Your therapist is not going to save you from being a pussi.
I knew a guy whose father was dying in 2014. He spent the last two months of his life reading about grief instead of just sitting with him.
Right now, there's a relationship therapist somewhere in your city writing our third book on how to fix marriage while sleeping in the guest room every night.
And then there's what happens in private, which will probably make you question the authority figures you look up to for advice.
I stopped counting how many public experts DMed me to say they're lost.
One of them a few weeks back, 20 years of clinical practice, PhD, National Speaking Circuit, apologizing for not interacting with my content because it would jeopardize her career and authority in this space.
Notice what these three have in common.
None of them are failing.
They're doing what humans do when the cost of choosing is higher than the cost of waiting. They're winning at being almost.
The guy who calls his dying father has become a son saying goodbye, but the man who reads about grief is still a man preparing.
The first one is finite. The second one is infinite.
And this, my friend, is the self-help industry in a nutshell.
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Hunter-gatherers didn't have this problem because they couldn't afford to. The man who couldn't decide which barrier to eat starved. At that time, indecision was death and choosing was survival.
You are alive today because one of your ancestors chose. The problem is that now indecision doesn't kill you.
So humans indulge it:
They pay therapists to help them indulge it.
They write books to systematize the indulgence.
Then you end up with a 36-year-old who has been exploring this purpose since he was 28, or your friend who keeps her ex on Instagram because blocking him would mean she chose.
Neither of them is stuck. Both of them are protecting every life they could still have by never committing to one.
The finite self is the self that could die.
The potential self is immortal because it never has to collapse in one specific form.
The therapist, the coach, the 47 books on the shelf. They are all a hallway you that you have built with every door left open. And you convince yourself that you have to pay rent on a life that hasn't started.
Healing isn't a framework.
It's the moment your hairy ancestor walked out of the cave knowing he might not find the next one.
That he might die in the open. He probably did.
Sometimes.
But the ones who walked out are the reason you're alive. And the ones who stayed aren't anyone's ancestor.
Plato saw this 2,400 years ago: Prisoners were chained to a wall staring at shadows convinced the shadows were reality.
The self-help industry is the people drawing the shadows.
You are the cat in the shoebox.
And the lid was never on.
Stay smart,
Benoit
