Humble the Poet - Things No One Else Can Teach Us

One day the star we call our sun will burn out, the galaxy we call the Milky Way will fade, the universe we call home will cease to be, and there will be nothing. Before any of that happens, we’ll become nothing too, and that’s okay; it just means we should appreciate who and what we have, while we have them, for however long we have left.

I hope someone is reading this well after I’m gone and is scratching his or her head about what a first-class flight is.[1] I’ll take comfort in knowing my thoughts outlived the mind that manifested them, if only for a few extra millennia.

Exit

You won’t return like the sunrise

But I’ll feel your warmth

What did I do to deserve the few moments we had

I’m overwhelmed

When you brought me pain, you brought me rain

And a seed of wisdom came to sprout

Your voice vibrates with a half-life of infinity

Everything will be said, will be said forever

Until there’s no one left to hear it

And then it won’t matter

In a temporary world, it matters that you shared your temporary time with me

I’ll see you in forever

Enter

Roses are red, violets are blue

Listening to your parents

Means you don’t have to decide what to do

Sugar is sweet, syrup is sappy

Stick to the script

and keep everyone happy

Decisions are exhausting, and everybody likes to blame

So don’t rock the boat

And you won’t have to worry about them

Life is confusing, someone’s got to have the answers

And if they’re amusing, let’s make them our mentor

Let’s avoid the mirrors and allow others to paint our pictures

Of who we should be, without ever knowing who we are

The cost of being yourself, is being by yourself

And that’s a pretty penny I can’t afford

But staying in line has its cost

Keeping everyone else happy but ourselves

What do you want to eat?

I don’t know, what do you want to eat?

I’m too tired to decide, just pick anything.

Making decisions takes energy, and it gets exhausting. There’s a term for this. It’s called decision fatigue , and it’s the reason that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, always wore the same black turtleneck and blue jeans. It’s the reason Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, expects himself to make only three good decisions a day. These high-functioning individuals understand the importance of every decision they make and what it takes from them, so they reduce the number of decisions they make. Jobs did it by wearing the same clothes, to avoid that first decision of the day. Bezos understands that he can make only a finite number of good decisions each day, so he aims to make only three.

The rest of us have found our own hacks, like packing our lunch and laying out our clothes for the next day the night before. But in the bigger picture, with the big decisions in life, we’re either too overwhelmed with the options or constrained by the rules that society, culture, and friends and family have placed on us. The decisions we can’t make with confidence end up being made for us. That’s why so many of us are in school studying something we don’t like; getting an education is a realistic way to plug ourselves in to society and earn a living, allowing us to feel accepted by everyone else—and also to not embarrass our families.

That template isn’t just related to our careers; it’s related to our beliefs, values, and pursuits of happiness. Go to school, get a job, get married, have 2.5 kids, put them through school, get them married, have 2.5 grandkids, and retire, wait for death, while you reminisce about how horrible you were at math.

For those few of us who decide to go off-script, we’re leaving a zoo to enter the jungle. Sure, there’s an abundance of freedom when we choose to go against the template, but with that freedom comes new challenges. We have to trade feelings of safety and security for uncertainty, and we have to learn how to be out on our own. All the decisions that were previously made for us now rest solely on our shoulders.

And that’s fucking exhausting.

Many people give up and rejoin the templated life, where the path is so beaten, it’s paved with pretty lines and streetlights, which is much nicer than the dark dangerous uncertain jungle. There are fewer decisions to make and more guidelines for how it all works. Hit that benchmark at work by this age. Have kids now. Wait to travel the world.

Sticking to the script saves us from having to make a lot of tough decisions, but tough decisions still find us, often when life doesn’t go according to plan. The beauty in those tough decisions is that they teach us about ourselves.

We’ve been fed messages of how to know ourselves throughout our lives. The corny after-school specials always half-heartedly encouraged us to be ourselves. Social media found a way for us to sell an idea of our authentic selves. But the truth is, we have to go through bullshit in order to learn who we really are. When we get those moments, we realize one simple truth:

You can’t be yourself if you don’t know who you are.

So how do you know who you are? Everyone is a gooey batter of both nature and nurture, and every time shit hits the fan in our lives, we have an opportunity to get to know ourselves a bit better. It’s an exhausting experience, but it’s enriching.

We learn about ourselves through all of our interactions with the world, both good and bad. This is the reason your fourth-grade teacher taught you about rocks—not because it’s important to know the difference between sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks, but because a little dabble on a subject may awaken something in you to help you become the next Charles Darwin or Ross Geller.

So with everything you do, think about how it shapes who you are, and think about how who you are shapes your experience of everything you do.

The more you know yourself, the more you can live a life that feels right for you. The life you want to live will rarely be one-size-fits-all. Society, culture, and all the people you care about will try to make decisions for you, accidentally reinforcing their own desires for your conformity. But with conforming comes the kind of stress that can’t be meditated away ten minutes a day using an app on your phone.

The journey to know yourself better isn’t paved and doesn’t come with a map. That’s why you often feel like you’re lost or broken. Every moment when you’ve discovered something new about yourself likely happened the hard way, but it was worth it.

There’s nothing more important than being self-aware,and although it takes more brainpower than simply falling in line, it’ll save you so much more heartache, headache, and tension in the long run. That type of tension is what has us chasing fixes and distractions, avoiding the very inconvenient truth that stares us all in the mirror every day:

I’m not happy where I am right now.

Every promise broken, every heart-breaking moment, and even the random glimpses of hope can teach us about who we are, and what we want. Knowing these things will make all the difference in the life we have, the life we want, and how to bring the two together.

It was every dweeb’s dream—a message from a very pretty girl acknowledging the dweeb’s existence: “I know you’re the brains behind the operation.”