Breaking The Circle

I think about the concept of confidence quite a bit, mainly because I have social anxiety and I have struggled with my self-confidence or lack of it for many years. In that time I have read many books around the subject but one text in particular has stood out, perhaps most surprisingly it isn't a book about anxiety at all but rather a book about Cold Reading that had a generic extract that at first pass was so specific I thought it had been written for me personally, but that was the point. The extract served to demonstrate how statements that seemed precise and personal were actually generic when you stepped back and considered them objectively, free from the original context in which they were made.

Whilst the purpose of this extract was to demonstrate the effectiveness of confidence trickery, the key take away for me was the fact that the specific insecurities the passage referred to were considered generic which alluded to the wider experiences that people have; or more succinctly the prevailing relationship to confidence that people have in general. If a fear of being judged and what other people might think of you is considered generic in this regard, then it had to be a fear that everyone, or at least the vast majority of people had.

The more I took this concept and broke it down, the more I focused on the idea of confidence as a concept and what that actually meant to people. The conclusion I inevitably drew was that confidence was actually an illusion, that it didn't exist, not in terms of an attribute that people had or lacked. I came to realise that confidence in truth was just the ability to hide your insecurity, and conversely a lack of self-confidence in reality wasn't borne of an insufficient quantity of some arbitrary attribute, but rather the inability to hide your insecurities.

There is however a paradox that I observed as a result of this conclusion, namely that those people who were completely open and honest about their insecurities and their own inadequacies appeared confident despite professing openly that they never felt that way or that it was a label they did not identified with - in other words they appeared to achieve confidence by completely abandoning any attempt to convey it.

For the better part of the decade that followed, I tried to accept that I was unlikely to overcome my insecurities and feelings of inadequacy because they stemmed from past events that I could not change - "accept the things you cannot change bitch!" became my mantra. I tried to be as open as possible with others instead of trying to convince them I had confidence when I didn't, because I never quite felt comfortable with that idea in the first place as I don't like lying and misleading people, it brings back a lot of discomfort as a gay man with the obvious parallels to my time in the closet. That and lying requires effort and expended energy which becomes increasingly burdensome in time, the truth is effortless.

The intention of trying to nurture a healthier mindset and a greater sense of self as the result of complete transparency didn't bear fruit. My relationship to my past didn't grow, and my mindset remained more or less the same. Meanwhile a lot of things happened in my life and a lot of personal growth resulted from those experiences, just not on the one area of my life where it would have been beneficial as far as I could see. I spent the better part of another decade completing one big loop that took me on a journey and a half, yet somehow I ended up in the exact same spot I was in to begin with.

In little under a month I will turn 35 and whilst other people may find it easier to point to things that I have to show for it, at times serving as my own worst critic I underwrite what I have achieved and dismiss it as lacking substance or meaning. I know that I have seen and done things that people twice my age haven't managed to do and to an extent I should be grateful for the life experience and the wisdom that it has afforded me, the problem is comparing yourself to other people.

"Comparison is the thief of joy" someone recently wrote on a discord server I am a member of, and that's been echoing in my mind. It's a quote originally attributed to Theodore Roosevelt but still rings true today. Whilst the Internet enables us to do many things that enrich our lives it does make it all too easy to find people around the world to compare yourself to; seeing millionaires under 20 and billionaires under 30 doesn't do much for your self-confidence and feeling of accomplishment - there will always be someone who has done more, seen more, heard more, and has more to show for it than you. Closer to home I've written before about the intergenerational comparison and the fact by 35 my parents had gotten an education, started a business, bought and sold their first house, had two kids, and were looking to buy again.

It's easy to be angry at the world and society for how you feel your generation was let down by the promises that were made to it, as I am now essentially an elder millennial, with elder Gen Z now entering their late 20s and Gen Alpha now soon to come of age the pace of progress and the momentum is continuous.

I don't hold onto anger at this shortcoming however, and I don't want to stop the passage of time or return to my halcyon days - I recognise the selfish choices of the generations before me and the negative impact they've had on my generation and don't begrudge those that come after me for having success. I want future generations to be more successful than mine.

To be clear I'm not saying they don't deserve it, or that I am jealous of what they have achieved far from it, I would say I am more in awe of what they have managed to do with the shitty hand they were dealt, because let's face it, my generation didn't really give them anything other than acceptance and realistic expectations. If they want to change the world I'm not going to try and stand in their way and stop them from doing it, I'm excited by the prospect of someone actually doing something about the mess we're all in because we're all in this mess together. As the old guard loses its power and influence that's becoming increasingly possible but only if my generation doesn't attempt the inherit the obstinacy of those that came before us.

If the millennial mindset is to be summed up by a single meme it would be "Say the line Bart" and the disillusionment with the idea that anyone can do anything, we're much more realistic. We encourage you to do as much as you can and aim high by all means but it's enough to achieve what you think you're capable of, whatever that might be. It's easier to give other people advice than it is to take your own though, and whilst that is a mentality that we would be wise to serve ourselves we're still jaded by the grief of missed opportunity.

In the opening scenes of Bioshock Infinite there's a preacher that repeatedly says "It would have been enough" and with that echoing in my mind I don't know how to define "enough" in terms of what I want to achieve in my life, or the point at which I could say I have achieved enough; the same game and the same scene is set against a choral rendition of a hymn 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken?' originally written by Ada R. Habershon. That idea of breaking the circle is at the very least the legacy I want to leave behind, I don't want to inherit the obstinacy of older generations, I don't want to try and turn back time, and I don't want to tell future generations they can't or won't succeed, I want to believe that they can.