five moderations/traits i've come to appreciate
for all of these, i know people of one extreme, people of the other, and those with moderation, and for all of these the moderation best. moderation here is used in the Aristotelian sense, not in the sense of averaging.
1 - people who are able to be self-critical without being self-hating or overly humble or self-depreciating. this is a middle ground between people who never find fault with themselves, and people who always do. it's lazy thinking to expect to always be right or always be wrong: sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong, and we need to identify which is which, not just automatically group everything into one or the other and group everyone else automatically into one or the other.
2 - people who are moral, rather than people who are moralistic or immoral. people who have their own set of principles which they live by, but not people who get angry or upset at others for not living by those principles, and not people who live by no principles at all. on the one extreme you have people who are fundamentalists about it who get angry at people who make the barest infractions on what rules they've set for themselves, and the other are people who don't live by anything, constantly act in a way to harm others or themselves, and mistakenly believe they're good people anyway.
3 - people who treat work and productivity and craftsmanship as important, but not people who see it as the purpose of their life. on one extreme are those people who don't take pride in what they do, or just work for some company and don't care about what they do as long as they get paid, and on the other extreme are people who see themselves as ___ machines (where ___ is their career), with everything else in their life revolving around optimizing the quality and quantity of their output. the moderation is to be very good at what you do, and take it very seriously, but not to identify with it so much that you'd rather be dead than do it or that you'd get depressed over something you created not being well-received, or not being the best at what you do in the world.
4 - people who are comfortable regarding sex or relationships or romance and not embarrassed about it, yet not promiscuous or obsessed with it or take it lightly either. i.e. people who aren't repressed and treat it as a source of enjoyment, but not as a particularly important or crucial one.
5 - people who are comfortable using abstractions as tools, but don't live in them. people who can read philosophy and understand it, and understand its importance, but not people who treat theory as more real than concrete, sensory existence, or some type of substitute for experience and empiricism.
agree/disagree?
I suspect these five are core personality traits -- things that change very slowly or gradually in a person, if at all. people who tend fall on one or the other side of these often stay that way, barring some enlightening experience or trauma, although it is true that generally people become more moderate in these with age. I can think of very few people who are moderate in all five of these ways (even myself, I tend toward the perfectionist extreme in #3, and I used to fall on the abstract extreme in #5); most of the people I've known, including most of you, fall to one extreme or the other in at least one of these.
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rinku) wrote,
