The Middle Layer
As long as we can distract ourselves from stuff, we are okay. If
there is a person lying in front of us, dying…. we will try to
help him. We might take him to the hospital, maybe fill up a few forms. Beyond
that, we draw the line. We literally think to ourselves “This is the point
where it stops being convenient to save a man’s life. This is
when it starts to become a bother to care about some unknown kid becoming an
orphan.” And this is when we can't run away from it altogether.
Picture yourself in the traffic. You are waiting at a signal.
Suddenly, you hear an ambulance behind you. The right thing to do would be to
make way for it by taking your car to the side. But you don’t
do that. You start honking your horn at the car in front of you. You feel
righteous anger rising in you. “This asshole doesn’t
understand that the value of human life is greater than a traffic signal? Move,
you moron!” And finally, the whole line of traffic jumps the signal so
the ambulance can move. You have saved a life, and have managed to save a few
seconds on the signal. But if you are truly truthful, if you can look inside
the very confines of your soul, are you sure that saving that life meant more
to you than cutting the signal? Can you swear, and hope to die, that you did
not just use a man’s life as an excuse to save a few
seconds of having to wait?
We are complex creatures. We have a lot of reasons about why we
do something. A friend I had had this weird phobia where he didn’t
like talking to strangers on the phone. Now he has a kid. He asks the kid to
make his phone calls, now - so that his kid will not have this crippling fear
of interacting with strangers. I’ve seen him force his kid to order
food over the phone, telling him that it was for his own good. And I am quite
sure that that is probably true. But if my friend is really honest to himself,
will he still maintain that his kid’s well being is the dominant reason
behind him doing this? I’m quite sure it is one of his reasons,
but the main reason is that my friend is still effing afraid of talking to
strangers on the phone… so much so that he will make his poor
kid (who definitely has the same problem) do it for him!
We tend to find the most noble of our reasons to do something and
then parade it as our main reason. Not even a socially acceptable reason will
do, we have to pick the most NOBLE reason, pompous asses that we are!
-I am earning a shitload of money so that my kids can have the
future that I couldn’t (Yes, that is definitely one of your
reasons, but you are also doing it because you WANT a shitload of money so that
you can now have the future that you couldn’t)
-I am choosing this career because it is the smart choice to make
(Yes it is, but you are doing it because you want to be with your friends, and
this their choice)
-I am doing this good deed without any expectation of returns
(Yes, and you really want everyone to take a note of this)
This is exactly why we respects saints so much, because they don’t
get trapped in this. This is what makes the greats so great. The rest of us are
just trying to be our own heroes…
Think about it. They say “Everyone is the hero of their own
story” but it’s not just a relatively smart saying
anymore. It is the truth. Except that we are not heroes, we are anti-heroes. An
anti hero does the most despicable things possible - kills people, lies,
cheats, is an all round idiot - but we still root for him. That is like the
perfect representation of our view of ourself. We can always justify every
single, shitty thing that we do.
And we do do shitty things. We don’t really mature. It’s
like playing a game. You play it long enough and you get better at it. It doesn’t
mean that you have matured. It just means that you are your own anti-hero, and
have played this game long enough to sugar-coat and hide your true intentions
even from yourself.
Even now, as I am writing this overtly cynical and pessimistic
rant, I am trying to justify that I am, maybe, not completely serious. When I
read this back, I will try to pass this off as a mildly-amusing write-up that I
wrote because I was bored and had nothing else to do. Which is definitely ONE of
the reasons that i wrote this, sure. But is this the REAL reason?
The day I start to think about that, maybe (and I am saying
MAYBE) I will start to mature. That’s what, in my humble (or not) opinion,
we should try to do. Just wait and think. Look inside, Reflect. Start letting
that middle layer feel, that layer of you which actually takes actions.
And then… then we can stop being the anti-hero
and start being the hero of our own story.
Because the thing about anti-heroes is - they may appear to be
glamorous…. but their stories always end in tragedies.
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