Category: Josh Feingold Blog

One of the main dichotomies of life is that while you are the center of the world, you are most certainly not the center of anyone else’s world. This leads to the grand social compromise that we call society.

The main take away here is that there are two mentalities that we need to successfully integrate; our solidity as the center of our world, and our solidity as not being the center of anyone else’s world.

These are both very difficult to achieve.

Solidity of the center of our world, is what we typically call self-esteem, and as you and I both know, is a struggle for all human beings, and is one of the main differences between man and animals.  (I would argue that it is this meta-cognition that forces man forward to try to achieve and impact the world in search of finding their way and purpose through life instead of realizing that they are solid in their place and there is no need to find something new, which I have touched on elsewhere in this blog, and will return to again, I am sure.)

It always amazes me how self-esteem plays such a central role in people’s lives, and how seldom I meet anyone with really solid self-esteem.  Typically, when I think I have met someone who is really solid, as I got to know them, I found that underneath it all they were just a fragile as myself.  Or that they were lying to themselves or me.  Or they simply had no meta-cognition.

Solidity as not being the center of anyone else’s world means that we can’t think too highly of ourselves or we’ll be shunned by the community as egotistical, since “who are we to think so highly of ourselves.”

The intrinsic conundrum here is that we end up impacting our own self-esteem since we can’t think too highly of ourselves, but at the same time we certainly do need to think highly of ourselves to have good self-esteem.

The best compromise that I have found is to realize that I am the center of my world, and the most important person in my world, but that doesn’t mean that I am better than anyone else, simply the most important person in my world.  That way, I am not putting anyone down in my assessment of myself, rather, stating a fact, which honestly, I think anyone else can agree with too.  I think you are the most important in your world, and I would expect that you think the same thing about me.

When I was younger, I didn’t want to conform with a certain social norm in college, and went out of my way to make sure that whatever I did, I under no circumstances would be seen as a conformist.

One day, I thought about my actions, and realized, the reason that I didn’t want to conform was because I wanted to be seen as an individual and not constrained by society, but in not confirming, I was ironically, being constraining myself by society in an effort to be seen as an individual.  So I was stuck.  How was it possible to be a non-conformist?

That was when I realized, that as long as I cared what society had to tell me, I could never BE a non-conformist.  In fact, you can’t be a non-conformist.  You just are a non-conformist if you are – or aren’t if you aren’t.

Similarly, in the efforts to be an individual, I wanted to be an individual so no one could say, “look at Josh, he does what society tells him to do”, but again ironically, in wanting to BE an individual, I was in fact doing something for the sake of society, and not for myself.  Funny, isn’t it.

The lesson to take away is that if you want to truly be an individual or non-conformist in this world, you must first stop trying to do anything for the sake of another.  Once there is someone else in the picture, there is no longer any more individuality.  Rather, you must focus on yourself as the only person in the world that really exists (more on this tomorrow – don’t take it too seriously for now) and ask what you need to thrive – or better, what you should need to thrive – and make sure you fill those needs.  From there, you won’t need to try to BE an individual, because as you already know, you already ARE an individual.

P.S. As I mentioned, I realized this lesson almost twenty years ago, and I have yet to really be able to break away from caring what people think about me or do what I think is right in the face of societal norms.  However, I have certainly slowly gotten better at it over the years though constant sustained efforts, and would suggest that if you work on it, you will certainly make headway, and your life will improve because of the efforts.

I wrote a whole blog post just now, about patience not being a virtue that I really liked, until I realized that I was wrong.  So I erased it and started over.   Since if it’s not truth, it’s fiction, and we only have room for truth (or at least attempted truth) on this blog.

That’s kind of how truth, and goal of getting to the truth goes.  It leads you down paths that take up your much of your precious time, and you’ll never see anything from.  However, be careful about seeing these tangental paths as a waste of time, since these paths enable other thoughts, like this post.  So I guess it no thought is ever a total wastes, now is it? 🙂

P.S.  For those of your who are curious, below is the original post…  If nothing else, I would suggest you spend some time reading this Wikipedia page on the definition of Virtue.  Very interesting.

“Patience is an imperative.”

The old saying that “Patience is a virtue.” is just plain wrong.

A virtue is something that is nice, but if you don’t have it, well its not that big of a deal.

In my book, virtues would include, being generous, being nice, and other similar traits that help others.  However, patience isn’t a virtue.  It is an imperative for ourselves.

[Spent some time reading definition of Virtue on Wikipedia … and found that, in fact, Patience really is a virtue.]

After I told a friend about my last post, he put me in my place.

“What do you mean,” he asked, “that we don’t limit pleasure? We most certainly do.”  So I thought about it, and he is right.

When we are happy, we don’t go around telling everyone how happy we are and spreading joy out of fear for being labeled as “one of those annoying cheerful people” by the curmudgeons of the world.  When we are excited, we don’t go around telling everyone how excited we are lest someone burst our bubble and ground us in reality.  When we are feeling playful, we don’t go around tapping people on the shoulder lest people think we are just plain weird.

So really, as he pointed out, we limit our pleasure as well as our pain.  That is the way of adults, we have learned to control our actions to be socially acceptable, but in doing so we have really lost an important part of ourselves without realizing it was lost along the way.  We lost touch with that key internal feeling of freedom that all children have, and replaced it with a restricted form of ourselves, which isn’t all that natural.

Those people that we meet that don’t have those controls in place, we see as weird, eccentric, and uncouth.

But if you think about it, who is happier?  The person who is making their way on their terms through life, or the person who is making their way on the terms of the world through life.  I would think that it is the former.

I would argue that this is one of the main reasons people turn to alcohol (when not getting drunk).  Not just to forget about their troubles, but rather to allow themselves to open up and be free to feel unbounded happiness and emotional openness, which is naturally restricted.

However, there is an easier way to do this without alcohol.  Simply tell yourself that you aren’t going to care what people think about you and that you are going to feel your emotions to their fullest extent because that is what will make YOU happy.  But remember, only do this if you truly want to live and have the self esteem to back it up.  Otherwise, you’ll just end up being embarrassed and wondering why you are acting like a fool.  Try it once and you’ll know if you are ready.  If not, work on your self esteem some more, then try again.

None of us have any issues feeling those good emotions that come with life, like happiness, or joy, but when negative emotions such as pain, guilt, sadness, etc. come we often try to not deal with them and push them away or suppress them.

The problem with that approach is that suppressed emotions are like kickboards that you push underwater at the pool, as soon as you let you, they come shooting up, and the entire time you have to spend emotional energy to keep them down.

So a friend mentioned that a better approach is the accept the pain as it comes.  Really feel the pain, and hate it that you have to go through it, but understand that it is part of life, and tell yourself that (hopefully) things will get better soon.  But don’t ignore it or push it away to deal with later.

They tell a story of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav that he would go out into the forest and scream at the top of his lungs.  Sometimes we need to scream, and if we do, find a place to scream, but don’t hold it in!  Sometimes we need to cry, so cry like a baby, but don’t hold it in, let the tears flow like water.

When pain comes, feel your pain.