You're Not Better Than Me

Fuck off if you say you are.

“You’re not better than me.” - Amy Poehler’s parting quip to Ben Affleck here.

This is the swan song of the protector part that is sick of being compared to the rest of the world.

And so I don’t want to have to mean this in an elevated, spiritual, all loving, all embracing sense. I genuinely want to include and center the most basic, survival-level “fuck you, just so you know, you’re not better than me.”

I don’t care what you’ve achieved. I might be three insecurities in a trench coat walking around pretending to be a functional human being. But you’re not better than me. I’m really fucking amazing. I wish you could see who I really am so you could fall in love with the wonder, the brilliance, the goodness that is me. But if you don’t, you’re not better than me.

“I fall in love with myself, and I want someone to share it with me. And I want someone to share me, with me.” - Eartha Kitt

This. I want to spend a lifetime discovering myself and I want to spend my lifetime with someone to discover me with me.

I could produce nothing for the rest of my life. You’d still not be better than me.

People with tech salaries that are double or triple or quadruple mine, who are younger, less experienced, less smart and knowledgeable or interesting than me - I want you all to know - you’re not better than me. People who are flourishing in your Carnatic careers, those with happy marriages and kids, impressive achievements, all of you — I want me to know that you’re not better than me. I’m not at all ashamed of myself, I was spending time in the trenches with my selves. Not coercing them, but getting a lesson in listening to them yelling and sitting immobilized throughout.

To fail as a spiritual practice. To not try as a spiritual practice. To sit it out as a spiritual struggle. To lose as a spiritual experiment to see what really can be lost in oneself. What happens when life passes you by? Yeah, I did all that. I think I am ready to come back out into the world. As a spiritual struggle of course.

Basically when life passes you by and you sit by and do nothing, it is a front row seat to the worst, most pointless seeming war of all time. And the question that it trains you to answer some day is “is there anything worth living for?” And if so, what is it?

The world is a mirage and we are in thrall to it. I’ve heard about this maya thing for decades. I have never understood it quite as I understand it now. The world is full of glittering lures and we get mesmerized by them and forget who we are. This is the story of religion. “The world is Krishna’s leela.” “Life is suffering.” “The world is broken, we have fallen from grace.” All of these religious frames have in common the observation that our default perception of the world and our role in it, is somehow incorrect. These religious frames and allegories are useful in that they seem to describe a thing that really happens, but they are not useful if we don’t know what they are allegorizing.

Where I ran up against this “the world is a mirage” business was that there were people living real, happy, high achieving lives around me. And it really felt like all “mirage” talk was cope for not achieving cool stuff. Assuaging my jealousy at watching people be motivated to do cool stuff and genuinely being happy with their lives with “it’s all an illusion” seemed deeply hollow and ridiculous. Some part of me clearly wanted that. At the same time, if I wasn’t achieving cool stuff but even more importantly, wasn’t even motivated to do anything, then the explanation turns to “I am fundamentally broken.” All the evidence seemed to support that statement. Something was wrong with me and I should be ashamed and do a lot of work to fix myself.

And I think this is where the “mirage” really applies. Anything in the world that tells you that you are fundamentally broken - that is the mirage. This applies especially when you are sensing lack and brokenness and a vacuum within yourself. If you look out into the world in that state, it seems full of incredible wonders. Wonders that are barely believable. People are writing and singing and creating and building and expressing and achieving mind blowing things. And it feels like if only you could take their example, take their energy, take their ideas - and do something with them, maybe you could be a bit less empty as well. And that’s the mirage when you really see it.

It points to this way to move through the world without being in thrall to it and without losing oneself in it. Eckhart Tolle writes of his life after his awakening experience: “I could still function in the world, but nothing I eve did could possibly add anything to what I already had.” There are other ideas that rhyme with this. There is this notion in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand of “the pain that only goes up to a certain point.” The protagonist, Howard Roark says “I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.” Sasha Chapin talks about Deep Okayness and “the closure of the self as an attack surface.”

I don’t want to throw my understanding and my arrival at it, into a mix with a hodgepodge of rhymes though. I’m saying, as Bill Hicks says, the world in some sense is “just a ride.” It’s an incredible ride and you don’t want to sit out life with the cope of “it’s just a ride and so there’s no point in getting on it.” But really you want to understand that what matters is your experience of this ride because what’s out there is not inherently meaningful. Meaning occurs with the impingement of world upon self. What’s important in the world is the experience of looking through this aperture of our own lives that the universe expresses itself as Chapin says. We decide what is meaningful because we already are what is meaningful.