People literally wreck their own lives??

(UK, September 2024) The title of this piece are the words which jumped out from me when watching a podcast where a chap called Sadhguru was on.

As ever for a podcast, I was listening to it in the background while grabbing a bit of flow-state (washing the dishes).

My own brief relevant backstory is that I’m a relatively fortunate human, born in the UK, but with the usual dose of life-based angst that many of us deal with – hence hunting down podcasts and other sources of wisdom, guidance and advice – as I approach my 50s.

This piece is only relevant to you if you feel that right now, you are not where you ‘should’ be, not where you could have been by now – and where you know you had the potential to be.

And – there’s so many of us ‘normal’ and relatively balanced folk (not even with much childhood trauma to deal with) - just trying to work shit out, get a bit of control over our lives – flail less, steer better.

Then I heard a quip along the lines of: ‘Life is complicated – it will always be complicated, so we would do well to do our best to navigate it as best we can… The one thing we have over the animals is our imagination – but most of the time we just handicap ourselves with that superpower, and gain little from it… and so many others of us are just sabotaging our own lives, ourselves…’

That last line initially didn’t strike me as anything profound, as all I thought when I first heard it was, ‘Heh – yup – junkies, alcoholics, and other similar wastoid self-saboteurs…’.

But then I’m recalling this awesome Alex Garland film (Annihilation, with Natalie Portman), and there’s a scene where one of the characters is saying that most humans are self-destructive, and we’ve just all of us simply found different and novel ways to effect that destruction.

And I’m thinking, ‘Heh – not me – I’m literally spending all of my time trying to fix my life, get it in order, be on top of things, imbibe all the self-help YouTube content that I can, etc, etc…’

This all percolates in me for some days I’m sure – and then a grave realisation:

I have also been just as self-destructive of my own life as the junkies I look down upon!!

I mean – what is the definition of ‘destruction’? It must in this context surely be:

Preventing a good or desirable situation from coming about - through one’s actions or inactions, whether knowingly or unknowingly

Couple this with the fact that at the age of 50, I am looking back at a life that is more about what hasn’t been achieved, where I am not, what I’ve missed, not done, etc.

That sounds like a textbook case of passive self-destruction to me!

It’s the passivity and latent nature of it that allows it to go unnoticed over the years – in contrast to the way a blatant bad habit would not go unnoticed.

But in the final analysis – if you compare where you are today, to where you know deep down that you could have been had you only ‘woken up’ in your twenties or thirties – then that landscape you are looking back upon – is one of destruction.  Only an act of destruction could have gotten you from that potential, to where you are today.

So the question appears – am I going about self-sabotaging and destroying my life just as surely as a junkie is?  And if so – how exactly?

To my analysis – we do do this, and it’s down to the excuses we give ourselves during each phase and stage of our lives, and we have this excuse-devising down to an art.

Excuses for:

Laziness

Being too shy to act

Indecision

Fear – of rejection, of growth, of exiting one’s comfort zone

Not striking at blatant opportunities as they knock at your door (Synchronicity)

Basically – all those things which we will see at full 100% clarity on our death beds!

Not to mention allowing parenthood to permit us to ‘park life’ for many years, or decades.

In a (very good) television series called Debris, there’s one episode where a bunch of elderly people come across a technology that makes them young again – into their late teens/early twenties. And the authorities need to take that technology back from them.

One of them poignantly says, “Why do we only arrive at wisdom when we’re so old that we’re just waiting to die?  We needed our old-age wisdom right in our youth, so that we could see all the potential in life and not waste one single moment…”

This really struck home for me – and is probably the final catalyst that caused to me write this piece.

The thing that literally struck me is that I was so oblivious to the possibility (turns out – fact) that I was just as ‘insane’ and destructive as the junkie destroying and wasting his own life – when my life is looked-upon sufficiently zoomed-out.

It was like, ‘Why would anyone do that FFS? Life’s difficult enough as it is – thank God I’m not dumb like that – crassly squandering the gift of life…’

It was all just a really massive eye-opener for me.

Thinking on why this seems to be so universal – I’ve decided that it’s because it’s too easy to make babies, and literally no-one who has a (first) baby has any knowhow over what to do.

Literally everyone is fumbling and stumbling - and only after 18 years of accidental parenting (or indeed mis-parenting) – do we have any iota of an idea over how to do it right.

Cue – babies, humans – who get to grow up with no real guidance or key perspectives provided.

Now sure – there are loads of folk who have kids who transmit genuine and useful wisdom to them – but you’re not one of those kids, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading a piece like this.

I suspect that we’re in the majority – and this is not even counting those who have genuine childhood trauma to deal with – which loops back to the point about babies being way too easy to make for folk who really shouldn’t be having them (at that stage of their lives, at any rate).

So – take a step back and consider what you might be doing (or not doing) today, which when looked back upon will amount to almost wanton destruction of your own life (and sometimes by extension of those around you).

Further - only concern yourself with how to fix it – not ‘why’ you’ve been self-destructive. 

We can spend a lifetime trying to figure out the ‘why’ of life – costing ourselves all the progress which would have been obtained if we just focused on the ‘How’ (to fix things). 

Indeed – trying to examine the ‘why’ of life can lead to exactly the self-destruction we’re talking about – a life wasted under the guise and delusion of pursuing wisdom and clarity. Oh the irony.

See it.  Fix it.

Share

Share Haec Cogitate

If this piece resonated with you – feel free to subscribe:

There will never be a paywall, as I don’t write here often enough to warrant a paid subscription. I write here purely to convey thoughts which I think are worth conveying