7 January

The oldest you will ever be is the day you’re born. Everything you inherit, in your biology and culture, is ancient. And then everything you add to both of those in your life is brand-new and young. The more you interrogate your inherited life, the younger you will be. The more you use social conformity as the guide for your life, the more you will never be anything but old. You can’t escape social conformity by just doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing, that traps you even more deeply. You need the bravery to question and understand what is popular and stand behind what is important but unpopular. It’s extremely difficult if not impossible to both understand life and reality, and be popular with anybody. I think that’s the true measure of whether you’re beginning to understand something, if it’s unpopular with everybody. I don’t think we really understand just how much everything we think and do is shaped by social conformity. By status. It blocks our access to reality as it really is. It’s easy to disagree with people you don’t like, it’s much harder to do it with the people who are closest to you. And in fact when you do reach a deeper understanding of things as they really are, people won’t so much disagree with you as just see you as completely incomprehensible, because that understanding doesn’t slot into any of the team sports of social life.