Theme: Commons

(no, I don’t think of myself as a good person. In my mind a good person is kind, humble, honest, hard working, raises a family and respects or maintains the commons – an ordinary person. The people I envy are ordinary men with ordinary family lives. Because I understand the value of such things even if I am … not on such an ordinary path myself. )

Actually, I don’t think of myself as a good person. Not at all. Probably I just don’t want to be a worse person than I already am. But I screw up like everyone else does. That said, I manage to do some good stuff along the way.

If you are extremely competitive and risk, work, and stress tolerant, you are going to take more risks, and produce more failures than other people do.

If you choose a goal that all other choices are subservient to, you put yourself on a path that is uncompromising, and that will eventually effect others who don’t have such goals.

The moment you survive one or more serious illnesses, you become very intolerant of anything that interferes with that goal, and very intolerant of anything that adds work, risk, or stress.

Almost everything I ‘feel bad’ for, is a consequence of (a) taking on too much risk, work, or stress than I am capable of enduring or, (b) putting my work above all other considerations, and (c) exacerbating that narrowness due to multiple serious illnesses. For these reasons I do not treat other than a very small number of relationships as worthy of much compromise. And so this is a natural conflict one must live with to pursue certain categories of goals.

It’s not that I don’t understand it. It’s that I struggle extremely hard to stop myself. And I almost always fail.