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Original Post
Post date: 7 months ago
Payout: $1.94
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I wanted to raise an old post from the dead for the #steemitzombies tag. I used to do this series called “Optimism at the End of the World” which explored ways of reframing your life in order to improve it and to improve society. Eventually I quit because while it started with some awesome support, as it went on it lost most of the attention it started with. I would spend 2-4 hours on some of these posts and a few of them had barely any readers and eventually I decided it was better for myself to take it easy and work on more casual pieces. I’m still proud of every post in this series *

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Optimism at the End of the World #12 : How to Kill your Heroes

I recently wrote an article describing why A Song of Ice and fire (Game of Thrones) is such an engaging story. One of the main reasons is the way "good and bad" are not oversimplified like many other fantasy epics, almost everyone exists in a grey area and is allowed to choose which side of human nature they would like to explore. This is how life actually is. What human nature looks like is entirely up to us. It's not a fairy tale where good and bad are implicit, we have to decide what kind of impact we want to have.

me being evil

You are as evil as they get.

You could murder someone. It might be hard to imagine but you could. Perhaps not as the person you are right now, perhaps not with the experiences you've had and the attitude you have right now, but if you had a different set of experiences, you'd have different toughts running through your head and wouldn't be that person. For anyone who sees a terrible act and says "I could never do that!", you lack imagination. Just because you can imagine one aspect of the experiences of another, doesn't mean you can imagine the whole ride up until a certain point. You can't imagine how words and actions affect people differently. Perhaps something that is no big deal to you is devastating to someone else. Different people are sensitive to different things and the thoughts that go through their mind are influenced by an uncountable amount of factors.

So try to imagine the worst you could possibly be. Don't worry, you don't need to become it. Just imagine the worst set of circumstances you possibly can and imagine what kind of person you would become under those circumstances. Imagine that the worst people you've ever heard of, murderers, rapists and swindlers and imagine that they were good people once. What would it have taken to lead them to become so awful?

The myth of a hero.

You are also capable of being the most shining example of humanity that the world has ever seen. Just as we think we are incapable of terrible atrocities, we also tend to think we could not contribute great things to humanity. We glorify the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and Mother Theresa, and seem to think we are so much different. But there are flawed aspects to this desire for heroes. The first, as a few tend to point out, these heroes are all imperfect. Some are intolerant of others' beliefs, some sexist, some unstable. But we can celebrate their contributions without ignoring their flaws. We just need to take them off that pedestal.

Some of us like to take these people off of their pedestals in a pessimistic attempt to say that humanity is flawed and not capable of true greatness. But let's change our framing a little bit. What if these people are just like you and me. What if they just made a decision in a certain moment, to be truly incredible, if just for a moment, to ignore their fear and to insist on what they thought was right. By recognizing that heroes are just like everyone else, you suddenly gain access to the mindset that allows for such bravery, innovation, and ACTION.

Why we live vicariously through heroes

We live vicariously through the heroic acts of others for one simple reason: it's easier to avoid true responsibility. Sure we may accept the outcome of our choices, but we haven't made the most important choice, the act of defining ourselves despite circumstance. We don't need to feel bad about our past mediocrity, and we don’t need to bury ourselves in the guilt of our past questionable acts. But that doesn’t mean we can brush it all off as up to circumstance or say "that's just who I am" as if we don't have any say in the matter. "I am not one of the chosen ones. I don't have the talent. I am just one person, I can't make a difference." Why? Because it's easier to let society or circumstance dictate what kind of person you are going to be.

It's convenient to have heroes. It keeps us complacent, like cogs in a machine. But by realizing how terrible you could be, you can also open yourself to realize how truly amazing you can be.

You are your experience multiplied or divided by what you do with it. So what will you do with it?

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