Integrity’s subtle victory over good intentions

As someone who is 26 and feels that they’ve been around a few blocks a few times so to speak, I’ve accumulated a quite a bit of anecdotal experience with regards to all sorts of characters. I love people, I find any type interesting, explicitly crazy or stereotypically dull, the why factors at what is making them tick is fascinating to me. I also love love, being rightly Doestoesvsky Friedman pilled. I have a keen eye I would say for those who radiate love, those who do not have a malicious bone in their body, those who, without even looking like they’re trying, try and brighten the day of everything they encounter. They are like The Beatles in personhood format, its nuts. They are rare and are an inspiration.

David McClelland was a Psychologist who I learned about in my first year Psychology class, who posed a theory that each individual generally tends towards an underlying need which drives their will. The three being need for affiliation (interpersonal relations), achievement (success in domains) or power (control and influence over others).

The people who I know who I spoke of in paragraph 1, clearly fit neatly into a need for affiliation. They want strong interpersonal relations and have high agreeability and it kills them to see one unhappy in front of them. Thus, their intentions are to be as kind as possible to uplift and unite this underlying need.

Now the thing that just struck me 15 minutes ago which compelled me to write this now, is that the people in my life who have had the most positive impact on me tend toward the need for achievement. Perhaps this is also because I fit into the need for achievement too and so their obsessiveness with development in domains directly caters to my wellbeing flourishing. I am studying Psychology and Philosophy at a Canadian University and 80% of the people I encounter can’t help but compulsively bash capitalists and it is in my humble opinion that high achievers who fit this capitalist descriptor are underrated and underappreciated in their utility onto others lives. Niceness is so nice and it kind of is what we need to put a stop to global atrocities, but in thriving peacetime Canada where we all have electricity, furnaces, AC’s, water, internet, smartphones, laptops and even the people I know that work minimum wage ordering uber eats, I argue that these high achievers are more positively impactful then ever on us.

I don’t think we are as a species evolved to want to be content, not to say we are evolved to be unhappy, but it is better for the propagation of our species if we were not content on the couch once we collected the food and have our mate. It is genetically advantageous to always have a will to look for the next thing that can bolster progression of any kind. In the land of ridiculous excess that is riddled with an uprising in mental health issues, it is clear that there is some kind of meaning problem going on. If most people look forward to retirement because they are not living up to the proverb “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and divorces rates (the ones that get executed that is) are at 50%, then this get a job get a wife shit clearly ain’t panning out too hot. But maybe its not that this shit aint panning out so hot but that the human condition, as I said earlier, is not designed for contentment (not to say that not being fully content = unhappiness). Think about it for a moment, what is the darwinistic benefit to bing chilling once resources have been acquired? I can’t think of one, and so in this land of AI and automation on the up and up coming to take our jahbs, we sit here watching netflix eating packaged garbage that tastes amazing and is terrible for us and asking ourselves what is the point of doing anything if a million chinese kids that we see on tik tok are doing it better and soon chat gpt will be able to put those biological discipline robots to shame and theres 100 books you have been reccomended that you tell people you’re interested in reading but you can’t because big tech has given everyone adhd and whenever you open the news widget on your homescreen that may or may not of been dinging at you, you read of 30 different people dying in 30 different peculiar ways all written with the same soulless shit journalism writing style in 5 minutes before being reminded by another ding that softcore porn exists but its really just yas queen social networking that you have no right to categorize as vice and everyone is a fucking idiot who can’t stop having an opinion on everything and critical inquiry is some kind of anti social autistic asshole behaviour so be polite, and yesm do the drugs we do to make us feel better about ourselves too. All to say with how lucky we are to be in the .001 % ish of humans in history who do not just get really cold or really hot when the temperature changes, there's clearly something wrong when most people I talk to refer in some kind of way about struggling with a mental illness. And well maybe there is nothing wrong that is the problem. We are able now to be comfortable motionless, and if the old cliche “its not the destination but the journey” has any truth, maybe we can learn to take after the high achievers.

The people who have had the most positive impact on me never tried to. They just crush their goals and do so out of building up a person that is essentially bulletproof to every kind of punch you can throw at them while having their sights aimed high. The people I know who are the nicest and most explicitly loving are great, but no matter how hard they have tried to suggest positive action to me, they just do not have that wisdom that comes with the vital experience of having spent a long time in the dungeon of brutal self examination of any possible leak that can be plugged. If you want all of your potential you will look in the hypothetical mirror everyday with a certain eager judgmental stare, not because you despise who you are now, but because you are dead set determined on figuring out what it is you must do to become who you can become later. And so these high achievers made no clear action of love for me, made no altruistic offers, offered no favors, said nothing of praise, just shared in my presence out of mutual enjoyment of each other in recreational downtime. The affiliatiors on the other hand, constantly do all of what I just mentioned. And so another saying of “you cant help others till you help yourself” or “set your life in perfect order before going about criticizing the world” comes to mind. You can’t build a sturdy house on an uncertain foundation based on optimistic well intentioned hope. To try and extend a hand when your own feet aren’t sturdily set perhaps is not the best thing you can do. Perhaps advice is better suited for those who have prioritized excelling at being person in general who thus have the upmost overall integrity which bleeds over into reputable advice in everything they have fixed their mind upon. Not to say that advice is exclusive to the achievers, but maybe your skillset is more so being a good listener or conversationalist to those you love and want to enrich? As for those who are instilled with a need for power, I emphasize with the fact that you didn’t choose this disposition, but the manifestations I see in the world that screams power hungry animal makes me want to say that for the sake of a utilitarian social harmony for the world, be very careful that you are not playing a zero sum game with others. If you don’t care about that, then I stand by the capitalist hating libbies at my school for instances like you in saying “please fuck off”.