I spend a lot of time thinking about something I call the treachery of childhood. My experiences in life so far strongly indicate to me that the ways I was trained to think and behave as a child are strongly counterproductive. For anyone who failed to be a sufficiently rebellious child, becoming a functioning adult has a lot to do with unlearning the habits acquired in childhood. I don't regret remaining sober throughout high school. I don't regret remaining a virgin throughout high school. (I have some slight regrets about not making use of my first few opportunities to lose my virginity in college, but I think I would also have regretted the opposite had I been in that situation.) I don't regret doing my assigned readings, doing my homework, and doing well in school. I don't regret not having shoplifted when I was a teenager. I think all of those decisions were individually good decision. What I do regret is being the sort of person who would make all of those decisions. I regret having been a good kid, because there is so much wrong with being a good kid. I regret not having done enough thinking for myself. I regret having been too willing to follow the advice of my elders and abiding by the moral customs of the culture that raised me.
All of the things I just listed are the reasons why it's bad to be a bad kid. Some of the things that people can do have consequences that people eventually regret, and everyone who lives with those regrets tells other people not to do those things because they wish they'd never done them themselves. The lessons that those types of experience teaches it that some of the advice that your elders give you and that some of the advice that is part of the moral custom of your culture is good advice. However, some of the advice is also bad advice. Good kids who follow the rules and do what they're supposed to do make mistakes whenever what would be beneficial to do differs from what they are supposed to do. Bad kids who break the rules and do what they're not supposed to do mess up whenever what they're supposed to do actually is beneficial. Both of these policies are idiotic.
What is also idiotic is that both of the adherents of both of these notions advocate think for oneself. Those that give advice advocate "Thinking for yourself" and those that advocate being a rebel advocate "Thinking for yourself." Actually, I think that this is a big part of why I failed to think for myself. I always viewed myself more as a thinker than as an individualist, so I did what the people who emphasized thinking suggested instead of what the people who advocated being myself suggested.
As always, the problem is that I didn't yet have any understanding of statistics when I was six years old or however old I was when I was first forming a strong sense of my own identity as a person and picking sides in this charade.
If you are actually thinking for yourself, you will sometimes decide that some of the rules and routine advice you receive is good. When that happens, you will follow it. You will also sometimes decide that some of the rules and routine advice you receive are stupid. When that happens, you won't follow it. Whenever multiple factions continue to exist, it is sensible to assume that neither of them have a monopoly on good information. If the rebels weren't doing anything right, all of the rebels would grow up to be failures and people a little bit younger than them would be able to see that being a rebel would soon become incredibly uncool, so they should grow out of it ASAP. Of course, this doesn't happen. A lot of rebels go onto become great successes. Actually, disproportionately many of the extremely successful people in the world were rebels in their younger years... in many cases, serious rebels, who were too extreme to be mainstream like Steve Jobs whose time as a hippy instilled in him a hatred for the tyranny of basic hygiene like showering, or cofounders of paypal, the majority of whom built bombs in high school. Somehow, I don't think that not showering and building bombs are the things that they did that helped them become more successful. What they did right is that they didn't listen to bad advice.
Anyways, if I had truly been thinking about what seemed right to do and trying to do what seemed right, I should have developed a personality that was a combination of the different trends, as well as some things that nobody else was saying. If neither side has everything wrong and neither side has everything right, then the optimal strategy whatever it is, should have some things that each group says to do, and some things that each group says not to do, plus some things that nobody talks about.
The perspective of rebelliousness isn't really worth analyzing, so I won't analyze it. One can learn everything worth learning about the perspective of rebelliousness by analyzing the things that the rebels are rebelling against, and trying to figure out what portion of that perspective is worth keeping and what portion of that perspective deserves to be thrown away. The good parts of the traditional moral perspective are pretty obvious: don't do all of the stupid stuff that people do as teenagers and later regret in life; don't take stupid risks; and don't become a total hedonist. Driving 100mph on roads that were not meant to have people drive faster than 45 on them is a bad idea. Failing to get enough sleep is unhealthy. (It's unhealthy whether you fail to get enough sleep because you stayed up late studying or because you failed to get enough sleep because you were out late partying.)
The horrible advice also tends to fit into a few broad categories. The one that I've been thinking about most recently is having high standards. Sometimes, it's useful; usually it's not. I love hanging out with people who are frequently pleased and who frequently get excited. Being someone who is genuinely pleased and excited by things that other people regularly do is so rare and so beneficial that it's practically a superpower. It also has to be something that makes your own life way more pleasant.
A similar sin that someone can have oneself is wanting to have a finger of Midas. I want everything I attempt to turn succeed and everything I touch to told to gold. It's crippling, and it leads to all sorts of poor decisions. I wish I'd decided four years ago to just take more risks, begin presenting my thoughts to the world, do a bunch of things that would have likely led to failure and possibly led to success. Four years from now, if I don't start doing it now, I think I'll still have the same regret. I had the same regret two or three years ago, and decided it was to late to change. Doh! That was a horrible decision. Here's some good advice: don't become a total hedonist. Have fun though. Delay gratification enough that you are confident that you are building a life that will be better five years from now than it is today, but don't delay it so much that you cease to enjoy living. Also, don't delay gratification without reason; becoming ascetic and depriving yourself of something when you don't know why your doing it isn't going to help you with anything. When you delay gratification, you should do it for a specific reason with a specific belief in mind. I'm not going to buy X today because I want to save money so that I can do Y tomorrow... where Y might be something as complicated as "save up $20 million so that I can spend a thousand a day living off my income while still having my net worth increase faster than inflation assuming I don't utterly fail at my attempts to invest it wisely." Unless you're planning to buy a space elevator, delaying gratification in order to save up more than $20 million is not actually delaying gratification, it's foregoing it. It's asceticism at that point. Not many people are in that position, but many people would rather have a 10% shot at becoming a billionaire than a 50% shot at accumulating $20 million, but unless you have your heart set on collecting Picassos and Monets or you want to build your own private island in the middle of the Pacific or you want to make the biggest donation in the history of some organization that you care about contributing to, it's hard to imagine why. There's practically no differentiation between the way you can live if you're able to spend $1000 a day from the way you can live if you're able to spend $50,000 everyday.
Getting back to bad advice, according to the Bible's book of proverbs, "A man of many friends comes to ruin." So pick your friends carefully and have a few good friends. That's horrible advice. It's hard to even think of worse advise. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration: "go commit murder in a public place with lots of people watching and stand around afterwards to gloat" is pretty easy to think of, and it's worse advice. Having many friends is better than having a few good ones. Some people, mostly people steeped in traditional wisdom, disagree, but the evidence is squarely against them, assuming that you treat the success and happiness of the people who adhere to advice as a good marker of whether or not the advice is good. While I received mixed advice from my elders about whether it was better to have many friends or a few friends as a child, my elders were uniform in advising me and the other children I knew to be careful about who we befriended. Some people advised me to find a few of the right sort of people; others advised me to find as many of the right sort of people as possible, but they all strongly cautioned against becoming friends with the wrong sort of people. (This is not to say that everyone who gave me advise as a child gave me this advice or believed in it; some people never advised me one way or the other on this subject. Some of them, I would guess, remained silent on this subject because they knew that their viewpoint disagreed with the dominant one in their community.) Of course, the right sort of people were people who had a similar background to ourselves, who followed the same advice that we were being given, who wouldn't tempt me to question whether I should be doing the things that I've been told I should do. This is even worse advise than telling someone to have few friends. People can't learn anything from talking to a mirror, and the closer their friendships come to approximating that experience, the less they will be able to learn from them. Moreover, people's influence is measured much better by the breadth of the cross-section of society that they have formed close associations with than it is by how many people they know. Influential people tend to know retirees and students. Influential people have connections to politicians, criminals, and prison guards, protesters, and the people do the things that protesters are protesting, slum lords and their tenants, journalists and engineers. The idea of popularity separated from everything else is just fame: being Paris Hilton. The idea of being well connected separated from everything else is the idea of influence: being a mob boss.
The American experiment, i.e the type of democracy that first appeared in America, owes in my opinion a great deal of its success to the development of classnessless, of refusing to have standards.
When I think about things I've gotten wrong in the past few years, that I need to correct going forward, I think the biggest overarching mistake I've been making in my life is trying to be too selective in general (not just with respect to forming connections) and looking for too much perfection in the immediate term. Perfection, like gratification is something that often needs to be delayed. In the short term, there are a few forms of perfection that are worth striving for: perfect technique, for example, but that's another subject for another time. Sometimes, having low standards is a good thing. All of the people who are natural rebels already figured that out a long time ago. It's one of the things that they got right. For people like me, to whom rebelliousness, for all the intellectual appeal it sometimes had, never came naturally, this realization clashes with entrenched beliefs and heavily trained tendencies. To correct for my natural tendencies, I think I need to try to have low standards except when I have a good reason to raise them. My natural tendency to try to be selective gets in my way.
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