The Identity Trap: How to Be Less Wrong – Personal Growth – Medium: Think about the difference between how you viewed a big event in your past, with all its facts and feelings, versus how you view that same event now with different thinking patterns dominating your mind. Now consider how that may change again in 10 to 20 to 30 years.
This gap between the reality (that our identities are in constant flux ) and the mistaken fantasy (that rigidly confines them within the bounds of a particular systematic framework) causes us to make decisions that are neither in our own self-interest nor that of those around us.
Whatever your actual, objective identity is — if such a thing even exists — is always a step ahead of the frameworks you design to capture it, and this attempt at capturing drags with it a past that may no longer be relevant.
The world around you exists independently of the opinions of right and wrong that you enforce on it. Rorschach may have done something heroic and touching by showing courage as he refused to compromise on his principles, but if we step back a bit, this lack of compromise actually lead the world in a direction that he, himself, was fighting to avoid.
Always being consistent makes you inconsistent with the reality around you.
This gap between the reality (that our identities are in constant flux ) and the mistaken fantasy (that rigidly confines them within the bounds of a particular systematic framework) causes us to make decisions that are neither in our own self-interest nor that of those around us.
Whatever your actual, objective identity is — if such a thing even exists — is always a step ahead of the frameworks you design to capture it, and this attempt at capturing drags with it a past that may no longer be relevant.
The world around you exists independently of the opinions of right and wrong that you enforce on it. Rorschach may have done something heroic and touching by showing courage as he refused to compromise on his principles, but if we step back a bit, this lack of compromise actually lead the world in a direction that he, himself, was fighting to avoid.
Always being consistent makes you inconsistent with the reality around you.