It takes a lot to put a lot in.
Most of us are definitely cowards. Few
people ever put their whole selves into actions or tasks.
Now, the surface reason for this is that it’s just too hard
to invest the combined behemoth of all of a person’s
energies into a certain thing. But, really, it takes far
more than strength and endurance to devote your one hundred
Why else do we see a lazy legion of
slumped teenagers sitting at desks in classes? Why else do
we reside in a world soaked with regrets? Why else are we
always stopping in our tracks, turning around, and
ruminating about the missed trails we could have taken? Why
else do few people ever feel fully satisfied?
Because pouring all of the sweat and
blood you have into something signifies something huge.
It means that you acknowledge that
there’s something you can’t do. That even if you try your
best, you may not be able to accomplish a certain task.
Because if you give it your everything and find that you
fail, this means that the task really isn’t yours to
conquer. It means facing reality, because in the real world,
while many are abetted by other people and told that they
can “do anything they put their minds to,” nobody really
But it also demonstrates that you care
whole-heartedly about something. Which is kind of gross in
our world. I mean, nobody wants to see amazing passion from
the disgustingly ordinary people! It’s revolting and
pathetic. It’s so horribly open and gaping in sincerity that
we all just want to shut it and sew it closed before its
sappy syrup slips out and spreads to us all.
Nobody likes these realizations – neither
that of reality nor of sincerity. How funny that closing
ourselves from these two ideas is what we dope ourselves
into thinking will actually gift them to us.
Take high school as a case study.
Students proudly brandish good grades they say they earned
without trying and grimace when they hear the deadened voice
of a student who applied his or her everything and failed.
It hurts to truly know yourself. So why give everything?
Hey, what’s the extent of your ability anyway? What’s the
point in trying so hard to find out? Just sit back and have
fun and don’t care and watch the world with glazed eyes.
After a while this mantra has a lulling effect, making your
eyelids flutter and dip to a close. How nice. How
convenient. How ignorance-is-bliss-ish.
It may hurt to truly know yourself, but
nothing could possibly feel more invigorating or real.
Because then that brainwashing muck that society lathers us
with of “relaxed is cool” and “not trying hard is cool” will
all efface and leave behind a clearer world.
More importantly, we’d be putting the
individual and the individual’s power on the pedestal it
deserves. A weakened and brainwashed society is far easier
to subject, with its individual constituents getting too
weak and lazy to stand alone, so weak and lazy that they all
sort of fall slowly into each other, a silly, vapid mass.
So. Try trying sometime.