All That Matters

Be Lucky or Be Gone

Remember when you wouldn’t study for any tests in school and yet you did better than all the other kids? How you could throw a ball farther than anyone else without doing anything differently? The way you kept running while the other wheezing, breathless children dropped to the ground all around you? How about never having even tried to pick up women, because they’ve always thrown themselves at you? Do you know that thing you attempted for the very first time and it worked flawlessly, whereas it always fails for everyone else?

No?

Then you never stood a chance.

Every person who is good at something is so not because they worked harder, not because they deserve it more, but because they are more talented.

Talent is something we are born with. It’s something our brain does automatically for us or our genes facilitate. It’s blind luck – we don’t choose it, we don’t earn it, we don’t understand it, and by no means do we deserve it (hence why “talented” and “gifted” are interchangeable). Effort, on the other hand, is all the extra crap we have to endure when we don’t have a talent, just to reap far worse results.

Merit – which I would define as “the amount of suffering one has to withstand in pursuit of an objective” – comes from effort; success comes from talent. And people tend to mix those things up as if the two of them walked hand-in-hand. More often than not, they don’t.

Take Andre The Giant – a man born with acromegaly (a disorder that causes an excessive production of the growth hormone) – at a young age, and another boy whose muscles don’t properly synthesize proteins, both dreaming to be the world’s strongest man. The first can push a car sideways with his bare hands at the age of 10 (rough guess) without having ever done any actual physical training or work. The second spends the next twenty five years of his life going to the gym and lifting as much weight as he can, an hour and a half a day, six days a week and, at his peak, manages to weigh impressive 65 kilograms and bench-press the same.

Watch a tennis match between a tall player and a short one. One screams sweat and blood throughout the entire game; the other wins. You hear one of their names everywhere, while no one knows the other guy’s. Guess which one is which.

Let’s say an American guy wants to “defend” his country so that people will publicly thank him for his service. But he wants to make things happen, to see constant action and make a real difference, so he decides to join the NSA instead of the Army (no one is going to thank him for this, but that’s okay). He studies hard since a young age, is called a “nerd” and bullied on a daily basis, manages to get into the MIT, attends his college classes diligently, and spends five years studying computer and software engineering, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, under some of the top experts in the field (by himself after classes, during weekends and breaks). Finally, after graduating suma cum laude, he applies for a job in the Agency. But he doesn’t make the cut. No – only Caltech folks who know everything before ever learning any of it get hired. Our guy ends up moderating a math forum for kids on the internet. Meanwhile, self-taught, high-IQ Snowden got into the agency without even going to college and became the Snowden. And he hooked up with a hot chick somehow, while our MIT guy routinely contributes to increasing PornHub’s daily traffic.

Picture this: a young girl who dreams about being in the movies. She starts taking theater classes during school years. Before long, she’s making presentations before her peers on commemorative occasions, just to be laughed at despite her best dramatic efforts. Our girl goes to college and double-majors in acting and filmmaking, dedicating every second of her waking life to her beloved craft, learning everything there is to be known about it. She knows her Chekovs, Millers and Molieres forward and backward, and finally starts acting professionally, playing support roles in theater plays. Her entire life was dedicated to each and every one of her performances, and it does show. She’s good, and she has earned her place under the spotlight. But then comes along Gal Gadot. Gal doesn’t know the first thing about acting, but she’s pretty and knows people in the movie industry, so she gets the part that our poor, real actress also auditioned for – and not just one, but all of them. Gal gets paid millions of dollars just to be herself in front of a camera, while our dedicated girl struggles to make ends meet and never manages to find her way into the big screen.

We also have Denzel Washington’s son (I always forget the kid’s name), who is as wooden as a urinated cat-pole and yet got cast to fill major roles in multiple large-budget movies, including a leading one in Tenet – a movie he completely ruined, and one in which Robert Pattinson (an actual actor, despite his supposedly good looks) was embarrassingly forced to support him. And all exclusively thanks to daddy’s influence (which is not a talent per se, but a matter of sheer undeserved luck all the same).

As a completely off-topic side note, just not to miss the opportunity as I am currently talking about specific actors: Michael Caine (you know, the guy who, among many other roles, portrayed Albert in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy). Look at the stage name he chose: My Cocaine. The man completely mocked his own craft and career as well as everyone else who’s a part of it and, still, somehow he made it. I checked it and “Michael Caine” has nothing to do with his real name (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite). He chose that alias on purpose. If he had to do it all over again, at this day and age, he’d probably dub himself “Fukk Yall.”

Back on topic: I’m not saying successful, talented people are necessarily undeserving. The very best results, of course, come from talented people who also put real effort into their work – almost as much as those without talent do. I say “almost” because, once one succeeds, they stop trying, training and practicing, since attempting to improve something that has already been perfected is pointless. They stop pushing themselves, whereas those who are not talented keep failing and thus must keep trying, and trying harder, until they eventually give up without ever achieving anything. And given that people often preach one should never give up (which is an absolute idiocy), untalented folks always end up putting far more effort into what they [try to] do.

You might question what I said above on the basis that “some people don’t try hard enough.” If an untalented person puts a lot of effort into something while a talented one puts none, the first may actually end up surpassing the second. Yes, it’s possible. But the very willpower one needs to try and keep trying, to ignore their failures and overcome their limitations, is a talent. No one gets to choose how much they want something, how much they can endure, or to be stupid enough to believe something impossible isn’t (which is required to attempt and then insist on it).

If someone is born with an extraordinarily strong will while another person is born being capable of, let’s say, instinctively and precisely measuring the strength and direction of the wind, and they both decide to become archers, it’s possible the second person will give up after just a few disappointing failures while the first will keep going even after failing a thousand times more and, eventually, this one may become better than the other. It can happen, it does, and it’s a matter of talent just the same.

Will alone is no match against specific, full-blown cheating talents, though. No matter how many decades you spend “mnemonicing” paragraphs of text, you’ll never get close to the performance of someone who has a photographic memory (Wikipedia states this is a myth, but Dame Judy Dench claims the opposite. I saw her saying, in an interview, that she had such a memory, lost it once she reached an advanced age, and consequently can no longer portray more complicated roles on stage).

The amount of work a person with a talent needs to dedicate towards something automatically done by their brain or genes is always, by definition, much lower. If it isn’t, they don’t have a talent.

“Practice makes perfect” is a fallacy – talent plus directed training (no coach necessary) makes so. If you want to be truly good at something, find out if you have an edge for it first. Only then should you put some heavy, deliberate effort into it. If you don’t have a natural advantage, find a way to want something else. Don’t waste hours, weeks, years or decades of your life trying to do something that others can do better than you ever will in just a few minutes. Also, do give up as soon as you realize an endeavor is pointless or otherwise not worth doing.

Good luck!

Oh! And always root for the underdog as well – if he made it far enough for you to know he exists, he’s probably the one who deserves to win.

We, The Braves

Fair warning: this is where things start to get “offensive” or, in other words, where the truth starts to become unpleasant.

We, humans, are a proud species. Why? I have no idea. But when anyone tries to dispel our holier-than-thou, made-in-God’s-image illusion they end up being crucified. And yet we need to see ourselves for what we are, and someone must say the things I’m about to, because we can’t even try to fix something that is broken while we keep fooling ourselves into believing it’s not.

So let’s get started.

Dare a skinny nerd to spit on an NFL offensive liner’s face. Or ask this one to go alone against another team’s entire defensive line in a bar brawl. Put them all together and tell them to take down an old, retired police officer holding a loaded pistol. None of them is going to do any of that, even if they had every possible reason and right to do so. Why?

Because every human being is a coward.

Unless we have a clear advantage – be it weight, height, speed, some skill or, above all, we are part of a larger group – we’ll usually have [some] manners, behave [almost] properly, and act like a [minimally] decent person. When we do have an edge, we are inclined to do the opposite.

Some people are just cretins who are willing to hurt any number of others so long as they profit from it. Others are frustrated and angry with something that happened to them and need to unleash that frustration on someone else. Few do not fall into at least one of those two categories. And as most of us seek to make ourselves feel better at someone else’s expense (because this does make us feel better), whenever we run into a person who seems like an easy prey we hardly ever let slide the opportunity to bully them. Our victim’s innocence is, in practice, entirely irrelevant to us.

Being in a larger group against a smaller one is the “worst” (from the opposite perspective, the best) of all advantages we may have because, in this situation, if we mess up, we expect someone else on our side will come to our aid and fix everything. If things go south, there’s a good chance that someone other than us will pay for it. And if our “team” beats the other, even if we didn’t do anything we still bask in “our” victorious glory.

When being part of a larger group we also always try to impress its other members. We do things that even when having some other advantage we usually wouldn’t. To increase our personal standing among our peers we might, for instance, beat up a man we could instead have simply argued with. Or steal something instead of bitching about the price and asking for a discount. Or drink far more than we should, throw up, and then continue drinking. We do stupid things to inspire some level of fear or admiration in the people surrounding us because both of those things translate into respect, and respect translates into personal safety. The more we harm others or otherwise prove we are “better” (hardly ever in a good way) than them, the less those who witness such actions are inclined to harm us in the future. (Social psychology has even coined terms for the attitude that derives from one being part of a group, such as “groupthink” and “deindividualization.” You can look those up if you want to read what experts have to say about this particular phenomenon.)

Circling back to our lack of courage: when in a disadvantage, the best we can do is to get drunk, blow some coke or smoke crack, because then we are not quite ourselves – some of the neurological devices that define us are temporarily altered or disabled, allowing us to do what no sober person dares. Alas, in such circumstances we are considered stupid instead of valiant. But fairly so, because “to be brave” and “to be stupid” are synonyms.

As I once saw written on a wall, “A hero is one who didn’t have time to run.”

Genghis Khan wouldn’t have killed hundreds or thousands of men if he wasn’t an extraordinarily talented warrior who had an entire army behind him (an army that had as its top priority keeping him from being blindsided or overwhelmed).

The Spartans of the Battle of Thermopylae were not the men of legends, or at least not as we like to imagine them. They were 7,000 Greeks in total, not 300; they fought between 120,000 and 300,000 Persians, not a million; out of the 2,300 of them who stayed behind to cover the main Greek army’s retreat, some 400 surrendered; they fought because they had no choice; they only temporarily succeeded, for a couple of days, because they had a very strong tactical upper hand; and those who died in their last stand only did so because they had nowhere to run.

Edward Snowden wouldn’t have blown the whistle on NSA’s omni-spying if he didn’t have a place to flee to, a plan for how to get there, and help from others to actually do so.

We never pick a fight we don’t expect to win because doing so is suicide. We are programmed to fight or fly and usually more than smart enough to know when the odds are stacked against us. And we naturally (read “automatically”) stick to our basic programming and by the obvious.

The best we can accomplish is to do something that seems courageous (but isn’t).

Many people are too stupid to foresee and/or fully comprehend the potentially dire consequences of their actions, so they dare out of sheer ignorance. Some feel less pain than the rest of us, so they dare because the consequences, for them, are not as bad. Others dare because they are even more afraid of not doing so – they are particularly terrified of being considered as much of a coward as they, like everyone else, in fact are.

So don’t feel bad when fear makes you refrain from doing something. Even if most people do it and you are the exception, you are no more of a coward than any them. You are just better aware of the risks involved, of the potential consequences, and of what these mean to you (which is different from what it means to any other person).

You are not worse – you are just as bad as everyone else. And probably smarter.

We, The Nobles

Courage isn’t the only virtue we lack. We are also dishonest, unkind, and we have no honor. In general, we lack intelligence, wisdom, humility, integrity, compassion, civility, decency, ethics, professionalism and manners.

We have a strong tendency to flatter ourselves. We all want and try our best to believe we are better than we really are because we need to feel special, non-mediocre. But if we need to believe we are better, it’s because we know we are not good enough.

We don’t do anything that is not in our own selfish benefit. We are guided by survival instincts and personal interests, rarely by reason and never by virtue. We couldn’t possibly care less about people we don’t know, regardless of what unimaginable ill befalls however many of them.

Throughout countless years of prehistory, we did our best to weed out those who were useless to our tribes and clans. It made sense, it was logical, and it had to be done for us to survive. Nowadays, though, it’s not so easy to tell who has use to us or not, because most of the things we all own and eat were invented, made, or grown by people we don’t know and never will. Other than those closest to us, no one else seems to have any value. And we are still programmed to think the same way we did in ancient times.

If, for instance, you murder a farmer, your food will come from another and be there at the grocery store readily waiting for you just the same. The man you killed is completely irrelevant – to you, his death is no loss at all.

Think about those times when you helped someone (if it ever happened). Did you do so out of kindness? Or perhaps to bargain for a favor in the future? To influence how others perceive you? To feel better about yourself?

Are you more interested in loving or in being loved? Is the second even relevant if not for the reciprocal effects it has on the first?

Is it how others feel about you that matters, or how you feel about how they feel about you?

Answer those questions.

Are you sure? Or are you lying to yourself?

Altruism is pretty much a myth. There may be some rare exceptions (none comes to mind) but, in the vast majority of cases, we help people exclusively to benefit ourselves, to feel better or otherwise advance our own cause. Interacting positively with others releases oxytocin in our brains, making us high. Helping someone while under public scrutiny makes us look like decent people, and we look preemptively forward to the social rewards we expect to arise from that forged impression (this is called “performative altruism”).

There are no knights in shining armor among us. We just throw some colorful, poorly-knitted tabards over our blood-splattered, Chinese-made aluminum breastplates hoping to fool ourselves and everyone else, because we cannot accept our limitations, the flaws of our society, the truth of what we are and of what we have accomplished as individuals and as a species. We act and speak proudly just to hide our inner shame.

I painted a somewhat grim picture of ourselves, but the fact is it doesn’t matter for what reason we do something good, so long as we do it. Even if motivated exclusively by personal gains, helping others is still helping. However selfish the cause may be, its consequences are still positive. Just don’t feel smug about it because, if you ever aid someone else, there’ll probably be nothing noble about your motivations and, in any case, you’ll only be doing what you should do.

Funny story: I was recently talking to a girl – one of those who literally undergo a series of plastic surgeries just to look better on Instagram photos – and at a certain point she said, “I do some voluntary work every now and then.” As I began to roll my eyes, she added, “But I do it because it makes me feel better.”

Against all odds and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, maybe there’s still hope for these latest human (de)generations. It seems a few of them are not entirely retarded (that girl was a Millennial though; not a Gen Z or newer model).

Them, The Princesses

One of our major goals in life is to get sex. That’s what we pursue when we are temporarily rid of any pain and what most people ultimately purchase with all the money they make. I will go ahead and throw the emotional side dish (being loved, socially accepted, the fear of dying alone, etc.) in there too so as not to ignore our psychological issues.

Until we are 30 or so, we are pretty much blind to anything other than dating. Many remain oblivious to everything else that comprises our universe until they die of old age. And this narrow focus on romantic relationships and sexual activities creates problems, because it hinders us uninterested in things that are actually interesting, directing most of our efforts towards a goal that is not only useless but in fact destructive, as it can lead to men fighting over women, to people murdering their cheating spouses, to children being born, etc.

One all-encompassing sociological consequence of our sexual overdrive is that women, albeit unknowingly, control our species – men rule over the whole planet, but we are ruled ourselves by women. The fact that they are indirectly in charge, in itself, is no big deal. The real problem is that women are far more attracted to aggressive, dishonest, sly and/or arrogant scumbags than to smart, educated, humble and/or well-mannered gents.

When we hurt or humiliate someone, not only do we get testosterone and dopamine boosts and social respect (out of fear), but also the big prize: the ladies. And this makes it so that, instead of behaving civically and constructively as we should, we deliberately behave animalistically and destructively, because this pays much better in the ways we are programmed to appreciate the most.

Take a look at professional athletes and their behavior, at the attitude, arrogance and general disrespect that comes from being physically more apt than most and making a fortune out of doing something useless that everyone else does for fun, while getting daily public praise from irresponsible people who profit from broadcasting their usually unmerited talents in pointless action. Then see how much a Nobel Prize winner makes, how he talks and behaves, and how much attention he gets in comparison. Guess which one gets the girl.

I suspect the true source of this problem is primitive and very deeply seated: women’s preferences probably stem from them being no match for men in physical confrontations, so they have an existential need to be protected by someone who is able to defend them from the largest possible number of [mostly man-born] threats. But this can and should be changed.

If we started publicly praising those who actually help our species instead of those who hold it back, showcasing good-natured political, social and scientific accomplishments every day, everywhere, and praising the people behind them instead of those who dedicate themselves to useless physical endeavors, women would be much more interested in and inclined to admire those among us who actually deserve admiration. To allow for their mating standards to evolve we must also make our world safer, so that women don’t need to bed a Pit Bull to feel secure. And by simply stopping to encourage senseless violent activities, the competitive and aggressive mindset they foster and the destructive behavior they lead to, we might achieve this result.

If female preferences change, this alone should greatly improve our society and global quality of life, because the most sought-after prize would go to those who contribute to our betterment instead of those who jeopardize it. With some ethical social engineering (in the original sense of the expression), women could willingly reward the human instead of the animal, the intellect instead of the instinct, peace instead of war, life instead of death. They could be “used” (in a good way) to forge a brighter future instead of one potentially even darker than the present. Our governments, media and filmmakers should try herding us all in this direction instead of encouraging disputes, incompetence, slyness, victimization, homosexuality, criminal behavior, etc.