Two Things I've Heard Folks Say

​​In my days as a grumpy professor, I made a list of things my students were to avoid saying. [LINK] I had my reasons. If I ever got a teaching job that paid the bills, I would have spent a little time each school year making a new version of the list. I might still do it and put it here -- like a curmudgeon’s word of the year sort of thing. About five years ago I heard a new one: 

 “You do you.” I thought it sounded weird, but it’s mostly innocent enough (I.e. when it gets used it’s unlikely to interfere with the sort of communication I’m deeply concerned with achieving and maintaining). 

Then, maybe last year or so, I heard a new one: to ‘live one’s best life.’ And I actually think that I love this phrase. It occurs to me that these are often treated as synonyms today. “You do you. Live your best life.” They feel sorta like they mean the same thing.

But I would suggest that they are actually antonyms, and that when we are not aware of this, we invite trouble into our lives. 

Left to their own devices, and given the choice between a healthy, home-cooked meal (we make pretty tasty food in my household), and a bowl of Jelly beans, my kids would devour the latter ten out of ten times. That’s you-do-you for you. 

But is the jelly bean diet your best life? I would say ‘no’ and hope for agreement from most corners. 

At its core, this is the recognition that some activities, some choices, some things at which our desires can aim are better than others. They are better for us, they are better for the state of the world. Sometimes ‘you-doing-you’ will result in ‘your best life’ but who can make himself believe that this is always the case? I cannot now, if I ever could. 

Your best life is aspirational. It’s very very hard, and we are bound to miss. And when ‘I-just-do-me’ I find that I am more likely to miss than when I work toward my best life as though it were something at which I can, even might, even most likely will fail. 

This year, I am aiming at attaining more discipline in my life. More on that some other time. But I know that I cannot live my best life without it, and that as I am, when I ‘just-do-me’ I lack it. I am working at seeing discipline as a skill which one can (indeed, must) practice in order to improve upon. And if it is possible to improve, that means I am not now at my best, and I will not make it without work, and I might not make it even then.

The possibility of failure is one of the things that gives meaning to ‘best’ -- otherwise it is simply ‘different’ Where there isn’t a hierarchy of value, comparatives like ‘better’ and superlatives like ‘best’ are meaningless. [LINK]. 

This next part is crucial -- in both the current and etymological senses of that term. That gap -- between one’s best life and what one would will, left to his own devices -- has a name. The emptiness between where we are and where we should be, the observable outcome when we miss our target mark is something called sin.