So I’ve been kicking this idea around in my head lately about this like, Philosophical Stages Of Life And Becoming An Actualized Person, and I articulated it for the first time today to a friend of mine and I wanna write it down and see what my friends think about it. Explaining what it’s exactly trying to codify is easier if I just go through the whole thing first.

Step one, I think, is realizing that your parents are not perfect, and fucked you up in myriad ways, many of which are irreparable. Step one is realizing that your parents failed you. You have to start here. If you don’t ever achieve this, I think that you never even really approach humanity. I think that you remain an automaton living a vicarious life of your parents and never really become yourself, because you never acknowledge that your parents (and by extension, you as an expression of their attempt to create something) are imperfect and failures (ALL parents are failures, because they are human, and all humans are imperfect and by definition fall short of what they aim at, and even what they are capable of.)

Step two, or maybe five, (we’ll get to it later) is that you have to forgive your parents for being ultimately failures. It’s not their fault, they’re human, and they’re doing their best. They did as good as they could, and you have to ultimately forgive them for being failures.

Step three, is that you have to find surrogate parents that you think are more perfect than your real parents. This is more like mentors, teachers, role models, inspirations, friends, etc. The people that you look up to and admire as more perfect people for you to learn from. For me, this was mostly authors whose books I read, fictional characters in some of those boos, a few teachers that I had in highschool, some of my friends, and more than the minimum threshold for ‘embarrassing’ podcast bro type dudes. Dan Carlin, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Matt & Shane, Thooorin, Jon Bois, Dave Smith, Scott Horton, and that’s only as many as I can remember right now. You pick them as people to learn from, because you view them as more perfect than your parents.

Step four is that you have to realize that all of those people, your surrogate parents, are imperfect and therefor ultimate failures as well. They, like your parents, did their best, but ultimately fall short for you in some ways, sometimes many ways, and you reject them as such. You recognize their failures both in what it is that they do, as well, in many ways, as people. They are broken, imperfect and limited human beings, not infallible teachers for you to learn everything you could need to know from.

Step five is that you have to forgive them, too. I also include your parents here, because I think that for a lot of people, they won’t be able to forgive their parents such a traumatic and large scale failure so soon after the wave rocks your ship so strongly. Their failure is ultimately the biggest and most disappointing and life changing to realize. So taking until you see that failure reflected in smaller ways throughout the rest of your life I think might even be the way that most people experience life.

Step six is the hard part, is to realize that You, yourself, are also ultimately a failure. You fail to express the full depth and breadth of your experience, you fail to achieve everything that you set out to do, you fail to control yourself in moments where self control is paramount. You Fail.

Step seven is probably even harder, and these may even continue to get harder as they go on from here. But step seven is to forgive now also yourself for being a failure, because you too are only human and you too only capable of doing your best, which because you are human, is less than perfect.

Step eight is to realize that not only are you, and your surrogate parents, and your parents failures, so is everyone else. Every single person who has ever lived has failed to do everything they wanted to do, and to actualize and fully BECOME themselves, and so will you, and so did your parents, and so did your surrogate parents.

Step nine is to forgive everyone. Everyone is a failure, and it’s okay. Nobody is perfect, nobody becomes themselves to the maximum amount possible. Nobody accomplishes everything that they could ever dream of accomplishing. And all of that is okay, because everyone is human. Everyone is flawed and broken and incapable in some way or another.

Steps ten and eleven are probably the most controversial, I think. Because they’re about God. And I might be blaspheming myself here, and if I end up in a fiery pit for all eternity for writing this, then so be it. Step ten is realizing that God, too, is a failure. God created an imperfect world. God created a world where not everyone gets the chance to become themselves. God created a world full of suffering and lives being cut short and lives being destroyed by things that nobody on Earth could ever hope to control. And He made us imperfect, too. He made us to be failures. He made us to suffer and die and get lost and broken and never find the light.

And step eleven, you might be able to guess by now, is to forgive God. Because just like you and me, He was doing his best. Or, if you don’t believe in God, then forgive whatever it is you do believe in, because you believe in something. Forgive the universe. Forgive the Godhead. Forgive unity. Forgive the Demiurge. Forgive Gaia. Whatever it is that you believe in, once you realize that the world and all of the people in it are imperfect because they were made that way, you have to forgive whatever reason put us all here in this imperfect world.

So that’s my kinda little philosophical screed. I probably could expand on this a lot and maybe trim it down some. Curious to see what people think of it. Email me or comment here or message me on twitter or whatever.