Why You Shouldn’t Make Your Role Models Your “Idols”

This is not a new topic. A lot has been said about it and the general consensus is to never put people on a pedestal, because they’re mere humans with flaws.

A lot has also been said about how choosing not to be yourself makes you a second rate imitation of someone else, thus making a mockery of everything you could have been.

This article is my addition to the literature.

This will be a short read because the lesson is simple: the act of craving to be someone else is a rejection of who you are.

This is a good thing in some cases. For example, if you live a life that is basically a race to the bottom in all dimensions, it makes sense to reject your current form and seek to be more like those who have their lives more together. That said, you should still note that there’s a difference between wanting “to be like someone else” and “wishing you were someone else.”

The former is healthy human mimetics; you see a behavior, trait or attainment someone possesses and seek to achieve something similar for yourself. The latter is an outright rejection of everything that makes you who you are, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that self-rejection means no investment is made in the self being rejected.

And so the downward spiral begins. You reject yourself > stop investing in yourself > your self starts to shrivel till it dries up > you end up as a hollow replication of whoever it is you wanted to be.

This may work for some people though. The world is big and random enough that there will be an exception to this rule who will live their best life and find fulfilment by deciding to be somebody else. But I assure you, reading this, that you are not that person.

So, what does not rejecting yourself look like?

At the lower levels, it’s a simple gratitude for being alive, for having the opportunity to chase after your dreams and to experience this mystery of living.

More sophisticated forms of not rejecting yourself involve doing things like introspection, seeking to increase self knowledge, to understand why you are the way you are, and more importantly, using this knowledge to make better decisions.

At the highest level, we have the full embrace of concepts like Nietzchie’s “Amor Fati”, which is the idea of loving your life such that if you had the option, you would choose to be reincarnated as yourself everytime. A tad idealistic, but I’m hoping you get the idea.

Some things to note

• Rejecting yourself isn’t a one-time action. It’s a process that happens everyday and compounds over time. Same goes for the opposite. You have to learn to sense when you’re pulling away from yourself and seeking pyschological safety somewhere else. Meditation can help with this in real time.
• It is very healthy to have people you admire and people you want to learn from. The issue here is devoting your entire being to them. It can get really tricky if that becomes the case and lines can get really blurred.
• I am not an expert at living, so you should really think about everything you read here critically.
• Also, you’re going to lose your ‘self’ many times, it’s part of the growth process. Your ‘self’ is not a static thing, it’s an ever shifting process that moves in concert with the rest of the universe; it will descend into hell and ascend to heaven many times over throughout the course of your lifetime. However, this is an entirely different process from rejecting your ‘self’. The latter keeps your ‘self’ stagnant and isolates it from the death and rebirth cycle that triggers its growth.

Conclusion

In a vast, complex world with approximately 8 billion other humans, it is very easy to feel small, insignificant and incapable. Role models are irreplacable because they are like lights in the dark that show us the way. But many of us become so awed by the lights that we stay stuck watching and forget to actually walk the path they illuminate. Or maybe we’re just scared of straying too far from this light. You’re going to have to relearn, through fear, anxiety, loneliness, many disappointments, how to find the fuel for your own light. Thankfully, you’ll also learn how capable, resourceful, and impactful you can actually be.

Peace.