Stop Giving Answers
Savage / Zen Newsletter No. 103
A lot of people claim to have answers. Orations of what we should do, what we need, what we should say, and how we should behave are all around us.
Nuanced discussion seems to have all but evaporated, at least from online spaces and “the news.” This is particularly true in the health and fitness sphere.
Do this. Don’t do that. Vote for this person. Don’t eat that. This is the new meta. The old way this… the new way that… This is actually a predictable social trend. Each generation tends to fancy itself smarter than the previous one and wiser than the younger one.
Admittedly though, the current state of geo-politics and “social” media have made all of that worse. All creativity, in music, movies, and elsewhere, seems to have died around 2007 (sorry iPhone) and for sure fallen off a cliff by 2010/12.
We’ve forgotten how to listen. We’re so eager to respond, as if trying to convince ourselves we believe whatever it is that’s about to come out of our mouth. As soon as we hear something we don’t like or don’t agree with, we go clamoring for validation of our previous beliefs via confirmation bias, appeals to authority, and any number of other logical fallacies.
Vapid politeness and rhetorical political correctness don’t serve us any better. People’s need for attention only gets repressed and as a result we’re seething with sideways passive-aggressive jabs and proliferated by keyboard warriors and boisterous charlatans.
You’re entitled to your opinion and your judgments rest on you. That doesn’t change the fact that our quality of life tends to improve when we listen more and speak less.
““Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.”
~ Carl Jung
In this day and age, the only reason for existing in a vacuum or an echo chamber is because you choose to. What are you hiding / from? What are you afraid of? What are you so desperate to prove? To yourself?
The challenge I’d like to put forth is for you to encourage curiosity from others. Seek things, experiences, and people who pray, vote, love, live, train, and eat differently than you. This doesn’t dilute our human experience, it enriches it by breadth.
You don’t have to, and maybe even shouldn’t, agree with everyone or accept everything. Your values are your backbone. But they’re brittle and frail if not tempered with perspective and experience.
I’ll admit that one of the ways I grind through long endurance slogs in the gym is to mentally criticize half-reps and other ridiculousness I see in public big-box-gyms. I’m not immune to anything I’ve mentioned here, and the challenge still applies to myself.
I try to steer that internal dialogue towards something more productive, maybe even positive… at least they’re here instead of on the couch… or “that looks like a good idea, here’s what I would do different.”
These sorts of mental shifts say a lot about ourselves; not just our internal state of dis/satisfaction, but also our willingness to change and / or interact with the world and people around us.
“No man is an island” as they say.
As much as it may be an evolutionary survival mechanism to be defensive and on the look out for threats, you don’t win by trying to not loose. This is true in sport and in life.
Before the privilege of modern technologies — various tools, industries, communications, and resources — to be exiled from one’s tribe meant almost certain death.
Some of the most valuable guidance I ever heard from a fellow clinician was simply: “shut up and listen, it’s not about you.”
“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
~ Anais Nin