We Cannot Escape Our True Nature
There are many different paths to take in life, but some things are set in stone.
One day, a scorpion and frog meet on the side of a stream, and the scorpion says, "Frog, will you carry me across? I need to get to the other side."
The frog replies, "I wouldn't mind, but I worry you'll sting me—after all, you are a scorpion."
"But frog," the scorpion replies, "I won't sting you, for if I do I'll sink to the bottom and we'll both die."
The frog reluctantly agrees, but then, halfway across, feels the scorpion's sting and has enough time to gasp, "WHY?!"
And before they both sink to their death, the scorpion replies, "Because it is my nature."
This story has been around for at least 2,500 years, dating back to when Aesop wrote his fables. There's also a Persian version about a scorpion and turtle; slightly different in that the turtle survives because of its shell, but the lesson remains the same: we are beholden to our nature, no matter what we try to tell ourselves.
I used to teach this story to my high school Language Arts students as an example of both an allegory and universal truth. I also hoped they'd take it to heart.
The Limits of Education
Freddie deBoer made the argument in his book, The Cult of Smart, that despite the widely held belief anyone can achieve whatever level of academic success their little heart desires with a proper education, the truth is that some people aren't going to perform as well as others for a host of reasons, including baseline IQ, culture, aptitude, etc. It confirmed my anecdotal experience during my 14-year career as a teacher: some students, no matter what I did to help them, were limited in what they were going to be able to do academically—doesn't mean that they were bad, or weren't trying, just that when push came to shove, their ceiling was lower than some of their peers.
However, despite the fact that not everyone can become a genetic scientist or write the next great American novel, school is still important and necessary. Well-run schools teach people how to show up regularly and on time, behave, learn to interact and play well with others, and work hard—and if students don't do these things, they are held accountable. That's the essential nature and purpose of going to school, whatever other services they might perform, and whatever varying academic success students might achieve.
For many of my students, graduating high school—not a super high bar to be honest—was a struggle. But up to 2015-16 or so, I was confident that most of them would be OK: able to fill out a job application, show up on time for work, complete the essential tasks of their employment so as to earn a paycheck, make appropriate and hopefully fulfilling life choices, and contribute to society. Why? Because school to that point was a place where we taught them how to show up regularly and on time, behave, learn to interact and play well with others, and work hard. If they didn't, they were held accountable—and if they couldn't get back on track, they didn't graduate or were expelled.
When Institutions Abandon Their Nature
And then, suddenly, everything changed despite nothing really changing.
Boundaries disappeared. Racism was the only possible reason Black and Brown students didn't perform as well as their White and Asian counterparts, and therefore homework could no longer be assigned, assignments could be turned in late or not at all, and every behavioral issue became a story of oppressed vs. oppressor.
The fact that smartphones are massive distractions and should be banned from classrooms was ignored, because administrators were afraid to enforce rules or discipline students—too afraid to fight the battle against the small minority of parents and students who would've complained.1 And perhaps with good reason: students, having learned through their experience with social media and the moral panics that followed Trump's election in 2016 and the COVID pandemic, knew that there was always an authority figure to blame, some teacher, administrator, coach, or counselor who had it out for them—or worse, had "assaulted" or caused them "trauma," as these terms had ballooned to include any social, political, or moral disagreement one might have with someone with more power or privilege than their accuser.
A complete and utter mess, and for some reason, the adults in charge—the superintendents, school boards, and administrators—refused to do anything, as cowardice and self-preservation overwhelmed whatever sense of right and wrong they had to begin with.
It's a story we saw play out everywhere left-leaning politics were in vogue, with tragic consequences, as teachers have fled en masse to take less stressful, more remunerative jobs.
And so it turned out for me, that ironically, the fable I taught to my students was also why I left teaching: because schools and the culture within schools became alien, fundamentally divorced from their essential nature.
Personal Encounters with Unchangeable Nature
A lesson that, as they do, has again resurfaced in my life.
I'll start with a hilarious episode while skiing recently, when a snowboarder got into trouble in the lift line. For those unfamiliar with how lift lines work, when lines are short, you can jump on a chair however you want as long as you don't cut; however, when it's crowded, the lift attendants group people so that every chair is full, combining singles with triples, doubles with doubles, and so on, as it makes a huge difference in reducing the wait time for everyone.
Recently, it was super crowded, but a group of three snowboarders (the lift seats six in this case) skipped a chair so they didn't have to ride with anyone else, despite the objection of the lift attendant. Everyone in line who saw this booed this violation of basic etiquette loudly, and to be fair, it was all in good fun—the bros could've gone up regardless and no one really would have cared. Instead, one of the dudes turns around and flips everyone off, screaming "fuck you, eat my dick retards!" The lift attendant immediately stops the lift and asks him to come over and talk to him, probably just to tell him to behave himself better next time.
Instead, he refused…and continued to stand there and argue. And argue. And argue. I was at the front of the line, so I ventured, "Dude, you're not going to win this fight—just apologize, make it better, and let the rest of us get on with our day!" But he just stood there continuing to argue. Finally they had to bring security out, and with five or six of the burlier guys on the ski patrol, he was escorted away, and will no doubt lose his season pass if he has one and be banned for the rest of the year, if not life, for being such an asshole.
It's one of the most irrational things I've ever seen, but he couldn't escape the essential shittiness of his nature—one of those true assholes who can't admit fault, can't apologize, thinks he is never wrong.
Hopefully he'll learn from this experience, but he probably won't: if he hasn't learned by the time he's a grown man that you can't behave this way and get away with it, it's likely he never will, and he'll reap whatever consequences that entails going forward, believing any friction he experiences as he moves through the world to be someone else's fault. It would not surprise me at all if he attended high and/or middle school after it ceased to hold students accountable.
I too have experienced consequences recently—not for expressing my true nature, as above, but for ignoring it. I am a writer who's not written, an athlete who doesn't compete, a teacher who's not teaching, a man without a mission, and a lover who's lost his flame. I've gained weight, I'm not healthy, I don't sleep well, and despite my career success, I often feel listless and melancholy.
It's no one's fault but my own, of course, and though it's painful to write those words, it also gives me hope, because I now know why I’ve felt so unfulfilled and unhappy.
I need to rediscover my true nature.
A society that's lost its bearings
There's a great deal of confusion in the modern world, and a big reason for that is we've forgotten our inviolable human nature, individually and collectively. While society as it existed before the 1990s/2000s was too rigid, prescribed, and biased, the social landscape we now inhabit is a vast wasteland of choice.2 A lot of people, maybe even most, don't have any idea what direction they should take, and they have few true mentors or role models. In this void, podcasters and influencers have taken up this role, with tragic consequences…
But back to the original question: what is one to do with life?
At the most granular level, there's a limitless menu of choices: you can work from home, an office, or hybrid; you can do physical labor, work in the service industry, drive a truck, work on a computer, use AI, join the military, be a traveling account rep or salesperson, or strike out on your own as an entrepreneur. If you're an American, you can live and work anywhere you want in the US, and then there's always the opportunity to work abroad in a myriad of foreign locales.3 You can go to college, trade school, take a gap year, or start your career post high school—hell you can drop out of high school and start a career on social media as an influencer, model, or OnlyFans sex worker.
It's no longer standard practice to get married and have kids after high school or college, or to live in or near our hometown…which is good in many cases, but another example of guardrails that are no longer in place.
Layered on top of this is that every aspect of information we consume through social media, podcasts, YouTube, etc. is personalized—it's as if everyone has their own media company with unique branding, imaging, news, audio, and video to go with it. The tether to reality and a fact-based understanding of the world is increasingly thin if not entirely absent: huge swaths of society now believe things that are obviously not true, but because they are presented as true on TikTok or Reddit or Reels or by a podcaster who's been entirely captured by his audience, reality doesn't matter.
If everyone is shouting about Venezuelan gangs taking over entire apartment complexes on Twitter, then it must be real—especially if it confirms the propaganda I've been watching on Fox News. The same thing happens on the left. And once the mob gets hold of something, no amount of fact checking matters, even if you show someone a video or have them read a well-researched article demonstrating that the thing they say is happening, isn't. The last thing we need is virtual reality: we already have it. Millions of people in the US are now convinced reality isn't real. And all of this is amplified by algorithms that are designed to enrage us, engorge our desires, and make us as crazy as possible.
The guardrails are gone
The guardrails are gone. Most people don't know their neighbors, let alone have any real connection to their community, and the number of us who attend church, join a club, or have a vibrant social circle decreases by the day. Family remains, but the notion parents should have any real authority over their children has eroded, because surely you can find a subreddit or TikTok where people will tell you that your dad wanting you to go to school or get a job is peak toxic masculinity, and what we really need to do is destroy the patriarchy.
Worse, in what has to be one of the dumbest self-owns in recorded history, we've now managed to confuse people about the most basic aspects of their nature—biology. As I've written before, while I don't doubt that some very small percentage of people truly experience gender dysphoria, the far left and trans-activists, piggy-backing off an idea that originated within feminism that sex and gender are mere constructs, have convinced or bullied many people into believing, or saying they believe, that biological sex is irrelevant and that there are some unknown number of sexes and genders. And it's not like this is a fringe idea: it's infected our entire education system, from K-12 public schools to state universities and the Ivy league, corporate culture (raise your hand if you've been through a DEI training in the last few years), and massive proportions of Zoomers and Millennials, along with a fair proportion of Boomers, whose generational slogan might as well be, "going along to get along since 1955. Don't rock the boat and don't worry—everything is going to be fine."4
We've changed bathroom signs, put pronouns in our email signatures and profiles on social media, and let biological men compete with biological women, simply because they claim to be a woman. We've allowed tens of thousands of young people take puberty blockers, sex hormones, and/or cut off their genitals and create new ones, treatments that render one incapable of ever having children and in some cases, of ever experiencing an orgasm. It would all make a great science fiction novel if it wasn't true.
Biological sex and the physical differences between men and women are among the most basic facts of our existence, as inviolable as the existence of gravity or the observation that the sky is blue.
And it doesn't just affect members of the LGBTQ+ community. For heterosexual men and women, this violent assault on reality dictates that masculine and feminine roles and behavior are also irrelevant, so we now have legions of effeminate man-babies and masculine boss-bitches (their words, not mine) who can't find a partner because they've adopted life choices and behaviors that are fundamentally unattractive or unuseful to the opposite sex.
Freedom! Terrible, terrible freedom!
If you ignore all the bad parts, it's amazing. We've never been more free to embrace who we really are and run with it. One of my favorite follows on Instagram is snowbrains, a dude who does nothing but ski and travel the world, and appears to make a killing doing it. In the few DMs we've exchanged, it's clear he's a wonderful person who's incredibly thankful and positive, and brightens the lives of all of us who follow his journey. There are millions of examples like this, and as an old school liberal who believes people should be free to live how they choose so long as they're not hurting anyone else, it's incredible, and I'm not arguing we should go back, even if we could.
But there is such a thing as too much freedom, and for many people—maybe even most—it's very difficult to discover who we really are. In this confusion, we're prone either to forge a nature that makes us miserable, like the snowboarding bro above, or to forget what we know to be true about ourselves, as I have.
And it's making us terribly unhappy. People are more lonely, afraid, depressed, and anxious at a time when we've never been more free or enjoyed more collective material wealth. Why? Because they don't have a role to play, a community to lean on, or a real purpose to pursue. Because so many of us don't live in harmony with our inner nature—the truth of who we really are.
Finding your purpose—your true human nature
So that ultimately, is job number one: to discover our purpose—the life path that will bring us happiness and fulfillment. Stop trying to be someone you are not, casting about from identity to identity.
You are NOT a social media handle.
You are NOT a political movement.
You are NOT responsible for making other people happy.
You are a human being who needs love and belonging, passion and projects, food and laughter, sex and entertainment, to speak of your truth and experience, to learn and to teach, to forgive and be forgiven…
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This is so goddamn obvious it doesn’t need academic support, but if you want it, read Jonathan Haidt’s work, or Jean Twenge.
Racism and sexism are bad and obviously prevented people from being free in the ways they are now, and the further you go back the worse they were…however, anyone who thinks racism or sexism are now huge problems is either a DEI grifter or someone who’s too dumb to see through their grift.
Same is true if you’re a citizen of most countries in the world.
Easy to say when houses cost 50-100K during your professional career and you lived through the greatest expansion of the world’s economy that has ever occurred in human history.