Worldview decisions

We don’t actually make many decisions in our lives. It seems we make pivotal decisions at certain points in our lives, and the rest are automatic “decisions” that follow, but aren’t actually decisions. 

One of these pivotal decisions is choosing what kind of worldview we want to have. It’s usually when something unexpectedly tragic happens do we realize we’ve been taking everything for granted, not in the sense of gratitude, but in the sense that we already have the world figured out, or that the world only obeys a very specific set of rules.

One worldview I’ve held for 8 years is that you can only do something meaningful, or only do something altruistic, if it’s born of sacrifice. And frequently that sacrifice is the discomfort of going outside the status quo, of being ridiculed. But often that sacrifice is the suffering in your body, and the worry in your head. And so when you are unmotivated, you can motivate yourself by telling yourself to get up and push because it is for the good of humanity. And what gets really dangerous about this is that at some point you get addicted to sacrifice, and addicted to overwork, and addicted to your own mental anguish because you think, it’s all justified as sacrifice. And if you just gave up on feeling bad then also all your previous feeling bad will all be for waste. 

And the thing is that being altruistic and compassionate to humanity includes being compassionate to yourself. And that if you want to help others, you have to learn to help yourself as well. Otherwise you are really just running yourself into the ground, and helping nobody. And this is a hard lesson and worldview pivot I now have to make after 8 years.

I’d say the hardest thing about changing your worldview is that all of your planning has to be redone, so you don’t see the road ahead anymore. And I’d say that’s pretty scary. And so meditation as a practice is extremely useful because the point of meditation is that you’re in the present, even if you can’t see the road ahead, you know to have faith in the process and faith in yourself.

I think that’s the main thing I’ll be taking away from school now that I’m graduating, even though I never expected it.