I want to say something careful about the people we admire — and about how quickly we decide someone is good. Real goodness is rare. Not because most people are bad, but because becoming genuinely good is slow, unglamorous work that most of us are only partway through. The person who criticises the powerful, who claims to hate what ambition does to people — watch what happens when power comes their way. The vices were never absent. They were just waiting for the right conditions. A cold snake is still a snake.
I'm not saying this to make you suspicious of everyone. I'm saying it so you don't outsource your judgement. Including about yourself.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though — the thing that feels more urgent than the question of other people's character. It's the question of what we pay for the things we pursue. We think we understand cost. We haggle over money, we weigh prices, we consider value. But we do this almost exclusively for things that can be measured in cash.
The things we spend our actual selves on — our time, our peace, our freedom, our self-respect — those we give away as if they cost nothing.
We would never buy a mediocre thing at a ruinous price. But we trade years of anxiety for an outcome we're not sure we want. We spend our freedom acquiring things that then require us to defend them. We mortgage the interior life for the sake of appearances. And we do all of this without ever quite seeing the transaction for what it is.
Try applying the same scrutiny to everything. Not just the things with price tags. Before you pursue something — before you spend yourself on it — ask what it actually costs. Not in money. In attention, in freedom, in the quality of your days. Very often you'll find that the thing you were reaching for is either unnecessary entirely, or not worth what you'd have to pay.
And when you lose something — which you will, we all do — try to look at it clearly before you grieve. Most of what we mourn isn't really the lost thing. It's the story we told ourselves about what owning it meant. The thing is gone, but the loss we feel is a construction of the mind. The object vanished. The suffering is optional.
He who owns himself has lost nothing. But how few people are blessed with ownership of self.
That's what all of this is pointing toward. Not detachment in the cold sense — not caring about nothing. But belonging to yourself so completely that what comes and goes in the external world doesn't determine what happens in the internal one. That's the only kind of wealth that can't be taken. Everything else is on loan.
Yours, counting the real costs,