Note: This article is largely based on excerpt from Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson. The catharsis builds on the philosophical notion of nature of Values. READ more: For application and framework to finding out your personalised Values.
Past a certain point, maturity has nothing to do with age. There are plenty of grown-ass children in the world. And there are a lot of aging adolescents. Hell, there are even some young adults out there. What matters are a person’s intentions.
The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but WHY they do something.
Wait I have a more basic question: How are values made, why do religions and cults share them, is it a spiritual thing or like a school thing?
Answer: The process of forming values is complex and influenced by various factors. Life experiences play a significant role in shaping our values. Emotions, such as pleasure and pain, are generated through these experiences and contribute to the development of a values hierarchy. For example, the experience of a skinned knee may lead to valuing physical safety, while the absence of a parent may lead to valuing familial relationships.
This values hierarchy then guides the interpretation and meaning we give to our life experiences. People with similar values and interpretations often come together to form religions. Religions serve as frameworks that provide shared narratives and meaning to life. Effective religions tend to have devoted and disciplined followers, as they provide a sense of purpose and guidance in adhering to their respective values.
Lets dig a little deeper below the tags and labels of values:
Child Values: Young children are like little tyrants. They struggle to conceive of anything in life beyond what is immediately pleasurable or painful for them at any given moment. They cannot feel empathy. They cannot imagine what life is like in your shoes. All they know is that they want some fucking ice cream.
Issue: Everything because it’s a child doesn’t have consciousness.
Adolescent Values: They are a step up from the child due to an algorithmic pattern/data points to the same core i.e. pleasure and pain. The adolescent stumbles around by trying on different social rules and roles. If I wear this, will it make me cool? If I talk like that, will it make people like me? If I pretend to enjoy this music, will I be popular?
Issue: This is an improvement, but there’s still a weakness in this adolescent approach to life. Everything is seen as a trade-off. Adolescents approach life as an endless series of bargains: I will do what my boss says so I can get money. I will call my mother so I don’t get yelled at. I will do my homework so I don’t fuck up my future. I will lie and pretend to be nice so I don’t have to deal with conflict.
The problem with adolescent values is that if you hold them, you never actually stand for something outside yourself. In the end, adolescent values are self-defeating. You can’t live your entire life this way, otherwise you’re never actually living your own life. You’re merely living out an aggregation of the desires of the people around you.
Adult Values: Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do. In the same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.
Part of that is the realisation that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect. Bargaining with people into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It undermines the whole project. If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting you, then they will never respect you. If you have to convince someone to trust you, then they won’t actually trust you.
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, are nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them.
You cannot conspire for happiness; it is impossible. But this is often what people try to do, especially when they seek out self-help and other personal development advice—they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play, and I’ll play it,” not realizing that it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy!
Concluding Example: The child steals the ice cream because it feels good, and he is oblivious or indifferent to the consequences. The adolescent doesn’t steal because he knows it will create worse consequences in the future, but his decision is ultimately a bargain with his future self: I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater future pain. But it’s only the adult who doesn’t steal for the simple principle that stealing is wrong. And to steal, even if she gets away with it, would make her feel worse about herself.
Complexity 1 : People get stuck in the adolescent stage of values for similar reasons that they get stuck with childish values: trauma and/or neglect. Victims of bullying are a particularly notable example. A person who has been bullied in his younger years will move through the world with an assumed understanding that no one will ever like or respect him unconditionally, that all affection must be hard-won through a series of practiced conversation and canned actions. You must dress a certain way. You must speak a certain way. You must act a certain way—or else
Complexity 2 : Some people become incredibly good at playing the bargaining game. They tend to be charming and charismatic and are naturally able to sense what other people want of them and to fill that role. This manipulation rarely fails them in any meaningful way, so they come to believe that this is simply how the whole world operates. Life is one big high school gymnasium, and you must shove people into lockers lest ye be shoved first.
Broader Challenges:
I feel transnationality kills the sanctity of everything sacred in life. In simplistic terms, it means there is something else more important than the relationship (familial, personal etc.) and at times the humanity of people in the relationship. If that condition changes, so does the associated relationship and that’s where the issue become severe – if it’s the transaction of slot machine with a next dollar it’s financial loss, if it is ’till death us apart’ or ‘I made you with another human being’ arrangement, the consequences are quite dire. Ask yourself, in relationships where men trade sex/physical intimacy for love and women trade materialism/sustainability – what happens, when sex is forced/dries out? Or when you get fired, your industry gets disrupted or economy goes into recession – as a law of impermanence which impacts all living things, what if the conditionality comes at the expense of someone’s humanity? Result:
Around 70% of divorces in US (probably most places in the world) are on financial matters and probably same %age is the reason why men leave their older partners for younger women [60% of people under poverty guidelines are divorced women and children]. Essentially you will build relationships by manipulating others/or moulding yourself to fit your/others needs, respectively instead of taking care of them yourself aka toxic relationships.
Self Reflection: When parents and teachers fail it’s usually because they themselves are stuck at an adolescent level of values. They too see the world in transactional terms. They too, bargain for love for sex, loyalty for affection, respect for obedience. In fact, they likely bargain with their kids for affection, love and respect. They think this is normal, so the kids grow up thinking it’s normal. And the shitty, shallow, transactional parent/child relationships in the world, because he then becomes a teacher or parents and imparts his adolescent value on children, causing the whole mess to continue for another generation. P.S. I’m really good at picking up shitty/transactional values taught in minorities social and cultural conditioning – mainly because I too, to a large extent, made to believe that it was normal, as elders claimed their expertise based on their age, success, money, houses, kids, not just project it but made it a point to vouch that this is the only way to exist, sadly again for transactional purposes i.e. legacy for self fallatio, respect for obedience to their cult, self aggrandisement in the name of religion/culture.
Conclusion:
It’s no coincidence, then, that all the world’s great religions push people toward these unconditional values, whether it’s the unconditional forgiveness of Jesus Christ or the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha or the perfect justice of Muhammad (PBUH). In their purest forms, the world’s great religions leverage our human instinct for hope to try to pull people upward toward adult virtues. Or, at least, that’s usually the original intention.
Unfortunately, as they grow, religions inevitably get co-opted by transactional adolescents and narcissist children, people who pervert the religious principles for their own personal gain. Every human religion succumbs to this failure of moral frailty at some point. No matter how beautiful and pure its doctrines, it ultimately becomes a human institution, and all human institutions eventually become corrupted.
The biggest epiphany in this for me was the knowledge that anything that our mind can conceptualize is fundamentally flawed and limited and therefore damaging if worshipped unconditionally. We need to go beyond the realm of psyche and mind to break this feedback loop from hell where we create flawed measures of hope and we ruin our humanity and humanity of others in the name of self aggrandisement, validation, satisfaction and approval. So we have to transcend beyond mind and into deeper consciousness to not be in a situation where we are looking to cure a tsunami by more water.
Excerpt – Everything is Fucked by Mark Manson
Catharsis: Your truly who knows nothing!
