In the imaginary small town of Jante there is an informal, oppressive law that forbids anyone from standing out from the crowd:

The Law of Jante

1. Thou shalt not believe thou art something.
2. Thou shalt not believe thou art as good as we.
3. Thou shalt not believe thou art more wise than we.
4. Thou shalt not fancy thyself better than we.
5. Thou shalt not believe thou knowest more than we.
6. Thou shalt not believe thou art greater than we.
7. Thou shalt not believe thou amountest to anything.
8. Thou shalt not laugh at us.
9. Thou shalt not believe that anyone is concerned with thee.
10. Thou shalt not believe thou canst teach us anything.

We are now living in Jante.

Better has died.

There are many reasons behind this, such as the need for empowered individuals that can consume stuff and an exaggerated fascination with democracy, to name a few. However, I want to focus on the fear of violence.

The horror of wars and recent dictatorships have made us afraid of the consequences that fighting for an idea may have. We worry that trying to impose objectivity will inevitably lead to some sort of authoritarianism and physical retaliation. Past (and still fresh) violence has left a bad reputation in people’s ability to handle disagreements. We prefer to say “to each its own” because we believe that a new Hitler can be just around the corner.

Terrorists prove everyday that this possibility is very real. Their blind and retarded belief in a “better scenario” lets them justify any atrocity to humanity. And this is why we need to learn from the past, not ignore it. We need to embrace the intensity of a war and apply it exclusively in an intellectual setting. It’s the year 2010, we have to be able to separate our ideas from our bodies.

Everyone should live with their needs covered in a peaceful society that respects every individual, I’m all for equality in every aspect of life. We can’t let any kind of moral debate overrun human rights.

But when it comes to debating, let’s beat the shit out of each other. We can’t keep putting our emotional fragility before intellectual objectivity either. Let’s stop respecting each others’ feelings so much.

Like Philip Pullman says, no one has the right not to be offended (h/t to Tyler for sharing):

In a world where feelings are a priority, quality of life, ideas and morals drop.

In a world where feelings are a priority, conflict and improvement become taboo.

In a world where feelings are a priority, mediocrity rules.

Here’s to a world that values rationality, logic, quality and growth before fear, feelings and ignorance.

Here’s to the end of Jante.

Being realistic is the fastest way to mediocrity.

Sorry Will, but I disagree.

Realism has bad press, but it’s the best mindset to get things done.

We love to repeat over and over about how you need to stick to your dreams, about how you can accomplish anything you can imagine, and more cliche advice. This is what I call the “Disney Mentality” of our society. We don’t believe in what makes sense, we believe in what sounds good. And what sounds better than dreams? The best things happen there…

Not surprisingly, we usually don’t listen about all those dreams that never became truth, about all those “passionate” people that just failed.

There’s no merit in failing while pursuing something impossible. However, we are sticking to it.

Anything in the name of romance.

Anything in the name of this supposed heroism chasing impossibility brings.

There’s nothing easier, more mediocre and common than dreaming. Everyone has dreams. For example, it’s because of dreams that gambling works so well.

The reason we love to dream is because it gives people the feeling of acting. By keeping their dreams alive, they hold on to the idea of making them real eventually, without putting the required effort to make it happen. I may write, dream and talk about love and how I haven’t “found it” yet, but you know what might actually help? Shaving and going to the gym.

Not that romantic.

True realism does not let you dream. It needs you to act. There’s no justification for doing nothing if you are realistic, because you know that wishing and hoping gets you nowhere. True realism means seeing the world as it is, taking the good with the bad, and then doing something that can be done. It means changing what can be changed. Don’t confuse this with false realism (the most common kind), which consists on rationalizing one’s laziness.

Semantics indeed

Now, some might say that I’m sending the same message with different words.

And that’s exactly the problem.

It’s the choice of words what’s harming us.

The words and mentality that we use affect our actions. Someone who “works hard” will accomplish more than someone who “follows his passion.” The thing is, passion and dreams are much more appealing (and meaningless) concepts than hard work. This is why all these self-help books disguised as business advice are doing wonders: They are a manipulative fad that make people believe they are moving forward.

It’s by making everyone feel good about their lack of focus and concrete actions that Smith’s empty sentence sounds wise.

Bottom Line: Realism is a powerful and liberating mindset. With it, you’ll aim high and your shot will land somewhere.

This priceless collectible will permit you to be surrounded by hobby-less assholes whose entire life is dictated by billing by the hour and being anal dickheads. Additionally, this piece of paper has the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success. Finally, girls in the Marina will swoon with retarded thoughts of sugar daddy when they hear you went to XXX prestigious law school and are a lawyer.

It’s a tragedy when remarkable people realize they are remarkable too late.

This case proves the sad reality that has struck me recently:

Context trumps individuality.

The reason an out-of-the-box thinker and ambitious person may follow a traditional and less fulfilling path is because either a) the societal pressure is too strong to avoid, or b) the context lacks the tools, means and support to exploit that capacity.

The reason I relate to this lawyer, is that we both realized too late that with a different context and more support for our ambitions, we would have gotten further. I will always wonder where I would be if I would have been born in the US, or at least, in another first world country that had similar intellectual opportunities.

For example, when I think of Colin Wright or Ben Casnocha, friends that have achieved much more than I did so far, I feel that I lost the race. Not the race with them (although I am competitive), but the race with myself had I had their context.

The obvious response is that things couldn’t have happened in any other way and that I wouldn’t have realized this if I hadn’t been through what I did. While true, the possibilities that escaped me since day one (and still do) are too many to be ignored in a flat world.

Another harsh realization of late awareness is the need to lower my expectations. While others were taking advantage of the entrepreneurial culture and taking unconventional paths, I spent most of my life realizing that there was such a thing as an entrepreneurial culture and an unconventional path.

While others were doing, I was catching up. I’m way behind on the path that society considers successful.

And there are real barriers, such as language, visa requirements and currency exchange, to name a few. While not impossible to overcome, they are permanent weights that slow down anyone that has to deal with them.

The hardest truth is this: The world doesn’t give a crap about what I’ve done so far. The world wants start-ups, Fortune 500 corporate experience and world traveling knowledge. It doesn’t care about self-realizations and unconventional personal philosophies, however hard it was to reach them.

This is not a regret. It’s coming to terms with reality. It’s what every ambitious person who lacks a supportive context has to understand:

My definition of success has to be unique and personal, because it will never match the world’s.

1) This one is obvious: The bad white military man that attacks poorer civilizations to steal their resources. Clear criticism towards corporatism and the American government, no further explanation needed.

2) This one is more subtle since it involves the spectator: We are embarrassed by what we have done to our planet. That’s why we, human viewers, end up wanting that they, human invaders, lose the battle. We want to learn the lesson.

Avatar makes a strong case on our primitive need to go back to a natural lifestyle. The spectator realizes that we are quickly moving towards technological progress and that living in nature is going to be impossible for most of us by now.

Our animal inside knows that societal satisfaction is less fulfilling than natural satisfaction.

Our animal inside wants us to cut ties and respect our home once again.

Our animal inside feels guilty.

Tangibles

How much money you make, which car you drive, where you live, the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat, the places you visit. If you summed the financial value of all the tangible things in your possession, you would get a “number”, which would tell you how much you are “worth.” This is why rich people are considered more important in society – or at least looked up to, and why a homeless person may feel miserable for not having any stuff.

The problem with measuring yourself in this way is that there’s so much tangibles can do for your sense of fulfillment. If we were to think of a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being absolutely miserable, and 10 feeling very valuable, even if you are the richest man in the world, you would only get to 3 or 4 just with tangibles.

Intangibles

How famous you are, how powerful you are, the amount of relationships you have, how many people are you in charge of, how successful you are with the opposite sex.These intangibles that society considers high-status define how valuable we think we are.

With a decent and balanced number of material possessions and experiences, a good rating of intangibles gives a person a high degree of value. For example, if you have enough stuff to live well, time for your hobbies, a good number of strong friendships, a loving partner and are respected looked up to by your peers, chances are you consider yourself a valuable person.

The Conflict

My point behind this predictable analysis: intangibles get in the way of people understanding each other.

If you became an 8 because you are a womanizer, you’ll consider yourself as important and worthy of people’s respect as an 8 who got there by being a famous rock star, or a respected scientist. When the ways to measure ourselves are so many, a unified way of valuation becomes impossible.

This is why people will call others arrogant, jerk, incompetent, lazy and nerd. Because the areas that they consider interesting and respectful are the ones where they themselves are considered interesting and respected.

This does not mean that we don’t see value in others. It just means that it’s hard for a regular lawyer to consider a regular doctor as valuable and interesting as him.

It means that most groups of people think they are better than others (even though some may be right).

It means that we are clueless when judging someone’s value.

But most of all, it means that you have to ignore anyone that defines your worth because they have no idea what they are talking about.

If you are living your life looking for happiness, you’ll feel disappointed with the results, and here’s why:

1) There are more tangible things to look for (often not discussed in those happiness books and speeches): laughter, material possessions, sex, intellectual growth, free time, and more. These are much better symbols of happiness, joy and accomplishment than happiness itself. When we experience them, happiness becomes graspable. Those are the popular happy moments.

2) It’s hard to feel it as a whole. What usually happens is that we evaluate our life and calculate an approximate level of happiness depending on our current situation on many variables, like our jobs, relationships, achievements, and more. We define happiness as being “happy enough so far” instead of seeking sensations that are easy to describe and transmit.

3) Happiness is as imprecise and appealing as the idea of “heaven.” I’m sure that there’s some historical connection between the concept of happiness and a heavenly after-life. On a side note: writers and speakers who make money selling the promise of happiness are the priests of the XXI century.

4) If you lived most of your life happy, but you were miserable the last year, then you died miserable. Having an impact on the world and leading an exemplary, ethical life without regrets is more important than being happy, because it cannot be taken away by time and its randomness.

Here’s Betsey Stevenson on the difference between happiness and fulfillment (h/t Stephen Dodson):

There is probably more to life than even life satisfaction. I know that sounds almost oxymoronic, but perhaps we’re missing a sense of greater purpose or fulfillment.

The example I give to demonstrate the limits of happiness data is that people with children are less happy than equivalent people without children. The only explanation that I can think of is that parents are more stressed and harried so when they’re asked about happiness or life satisfaction, they’re not quite as joyous or satisfied as people without kids. But it’s hard for me to imagine that they’re all making a mistake by having children.

To sum it up, there are bigger things in life.

Ben once asked me:

If you could be plugged to a machine that made you feel happy all the time… would you do it?

After thinking hard about it, I realized that I would not.

For me, and I suspect for more people as well, a happy life is an uncomfortable life. In other words, predictability and lack of hardships means an unfulfilled and unhappy life (although this may change in the future since my life philosophy involves the benefits of a healthy body and mind). By overcoming discomfort, I grow as a person and find meaning to life.

Bottom Line: Increasing my wisdom and passing it on to future generations is a more important goal for me than happiness. Each person may have different life objectives and value hierarchies, but I’m confident than most people don’t have happiness at the top, even if they say they do when they are hurried for an answer.

You can subscribe to Ophelias’ Webb here.

Elisa, one of the nicest girls I’ve met online, reached out to me to write a post about love for her blogging series “All you need is love.” I don’t usually write about this kind of stuff, but it was a good moment to show my cynicism regarding the topic. Thank you Elisa, I had a blast doing it!

Do read my guest post “Love Is Irrelevant.”

Things rarely go exactly the way you want them to, so sometimes you make due with whatever you can get.

Endings are never easy; I always build them up so much in my head they can’t possibly live up to my expectations, and I just end up disappointed. I’m not even sure why it matters to me so much how things end here.

I guess it’s because we all want to believe that what we do is very important, that people hang onto our every word, that they care what we think. The truth is: you should consider yourself lucky if you even occasionally get to make someone, anyone, feel a little better. After that it’s all about the people that you let into your life…

…And even though it felt warm and safe, I knew it had to end. It’s never good to live in the past too long.

As for the future, it didn’t seem so scary anymore. It could be whatever I wanted it to be…

And who’s to say this isn’t what happens? Who can tell me that my fantasies won’t come true… just this once?

In reality, you never know what’s going to happen.

Let go.

Enjoy the ride.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” – Steve Jobs

Here’s the best reason to do whatever you feel you have to do in today‘s world, without worrying about the consequences: today’s dots are infinite.

Fifty years ago, one of the strongest arguments to keep people on the safe path was predictability. It wasn’t that hard to foresee how many possibilities a person would have depending on what they studied, where they lived and which people they knew. This happened because the variables that influenced someone’s future (let’s call them “dots”) were very few. Money, heritage, and geography mattered. You could still challenge traditional paths, but the tools and reach were limited. Changing the world fifty years ago was harder than it is today, simple as that.

If you looked back and tried to connect the dots back then, the unpredictable ones were fewer. A linear path was easy to walk.

Now, the world is flat, globalization is happening and the internet is shortening the distance between each other. When the world truly is your oyster, every aspect of your life will get affected (and probably improved) if you decide to step out of your traditional boundaries. Thanks to today’s connectivity and the increasingly popular “world citizenship” mentality, the magnetism of people’s desires can bring them together fast and easy.

The process of dot connecting does not have to be hard, but it has to be consistent. With every little challenging step that you take now, you are opening the door to countless new opportunities. There are enough dots for everyone to reach an interesting life, but you have to keep opening doors.

You need to be strong, independent, and aware that you can’t know how things will work out. If you can see the outcome clearly, rest assured that you’re going after a boring and mediocre lifestyle. If you are trying to “make sense”, then you are going after other people’s definition of “sense.”

Lives full of exciting dots don’t make sense.

Sparked by Colin Wright

The concept of Happiness Hyperopia is very interesting:

Overestimating the benefits we think we will accrue at some mythical time in the future.

There are people who “suffer” from this condition. But there are also people who do not. I asked my friend Steve a long time ago: What is more likely to happen? Overvaluing or undervaluing the future?

Steve’s reply:

“My take is that it depends on who it is.  For example, someone who does a lot of hard-core drugs or gets a facial tattoo is obviously someone who is likely to undervalue the future.  On the other hand, the person who toils away in a miserable job just for the money that he theoretically will spend when he retires is someone who overvalues the future.”

While Steve may be right, those are extreme examples. They are not demonstrative samples of the rest of us.

My estimation is that most people do suffer from happiness hyperopia, whatever it is they do. You don’t have to be an executive that works 70 hours a week to overvalue your future. Happiness hyperopia is what feeds consumerism: the constant illusion of a better future. We become victims of this “condition” frequently, no matter how many times we have been disappointed before. We bought that device, we got that job, we dated that girl, only to end up looking for something else.

There are many reasons happiness hyperopia to be so prominent:

- Tradition would be one. The mentality that religion has impregnated in our culture for hundreds of years is all about happiness hyperopia. What’s religion if not a promise of a heavenly future as long as you pay your dues on Earth?

- The increase of our life span also has huge effects on our way to see the future. When people lived 40 years and the fear of war or many deathly illnesses was constantly present, there weren’t many motivators to wait, invest and play the “hope” game. Now, with many of those fears mostly eradicated, we can expect a wonderful future if we work hard enough. Not that this future will ever come, though.

- When one gets rational about this, one can’t avoid considering the “live now” mentality as the best choice. The problem is that “living now” is not that easy either, because dying now is hard. When you know that there’s nothing after you die (which more and more people are believing), there’s a lot at stake on living like a rock star. Basically, those that live the moment and undervalue their future aren’t ready to say their goodbyes before their undervalued future catches up with them, which usually does in today’s world. People get to live for many years regretting their past decisions.

In the end, happiness hyperopia is all we have. We can’t go any other way because we’ve been trained to overvalue our future.

Trying to be realistic and being ready to settle is the best choice. It will bring the most tolerant misery (or the most realistic happiness).