Practicing humility in the vain age

The moral of the story is just go to sleep

A couple of weeks ago I met a perfect stranger. He sat at the table right beside mine, watching the sun slowly find its nest behind the Peloponnese. I caught his gaze and I knew we would soon be talking — unfortunately, few things come as a surprise to me, but that’s a story for another time. Meeting new people is my favorite pastime, but this one didn’t feel like much of a stranger. Our conversation sparked instantly and I soon realised that we had something in common: we were both going through a period of total deconstruction. This comes with little astonishment as most people I know that are around my age are going through it as well — a clear consequence of what I like to call the bridge years. Every year of my twenties has brought so much change, that life is beginning to look like a prolonged quick change act. This year in particular has brought the most change and sometimes I’m surprised when I think of myself, how much I’ve grown and how much more there is left to do, how much I think and how reasonable those thoughts are, and how little fun I can have without ever being self reflexive. I see my dog, gaze directed at the sun, unconscious of time, not waiting, just being, and I think, why can’t I be like that?

The Stranger felt the same way. He was one of the few people I had ever met who was so frank about it. In a sudden spell of honesty, all his feelings flowed into the river of our conversation. Its water was crystal clear, and we dove into its furthest depths. Somehow this intimacy is dispelled by perfect strangers, with them all secrets disappear the next day.

As we swam together in the deep seas of our maturing thoughts, a sentence kept coming up, the idea of “loving yourself”. The Stranger spoke lengthily of the paralyzing requirements he, and society, set for himself and his fellow men, the need to excel, to love oneself first in order to love others properly (but how when we are so wretched?), to live by one’s own rules whilst also following society’s expectations, to be rich but also a good person, a good parent yet with such poor example, to love a woman and not resent her for loving you, etc…

I had a hard time relating to his worries. Not because I have none of my own, but because I gave up on “loving myself” a long time ago. Firstly, I’m not even sure what that term means. How can one, logically speaking, love oneself? Wouldn’t it suppose that we are somehow divided, that perhaps our mind can love another part of itself, or our body? And then, what measure of love are we talking about? Etc. etc. Being so pedantic would require a redefining of every word, which only shows, in my opinion, how frail these ideas, which are so easily taken for granted, truly are.

I don’t think I have ever tried to “love myself” because I always knew it was an impossible thing. I can always find a fault somewhere within myself and, perhaps due to an overly harsh French education, I find the idea itself presumptuous and — for lack of a better word — cringey. I don’t really see the point of loving oneself, what would it achieve? This doesn’t mean that I hate myself, but I have a hard time understanding how loving myself would materialise. The parts of myself that I particularly dislike — for example, how much I overshare, take up too much space in the conversation, or how intense I can be — I’ve found practically impossible to change. If I dwell on these things, I just get very upset, and what’s the good in that? Clearly, some faults are more easily rectifiable than others, those of character, I believe are there to stay. The flaws that are more manageable — flabby arms, cutting people off in the middle of their sentence, being indecisive and impatient — I work on, but not to the point of exhaustion: I am quite lazy after all. The truth is that I am far too distracted by everything else going on around me, that I find it quite tiring to think of myself on top of it all. Perhaps that is a problem, I am not sure.

I suppose what people mean by loving oneself is actually self acceptance. Yet, acceptance is very distinct from love. I accept my neighbor’s fat dog, but I do not love it. Love insinuates a feeling much stronger, a mix of admiration, care, sometimes fear, and I struggle to imagine how I could direct such deep emotion towards myself. It already seems so difficult to love others truly and unconditionally, without judgement. Oftentimes acceptance plays a more consistent role than love in our close relationships. Paradoxically, love is the most instinctive thing we can do, and which lets acceptance roam despite all the imperfections at hand. Can the ecstasy of love be as strong when directed to oneself? I doubt it. I believe it’s worth questioning how useful this idea truly is in helping live better, less anxious lives.

The Stranger’s worries were valid, ingrained in true earthly problems, and also came from a valuable desire of self-improvement. Clearly, to this day, we have not solved the problem of what it means to live a good life, or what Perfection, Beauty, Truth actually refer to. Worst of all is that reading any philosophy might prove more confusing than helpful. Since we haven’t found any satisfying answers, it feels dishonest to propose such simplistic ideas as “self-care” and “self-love”, concepts which seem much more useful to consumerism than true self-betterment. Perhaps the Stranger was already doing just fine simply by asking himself those questions, maybe the thought and intention were just enough to direct him towards the good life.

This is where I believe faith in God, no matter whether it is affiliated to a certain religion, comes in handy. God is also a century-long debated term. For the sake of clarity, let’s simply define it as an ineffable supreme being that created the universe. This God is external to us, and loving him would by proxy make us love not only ourselves but the whole world, since he created us within it. Loving that ineffable being, as challenging as it may be, directs our love and energy outward rather than inward. Modern attitudes towards mental health and spirituality are more often than not directed towards the self rather than outward. We are taught to look inward, to ‘find ourselves’ in order to become better people. But I wonder how productive such a method is. Who are we becoming better people for? Isn’t the maxim ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’—not ‘Do unto yourself what you wish others would’?

We exist thanks to and for those around us. Yet, it would be unoriginal to say that we live in a vain age. Through centuries of thought we somehow went from preaching “Know Thyself” to “Love Thyself”. The self has become an object of worship, as if it were a finalized thing, and no longer the mysterious, ever changing energy we once strived to understand. Can we undo this strange new paradigm, and if so how? How can one live humbly in the vain age, and still fully enjoy all its perks? After all, the goal is not to find inner peace through seclusion, and the “it was better then” mentality is hardly productive. Denying that social media is society itself, that our machines have become new vital organs would be naive and impractical. So, among the millions of gurus, therapists, life coaches and preachers, who can we really trust? I believe the answer is not within, but all around us.

It is not by looking in the rearview mirror that one can drive to their destination. It is by keeping the gaze far ahead onto the horizon, and being constantly aware of their surroundings that the driver is in control. It is by living in the world that you know about it, loving others that you learn about love. Being self-aware is as useful as that rearview mirror; it must not be a fixed point.

Humility is not a very popular word anymore; at least, it isn’t used as a quality as it once was. Humility is often misinterpreted as an act of self-diminishing, or it is often dismissed as a mere performance. The equilibrium between humility and pride is one of the hardest points to reach. I feel like I am constantly on a seesaw, sliding from one state to another and feeling disappointed every time I reach the other side. At what point should I be genuinely proud of myself? When should I draw the line of self-criticism? I suppose the reason I fluctuate so much, and to such frustration, is because I am stuck with a caricatural understanding of pride and humility. There is no harm in being proud of hard work or some special talent, it would be foolish and even more prideful to deny visible realities by forcing an imposed humility on them. Pride is worshiping the self above all else, above a truly deserving apology, for example, or a helpful confession. Humility is not self-denial in the sense of punishment and humiliation, it is the act of silencing the Self, which generally likes to take a lot of space (see word count of essay). My self-criticism and stubbornness are not symptoms of humility, they are the effects of my overactive pride.

So, this is what practicing humility looks like for me on a regular day:

Wake up, try to define what perfection is. Realise it’s taking too long and get out of bed. Remember that one day, hopefully not today, everyone I love will die. Doing a bunch of things I’m not great at and sharing the results with everyone I know at the risk of being ridiculous. (You’re part of this now). Then I go on with my day, behave angrily because I’m generally quite moody but then feel guilty about that but do nothing about it because I’m still not a pro at humility. Once I’m done with work I spend hours and hours distracting myself from everything. Then I go to bed, start thinking of all the ridiculous things I’ve said and done for about two hours and when it starts getting too much, I imagine myself being in a medieval torture chamber for having stolen a loaf of bread or something silly like that and then I prepare myself mentally to be quartered by four horses in the village center. Then I think of all the people who were quartered and tortured in the past and how much they must have regretted their mistakes, and then I think about life in those times, the cold hard winter nights, when people had to sleep all together in the same bed to keep warm and then I remember that some still live like this today and why am I so concerned by my silly little life when all of these awful things are happening. And then I feel bad about that for a while but my feelings don’t matter because they’ll change tomorrow or in a minute from now, and slowly the weight of the thoughts begins to put pressure on my eyes and I slowly drift away in a land of dreams where nothing like this really happens like it does out here in the real world. And once that land welcomes me I feel back at home, where I belong.