Maximilien Le Cleï

You might have heard of the saying: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

I'm coming to peace, as time passes, with the fact that I can never quite predict the consequences of my actions. There are times where I am really trying to do "good", where I spend a lot of energy on finding any flaws in the way I am trying to go about it, and yet it so often still leads to creating some amount of suffering.

I comfort myself by believing this applies to all of us, no matter how "holy" we are. None of us knows everything there is know to make an optimal decision, and, barring utopia, this will never change. There is always going to be a disconnect between what one wants/needs and what we think one wants/needs.

So how do we act if we believe that to be true? The way I see it: the way we've done it all along. We are all already acting optimally with respect to the state of mind, information and wisdom that we have.

Why did I waste your time telling you not to change anything? Because I want you to know that I think your behaviour is valid, and I hope you can derive comfort from it.

Is that even necessarily "good" for you? Probably not. I'm just doing what I think is best over here. :)

I've mentioned fulfillment a few times by now, so I want to get into what I personally mean by it.

Let's get into a little example. You surely know how there are times that you eat lunch or dinner or whatever, and you feel more or less satisfied with it. Sometimes it doesn't really matter how much you ate but rather what did you eat. Certain dishes/foods make you feel more satisfied than others.

Well I personally feel something similar for my "mental". Depending on how I act and think, my mental feels more or less satisfied.

At this point in time I personally see mental feeding in the same weight class as physical feeding. And just like being satisfied from good physical feeding, there is this satisfaction from good mental feeding. I see love, empathy, understanding and all that good stuff like gourmet mental food.

I don't know if I like thinking of myself as empathetic because I doubt I accurately understand what you are feeling. However, I can feel whatever emotion I would be feeling were I in the situation I believe you are in, to such a strength that it almost feels like it is happening to me.

I feel like we are all on a gradient in terms of 1) how strongly we feel our own emotions and 2) how strongly we feel what I described just above. My guess is that I have moved further up the spectrum of both of these over the years.

Moving up the spectrum is very exposing: you feel more of everything, the "good" and the "bad". I think the usefulness of doing so is not that clear and people most often already have enough challenges as it is.

I am guessing it is one of these things that only starts making sense when our more essential needs are met. Whenever that happens, it looks like a desire for fulfillment comes creeping, which empathy answers quite well I find.

Nowadays, I find myself interacting with everyone as if they were my siblings, no matter the age. While many do not likely see it reciprocally, I find that it does not matter that much, as in, reciprocity is not needed to maintain this point of view.

If you have multiple siblings, I am guessing that you will agree that some are more enjoyable to be with than others. However, no matter how bad the relationship gets, you keep them in your heart. You wish them well.

I find life so much lighter to live when I apply this to everyone. Yes some siblings might hurt me, but just like when that happens with a sibling, I believe that they just did not know better.

For having been a bad sibling in the past, I am confident that the joy they get out of hurting me is insignificant compared to the joy they would get if they were given the tools to enjoy loving me. I think it's all a matter of not having had the chance of being aware of the self-generating rewards that come with being kind.

When I first head of the idea of being kind to one's self a couple years back, I remember not being able to personally identify to it. Realistically, I don't think I had ever really been exposed to anything like it. At that point in time, I would only do "good" things for myself so as to avoid the "bad" things that would happen if I didn't.

As a consequence, earlier in my adulthood, I would often not listen to many of my own desires when making decisions; and when spending time with someone I loved, I would often choose to compromise myself, which was hardly sustainable.

Not too long ago however, I noticed that in my pursuit to being considerate to everyone, I wasn't considerate to myself, which didn't make sense, given that I am one of everyone! Funnily enough, I think this is how it clicked for me.

I also realized that different parts of me want different things: one wants a good career, one wants to play video games, one wants to relax and do nothing, one wants to exercise, etc. I think being kind to myself also means working on a compromise that works for each version of myself, kind of like an adult trying to put an end to a fight between a bunch of kids that don't know any better.

I believe that a ton of wisdom can be generated from the colossal amount of information that we are now ingesting . I believe such wisdom can come about through interactions, but I believe it is generated more efficiently while pondering by one's self: I think that nothing will ever make more sense to me than the conclusions I come to myself.

I personally ponder best while taking long baths, in the dark, wearing noise canceling headphones. It is as if my senses are all toned down, yet without making me feel sleepy, as long as the water is not too hot, essentially allowing easier focus on my thoughts.

Most insights I've had over the past few years have come from these. I've tried more standard forms of meditation, but none of them have ever worked out for me quite as much.

I believe that everyone's opinion makes sense in the context of what they are aware of. However, we are never aware of everything. Thus often times, opinions do not spread because other people are aware of other things that discredit the opinion.

I am unaware of many things, but I believe that all this time thinking has made me aware of many other things that are not easily accessible otherwise.

One reason I am sharing this is that I, for a long time, had trouble believing people promoting the type of behaviour that I now promote (love, understanding, etc). I often times believed that the rationales were disconnected from the real world.

However, after all this thinking, I now believe that it makes sense. Luckily for many of these loving people, they reached this understanding without having to dry up their skins on hot baths (though to be fair, they probably had to sacrifice other things). Lucky for people like me though, I believe to be in possession of a more "rational" roadmap, which you can now see me try to distill as much as possible.

I am in large part a product of my environment. Like many others, I grew up during a time where everything looked like it was going to be okay. In order to thrive in such a world, we were taught values like kindness, charity and honesty, among others. Like many, I thus wondered why things changed so dramatically, where our values feel disconnected from how to actually thrive in this world.

I think that we declared victory too soon. We were blind to the fact that we were building on unstable grounds, discarding too much of peoples' suffering. And this is now coming back to bite us.

Lucky for us, the advent of social media has allowed much more of us to talk to each other with various degrees of directness, which in turn has made a lot of our blindness of each other's suffering to go away, and continue to go away ^[1].

I think there is thus a way back to enjoying the values we were taught. However, I think that we cannot hide from the fact that this way is going to be demanding to craft up. We are so many, with so many different opinions. A lot of these opinions look irreconcilable. But I think that all problems have a solution if you are willing to let go of existing constraints that limit our outlook, and instead venture into new solution lands.

^[1] Notice, in contrast, the continuing demonization of "boomers"? I think it is in large part a consequence of that generation being much more disconnected from our discourse than the younger ones. We do not quite understand their pain, and they do not quite understand ours.

Given that they are all carefully chosen, I wanted to add some precisions on the words in "walking on a path to unconditional universal love".

Walking (...) to: Walking towards something, to me, metaphorically means having some sort of direction that we go towards. We might be slow, we might be fast, we might be off track, we might be still, yet the intention remains.

A (...): I purposely did not pick the word "the". I have my own path that makes sense in the context of my life. That path will be inevitably different from anybody else's, and will possibly never cross.

Path: I say "path" because I believe this is a quest that never ends. I don't think we ever reach "unconditional universal love".

Unconditional: Let me get into a little bit of situation to explain that one. Let's say you are being loving towards someone. When that happens, you roughly get feelings from [i] the way this person (re)acts and [ii] the "warmness" naturally created within you for being loving. I think that love starts losing its conditionality the moment the [ii] feeling develops. The further it develops, the less you need the [i] feeling to go your way. I believe (because I think I am successfully doing that) that the [ii] feeling can be trained to make the [i] feeling like a cherry on top of the cake.

Universal: From my point of view, many loves are high on the spectrum of unconditionality (e.g. mother love). However, I find fewer examples of loves that are high on the spectrum of universality. I think this is because it is a less natural property of love to develop.

When I love someone, I feel connected to that person, and that feels amazing. I am no longer a single floating entity that gets unwillingly rocked back and forth by the world. I have that person's hands to hold. Together we become more unshakeable.

By loving everyone and everything, I hold myself to everyone and everything. I understand how that might sound suboptimal, given the point of view that some are doing the rocking. However I do not think anyone is creating rocking out of thin air. They rock because they get rocked, often by something hardly visible.

By holding myself to everyone, I feel more connected, and that feels great. Now that I have developed myself quite a bit, I also derive pleasure from the feeling that my grip absorbs some of the undesired rocking felt by others.

Love: Love is love. I think everyone agrees that it is hard to set a definition to what love is. Love is expressed and received differently by everyone. All I know is that love feels both good and right at the same time (can't think of many things that do hehe).

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I think it all begins with aligning one's self towards the general direction that is "unconditional universal love" at first. And I have found the rewards to come reeeaaally fast once that happens. I like to sometimes quantify my mental health out of 10; and I know that if we were to plot that score over time, I am very confident that we'd definitely see the event of me coming across this notion a few years back as a positive accelerator.

I've come to believe that everyone is right. Every opinion is grounded.

Every decision that you take is justified. These decisions make sense in the context of the life that you've lived, the specific mood you're in, etc. Were I in the exact same position you are, I'd take the same decisions.

Believing this, I cannot rationally be judgmental about your behaviour. Sure your actions might negatively impact me, or not fit my world view. However I do not think that makes you any less right.