Are You Good Or Bad?

Are You Good Or Bad?

Look back at most of the moments from your life with an honest and impartial eye and you will find that in nearly every case you have acted out of ignorance, selfishness or cowardice, and sometimes a combination of the three. It’s the human condition! This (quite good) essay asks whether you are the hero or the villain of your own story, but I think that the question is a little too absolute. The reality is that most of us aren’t outright villains, we are just a collection of chemicals moving around in our own orbit, occasionally trying to do well yet always failing. At best we are able to feel some embarrassment at the awareness of how far apart our ideals and our actions reside; at worst we construct a string of justifications that never really do the trick and leave us even more empty and self-loathing. The good news is that eventually we all die and none of it makes any difference, but I guess that doesn’t make it much easier to take while we’re going through it.