How to own your life - The Harden Way
The 8 commandments of Harden
This issue to dedicated to a tweet I put out a while back. The tweet came to me as a sudden bang of energy while I was heading to the airport to board a flight for Bangalore. I had recently put my resignation paper and my last working day was just around the corner. For a brief moment, life felt complete. As if a lengthy chapter has finally ended.
This is my attempt to study the threads of that tweet’s fabric and capture its essence in length. It will help in setting the context for what this community is all about. I believe that every community has a few grounding principles to keep the mission’s spirit high and aligned. So, here goes the 8 commandments of Harden. These are attitudes that will help you in holding your ground while fighting against the subtle loss of agency in the socio-digital age.
Forgiveness is a virtue that is hardly ever taught to us. Well, not everything in life is going to be taught to us. But we intuitively learn to forgive in early childhood, since attachment is of cardinal importance and we don’t have much choice. What we never learn is to forgive ourselves. We wonder if forgiving ourselves is similar to not taking responsibility for our actions or the wrongs we did?
The thing is even if you are to right the wrong, you can’t do it under guilt or grief. You can’t go around planting the seeds of goodwill if you are constantly pulled by the chains of guilt. You have to give your whole to the problems to honestly take a shot at correcting them. At the end of the day, you have to go to bed with yourself. Chances are you are looking at a certain adverse event through the gaze of society. It’s good to see it that way for the sake of understanding the problem broadly but when it comes to solving it, that’s a detrimental perspective. Even if you are willing to improve, you have to forgive yourself. You have to be your own devil’s advocate and god simultaneously. The sooner you forgive yourself, the sooner you iterate, and the quicker you improve your life.
The accentuated virtuosity on social media makes us feel that we are constantly doing something wrong. Our minds have a tendency to pick sensational word patterns and obsess over them. But words spread 100x more than actions. The more we consume, the harder it becomes for us to recalibrate ourselves to our base reality. To accept that every single person is fallible and social media is very efficient in skewing this fact. So, adopting the attitude of mercilessly forgiving ourselves will help us in moving forward faster. Why mercilessly? Because we have a tendency of rationalizing too much about past events that occurred under chaotic circumstances. But we are not very good at dodging the guilt that sneaks in as a result. That’s why at times, we need to exercise our sheer will against the tendencies of our minds.
The poet David Whyte on forgiveness:
“To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity; we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.”
David Perell writes that we are living in a commitment crisis. The illusion of optionality and serendipity has provided us an easy excuse to avoid commitment, be it in our relationships, work, or big life decisions. Remember that compounding works only when you commit to something for a long time. It doesn’t work when you have spread your time and efforts on a number of serendipitous encounters, ultimately amounting to nothing concrete.
It really comes down to a decision crisis. Even if you have a habit of analyzing and assessing, most of our decisions are highly influenced by our gut instincts. Yet the barrage of options nowadays cripples us into deciding things. We delude ourselves into thinking that we should be careful about what’s best for us. But we don’t realize that the best decision can be known in no time if we are already clear about our values. If you are not clear, you will revolve around the options with a flailing sense of carefulness.
More and more people are becoming overprotective. The exaggerated negative and often polarized information on social media has led us into believing that we have been wronged in one way or the other, either by society, the government, or the culture. Which directly hampers decision-making as you grow unnecessarily careful and stop believing your natural instincts. However deep down, it really is a problem of courage. We are living with so much noise that subtly, all the right virtues are being eradicated from our society.
Everybody says we should learn from our mistakes but today, people are so afraid of making mistakes that they are hindering their own improvement. In a highly dynamic environment, the one who takes more calculated risks is going to improve faster than anyone else. Courage has to be practiced actively. It doesn’t pour like rain. The more you practice courage, the more you own your decisions. The more you own your decisions, the quicker you take them and march forward.
Since the digital world moves too fast, we have to take a lot of small decisions every day. Decisions that seem big but are inconsequential. When you get stuck on them, they hinder your well-being. More information doesn’t change the nature of things. It just adds more noise and makes the process more difficult. The goal is to cultivate confidence so that you don’t get stuck in deciding and owing the consequences. The goal is to trust your intuition often instead of noise.
Pain is not bad. Adding a value judgment to it is bad. Pain adds meaning to your life. While suppressing and ignoring the pain can work for some time, eventually, it sneaks into other aspects of your life. Suppress it enough and it becomes sadness. Pain is traceable but sadness is hard to trace. When we think of pain as a bad thing, we are implicitly saying that problems are bad. While the truth is that problems are inevitable. What we seek is not to avoid problems but good problems to solve. Pain is the most strongly felt after-effect of an unsolved problem.
We need to realize that though our pain is uniquely felt by us, the emotion itself is not that unique. There’s beauty in overcoming pain. In the journey of overcoming, you invent aspects of yourself that you were oblivious of. So, in a sense, overcoming pain is creation. Pain is insane fuel if you learn how to tame it. Just like we learned to tame fire. Rather than suppressing pain into sadness, we can let it express itself in the form of productive anger.
We often miss to realize that there’s insane power in shared pain. When you share and understand someone’s pain, you automatically inherit an existential belonging to that person. Repeat the same with more people and you separate the pain that is tightly coupled with your self and expose it in open light. You stop identifying your existence with your pain. Now, everyone you shared your pain with stands together against one common enemy. Suddenly, you have meaning in life. Meaning emerges just like that. Meaning is anything that several people unite to fight for.
Pain is the universal medium through which we collectively heal. For example, look at the comments under any Youtube video by Kendrick Lamar or Kanye West. Both these singers create music influenced by their experience of trauma, social injustice, suffering and overcoming struggles, etc. People feel raging power inside after listening to them, even if some of their experiences are completely unrelated to the singers’ experiences. Pain unites us on a visceral level. Imagine if every person felt a different emotion toward pain. That would suck real bad. Pain is a means of creation for music, arts, books, adventures, movements, etc. Your very existence is a homage to the creation that came out of the pain you felt in the past. When we share our pain with others, it becomes firewood. People become united to heal a single universal human problem.
Humor is a medicine to cure fuckups. Not just occasional. But every day. Fuckups should be fungible. Achievements should not. The irony of fuckups is that if you want to improve, you can’t treat them as fuckups. You have to believe that you did what you had to do. It’s almost laughable.
Humor acts as the 0 on the number line of events that happened in your life. On the negative side are all your fuckups. On the positive side are all your achievements. You must come to 0 if you want to march forward towards the good things. Humour is often a signal from our psyches that we are taking things too seriously where simplicity is required. Our minds can handle complex scenarios but we should be careful not to fool ourselves. We can think of gazillion ways for how things could have been done but we shouldn’t discount too much of our constraints.
We have a tendency of focusing more on our mistakes and less on our successes. It’s hardwired in us in the form of survival instincts. There’s always some fear that sets the undertone of our actions. But it should be a healthy relationship. It should not cripple us. On some levels, our fuckups are not unique. But we think so because we think of ourselves as special. Deep down we want our fuckups to be unique as that separates you from the herd and also makes for a good story. But that doesn’t align with reality. Mistakes are repeatable but disguised as unique in lack of information. So, laughter is a good way of seeing repeatable mistakes as an essential human trait.
Laughter has the kind of energy that is not available in the usual state. When we laugh uncontrollably, we are the most confident versions of ourselves. So, the underlying tone here is to become more confident. When we are confident about our decisions, any failure or mistake will seem like an inevitable joke life plays on us as a cost of improvement — which we can funge with laughter.
We all are the product of our narratives running in our minds. A simple exercise to test this is to ask yourself - did you choose your next thought? The answer is no. Thoughts appear randomly in consciousness. We are always in the process of filtering thoughts. Only the ones who pass the filter set by our values and beliefs are considered useful. Unless we aren’t highly self-aware people, most of our values and beliefs are there to defend ourselves from the unknown. The unknown is anything that doesn’t align with our narrative.
Our narratives are the engines that drive our actions. It’s what grounds us in our version of reality. It’s our psychological home. But our values are not always perfect. Chances are they might be detrimental to our growth. They are born out of circumstances that were out of our control. Most of them are formed in our childhood and teenage years. But circumstances change while values don’t get updated automatically. Hence, we have to keep asking the hard question of whether they are serving us or not. If not, they cap our true potential.
There is always an ongoing fight between our values and available mindsets. A mindset is a powerful tool that is accessible to everyone. It has a track record of change. It has the power to break the spell of our narratives. New ones should be adopted and old ones should be adapted to the changing times. It’s more urgent nowadays because the modern hyperconnected world is altering our psychological models of reality.
Observe when you snap out of a certain chain of involuntary thoughts. You wonder what were you even thinking. Think of your narrative as a deep-seated version of the chain that is hard to snap out of — because it directly challenges your reality. It’s hard to update it but sometimes you have to jump into a lake that is not too deep to see if you really fear it or not. You see, it comes down to honestly seeing your personal truths and taking responsibility for your situation. You can either see yourself as the victim of your circumstances or you can respect the human potential to defy all the odds. It comes with what is worth struggling for.
Every day we wake up and involuntarily choose our narrative. The acceptance of this fact is profound. We should be careful of fooling ourselves. We are fallible beings. That’s why we should frequently question the narratives that are driving us forward. We must not only be the readers. We must also become authors.
Contrary to popular belief, existentialism is good for your growth. People who display a hint of existentialism are more creative, open to perspectives, and always curious. They are also good at figuring out solutions to problems in novel ways. You can say they resemble the first principles approach as they often question the fundamentals of life, nature, and existence.
But people who don’t appreciate paradoxes get stuck into existentialist thinking only to get into a state of despair. A good life requires constantly being aware of the paradoxes of reality. We may not know all the answers to the universe but we also know a lot of them compared to the other species. We might suffer all our lives but we also get to enjoy the insane beauty of the universe. We are first and foremost human beings.
To explain what it means to be a human requires everything to be explained about the universe and vice versa. Objective reality means nothing without subjective experience. Human beings create their own abstract worlds full of meaning to give value to life. We can hope to find objective truths only when we reject the default nature of existence.
There’s a very fine line between existentialism and nihilism. You see not everyone is dealt a good hand in life from the get-go. And most probably, people are the primary reason behind that. So, it’s an easy instance to take that life is a single-player game and people don’t matter. But the very fact that we are here and a lot of species aren’t — rejects that notion. It takes work to find the people that can make life better for each other. It isn’t any less creative than learning a skill or finding a purpose. Euphoria requires effort and there’s nothing wrong with it. Every interaction with another human being is an opportunity to unlock it.
No relationship survives if there’s no tension. Tension is necessary and it’s good. It is not rigid but it’s not too loose. It requires certain stamina of hold from both sides and enough creativity and patience to not break the string. Life is like that. Life is full of absurd ideas, structures, processes, and events. You think you understand it well and then COVID comes and destroys everyone’s understanding. Forget life, you don’t even know yourself well. It’s in the moments of absurdity does our true character is revealed. So, there’s a lot of dark matter that remains unexplored because we try to fit everything into rationalistic roadways and chronological chains.
You see life is chaotic. It rewards randomness and is fundamentally antifragile. Human beings have a tendency to build order in everything and systematize our behaviors around that order. However, most of our profound experiences happen when we break the order, knowingly or unknowingly. Our minds register those memories starkly. So, it’s a clear signal from our psyches to go absurd sometimes. It’s like life and our psyches are in secret conversations trying to say something from the backdoor but our rationality-fused minds are too ignorant to think of it as important information. It is a code that is right in front of our eyes waiting to be cracked.
This is necessary. Stability is its own enemy. We were not born to repeat industrial patterns. It’s a waste of life. And it will keep bugging you until you don’t start to go unhinged once in a while. It’s resistance from your core. You can’t ignore it. Eventually, it will create so much psychological friction that will result in unwanted actions with heightened rupture.
When I say go insane, I’m not saying go outside and wreak havoc or leave everything you are doing right now and start doing everything that you always wanted to do without having any concern for health, safety, responsibility, and finances. It’s about going insane in your mindset and worldview. The world doesn’t like a vacuum but vacuums are always there ready to be filled. It’s the process of discovering an identity that is aligned with what people are missing in society but don’t know how to reach there. You need to be a role model.
You need to provide people with new ways of thinking and making sense of the world. You have to be useful. No one likes to see an insane freak show without any potential value. But it always starts with the mindset. You need to be in love with the unknown. Even if you want to go insane in physicality and by that I mean doing impactful things in a novel way away from the rat race. First, you reprogram your mind which then reprograms society. To bring change at the level of structures and atoms, you need to switch lanes in the abstract world of your psyche.
If this ring some bells with you, please share your thoughts in the comments. Share with your friends so that they can also be a part of our growing community and take charge of your bodyminds. Lastly, please share your queries and feedback with me at letsharden@gmail.com or at Twitter @poetofgrindset.
Really good Poet!
I have been experiencing these things first hand. This seems like a right approach towards the absurdity that is our life.
In the world full of "Let us sad be all together about life on the Internet and never work on ourselves", this is much needed shot in the hand for everyone.
Wishing success for Harden!
Excellent piece which reminds time n again that u ve such a nuanced independent understanding about life. Blissful reading