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What is difficult to overcome to succeed in life?

The natural slope of ease

What is difficult is not to give up sincerity.

From childhood, we feel pressure to be a good student, a 'good' son, a 'good' daughter. Later, to be a 'good' collaborator, a 'good' collaborator, a 'good' husband, a 'good' wife, a 'good' father, a 'good' mother. Not responding to these injunctions exposes one to the risk of exclusion and social downward mobility. Indeed, when our natural behavior does not produce the expected result, either due to lack of capacity or because our natural behavior is not aligned with social expectations, we are tempted by hyper-adaptation, which consists of seeking only maximum effect to satisfy social injunctions at the cost of accepting what seems absurd or unjust. This leads us to adopt a social mask, to pretend.

This is the path of ease, and this is how one most easily achieves social success. However, one is generally unaware of the trade-off linked to the cognitive dissonance this produces between our convictions and our behaviors. Indeed, the lack of struggle leads us, under the pressure of this cognitive dissonance, to progressively incorporate, without our full awareness or consent, the beliefs and values of the social environment with which we were not initially in agreement. Thus, the sincere part of us is progressively relegated to the depths of the unconscious and is no longer perceived as anything other than a simple existential discomfort whose origin gradually becomes unclear.

From the necessity to compensate and maintain this discomfort in the depths potentially derive 6 harmful consequences:

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This places us in a situation of dependency, like an addict, towards ersatz happiness (consumption, leisure, travel, etc.) that were imposed on us at the same time as the codes of our social environment.

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We feel the need to 'show off,' that is, to ostentatiously show others this success, in fact to confirm to ourselves that this renunciation was the right choice.

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For the same reasons, it becomes necessary to convince those close to us of the beliefs we have adopted, and to surround ourselves with people who share these same beliefs.

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We feel the need to display 'values' to restore the degraded image of ourselves. These values are chosen from thought systems largely disconnected from reality, or focused on peripheral topics (small gestures), in order not to call into question the beliefs we have accepted opportunistically.

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We live in anxiety, because from the depths of us, a small voice constantly rises telling us that all this is fictitious, and that our relationships with others are not sincere, thus dependent on a context that can turn against us.

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Finally, and most seriously, we lose the capacity to take into account facts that contradict these beliefs, and thus to help others, including those close to us, whenever it would require calling into question our fiction.

This is the Faustian pact. However, it should be noted that, on the one hand, the devil does not appear in person, so we are not aware of having signed it, and on the other hand, the position we adopt in practice is generally neither an absolute yes nor an absolute no, but an intermediate one resulting from successive small renunciations. It is simply the economy of struggle, which we grant ourselves out of convenience and opportunism, that progressively translates - through the effect of cognitive dissonance - into the triad of dependency, mental confinement, and irresponsibility.

The temptation of a good self-image through small gestures

As explained in the question 'Why are small gestures for the planet dangerous?', small gestures are a powerful tool to reconcile personal interest and a good self-image at minimal cost. However, this leads us to lie to ourselves to avoid more serious and more demanding solutions that may arise during life, and thus powerfully encourages us to gradually slide down the slope of pretending. The only thing that can prevent us from sliding gradually is to maintain dissatisfaction with the weakness of our action compared to the scale of collective problems.

Struggling with method

For those who choose to struggle more intensely, to gradually get rid of the diffuse discomfort, here are the difficult points we recommend working on:

1.

Getting rid of beliefs embedded in us by habit.
Deconstructing discourses that hold only on a facade.

Some examples:

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Girls are less important than boys.

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You are a failure because you are not as brilliant as others in your family circle.

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Black people are an inferior race.

This is the very principle of CBT psychotherapy.

2.

Learning to work methodically on problems.

3.

Becoming an adult, that is, having the courage to confront the group.

4.

Acceptingimpermanence, and thus living fully in the present moment.

Adopting realistic models

Many spiritual books take the Dalai Lama or Buddha as exemplary models of attitude. These are poor examples, exactly as if one took as a model for money management the example of some super-rich people. Indeed, the Dalai Lama or Buddha are princes, meaning they have a guaranteed high social status, so they can simply ignore social ambition and its tool, generalized nepotism, without paying the price. Moreover, the report Buddhism, the law of silence which we refer to more broadly in the question 'What is an adult?' shows that these people who seem like models because their lives have not confronted them with the problem are not necessarily so in absolute terms.
Good life management is to do the best with what one has received in terms of favorable circumstances and personal gifts. Personal responsibility always intervenes, in the form of setting noble goals as opposed to behaving like a simple schemer exploiting one's environment, and undertaking deep work on oneself, but the result one can reasonably achieve remains very variable from one individual to another.

Deepening

Point 1. explains the alternative title envisaged for this site at the introduction level: a small manual to stop being fooled by the aces of rhetoric.

Regarding point 2, see the questions 'Why do humans reason massively wrongly?' and 'What conditions must be met to produce serious reasoning?'.

Regarding point 3, see the question 'What is an adult?'

Regarding point 4, see the question 'What is impermanence?'

 

2022-09-05 20:34:38 u200bu200bJulie deconstructing herself

Plus que déconstruire les discours, c'est déconstruire les injonctions de la société que l'on a intégré malgré nous qui me semble important, il s'agirait de déconstruire en partie notre propre identité. Cela demande des moyens, accéder à l'information, du temps, le recours à des spécialistes, est-ce que la société ne devrait-elle pas prendre cela en charge?

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