I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our motivations for actions: Why we do things? Is it because we want to share it? Are excited about it? Want to find out more about it? Or is it because we want to brag to the world about it?
I’ve become hypervigilant about making sure my motivations are closer to the sharing, rather than the bragging.
Why should we care about bragging?
Well, at some level, bragging emploits scarcity; I have this, and you don’t. Such behaviour leverages the mechanisms that create scarcity in order to create the condition where bragging has the desired effect. When you realize that those mechanisms include wealth, meritocracy, and ability, we realize that bragging sets out to condemn a person for their perceived ‘lower’ current position, which probably isn’t so much a product of their own doing, so much as an averaging of the external forces they make trade with every day.
That is troubling to me. But luckily I’ve been reading a good bit about intentions in my Non-Violence class I am currently taking.
Gandhi believed strongly in not the product of actions, but the intention behind it. This is something I’ve gone over in the dichotomy of process vs product that i’ve been toying with for a while.
And in toying with it, I mean I’ve been trying to live by example. Love the day as much as the date. Love the preperation as much as the meal. Realize that the fruits of our labor (the product) are the PRODUCT of process, and the disassociation of the two leads to trouble, especially for humans, as we spend our lives in the process. The process is our quality of life. The product of our lives, in total, is something we will never experience. Becoming comfortable with that requires letting go of ego-driven desires, yet somehow still remaining active.
A lot to think about.