🏋️ The Pursuit of Character vs The Cult of Personality
+ AI - Rocket for the mind | Wisdom Letter #246
I’ve been writing a mini essay every day for the last 20 days, have 10 more days to go.
It’s part of a challenge I’m doing where I publish 1 essay every day for 30 days straight. The themes are well aligned to the philosophy of this newsletter, so I feel you might like these essays as well.
Here’s the best one from this week -
The Pursuit of Character vs The Cult of Personality
Every activity that used to build character in the past, has now turned into an activity that you do to build a personal brand.
Things like traveling, reading books, having cool conversations with interesting people.
All of them enrich your character - if your focus is inwards, if you care about real personal growth.
But if you do it for external metrics, to grow a personal brand or to magnify your personality cult, then it just shrinks your character.
You chase shallow goals, and win shallow contests, to impress people with shallow values.
And you sacrifice the depth of your character in the process.
You become a "travel influencer" posting pictures on Instagram, and not actually experiencing the places you visit.
Or you become a "book influencer" posting cool pictures of neat covers of books which you've never opened, let alone actually reading them.
Or you become a "podcaster", interviewing other influencers, and not actually ever having a deep and meaningful conversation with a friend.
A lot of this is rooted in mimetic desire.
It's who we aspire to be, who do we look up to.
Not so long ago, maybe 40-50 years ago, our role models in society were people of character. We were taught to focus on building up our inner strength.
Values like honesty, integrity, hard work and grit were the at center of what most people growing up in society aspired towards.
These were all inward focused values.
You could work on yourself, and get better at them. You didn't have to care about any external metrics.
Today, our role models are people with a charismatic personality.
So everything we do is in service of a show we're putting up for the rest of the world.
We are told we should build a "personal brand". We should be more controversial, to have spiky opinions and create a cult around our personality.
These are all outward focused values.
You could work towards building them, and get better at them, but your fulfillment will still be in the hands of external entities like social media algorithms, your fans, your competitors etc.
You cede control of your happiness to factors beyond yourself.
No wonder you feel empty inside.
Question is - Is it really worth it? And can you actually do something about it?
Other essays I wrote this week -
3 things I learned about myself after 2 weeks of daily writing
Time is the only real wealth - everything else is loose change
Money is like water - its in unlimited supply if you know where to look.
Last week’s most clicked essay -
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Thank you for reading 🙏
That’s it for today.
See you next week 👋
We’ll be back with more interesting notes, highlights and curations.
Cheers,
Ayush & Aditi