“Hey, It Works For Me.”

Brian Lynch

After speaking with a number of people in our lives there comes a time when we note that if people talk about themselves in any kind of insightful way they will say some remarkably insightful and accurate things about their personality but then seemingly not be able to use the information they just brought into consciousness.

Someone might say “I tend to see things in ‘black and white’ and that is the way it is.” Their voice will trail off and then go on to something else. Or maybe they will note that they see others in a similar situation that they have been in recently, but they just don’t have the patience to tolerate it in others. That is, they cannot help others, as they would like to have been helped.

As terrible as it sounds it seems that many people, in a manner of speaking, give up on life rather early. They give up in the sense of having a life of affluence, rather life is seen as “life is hard and you better get used to it.” The sense of this is magnificently expressed by psychologist Silvan Tomkins in speaking of grander defenses against life’s hardships when he says we enter a “..lifelong war that need never have been waged, against enemies (including the bad self) who were not as dangerous or villainous as they have become, for heavens that never were as good as imagined.”

There is evidence, that I would think is counterintuitive, that people become more sociable as they age and that in their twenties they are actually less sociable and more work-oriented. 

Implicit in the psychology of the late teens to the early twenties is “deciding how things are” and going with it. That is solidifying your ideals. The danger is, that while by necessity, one will have to close off certain options as life goes on to get anything done, one may also take on thoughts that are more rigid than necessary and that we may start to project onto others. That is, we may start to say others should be like we are. 

Of course, with not much reflection these thoughts are not surprising. For the vast majority of humanity, it is a matter of facing some kind of economic reality fairly early in life. A tiny minority of people have any advanced education at all. We are put out in the world with frighteningly little information and especially frighteningly little in the way of how to find alternative solutions to life’s problems. It is not surprising that we will then fixate on “what works” for us. “Hey, that seemed to work last time, why not this time?”   

We can fall into all manner of “bad” habits. It “seems” to work if I yell at people. I get my way I seduce people. This can go on for years and years before anything serious happens or before I realize how much better things could have been doing it another way. Or I more or less “decided” to hide from life and this went on for years and years and maybe I did or did not find out the damage I did to myself and others. But hey, “it worked” I was “alive” wasn’t I? The “Dapper Don” “Mafia King-Pin” John Gotti, lived with the belief and reality/acceptance that he would either be assassinated, “whacked” or die in prison. It “worked” for him.

Now is this anyone’s fault? No, it isn’t. It is the state of society. It only says we now know what the situation is. If we know the situation maybe we can change the larger conditions that trap so many people. It means making education ever so much richer at an earlier age.