No, this isn’t the opening section to a brand new snazzy tabletop RPG, after where they explain to you what an RPG is and what dice are (in case you’re a moron from space) but before the cool part where they list all the spells and superpowers and stuff.
This is about the other kind of character building, the kind your parents talked about, invariably when forcing you to do something incredibly unpleasant.
“It builds character!” they said, as if that meant something other than “I’m in charge and so there’s no way I’m gonna be the one to clean the gutters, chump. ”
“Screw character, I want to build a LEGO fort!” we defiantly retorted, right to their faces, in our minds, as we sullenly got out the rake.
But as it turns out, like with a lot of the crazy and apparently nakedly self-serving nonsense our parents babble at us when attempting to raise non-axe-murdering children, there is an important nugget o’ truth in there that is worth learning, if only they had bothered to actually explain what the hell they were talking about.
What they meant when they said “It builds character!” is something roughly like this : “as hard as it may be to believe, the ability to just do things you don’t want to do without a lot of time and energy wasted whining or foot-dragged is actually amazingly important in life, and the sooner you develop this ability to basically get the hell over yourself and get the job done, the better off you will be when you leave the nest and go out on your own, my dear child, whom I love more than life itself. ”
You can see why this is a bit much to explain while heading out the door to run a million errands on a Saturday morning.
Sure, by definition, we don’t want to do things we don’t want to do. Duh. But all of life involves doing exactly that. If you try living a life where you don’t do anything that you don’t want to do, you end up having a lot of things you don’t want happening to you, and not getting nearly anything that you actually do want, and brother, that sucks way worse.
Your parents, being, as it were, advance scouts into the world of adulthood and reality for their children, know this truth intimately (you think they want to be running your butt to soccer instead of popping a brewski in front of the bigscreen? or hell, go to work five days a week to pay for your, you know, everything?) and in their fumbling way are trying to pass that lesson on to you and save you a lot of what they had to go through in order to grow up and get on with life.
There is always things that you don’t want to do, but you want the result of doing it, so it’s do them or do without. That’s as true of going to work at a kinda sucky job every day as it is of going to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich and risk missing the last five minutes of House. Even rich people end up doing things they don’t particularly want to do because they want the results of doing it.
Like appearing on reality TV programs, for instance.
And if you have already decided that you want something bad enough to do what it takes to get it, there’s no point in wasting time and energy and wear and tear on your pouting muscles fucking around about it.
You are way, way ahead of the game if you can just go and do it, and save yourself a lot of grief, and the ability to do that is what is meant when people talk of “character”. Like all skills, it gets easier with practice, and if you are smart, you learn that when you are young enough to use it to get ahead and get more out of life than your whiny, foot-dragging, time-wasting friends at school.
It’s really just about making your actions match your intentions. Sure you don’t feel like doing it and you wish you didn’t have to do it to get what you want, but you want the result bad enough, so why waste time?
Just do it, and get on with your life.
And that, believe it or not, is what they were going on about when they told you that doing something “builds character”.
They really were trying to help you.
Don’t you think maybe you owe them an apology?