Valuing the Wrong Things Can Destroy Your Whole Life

If you’ve never seen the movie Troy, there’s a scene in it where the legendary warrior Achilles has a conversation with his more-than-human mother, Thetis. She says that if he doesn’t go to war in Troy, he will meet a wonderful woman, and they’ll fall in love and marry. He’ll have kids and a happy life, but he will be forgotten. On the other hand, if he goes to fight in Troy, he will die, but he will be remembered forever.

They show Achilles pondering this dilemma for a few seconds, as his pained mother looks on after telling him that if he goes, she will never see him again. They then immediately cut to a scene of Achilles on a ship going to war. Achilles was a man obsessed with glory. To him, there was never really a choice:

Along the same lines, have you ever heard of Goldman’s dilemma? It presented a theoretically similar choice to Olympic athletes:

There’s a well-known survey in sports, known as the Goldman Dilemma. For it, a researcher, Bob Goldman, began asking elite athletes in the 1980s whether they would take a drug that guaranteed them a gold medal but would also kill them within five years. More than half of the athletes said yes. When he repeated the survey biannually for the next decade, the results were always the same. About half of the athletes were quite ready to take the bargain.

Only recently did researchers get around to asking nonathletes the same question. In results published online in February 2009 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, exactly 2 of the 250 people surveyed in Sydney, Australia, said that they would take a drug that would ensure both success and an early death. “We were surprised,” James Connor, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and one of the study’s authors, said in an e-mail message. “I expected 10-20 percent yes.” His conclusion, unassailable if inexplicable, is that “elite athletes are different from the general population, especially on desire to win.”

We could even take this one step further with one of my all-time favorite movies, Limitless. In the movie, the lead character takes a drug that, as long as he continues taking it, makes him the smartest man in the world. He can master the stock market, write a best-selling novel, seduce any woman he wants, make anyone like him, think his way out of any situation, and even potentially become president. The hitch? Well, he has a limited supply and when he stops taking it, he’ll become sick and die:

Would you take the pill and become a meaningful impact player on the world stage even if it meant you would die in a couple of years? Would you go fight in a war that you knew would kill you if you also became a legend?

I would and I wouldn’t even have to think about either of those. It would be an easy decision for me.

Now some of you think the exact same thing, but other people reading this are thinking, “That’s crazy! I would never do something like that!”

Except… you ARE doing that. We all are. We are all living our lives, day after day, marching inexorably toward death, and for what?

For the things we value.

You are trading your time, your attention, your effort, your resources, and your very life force in return for what exactly?

Achilles was willing to trade his life for glory. Those Olympic athletes could be the same, although maybe some of them were motivated by wanting to be the best or to succeed. The trade in Limitless was for intelligence, impact, and success.

So, what are you trading for?

For most people, the answer is things they learned from their parents or from popular culture. Sometimes, even a single moment can have a huge impact on us.

For example, I have two left feet. Dancing has never been a skill set of mine but at one point, I WANTED IT TO BE. Why? Because at an event, they called some random people up to the stage to dance to that country song, “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy).”

Well, a guy from the crowd in a COWBOY HAT and BOOTS (!!!) walked up on stage and KILLED IT. People were going wild for him and my brain went, “I want to do that!” Granted, I did not learn to do that, but I WANTED to do that and if I had any kind of gift for dancing, I would have gone down that route.

Maybe something like that happened to you, but you went for it. Maybe a pretty girl laughed at your joke, and you suddenly wanted to be funny. Maybe a bully took a swing at you, you punched him out, people patted you on the back and you decided to learn to really fight.

None of those sound like bad things, right?

But, what if you learned to dance, entered the school talent show, everyone told you that you sucked and you decided to never try to stand out again? What if a girl rolled her eyes at your joke, you felt humiliated and suddenly you vowed never to try and be funny again? What if the bully beat you up and the lesson you took away from it was, “Never fight back?”

One-time events like this can literally steer people’s lives from the time they’re children until they die at 100.

So can popular culture.

No matter what people tell you, there’s a human need to be liked, thought well of, and recognized. If someone tells you they don’t care about those things, it’s either because they think that attitude will make them be liked, well thought of, and recognized or because they’ve simply given up on ever getting those things they want.

The things that are popular in our culture reflect what our culture values. What is the music like? Who are the heroes on the big screen or in popular books? What celebrities, athletes, and notable figures are “cool” and which ones aren’t? Who gets followed on social media and who gets ignored? We absorb all of this and although it may be subconscious, it dramatically impacts what we value and who we become as people.

So, if you look at current American culture as a whole, ask yourself which of these traits get valued more, encouraged, and rewarded, and which ones are valued less or mostly ignored:

Having lots of casual sex or finding one person to spend your life with?

Being attractive or being a genuinely good person?

Having a life of leisure or working hard?

Being arrogant or being humble?

Being brash and obnoxious or being polite?

Seeing color or being colorblind?

Finding a way to scam the system or taking pride in paying your own way?

Eating what tastes the best or eat what’s the healthiest?

Being charismatic or being wise?

Being famous or living a meaningful life?

Being self-centered or serving others?

Telling people what they want to hear or telling people the truth even if it’s painful?

Being popular or being right?

Doing whatever it takes to win or having deep, firm, moral convictions that may restrain your behavior?

Going along with the crowd or doing the right thing even if it costs you?

In every case, I’d tell you that our current culture mostly encourages people to do the FIRST thing, not the second one. Yet, if you asked which one would be more likely to lead to good lives, good citizens, and a healthy society, it would be the SECOND thing in each case.

How many of those things have you, me, all of us just learned to value without ever considering how it might play out for us in the long term? Probably a lot of them. There is nothing easier than just absorbing the messages your culture puts out about what you should be like, even if they’re not healthy messages that lead to long-term happiness or success.

Especially since many of these things aren’t bad per se. For example, who wouldn’t want to be attractive, charismatic, popular, and famous? But the question is always, “At what cost?” How many people married someone because they were beautiful and ended up getting divorced because they didn’t have a lot of other good qualities? How many of us have listened to the slick, fast-talking person telling us what we want to hear instead of the slower, more boring person speaking with wisdom? The world is full of people who became popular by saying and doing awful things on a regular basis. The same goes for being famous. The “Hawk Tuah” girl is famous for making a blow job joke. There are undoubtedly a few women in Hollywood who made their careers by very deliberately choosing to do some disgusting things for Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby is famous. So are Alex Jones, Jeffrey Epstein, Osama Bin Laden, and Milli Vanilli.

When people tell you that they want things, if you dig down deep enough, you’ll find there are deeper things they value that drive them. It’s good to figure out what those are and if they’re coming from a good healthy place.

Do you want to make a lot of money because it will provide you with freedom to do what you want or is your self-worth wrapped up in being the richest person in the room? One of those values may lead to having a lot of money, a lot of free time, and people to share it with at 40 and the other may lead you to being a 90-year-old, sitting alone in a mansion with no friends or family, fretting because someone richer than you moved into your exclusive neighborhood.

Want to be depressed over the long haul? Be self-centered instead of focused on helping other people. Would it be worth it to be “successful” at the price of making the world a worse place to live in for everyone? There are plenty of people who would (and do) say “yes,” but do you really want to see shame in your wife and child’s eyes when they hear about what you did to become so “successful?”

It’s worth it for everyone to take a deep dive into what your goals are, what you want out of life, and what you value that’s driving you in that direction. These are things you should be picking out CONSCIOUSLY.

The danger of not doing that is that you may be going down a path that leads somewhere you don’t want to go and eventually, you may get there and be someone you never really wanted to be. It would be better to do the right thing for 5 minutes at the end of a rotten life than to do the wrong thing forever, but it’s also true that the earlier you start choosing the right things to value in your life, the better things are likely to turn out for you.

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