Human beings perceive the world as they experience it, not how it really is. Without extreme, deliberate, consistent attempts to know yourself, your self-image will be as different from how you really are as your daily commute is from a cross-country road trip.1 While the unseen emptiness of the United States is beautiful, the unseen but equally vast aspects of your core character are not.
By default, humans are horrible people.2 In order to grow beyond the default, each person must actively search out how they are, how they could be, and address the correction necessary to become better. Because introspection requires uncommon courage, diligence, and honesty, few overcome the base human condition. Do you have reason to believe you are significantly better than average?
Do you see your faults as they really are? Are there negative qualities about yourself that you deny, try to hide, or minimize? Refusing to acknowledge some negative aspect of your perceived self prevents you from embracing the whole truth. Almost everyone has negative character qualities that they ignore rather than address. When you don’t like something about yourself, you can either accept it, change it, or lie about it. All kinds of lies are possible when it comes to negative character qualities. You can lie about their existence, their cause, what would fix them, or how much fixing them would be worth.
How confident are you that you see and correctly appraise the cost of all of your faults? How many of your flaws have you blinded yourself to, and how many have always been beyond your ability to perceive? Would a more observant person see flaws in you that you do not see? Would a wiser person appraise your faults as more pernicious than you do?
Are any of the positive qualities that you claim to possess without sufficient evidence? Do you say you do your best while continuing to willfully violate your conscience? Do you believe yourself to be an honest person, even while at least occasionally lying? Do you believe yourself to care about others, even when you at least occasionally do not? Is there untapped good available in your life that you have not sufficiently prioritized? Do you have habits in need of breaking, or habits in need of establishing?
Which of your continued flaws are actually far more costly than you thought, and what good things present and future will you be prevented from obtaining until they are corrected? Are there sufficiently evidenced improvements that you refuse to make? Are there ideas worth thinking about that you refuse to think about? Are there people worth engaging with that you refuse to engage with?
Footnotes
- 1. Those who take a drive from coast to coast might be shocked to see just how much of the United States is empty. Most of the population is concentrated into a small percentage of the geographical area, guaranteeing that what most people regard as normal population density is anything but correct. ↩
- 2. For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. (Mosiah 3:19) ↩