Growth has dominated our lives. So much of the world around us convinces us we must grow. In the world that we live in, we seek to grow, to become better, to have more. It is something we are told is good for society. That when this occurs everyone wins. What we don’t realize is that to do so, there must be a desired end state. We then must judge the progression in accordance with this end state. We deem certain outcomes as good and others as bad. We end up viewing the world through a judgmental lens. We do this for an end state that we haven’t chosen and can’t describe. We cling to the desires that our current environment promotes. We seek to grow, but to what end. Have we not been seeking to grow for growth’s sake. This is the trap we fall into.
Change Is The Only Constant
We are constantly changing. Over time we become more complex as our experiences are constantly increasing. As we go down this path of experiences we evolve. We go through an evolution that is neither good nor bad, simply necessary. It is the judgement of what we become that is problematic. It is as if everything before was lesser, that we needed something to be gained. This shouldn’t be the case as our environment dictates how we evolve. When we take into account the totality of the forces outside of us, how can we make judgements that we are better or have grown.
We have competing drives pushing us in different directions as we live our life. This is not to say one should strive not to change. All it means is within the complex dynamic of people and their environment, we should refrain from judging at the macro level. We should view it the same way as we view systems over the long term, as an evolution. We should not seek to grow, but seek to evolve. To evolve to our environment around us. All of your past and future selves are not better or worse, they simply are different.
