure and it hurts?" What we end up doing is setting up all of these survival techniques so that we have more control. We take less risks with our dreams and with our hearts. We choose a career that we know that we can succeed at and be safe in instead of one we really want to do. If we don't try, we can't fail, and we can't get hurt. One of my psych papers this week talked about one mechanism that students use in order not to get hurt. Sometimes students just don't try, so that when they fail, they can tell themselves it was because they didn't try, not that they just weren't smart enough. They tell themselves that if they had tried they could have done it, but they just didn't want to try because it wasn't worth the effort. This is much less painful than trying your best and still failing.
One final point about this is worth noting. This concept also applies to love/romance. Everyone who has ever had their heart broken knows that it hurts….bad. When someone we admire tells us that they don't feel the same way about us, we think that maybe there is something wrong with us. We tell ourselves that there must be something wrong with us, otherwise why wouldn't someone love us? We tell ourselves that we weren't good looking enough, or caring enough, or exciting enough. Once that happens to us, how do we still believe in love? Our natural reaction is to protect ourselves so that we don't get hurt again. If we never let anyone in to see the true us, they will never be able to see that we aren't good enough and leave us. If we never give our heart to someone else again, they can't break it, when they leave, it won't hurt. "How do we keep trying once we have tasted failure and it hurts?"
So this is how, slowly over time, we stop believing in ourselves.
What happens when instead we stop believing in the world?
So, if something bad happens and it isn't our fault, then life just isn't fair. If we can give it our all and still fail, what is the point? What if I try to change the world and it doesn't seem to do any good? Well, shit, why should I waste my time and money trying to save the world while my neighbor gets rich and takes vacations to the Bahamas? If the world isn't fair, if "life's a bitch and then you die" as my boss puts it, then I might as well have a good time while I can. Eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow we die. If we stop believing that life is fair and has a meaning, then we might as well fight and claw and kick people in the balls and do whatever it takes to get whatever hedonistic (i.e. food, sex, drugs, material possessions) gratification we can get. Maybe, for some people, that gratification is enough to survive. They may not have found meaning in life, but at least they had a nice time drinking champagne in the hot tub at the end of the day, right? But, more people will work their asses off to buy some stuff, and sit around in their mansion with a bunch of useless crap asking themselves what the point of life is, why do they work so hard to pile up all these stupid possessions?
Or, if life isn't fair, and we can't control anything, we can just stop trying. Period. We can fly by the seat of our pants and take insane risks, let things spin out of control until we don't know drunk from sober or up from down, until we don't care about anything or anyone. Or, maybe we just commit suicide, because at least if we can't control anything else about ourselves or the world around us, we can control how we die.
Moving back from the extreme, I think over the course of growing older and experiencing bad things in life, everyone loses faith in both themselves AND the world to varying extents.
How do we keep trying?
The truth is, we can't fully control the world, or even ourselves, no matter how hard we try. That's what we figure out, right? So once we figure that out, how do we keep trying? The only answer that I know of is faith. If anyone read this far and has some insight, please chime in. We have to have faith that our actions mean something. We have to have faith in the world and also in ourselves. We have to have faith that even if we failed this time, next time we might succeed, and even if we don't, it is worth trying. We have to have faith that if we let someone into our heart this time, they might actually love us back, we have to take that chance.
When I use the word faith, it will have different meanings for every person. Some people will think of it as faith that if we give it our best in this life, we can have faith that it will pay off in the afterlife. Some people will think of it as if they have faith in God, and they keep trying, God will eventually provide for them in this life. Some people believe that if they keep trying, and do the right thing, even if they fail in this life, it will bring them good karma which will allow them to be reincarnated into a more satisfying life in the future. Some people just have faith in love, and if they keep showing love to the world, it will love them back. Some people think that, even if doing the right thing doesn't make the world better in their life time, maybe they will be able to inspire one other person, who may inspire one other person and so on, and one of those people may be able to make the world better eventually, and that makes trying today worthwhile. These are all totally the same thing. Exactly the exact same thing. I don't care how much you want to argue about it or what you want to call it, every religion or non-religious philosophy that tries to find meaning in life is telling you the same thing in one form or another "Have faith. Keep trying. Keep hoping." We can argue about which option is the best way to motivate people to do that, but probably different approaches work best for different people, so we should be accepting of anyone who is trying to do the right thing, regardless of which path they take to find faith.
Faith. Will that help you sleep at night? I can't guarantee it. All that I can say is that I think it's better than the alternative. Perhaps for some they can think of the alternative like Pascal did (math really isn't my thing), except instead of believing in God or not, you really just could phrase it as believing in ANYTHING or not. There really is just one choice, believing something matters or believing nothing matters. For me, this is also the only way to live without regret. If I know that I tried my best, and I failed, then I know that I laid it all on the table and I have no regrets. Also, having faith in yourself and in the world is a lot more fun than not having it. I want to delete that last sentence because it sounds so stupid. I keep writing sentences here and deleting them. I don't know how to write this last part. All that I can say is that I don't care if I get hurt. I've been there before and I've held onto it inside of me and lost hope in myself and lost hope in the world, and it wasn't fun. Now I let it go, and it set me free, and I'll never look back. I'm not sure if that last sentence will make sense to anyone but me, but it felt good to type…..so there.
Shabbat Shalom.
~Eric
