3/ People who can't live up to their ideals talk the most about them. You'll find that people who put their money where their mouth is will generally express values as opposed to ideals. Values don't come cheap: they take individual time and effort to acquire and cultivate.
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4/ True values come from trial and error, personal experience and one's own trajectory in life. They are a system rather than a goal, an inspiration rather than an aspiration, an individual process rather than a ready-made model.
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5/ Ideals are cheap. You can read a book or two, follow a few accounts on here and grab yourself a handful. You can turn everything into an ideal, and many people use this very method to build their audience.
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6/ Why? Because an ideal is impersonal, easily transmitted and understood, it finds a larger audience and therefore, sells better. An ideal is a relatable piece of fantasy that serves less to teach you something about the world than to make you feel like you understand it.
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7/ Therefore, an ideal is seductive to the mind, but ultimately useless, because in the real world, there are no ideals. These exist only in the unfortunate minds of those whose personality (or business) depends on them (and we all know who those are).
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8/ The American Dream was less about American values and more about the democratization of consumption: An ideal life™ marketed to the biggest possible audience.
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9/ Who creates these ideals that permeate public consciousness and shape an entire culture? Corporations, mass media, and the government. Why? Because ideals can be whatever you make them to be. They can be manufactured to spec.
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10/ An ideal is appealing because it gives you the finished product without any of the effort : an end to hope for, an image to believe in, a version of reality other than the one dictated by your experience to dream about. Almost all sales is built on this principle.
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11/ Where an actual value is absent you will always find an ideal replacing it. So, where you see a lot of ideals (and ideologies) it is safe to assume a lack of refined personal values, or a surface-level awareness of what really constitutes them.
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12/ We learn from each other and help each other far more by expressing our personal values than by nodding our heads complacently to some boilerplate ideal that all it does is sound good but lacks the authenticity of human experience to back it.
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13/ The key is not to mistake ideals for values, because those who profit from selling you ideals are relying on this deception taking place: Chasing an ideal is easy, understanding and following your values is hard. Ideals give you an end; values give you the means.
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14/ The best thing you can do for your own psychological well-being and a meaningful life is to forget all the ideals that have been pushed on you by culture and focus on refining your own values; ultimately this is the only way to help yourself, and everybody else, too.
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15/ PS The only way to fulfill an ideal is to become an imitation, and those who imitate cannot create. The emptiness that this creates in a human being is unfathomable, which perpetuates the vicious cycle of trying to fulfill an ideal in the hopes that it can fill it.
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