Stop Living for Someone Else

Live as if your parents are dead.

Too many people live as if they owe themselves to someone. They succumb to other's expectations, even if it harms them.

Today we're covering this concept and why you should be a disappointment.

This is such a problem for some because it's programmed into them from a young age. Many parents live vicariously through their children and condition them to their selfish wants and desires.

They frame the relationship with the child as if they are indebted, which is backwards.

Yes, you should be grateful for everything your parents do and have done for you. But ultimately they chose to have a child, you didn't choose to be born.

Let's take this to its logical extremes: If your parent is a meth addict who wasn't present in your life and did more harm than good to your development, then do you still owe them?

Obviously not.

On the other side of the spectrum if they're amazing parents do you owe them still? This is a harder question to answer.

I'd argue you owe them your gratitude, but you absolutely don't need to meet their expectations. Although if they were the perfect parents they'd understand this.

Most people's situation is somewhere in the middle.

They may be good people, and have your best interest at heart. However, their expression of this may be misguided.

To live as if your parents are dead means to not live to their expectations. To act how you would if they couldn't judge you. In this sense, you should disappoint their expectations.

Being born doesn't automatically indebt you to anyone. Society understands a child doesn't inherit the debts of their father (moral nor financial).

Fundamentally, living by somebody else's expectations means you're playing their game. If you're playing somebody else's game, you lose your own by default.

Your life path is unique, and you should honor that.

Becoming a carbon copy of anyone is an insult to your humanity. Ask yourself: Do you truly admire any copycats? Someone who sees a figure such as Elvis Presley, Andrew Tate, Warren Buffett, or some celebrity then tries to imitate them.

When you defile yourself by copying somebody else to a tee, you accept the best you can do is being #2.

Nobody's going to be better than you at being you.

The function of role models is to take inspiration from, not imitation.

The only thing worse than death is not living in the first place.

I've dropped out of secondary education. This, as you can probably assume, didn't go down smoothly with my parents.

Yes, it's risky but I feel alive. I'm not dead in my mind living weekend to weekend. I'm not going through the motions in a degree or cubicle I don't want to be in. I'm not pretending to be busy, counting the hours until I can get a break from the prison I chose.

Simply put, sacrificing my mental state to meet the expectations of others is too steep a price.

I'd rather be an entrepreneur who tried and failed rather than “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat” — Theodore Roosevelt (from The Man in the Arena)

The alternative is pursuing a false prize:

You may be the smartest and fastest rat of the bunch, but that's hardly something to be proud of.

Life is risky, it's going to kill you. Only cowards avoid all risk —but then, they are already dead.

Another problem with expectations is they are prescriptions. Nobody can teach you how to become advanced in any area, it's a creative and spontaneous path. If you've ever had success in a field, you look back in hindsight on a messy path that somehow resulted in this. It wasn't by following a prescription to a tee.

You can ask Tiger Woods how he swings his golf club, but you'll never emulate it. He may give you a semblance of an answer, but the devil is in the details. Even he doesn't know exactly how he does it.

Prescriptions become shackles beyond the basic level. I can teach you how to drive a car: gas, brake, shifting, but I'll never be able to teach you how to be the fastest in the world around a track.

At some point, you need to shed the dogma of your field to pursue your messy and creative path to mastery.

One reason for this is you get locked into a creed made by another human who has the same limitations, biases, and tendencies for lapses in rationality.

Nassim Taleb argues formal education is dangerous in high doses. It's best to be an autodidact. He shares examples of intelligent people such as Einstein and Darwin who were not into the education system because it kills creativity.

This makes sense because how could it be possible to push the frontier of knowledge in any given field if you only operate in the realm of known and taught?

He cites writers usually don't like formal education:

Autodidacts don't narrow their knowledge by only drinking from school's well of information. They focus on learning what's important to them rather than what's important to others. (e.g., teachers or professors)