Stealing Agency
Anything that robs capability from the people that you love isn’t love.
If love wants the best for the other person, which seems to be our definition, then “I love you,” means, in addition to many other things, “I want you to do well. I want the best for you.”
Anything, then, that steals their ability to grow, to decide and act, to embody their own capability, removes well-being from their future.
When we say we love them, but we’re trying to do things for them that they could do for themselves, we are robbing them of their own path, of their own agency, of their own development. We know that some of the most miserable humans on Earth are the ones looping, with no sense of progress either behind them or ahead of them, caught in perpetual pattern loops.
We also know that human thriving and human flourishing is dopamine-driven (a progress chemical, anticipatory and dependent upon direction). You cannot separate progress from health. That goes all the way back to Genesis (“Be fruitful and multiply; Take dominion; Rule over nature; Name the animals.”).
We are also the only species that builds things that are never found in the natural world, and that is constantly developing new technologies and expanding. We’re an expansive species. We have to be growing.
If I say I love you, but I try to do your work for you, I either don’t know how to love you, and it’s probably my own ignorance — or I’m trying to play God and be important and be seen. In that case, it would mean I’m operating through fear, so that you’ll need me. That means that I don’t know where I stand in God’s eyes myself, because I’m operating from emptiness.
Love means you want the best for the other person, and the best for the other person is always progress. It’s always capability. It’s always agency. It’s always growth. That’s what we are as a species.
What about someone who really does need help? Help them. And then help them learn to do it themselves.
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
That’s how we love people. We don’t love them by doing it for them, carefully guarding ourselves from expendability.
What about situations where someone is down and out, and you have what they need?
What about a situation where they’re stuck in a pattern, and you’re desperate to see them stop hurting themselves or self sabotaging?
Jordan Peterson says, “if you want to help someone that doesn’t want to be helped, stop helping. The only thing at that point that you can do to help is exemplify that there’s another way to live.”
The most helpful thing you can possibly do is be the proof there is another pattern that could be held, another pathway that could be walked. Unless we have an example, we don’t know that. We can’t know that.
Listen to this article here:
Think about that anyone that’s ever helped you grow in a meaningful way. And truly, the people that we remember the most fondly are the ones who helped us grow.
Anyone who helped you grow in a meaningful way, did they do it by telling you what to do? (Maybe if you hired them to do that, but they still never did your work for you. They taught you.)
Far more often than not, in terms of effective “helping,” it was someone who embodied and exemplified what you needed; who had the things that you were striving to develop in yourself, right?
Or, perhaps you got to learn it together, each empowered through iron sharpening iron.
Either way, you got to see, “oh, maybe I’m not stuck, because I see an alternative to the ways of thinking and living that I thought I was stuck with.”
If you want to help, be the change.
That’s the most powerful thing you can do.
Holding someone “accountable” and chasing them is never gonna do the job.
Perhaps, what might do the job is giving them hope by taking up your own cross. Stop abdicating responsibility to everyone else to make you feel important. Walk your own path with as much integrity and as much sense of mission and forward motion and inner alignment as you possibly can.
Now. Now you’re in a position where you could actually welcome those who want to walk alongside, actually inspire those who don’t know that there’s another way. Actually raise children into functional adults.
I cannot remove anyone’s capability to do anything they could do for themselves — and call it love.
Comments