I’m (not?) a good person

Phaeton, Four Disgracers — Hendrick Goltzius

“You need to know, I don’t think you’re a good person.”

The words came through my tiny phone speaker and hit me like an anaphylactic shock.

Cold February light still spilled through my window. But a few mumbling moments later, I hung up. Watched myself crawl into bed, put my covers over my head, and cry.

*

Earlier that day, I walked into a study room in my school’s business building. I was gossiping on the phone with a friend about business case competitions and summer internships and stock investments. We were both ravenous for our first job placement. There was a boutique bank hiring but the hours were “sweaty” and the work trivial. A girl our year was interviewing—who I thought to be on the self-conceited side—and I heard she got an 8% on a calculus midterm and joked about how that’s even possible. 

Afterward, I hung up and went to work. Thought nothing of it.

Little did I know, in the next room over, through a paper-thin wall, sat the gatekeeper of my school’s fabled finance ladder, listening to the whole conversation.

It’s hard to give you an accurate picture. He was practically a god to first-year students. Perfect GPA, elite internships, headed to Wall Street. The model of success. He moved through campus in shadows, trailed by whispers of near-religious fervor. I was intimidated by him, but also desperately sought approval. He hand-picked people to “mentor”. He could get you interviews, connections, opportunities. Change the trajectory of your career. But only if he liked you.

A few hours later, I got a cryptic text through the grapevine that I had screwed up bad and he was furious with me. 

Oh no…

A nightmarish, feverish fear descended like a sudden storm.

My head began to spin. My heart pounded hot in my ears. My stomach twisted in knots like an angry garden hose.

Between jagged breaths, my sweaty thumbs trembled as I sent him a message asking to straighten things out. 

Somehow, he found the time in his sleepless schedule to talk. To tell me that I’m not a good person. To tell me that my comments were malicious and ignorant and I was a cocky kid with no work experience. That he’s willing to let it go but wants nothing to do with me. I paced my dorm room, trying to explain. That he misheard parts, didn’t have context. But nothing would sway his stubborn conviction.

My coffin was nailed. 

I hung up. Barely able to believe what the actual fuck just happened. Those five words in my head, “You’re not a good person,” burning like venom. My napkin-sketch plans of the future torn to shreds. I felt like a car crash. 

He wasn’t totally wrong. 

I was status-starved and money-hungry. Relishing the finance-bro identity. Clambering up the ladder. Obsessed with LinkedIn.

Compensating for my insecurity with a cosmetic overconfidence. Wanting to find a place in the world. Wanting to be somebody people want.

To prove my worth, I set my sights on the highest-status game in town.

Everyone was competition and I wanted to win¹. 

*

I’ve done many things I’m not proud of. Words I wish I could take back. Failures I’ll never be able to correct for. Damage I can’t repair. 

I’ve lied, even to people I love. I’ve been jealous and critical and quietly competed with friends. I’ve ignored classmates who couldn’t boost my status. I’ve been hurt by people and decided the optimal solution is to strike back twice as hard. I’ve made up stuff in interviews. I’ve cheated on tests. I’ve plagiarized.

In grade 10, I agreed to write my friend’s Great Gatsby essay for summer school English class for $50, but ran out of time and made slight edits to one I found online, before I knew what TurnItIn was. In the dying breath of my first relationship, things were messy and I felt manipulated and just cut her out of my life. Even when I was young, as my family never lets me forget, left unattended I would rig the deck of cards to win. 

Even years later, my conscience groans: do not remind me of my sins, I have not forgotten them². 

Some moments, I don’t know if I am the bad guy in this story. Like my goodness is a façade. Like everyone else is naturally virtuous and I’m huffing and puffing to tread water, stay afloat, dragged down by an anvil around my ankles. 

*

A short tale:

One smoky starlit evening, an old man told his grandson, “My son, there is an endless battle that goes on inside all of us. It is between two wolves. One wolf is bad – he is anger, envy, regret, greed, arrogance, resentment, lies, superiority, and ego. The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The boy thought, then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old man answered, “The one you feed.”³

Our bodies are battlegrounds between good and evil⁴. Different parts of us want different things and they conflict with each other⁵. The line separating good and evil doesn’t pass between nations or classes or political parties, but right through every human heart⁶. 

Carl Jung wrote: “No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”⁷ 

Jung believed the first step to enlightenment was an encounter with the shadow—the ugly parts of ourselves we banish to the unconscious. The parts we reject, despise, and hide because we’re scared or ashamed to face or because they incite self-loathing. 

A good person is rooted in the knowledge that there’s a part of them that is angry at existence itself. That wants to carve a little slice of hell and stew in it. But they can reach the highest, most heavenly part of themselves because of that awareness.

Good isn’t naive blindness. To be good is to know my own capacity for evil. To be intimate with my darkness, but not choose it⁸. 

I've always been a vague outline of a "nice guy". Friendly, polite, helpful, etc. But it wasn't until I stared at the bad within that I understood what it meant to be good⁹.

And, in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, I’m at my best when I keep my latent “not-so-goodness” in mind¹⁰.

*

I’ve found no one is exclusively bad nor exclusively good¹¹. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things¹².

But insidiously, the need to be seen as a “good person” wraps itself around my identity.

I’m panicked by any intimation from anybody that I’m not-so-good of a guy. Even if they don’t know me. As if my belief is so fragile it depends on unanimous affirmation. It’s partly the reason I worked hard to keep things kind and compassionate at the end of my last long-term relationship. I didn’t want her to think I was the bad guy. 

Even writing this, I’m afraid. That you’ll think I’m a bad person. I’m tempted to show proof that I’m not. I’m even more tempted to slide some proof in here as an example of the proof I didn’t include¹³. “See??? LOOK how good I am.”

But the only way to be seen as a good person by everybody is to be some docile manipulable rabbit that gets trampled on and stepped over¹⁴. Social consensus is a terrible judge of morality. To base my perception of good and evil on the opinion of the crowd is to be lost in the wind¹⁵. 

I’ve been asking myself: What if I released my dependency to be seen as a good person? What if I cared less about the flash judgment of some Wall Street bro? What if I was okay being seen as bad by some because it’s a necessity to be good to all?

Well… what if?

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Thank you

Haley Brengartner

for reviewing an early version of this piece. The correlation between getting your feedback and my essay not sucking is 1:1

While writing, I thought about this graphic from Tim Urban:

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• This has been my final week in Phuket before I fly to the island of Ko Samui for a 7-day silent meditation retreat. I’ve been working out 3 hours/day, 6 days/week, spending time with friends I made here, and taking lots of photos.

• Yesterday I biked up to Phuket’s main landmark, the Big Buddha, for sunset (picture Christ the Redeemer in Rio but the Budda instead). Today I visited an elephant sanctuary.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Author and recovering alcoholic Sarah Hepola on slow change:

"Change is not a bolt of lightning that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be thrilling to watch it take shape."

📸 photos i took:

This week in Phuket.

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Tommy

1. With any game you once played, it’s easy to look back and chuckle at how fake and made-up and see-through it was. Far removed from the flesh of reality. Collective myth. "I can't believe I was like that," or "I can't believe I took it so seriously". But the thing about playing a game (and we’re all playing one, whether we’re aware of it or not) is that it's invisible, like gravity. When you're immersed in it, it’s so close up and vivid and real, it becomes your reality.

2. The word "sin" derives from Old English ‘synn’, translating Hebrew ‘hata’ and Greek ‘hamartia’. Both the Hebrew and Greek were an archery term that meant ‘missing the mark’. To sin is to miss the mark.

3. Similar to the wolf tale: As a little boy Joseph Campbell, raised Roman Catholic, was told he had a guardian angel on his right side and a tempting devil on his left. The decisions he made would depend on whether he listened to the devil or the angel. The angel and devil aren’t facts, in a literal or scientific sense, but metaphors for the internal impulses that guide and shape our decisions. Heaven and Hell, angels and devils, are internal modes of being. To make sense of these energies, humanity has extracted them out into physical places and physical bodies (similar with God as a “man in the sky”). This is because we need physicalizations or concretizations of abstract ideas to understand them.

4. Any good story, any story that survives across time, tells of that same archetypal battle between good and evil. It resonates, deep within our being, because it speaks to the very silent battle going on within us. We all love stories because we’re all trying to piece together how to win the battle. 

5. This is the basis of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Freud believed the human psyche is a loose bundle of conflicting autonomous sub-personalities with a guiding conscience (the "I") at the top of the hierarchy. But the conscience isn’t always in control. Sub-personalities can take center stage at different times. This explains why we don’t always know why we feel the way we feel and have almost zero control over our emotions. Psychoanalysis was later proven by neurologists to be an accurate biological representation of how the brain works.

A related quote I found in my notes: For two decades I’ve been pondering the question “Why do we not do more of that which we know to be good for us”, and the dominant answer I return to is, “There is a part of us which does not want it”.

6. Attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

7. Dante echoed a similar idea in his Divine Comedy: “The path to paradise begins in hell”.

8. The ability to say exactly the way you fell short immediately creates the dynamic the ancient Greeks called enantiodromia: once something becomes fully itself it starts to turn into its opposite. Once you admit your woundedness, you’re on the path the healing. Once you admit your inability to give, you’re on the road to generosity. Once I admitted I wasn’t a good person, or as good as I could be, I started to work toward becoming a better one.

This runs parallel to a line of questioning I love from Viktor Frankl: "Could people even sit in judgment of themselves if they were so worthless that they were not even able to see the ideal? Does not the distance from the ideal, as soon as they perceive it, confirm that they have not become completely disloyal to this ideal?"

9. It’s hard to define “good”. The best place to start is “that which isn’t bad”. I have a much clearer idea of all the stupid things I do, all the ways I feed a lower version of myself, that I know I should stop doing. 

One note: Overcoming pain and having a healthy way to process suffering seems necessary to be a good person. The people who do the most damage can’t handle the pain and suffering of life, so they spew their hurt back into the world. Sometimes amplified. 

10. That’s why the Christian Church is adamant about reminding people of their sins. Not to make them feel bad. Rather to keep their transgressions top of mind so they don't forget that temptation knocks every day. To remember the evil they are capable of, if they don't make a conscious continuous effort to choose the good.

One of my favorite ideas from Christianity is that every day is Judgement Day. There isn’t a single day that passes where the future will not judge you for the actions you take and the decisions you make today.

11. My simple human brain likes to put people in neat and tidy boxes, "good" or "bad," to make it easier to process and navigate our hyper-complex world. But, of course, it's not that simple. 

12. Attributed to Colleen Hoover in ‘It Ends with Us’.

However, Nietzsche would disagree. He thought most people acted “good” not because they were good, but because they were afraid of punishment. They were never allowed to do bad things without punishment. But, if given the opportunity, like in a mosh pit or street party, they would take it. People will do bad things whenever they think they can get away with it. It's cynical (classic Nietzsche) but potentially true.

13. Even doing good deeds, like helping old ladies cross the street or donating to charity, don’t prove I’m a good person. Because they’re all based in self-interest. They make me feel proud, affirmed, righteous. But for now, I’ll settle for "self-interested good" and figure out how to cross the “selfless transcendent good” bridge when I get to it.

Having readers conclude I’m a bad person, or remain undecided, sort of proves the whole point of the essay: not depending on validation from others that I’m “good”.

14. In his Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus said "the meek shall inherit the earth," meek didn't mean weak, docile, and submissive. It meant "power under constraint". To be humble and not easily tempered.

15. It doesn’t take a history major to look back, especially evident in the horrors of the 20th century, to see that social consensus has proven to be a terrible judge of morality. For example, the social consensus in Germany in 1940 was that the Nazi party was "good". 

This is a benefit of having a higher, transcendent code of conduct. Some sort of god or spiritual-type-thing. I only need to be seen as good in God’s eyes. That can be my guide.

Everyone has a God. A “highest thing”. We all worship. Except anything else you put at the top of your hierarchy—money, power, beauty, intellect, children, a spouse—will either abandon you or eat you alive.