I’ve come across a lot of ideas since my self-improvement journey began. Many of them have been wonderful and have made my life better whenever I’ve used them consistently. However, there have also been plenty of bad ideas that have either kept me from improving or have gone so far as to make me regress. Sometimes pointing out the ideas to avoid can be just as important as pointing out the ideas to practice; simply steering clear of potholes can save a lot of trouble, both on the road and in life. Here are some ideas that I think should be avoided at all costs.
- “You can’t know the good without the bad”. I almost always hear this said alongside a long speech about everything from light and darkness to good and evil. The idea itself and the speech come across to me as attempts to think or talk away painful emotions instead of working through them. Also, how can anyone claim to know with certainty that idea about good and bad? Since nobody has gone through a whole life knowing only good or only bad, nobody can truly know if this statement is true or false. Instead of believing badness to be an essential element of life, it’s better to work to reduce or eliminate it wherever possible, which is difficult to do if one believes the first idea on this list.
- “You need some sadness in life”. Another seeming attempt to rationalize painful experiences instead of working through negative emotions and avoiding unnecessary pain. This one is similar enough to the previous idea that I’ll add a necessary clarifying point: it’s still important to work through sadness when it comes up. Most of my posts since 2020 have discussed this to some degree, so I won’t belabor the point here. As crucial as it is to manage sadness in a healthy way, it’s equally crucial to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that a life without sadness would somehow be worse than a life with sadness.
- “Protect your energy”. Of all the ideas on this list, this one is the least bad. I believe the intentions behind it are good but that it causes more harm than good. In addition to fostering excessive personal guarding, the notion that energy can be taken or given from person to person creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that can make someone attempting to “protect energy” feel worse than if he had done nothing. On a practical level, I’ve never heard any explanation of how to “protect energy” from anyone who’s used that phrase around me. My own daily practice involves noticing how I’m feeling and doing whatever I need to either stay feeling good or feel better if I’m feeling bad. This could include eating, drinking water, moving around, sleeping, using the bathroom, taking some deep breaths, talking to a kind person, spending time by myself, etc. I find all of that self-care more useful than trying to “protect energy”.
- “Life is suffering”. By far the worst idea on this list, it’s hard to know where to start with this one since there’s so much wrong with it. For one thing, it’s factually wrong. Suffering is a mental state, not an inevitable fact of life and especially not the totality of life itself. Someone can be in great pain without suffering while another can be in hardly any pain and yet suffer greatly. This is totally lost when someone uses that phrase without ever defining the word “suffering” or using the term “suffering” interchangeably with other words such as “pain”, “misery”, “discontent”, etc. Further, this phrase is often attributed to the Buddha despite the fact that it is a massive perversion of what the Buddha actually said. Although getting an accurate translation is difficult, it is safe to say that his ideas were more nuanced and useful than saying “Life is suffering”. Lastly, this phrase seems like an easy excuse to make oneself and others miserable. Creating and spreading misery was precisely what someone I once knew did almost every chance he got; the fact that this person also used this phrase more than anyone else I’ve ever known is, to me, no coincidence. If he wasn’t already out of my life, I still wouldn’t have turned to him for support when I lost my dog Sawyer. Knowing him and remembering some specific situations involving animals, he’d have made me feel much worse with his harsh words and total lack of compassion. Rather than repeat his mistakes, it’s best to recognize that life is an adventure that we can either use it for good or for bad, and to do our best to use it for good.