The other day in my post about Making It Personal, I wrote as follows:
I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Today I'd like to focus on that last part, because over time I've found that my To-Don't List can be even more beneficial than my To-Do List.
It strikes me that most of the books, news articles, blog posts, advice columns, and Internet memes floating around out there are implicitly or explicitly universalist: they talk about how society needs to change, about how "we" (always undefined) need to take certain actions, about how everyone should do what the writer or influencer says, etc. Yet changing society, modifying government policy, or convincing everyone to act in a certain way is completely outside my span of influence and control.
Yes, I freely grant that it's awfully tempting to make such universal claims; for much of my life I did the same thing myself! However, I've learned that when I give in to this temptation I immediately start weaving a tangled web of unrealistic hopes and self-righteous expectations, which inexorably pulls me into a cycle of anger and frustration ("why don't other people do what I think they should do?!").
This temptation to universalism is itself nearly universal: it seems to lie at the root of politics, activism, punditry, and far too much of philosophy, psychology, religion, literary criticism, sociology, and similar disciplines.
For myself, I've discovered that attempting to translate universal prescriptions into personal practices provides an effective filter on the endless stream of news, advice, and propaganda; and if a source of such information is too insistent, I simply start ignoring it. And in my own writing I try to scrupulously avoid the universalist temptation.
Naturally, I'm not saying that you should start doing things my way or that society needs to become less universalistic, because if I did then I'd be caught in the same old web...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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