‘It’s just part of being human’ is a harmful piece of cr-p
Clever tactics for mitigating mimesis are a waste of energy; there's a fundamentally easier, and wiser way to live
How would your life look and feel differently if you didn’t – and I mean really didn’t – give a crap about the stuff you say you don’t give a crap about?
Imagine someone – maybe you! – sailing through the saccharine aisles of a supermarket, or hovering at the window of a homely hipster bakery. The sirens are circling, singing songs of deliciousness and delight, and whispering ‘just this once, you deserve it’ into our someone’s ears.
This someone knows they ‘shouldn’t’ succumb. Their armour is solid. They know all the tactics. They identify as a healthy person. They have a set ‘cheat day’. They have an app, an accountability buddy, and a breathing technique for just this occasion. Heck, maybe they even ‘know’ that ‘treat’ is a terrible word to describe something that poisons their cells and lightens their wallet.
They ‘successfully’ resist. And this (we’ll assume, in the context of this someone’s whole life) is a good thing. It’s generally a good idea not to fill yourself with crap. But it could be so, so, so much better. Because it’s generally not a good idea to expend energy resisting what could just not be cared about.
And while controlling your environment with behavioural hacks can take you really, really, far, it can also get you stuck in the shallows, when what you really want is something deeper. There’s a huge difference between the person who’s fit and healthy because they’ve gamified and stoified their life so well that they can resist the alluring aromas of the patisserie, and the person who’s fit and healthy because, having got clean from cravings, they live in a world where resistance isn’t required.
A second example. Consider someone – you’ll all know one; maybe this is you too! – who says they don’t believe that having a higher salary or having more square footage to call home is a sign that someone is a better person, an indication that they’re making the most out of the beautiful opportunity of their life. And yet despite their words, this someone lives as if the opposite were true. They spend the majority of their time doing something that runs them down more than it lifts them up in order to spend the rest of their time sitting in a bigger space. They live like a printer attached to a paper shredder: wasting resources to justify the sacrifices made to obtain them.
This someone is defiantly ‘not extravagant’. Because – as long-time readers know very well – no one is extravagant, just like no one is rich. They’re not living beyond their means. They can ‘afford’ what they’re doing (as if this matters). They’re just doing what everybody else is doing… ‘keeping up’ with the Joneses and the Insta’ illusions (as if life were a race, rather than a dance). What everybody else is doing: it’s just part of being human!
Except, of course, it really isn’t.
Because someone always misreads paragraphs like the above: there’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with earning a high income! There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with living in a huge space! There are undoubtedly many contexts in which these things are absolutely the way to live better.
There is, however, something inherently wrong with the worldview that so often accompanies these inauthentic behaviours. Because it’s a massive f-ing obstacle to first seeing a better way, and then actually doing something about it. And there’s very definitely something inherently wrong every time you hear the words ‘it’s just part of being human.’
Resistance is both powerful and pointless
If you hear the words ‘it’s just part of being human’ – especially in the context of mimetic desire, or being hardwired to ‘want’ cake – chances are you’re hearing a terrible justification for a life-wasting act.
Of course the struggle to control desires driven by what everyone else appears to ‘want’ – be it a salary, square-footage, or sales numbers – are a big deal for just about everyone. Just as is the struggle to say no to cake. The pain is real, and unfathomably widespread. It is a big part of being human for billions of people. But also, it’s completely possible to live free of such a struggle. Not more comfortably imprisoned. Free.
There’s a massive difference – relevant to your relationships with your finances, your food, your friends… hell just about everything – between developing the strength to resist ‘temptations’, and living in a way that requires no resistance, because you’re simply not tempted by stuff you’d rather not be tempted by.
The major problem with this is that no bugger really believes it. Seeing what you’ve never experienced is hard! Especially when what you’ve never experienced is seeing clearly. (I do really recommend reading that last link; I’m clearly biased, but it’s pretty damn important.)
Many not only don’t believe that it’s possible to live in a world where resistance is unnecessary, but actively resist believing it. Because it allows them to keep believing that more information or more knowledge is the answer. Because it allows them to keep believing that the solution is for sale. And because it allows them to wallow in ‘challenging’ occasional lapses in behaviour, while very definitely not challenging the worldview that inspired those behaviours, and will continue to inspire a lifetime of others, all equally unsatisfying.
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I was at a posh dinner not too long ago. Black tie, centuries-old dining room, every conversation with a judge, or a partner at a prestigious firm, or an ambitious youngster on the high-hours, low-health toll road to becoming one.
One such ambitious youngster, sleep-deprived vision tunnelled towards corporate-law Valhalla, seemed genuinely engaged by the picture I was attempting to paint of a resistance-free way of life, and the evidence from all the exceedingly wealthy folk I’d advised over the years that spoke to the idea that perhaps, just maybe, the typical toll road was neither the most scenic, nor the most satisfying, route through life.
‘Yeah, yeah, I get that,’ he said, ‘it sounds amazing. But first and foremost, I’d very much like to earn half a million a year.’