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THE INTERNAL CRITIC
It was easier for people to be good at something when more of us lived in
small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone
else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were
only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains,
these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled
confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born
in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.
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If
you’re one in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there’s
twenty of you—and most of us now live in cities. What’s more, we have
become digitally connected to the entire seven billion. Our hierarchies of
accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your
accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look
incompetent. You’re a decent guitar player, but you’re not Jimmy Page or
Jack White. You’re almost certainly not even going to rock your local pub.
You’re a good cook, but there are many great chefs. Your mother’s recipe for
fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn’t
cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream. Some
Mafia don has a tackier yacht. Some obsessive CEO has a more complicated
self-winding watch, kept in his more valuable mechanical hardwood-and-
steel automatic self-winding watch case. Even the most stunning Hollywood
actress eventually transforms into the Evil Queen, on eternal, paranoid watch
for the new Snow White. And you? Your career is boring and pointless, your
housekeeping skills are second-rate, your taste is appalling, you’re fatter than
your friends, and everyone dreads your parties. Who cares if you are prime
minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?
Inside us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all this. It’s
predisposed to make its noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can
be very difficult to quell. Worse, critics of its sort are necessary. There is no
shortage of tasteless artists, tuneless musicians, poisonous cooks,
bureaucratically-personality-disordered middle managers, hack novelists and
tedious, ideology-ridden professors. Things and people differ importantly in
their qualities. Awful music torments listeners everywhere. Poorly designed
buildings crumble in earthquakes. Substandard automobiles kill their drivers
when they crash. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because
mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.
We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small
number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take
all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are
unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and
unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the
self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life
is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. What but willful
blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism? It is
for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists
recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental
health.
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Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched,
pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that
only delusion can save you.
Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the
cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is
somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal
voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life
itself—perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical voice within says the
same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how
reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom.
There will
always be people better than you—
that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase,
In a million years, who’s going to know the difference?
The proper response
to that statement is not,
Well, then, everything is meaningless.
It’s,
Any idiot
can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
Talking yourself
into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the
rational mind.
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