I just had a stupid realization: acknowledging your true nature is not the same as being true to it. I think Im bitter about certain things because I deny myself the luxury of being a flawed human, I have been separated from some normal human traits so long I forgot I have them in me too.
fuck, I guess its time to upset some people.
Hmm...or it’s possible that what you’re now realizing about yourself is still data on the superficial level. I don’t know. That’s just from my own experiences. I used to spend a lot of time being introspective and trying to figure myself out, and while it was really useful, and I learned a lot, there cane a time where I started to become very bitter, jaded, and nihilistic.
The only thing that cured that was learning to divorce myself of the opinion that I was the key to figuring myself out, and going back to a “childlike” mentality of learning about the truths of the world and human nature from others. Not...society. Others that I had identified as being consistently worthy to discuss it.
For me, the issue wasn’t the measurement. It was the ruler. Its like being on a boat out to sea, and knowing all about your boat from top to bottom, but understanding nothing about the sea in which it floats or the fact that the sea is, in fact, an ocean, many many miles deep, and vastly wide, but still with shores of varying types of terrain to border it.
There’s two frames of mind, if you want to make it that simple.
Finding yourself from the inside out, in which case we highlight what it is that makes us different, or finding ourselves from the outside in, in which case, we learn how we are essentially all the same.
I think the former lends itself to nihilism.
If you use your own biased, skewed, crippled understanding of the world as a metric by which to judge humanity’s worth and the world order, you’re bound to be disappointed. There is no way that the world or humanity will be able to tick off all your black and white, narrow-minded check boxes (which I find we all seem to have, even though we try very hard not to).
The latter seems to lend itself to wisdom. There have been many, many great minds and philosophies that have preceded this moment in time, and thousands upon thousands of hours have gone in to forming a database of human knowledge that has been created by brains equal to or better than our own. Humans contributing philosophy and understanding, affected by varying cultures, experiences, etc., leading to intellectual diversity that, when combined, presents a lesser risk of bias than one person reinventing the wheel themselves.
One useful philosophy I came to understand is that we are not one person, but hundreds of thousands of instances of existence. An hour ago, you were Peoples from that hour. Now you are no longer that Peoples.
The reason this is helpful is that you say you don’t appreciate labels and you want to escape them. It makes sense. Labelling yourself is like fortune telling. When you appreciate that you are not who you were, and won’t be who you are, then little mundane, trivial bullshit like “Why do I bark like a dog but walk like a cat”, starts to fade away into inconsequential background static, and your brain can make room for real truth.
It’s like your body and your mind are a vast, open book, where an infinite amount of invaluable information is available to you at the top of your fingers - but some jerk cake along and highlighted all of the stupidest lines. That jerk is culture. The book is something we find when we’re able to identify what is culture’s definition of what we should care about, and what is the world’s definition of what we should care about.
The easiest way to do that, I find, is to turn to philosophy, because that section of knowledge is rife with past humans of brilliant mental prowess who have done their best to strip their books of the highlighting. They didn’t all hit the mark, which is why it’s kind of a compare and contrast exercise. Themes arise though. This is how I’ve been discovering myself.
The only time I get actually anxious or uncomfortable now is when I socialize. On my own, I feel pretty optimistic and assured...but not arrogantly so. It’s made room for a lot of my more positive personality traits to really take hold. Stuff I’d been repressing.
Anyways, that’s my own personal journey with it. If you look at some of the most influential minds in history, I think you will see a theme of optimistic and peaceful feeling. So, then, it stands to reason that whatever truths you are finding that are leading to bitterness and nihilism are probably not leading you to a higher level of wisdom. Unless, maybe, you suppose that you know more than hundreds of very intelligent, brilliant people, who dedicated their lives to figuring humans out. Lol.
I’m sorry. This advice is probably not helpful to you whatsoever. Honestly...the personal reflection part is probably a necessary step at any rate. I think everyone goes through an uncomfortable stage with it. It’s probably what drives people to dig deeper.
Or maybe you’re right, and I’m wrong. I’m almost always wrong - but in degrees. Not sure to which degree I may be wrong this time. It can be hard to tell.
do it!
