Essential Human Experience

I'm going to go out on a limb and make the assertion that legions of social ills would cease to be were human beings to largely go outside of themselves more.  Not as one wise person put it, to think less of themselves, but rather to think of themselves less.

This is no doubt a monumentally difficult challenge in today's world, doubly so in the modern west.  We live in a culture that demands at every level that we consume.  It makes many fewer demands that we produce.  With operant conditioning in every electronic form we are invited to consume content like corn pellets, producing selfies, and getting rewarded with likes.  Like Skinner's pigeons or Pavlov's dogs.

There are a whole lot of problems to think about and write about, but I'm going to assert that there is a short list of things that are essential to a full and sane and fulfilled human life.  The list is simple, but hard to accomplish.  Here it is:

1) experience birth
2) grow up with your mother and father and siblings
3) graduate into adulthood - (often marked by graduating school but this has more to do with learning the basic skills needed to contribute as an adult)
4) get your first job on your own
5) get married to a person with whom you can produce a family
6) participate in the childbirth experience and practice parenting
7) let your children go
8) let your job go
9) let go of your fear of death
10) master each step and move on to the next, and do not fail to keep taking steps

I am convinced that these are all essential, and that to skip any of them is to rob ourselves of something profound and priceless, and because we do not live in a vacuum, to likewise rob others by what we fail to do.

I am convinced that each of these steps requires us to sacrifice something deeply important to us in order to take up something bigger and outside of ourselves, and the emptying of self produces giving to others as a natural consequence.  The more we can empty ourselves of selfishness, the more we can hold of something greater, and the more we can give to others, so again, even if we don't take away from others per se, every bit of selfishness we hold on to is that much more that we deprive others of, which is tantamount to the same thing.

Ten seems a paradox, but I would argue that mastery of each step is a process, not a binary possession, and therefore while continuing to hone the former you can still begin the later.

I am quite convinced that many of the things that we do instead of one or another of these are nothing more than clever counterfeits, undoubtedly supported by a tapestry of sophistries to justify.  Nonetheless, whether it is refusing to grow up and take up adult responsibilities, or refusing to sacrifice self to another in the full commitment of marriage, choosing a dog instead of children, or failing to let go of children and letting them live their own lives... all of these are failures to have the courage to burn your ships on the shore and go forward into a bigger, if unknown country.  But that is what is demanded to grow up fully as a human being.

There may be more (undoubtedly there is) than this, but I think that is it in a nutshell... I will have to think on this and write more as I do.