Using Anti-Role Models to Establish Life Continuity

How to not wait for the perfect moment

ESTABLISHING LIFE CONTINUITY

One of the most important steps a person can take towards increasing the quality of their life is to establish continuity.

Remind yourself that every choice you make today is a vote for yourself tomorrow. At your job, look at your senior coworkers. You will morph into them. Look at your friend group. You are slowly becoming more like them. Do you want that?

Everytime you indulge in a negative habit, you are cementing that to your identity. Conversely, every time you do something aligned with your personal development, you are growing into a growing person.

Even with this knowledge, it's extremely easy to delude oneself into false productivity. It takes the following form:

“I want to be as expressive, creative, original, healthy, smart, talented, rich, and (insert desired adjective) as XYZ, so I will model myself after them.”

People, lives, and subjects worthy of praise always bring a large element of autochthonously created content, that is, matter purely sourced from within. Therefore, if you are to derive anything from them, it should be that you, too, ought to work from an internal place. You may be inspired and educated by their work, but past a certain point, you must both ask original questions and provide original answers yourself. You cannot copy forever: if you could, the adventure wouldn’t be worth completing, and the reward would no longer be valuable.

We instantly reach a paradox. We gain clarity of our desire to reach creative, original goals, yet simultaneously accept that creativity and originality are inherently hazy, unknowable outcomes. How can you handle clarity of uncertainty?

Now, that’s an incredibly difficult question, one that will inevitably amount to the culmination of my life’s work. You could see every article, video, or piece of art I’ve made as a response to that question.

Regardless: take the inverse of the original heuristic. If every action is a vote towards the construction of your future self, every action you don’t take isn’t a vote toward the construction of your future self.

So, you don’t need to necessarily know what it is that you want to do. That might not be possible. But you can certainly spot things that you don’t want, and take efforts to avoid those. Rather than having role models, think of some anti-role models. People you don’t want to be like. Think of how they ended up, and don’t do what they did. Want to be happy? What a difficult thing to define! You certainly know what it’s like to be sad, or discontented, though. Those are far more easily addressed.

Choosing a positive goal involves both the labor of imagining it and achieving it. By adopting the mindset of anti-role models, you do not have to imagine it. People and things are all around you that you can avoid. This mindset has an additional positive bonus of biasing you toward action. The truth is that you’re probably ignorant of the true nature of your goals. By preferring action rather than theory, you quickly expose yourself to the reality of the situation, and expose yourself to attractive possibilities that would’ve been previously impossible for you to imagine.

I wrote this assuming that you’re a person who desires to produce original, creative work. Perhaps some of you deny this fact, and prescribe those goals to the “superhero”, “chosen-types” in your mind. Those aren’t real things. It’s easier to imagine a world where others are magically bestowed with powers rather than accept the fact we’re too anxious to reach for our own goals. We’d rather invent imaginary worlds than face reality and risk feeling the full blunt of our anxiety at our current failure.

Thankfully, the most effective medicine exists: by simply choosing to accept your present condition, you can make the greatest step toward the actualization of your desire.