here is the deal @marlon … you are an intelligent, knowledgeable guy and probably think you have valuable knowledge to teach and you do.
i also consider myself an intelligent, knowledgeable guy and think i have valuable knowledge to teach and i do just that.
here is the problem though … when i teach somebody it isn’t because i love them … it’s because i love myself. i am USING them to feel better about myself and my knowledge. when they tell me that what i said was interesting i think “that’s right bitch, because i am amazing” i don’t think “wow i am so glad i was able to help this person get ahead in life”
so when we’re talking about teaching your kids we have to ask - who are you doing this for ? are you teaching them for THEIR benefit or for YOURS ? are you teaching them because it’s something they need to know or because it’s something you want to share ?
in the movie “No Country For Old Men” ( 2007 )
at a certain point one dude is about to execute another dude and asks the victim “if your rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” …
the point being we all have some principles that guide us and we all obviously believe in our principles but we don’t all get the outcomes we would like … at which point one might reasonably ask if our guiding principles are maybe flawed ? yet nobody actually asks that. instead we simply keep believing that our principles are infallible because it is simply not physically possible for us to question ourselves on that deep of a level. it is not quite possible to question one’s own identity so to speak - you would lose your mind.
it’s like a game of chess but instead of thinking a certain number of moves ahead we’re talking about thinking a certain number of moves BACK. we deconstruct the chain of events, the causality of it, what lead to what - and we try to find where we went wrong. but when we do this we never go ALL the way back. everyone has a limit to how many steps back they can go. well i don’t, but most people do.
an animal can only go one step back. if doing something hurts they won’t do it again. an average person can maybe go two or three steps back. so if they buy something and it’s trash they are able to not just say i won’t buy this again but maybe they will be able to say “next time i will read the reviews” which is going 2 steps back because they didn’t just acknowledge the bad choice but also asked what led to that bad choice ( not reading reviews ).
but ultimately we won’t go all the way back and stop at some depth deemed good enough.
and when we teach our kids we will teach them to avoid the superficial errors that were 2 or 3 steps back that we were able to analyze … but when it comes to the real fundamental stuff “the rule that brought you here” so to speak … we have never analyzed it, and we will indoctrinate our children into the same flawed rule that has fucked us over so that our children will get fucked over too, but maybe in a slightly different way because they won’t repeat our EXACT mistakes, but rather different but similar mistakes.
the point is this - would you rather be yourself or Andrew Tate ? i would rather be Andrew Tate. my kids would rather be Andrew Tate too. but as long as i am the one teaching them they can only be me.
so i hate my own life, and love my kids, but by teaching them i condemn them to my life which i hate. because while i may warn them against the individual mistakes i made they will never be faced with those exact problems. they will be faced with different problems. they don’t need trivia - they need a good rule to live by. and since i’m not Andrew Tate it means my rule wasn’t very good, and i can’t teach my children what they actually need to know.