There are pieces of advice that survive precisely because they contain some truth, although the problem begins when that partial truth becomes a rule applicable to any person and circumstance. Over the course of my not-so-long years of life I have received several of these, usually from people who genuinely wanted to help me and presented them as conclusions already settled by experience: "you have to learn to be a hypocrite," "being alone is terrible," or "do what you can, that is enough." None is completely absurd, but all three ended up being insufficient when I tried to apply them literally to my life.
I understood it particularly when I entered medical school and moved provinces. Leaving my "routine of people" meant meeting new people and, according to my imagination at that moment, finding people full of experiences, ideas, and qualities that would contribute a great deal to the following years of my life. Some did. Others taught me things in considerably less pleasant ways and, between both experiences, I started to discover that several social rules I had accepted needed considerably more context than initially seemed.
1. "If you are not a hypocrite, no one will get along with you"
My first reaction to this idea was to reject it. Hypocrisy implies faking feelings, opinions, or qualities we do not actually have and, put that way, it does not exactly seem like a virtue one would want to develop. Behind the advice, however, there was an observation that took me considerably longer to understand: living with other people requires a certain management of what we think, because being sincere does not necessarily mean verbalizing every judgment that appears in our head.
When I moved to study I started noticing small lies, omissions, and gestures of convenience that seemed to form a natural part of many relationships among classmates, teachers, and friends, something that initially bothered me because I interpreted any difference between what was thought and what was said as a form of falsehood. My response was to try to do exactly the opposite, and I ended up confusing honesty with an absence of prudence: if I thought something, I believed that saying it directly was almost a moral obligation, regardless of the moment, the person, or whether my opinion added anything.
The result was fairly predictable. I had problems with classmates, I hurt people I cared about, and I lost some friendships that at the time hurt me quite a bit, although it would be comfortable to conclude that everything happened because "people cannot stand the truth." In some cases I was probably right about the content of what I was saying and still wrong about the need or the way of saying it, because a truth can be true and at the same time unnecessary, untimely, or expressed with a cruelty that adds nothing to its veracity.
Being sincere is not saying everything you think, but never saying the opposite of what you think.
That is where a distinction appeared that would have been considerably more useful than learning to "be a hypocrite." I started building a kind of mental scale before making certain comments, considering what I wanted to achieve by saying something, what consequences it could produce, and whether there was a more adequate way to express it without needing to lie. Sometimes that means keeping something to myself and other times it means saying exactly what I think, although trying to make sure honesty does not become an elegant excuse to be an asshole.
I do not believe, then, that I learned to be a hypocrite. I learned something less extreme and probably harder: not everything true needs to be said, not everything we keep quiet constitutes a lie, and telling the truth also does not free us from responsibility for the way we decide to do it.
2. "You are only happy if you are accompanied; being alone is living in deep agony"
This advice affected me in a different way because during one stage of my life I was really afraid of being alone. When I started my "social stage," around sixteen, I had little experience relating to different groups and I did not quite fit into many of them, so I progressively started treating company as evidence that I was doing something well and solitude as a sign that there was some problem with me.
The contradiction appeared when I finally managed to have a more social life and started missing the time I spent with myself. After several hours accompanied I wanted to be alone, and after several hours alone I could get bored again and want company, a fairly obvious situation seen from now but one that then I struggled to accept because I was trying to decide which of the two ways of living was "the correct one." In reality, probably neither could satisfy me permanently because company and solitude answer different needs.
It is also worth distinguishing being alone from feeling lonely. We can spend an afternoon completely alone and enjoy it, just as we can be surrounded by people and experience a fairly unpleasant feeling of disconnection, so reducing happiness to the number of people around us says little about the quality of those bonds or about our relationship with ourselves.
Being alone can provide something that company can hardly offer in the same way: a space where we do not need to react constantly to other people and can observe what we want when no one is setting the pace for us. I do not want to romanticize it, however. Too much isolation can hurt us, and human relationships fulfill emotional functions we cannot replace simply by learning to enjoy our own company, so my conclusion ended up being considerably less interesting than "learn to be alone": I need both things, and I need to learn to recognize when I am looking for one because I really want it and when I am doing it to escape the other.
3. "Do what you can; that is enough"
This is probably the saying with which I still have a more complicated relationship. "Do what you can" can be a reasonable phrase when someone is exhausted, going through a difficult situation, or simply needs to accept that real limits exist, but used as a permanent philosophy it can become a fairly comfortable way of not discovering how much we could develop our capacities.
An important part of knowing myself has happened precisely when something demanded more of me than I initially thought I could do. Studying more, taking on a responsibility I did not feel completely prepared for, or trying something with a considerable possibility of failing has forced me to discover capacities I would hardly have found by always remaining inside what I already knew how to do. In that sense I still believe a certain discomfort is necessary in order to grow, because our perception of our own limits does not always coincide with the real limits.
Here I have also changed my mind, however. Before I would have summarized all this by saying "give what you can and a little more," as if sacrifice had a mathematical relationship with progress and any additional effort were necessarily beneficial. I am no longer completely sure. We can work enormously in the wrong direction, insist when we should change strategy, or turn exhaustion into a kind of moral proof that we really want something, although none of those things guarantees that we are improving.
Experience can show us that we were capable of more, but it can also teach us that a certain limit existed for a good reason. That is why I am now less interested in asking how much more I can endure and more interested in asking what I am developing through that effort. If demanding a little more of myself increases my capacity, discipline, or knowledge, there is probably something valuable there; if I only manage to be more tired doing exactly the same thing, perhaps I am not overcoming a limit but managing myself badly.
The three pieces of advice ended up failing me for a similar reason: they tried to turn complex problems into rules that were too simple. I needed honesty, but also prudence; I needed to learn to be alone, but not convince myself that I did not need anyone; I needed to demand things of myself, though without confusing suffering with progress. In each case the error was less in the advice than in taking it as a truth independent of context.
I suppose that is why I now distrust a little any advice that promises to work "always." Even what I have just written here comes from my circumstances, my mistakes, and the provisional way I have learned to interpret them, so it would be fairly contradictory to end by turning my conclusions into three new laws for others. Some have served me, and I will probably correct them again with time.
For now something more modest is enough: being sincere without feeling I have to say everything, enjoying my own company without using it to isolate myself, and demanding things of myself without turning exhaustion into a virtue. They are not pieces of advice so easy to put in a sentence, but precisely for that reason they look a little more like the life I have had to learn to live.
