Standard disclaimer : these ideas are new and hence noit well thought out yet.

So bear with me.

It just occurred to me that there has to be a limit to how much one’s ego and self-worth is open to the vagaries of fate.

Put another way, there has to be a point past which one’s self-worth is no longer taking input. A zone where it doesn’t matter what happens and it doesn’t matter what anything thinks or says, the score will go no lower, period.

And I know what you’re thinking (spooky, isn’t it?) : That sounds an awful lot like narcissism, doesn’t it?

And you’re right, it does. But it is not narcissism. A narcissist is someone who puts all or nearly all of reality in that zone. They take a good thing – having this buffer zone – and turn it into insanity by taking it way too far.

My point is, everyone needs a No Apologies Zone. If they lack one. then they are missing the fundamental foundation needed for a stable self worth.

It is neither safe nor healthy to have your entire self worth on the line all the time. Like a gambler who bets it all every single time, it is a recipe for failure. Nobody’s self worth can survive that no matter how many reasons to think highly of themselves they have.

Like, to pick a random example, being hyper-intelligent, creatively gifted, and one heck of a nice guy to boot.

The problem for people of my own foolish mindset is that the act of sealing off part of your self-worth from all inputs is fundamentally irrational. In the false reality of reason, nothing should ever be immune to change based on new evidence. In theory, one’s entire mind, from brain stem to cerebral cortex, is constantly open to a radical realignment at any moment.

In practice, of course, that would make a person completely mentally unstable. People have to keep a lot of the fundamentals of reality constant in their minds or they would go insane. There is only so rational we can afford to be.

And yeah, I am talking to myself there.

And the thing is, most people do not, in fact, need to be told this or taught this because most people respond to and act upon their emotions without the interference of the reasoning mind as least some of the time.

So they don’t have to think about it, they just react. Someone hurts their pride and they strike back verbally at the source of their pain. Something agrees with their self-image and they accept it without question. Something makes them feel uncomfortable so they reject it as untrue.

You know, all the things that us smart logical types are not supposed to do. Irrational things. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Yeah right. Not if we know what’s good for us, which is an open question.

One can frame it as a sort of self-interest equation. Why should I, a naked beach ape who just wants to be happy, accept a truth into my mind that will only make me upset and unhappy when I can simply reject it and stay happy?

The counterargument would be that you are always better off knowing the bitter truth than living in a puffed up fantasy land, but I no longer think that is true. I think it is, in fact, an article of faith, and that faith can demand sacrifices far in excess of its utility.

And people of average intelligence get that, albeit unconsciously. It’s only us over-brained fools who go around shouting “VERITAS UBER ALLES” and making grand statements about The Truth and strutting our intellectually rugged stuff.

I have talked before (I think) about how a certain kind of intellectual openness is akin to simply eating everything you see and trusting your digestive system to work things out from there, with nor regard to the damage it may do to you or how it might make you feel later on.

A sensible organism knows to give things a sniff test and maybe a bit of a lick before deciding whether or not to eat something. Our minds should be at least that intelligent, and for most people, they are.

Again, it’s just us misguided lunatics with more brains than sense who act like we can take anything and try to make a virtue out of our lack of discernment.

There is nothing wrong with asking, “what will this do to me?” before integrating new information into your mind. That doesn’t mean making that the only concern – that way lies narcissism, even solipsism – it just makes it a legitimate question.

So when a Fox News type rejects the truth about oh, so very many things, understand that they are acting in their own best interests regardless of what us lofty intellectuals think they “should” do.

So let’s join them in a radical existential statement : I would rather be wrong and happy than right and miserable.

I have been asking “Would you rather be right, or happy?” for years in reference to people hanging on to emotional and/or philosophical positions that are bad for them simply because if they let go that means someone else was “right” all along and they would rather DIE than admit it.

But it turns out to be far bigger than that. There are things far more important than having the “right” answer or knowing that you are more “right” about things than others.

That is a very hard thing for a former precocious child’s mind to wrap itself around. We tend to have far, far too much of our self-worth wrapped up in being “right”. As if at any second there might be a quiz and we will need all the “right” answers to pass.

But the real logical truth is that what matters most to any of us crazed sex monkeys is whether or not we are happy, not whether or not we are right.

It’s just taken me a long time to figure that out.

Well I said I was intelligent, I didn’t say I was smart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.