Chasing Ideals
Ideals exist to strive towards. Like glowing beacons in the dark, they guide you towards some better destination. You need not ever reach or attain perfectly an ideal, attempting to do so misses the point. You simply use an ideal to guide your behaviour.
There is danger in ideals -- namely, if the ideal is corrupt, bad, or imperfect, you will be lead towards corruption, badness, and imperfection. So you have to remain vigilant and be prudent in your choice of ideals.
I've been thinking (well, I'm always thinking) about what my ideal self would be like. What person do I want to be? I want to be a writer, so there are 3 things that I can think of that are important character traits to have as a writer: one should be engaged in the world and with other people, one should read ferociously, and one should write.
Today I'm mostly concerned with reading. I don't read as much as I should do, especially considering that my course is text-heavy. But even beyond that, I don't read for myself nearly as much as I used to. I've been thinking to myself, why is this? The only explanation is that I've been quite wrongly putting value in other things over and above reading. I can't tell why I've been doing that, possibly because reading requires a bit more effort, but if I want to chase my ideal self, I simply must remember that I want to be a writer, and writers read to improve. And besides that, I enjoy reading!
When one decides what one should be doing, they consciously or subconsciously go through a decision-making process that involves contemplating opportunity costs. If you do X, you're cost in value of thing Y (etc) that you couldn't do because you were doing X. What I need to do is to making this decision-making process more conscious, because so far I have been doing it subconsciously and choosing the wrong things, things that don't lead me towards my ideal self. So the idea is, when faced with spare time, I simply ask myself whether what I'm about to do will lead me closer to being my ideal self or not? If the answer is yes, then I do it, acknowledging that it holds the most value. If the answer is no, I don't do it, and choose something with more value, such as reading or writing or engaging myself with friends or some aspect of the world.
Naturally being a writer doesn't encompass all I want to be as a person, it's just a very large part of it, that's why it's been the main focus of this post. But there are other things -- some simply mandatory, like being a moral person (i.e. not being shitty), some obligatory-by-choice (like uni). But the good thing is, my conception of being a writer is in harmony with these other things: uni will often have me read, being engaged with other people and the world leads you not to be a shitty person, etc.
The point, though, was I need to read more. There's no way of tricking myself into it, really; I simply need to keep conscious my ideal self, and act towards that, otherwise I'm just failing myself.
There is danger in ideals -- namely, if the ideal is corrupt, bad, or imperfect, you will be lead towards corruption, badness, and imperfection. So you have to remain vigilant and be prudent in your choice of ideals.
I've been thinking (well, I'm always thinking) about what my ideal self would be like. What person do I want to be? I want to be a writer, so there are 3 things that I can think of that are important character traits to have as a writer: one should be engaged in the world and with other people, one should read ferociously, and one should write.
Today I'm mostly concerned with reading. I don't read as much as I should do, especially considering that my course is text-heavy. But even beyond that, I don't read for myself nearly as much as I used to. I've been thinking to myself, why is this? The only explanation is that I've been quite wrongly putting value in other things over and above reading. I can't tell why I've been doing that, possibly because reading requires a bit more effort, but if I want to chase my ideal self, I simply must remember that I want to be a writer, and writers read to improve. And besides that, I enjoy reading!
When one decides what one should be doing, they consciously or subconsciously go through a decision-making process that involves contemplating opportunity costs. If you do X, you're cost in value of thing Y (etc) that you couldn't do because you were doing X. What I need to do is to making this decision-making process more conscious, because so far I have been doing it subconsciously and choosing the wrong things, things that don't lead me towards my ideal self. So the idea is, when faced with spare time, I simply ask myself whether what I'm about to do will lead me closer to being my ideal self or not? If the answer is yes, then I do it, acknowledging that it holds the most value. If the answer is no, I don't do it, and choose something with more value, such as reading or writing or engaging myself with friends or some aspect of the world.
Naturally being a writer doesn't encompass all I want to be as a person, it's just a very large part of it, that's why it's been the main focus of this post. But there are other things -- some simply mandatory, like being a moral person (i.e. not being shitty), some obligatory-by-choice (like uni). But the good thing is, my conception of being a writer is in harmony with these other things: uni will often have me read, being engaged with other people and the world leads you not to be a shitty person, etc.
The point, though, was I need to read more. There's no way of tricking myself into it, really; I simply need to keep conscious my ideal self, and act towards that, otherwise I'm just failing myself.
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