My dad told me: it’s not about the result, it’s about the path. I nodded my head, meaning I understood, but I didn’t fully grasp it. It really is about the path. When you hit the result, you realize that nothing has changed, at least not in the way you expected (and I’m just 21, so haven’t lived a lot yet). You are still you, alone with your thoughts, your body, your mind. The only change is in the internal. Your brain, your neural structure—those are the marks left behind by the journey. What you became through that experience is what truly matters, simply because its what remains.
Status is a result that can be sought, but it doesn’t truly exist. By definition, it’s in the eyes of others, a projection in their minds. But as before, you are you, alone with your thoughts. Perceptions are small electrical signals in the brains of other people. They do not alter your core experience. Status, is an illusion, it doesn’t really exists.
The path, in contrast, is transformative. The steps you take shape your capacity to think, to perceive, to make sense of the world. It is a recursive process, meaning each step you take changes the way you will walk in the future.
We are algorithms, creating knowledge and changing our actions along the way. We are adaptive and the feeling of life is greater when we evolve in a more efficient form of lives than we were previously. It’s not the change from state A to state B that gives us the sensation of being alive, but the rate of change between those states. The steeper the curve of evolution, the more intense the experience of living becomes. This growth is what generates the sense of vitality.
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How destructive behaviours fit into this proposition?
Destructive behaviours arise by the necessity of feeling alive but no capacity to aim at a higher point. In the process of dropping to the lowest point, you will feel alive because it is only linked with the steepness of the decline. This can also be viewed less drastically, for exemple a slow addiction provides small but steep declines, the individual will breifly feel intensely alive. And because the path taken is recursive, the individual will adapt to seek the same intense feeling of being alive, simply because neuroplasticity has no awareness of good and bad, up and down.