Avoiding what we are allergic to is good sense when we are talking about preserving the long-term health of our physical bodies.
Avoiding what we are allergic to is not good sense when we are talking about preserving the long-term health of habits we have acquired that no longer are producing optimal outcomes for us.
Understanding the difference requires us to engage in radical and persistent self-awareness. But the act of bringing our behavior under control becomes difficult (if not impossible) when we are surrounded by more noise that signal, and by more marketing than wisdom.
Engaging in such self-awareness is the price that we pay for becoming the human beings that we want to be. But we cannot often do this out of our own power. Self-awareness comes from listening to others about ourselves, engaging with ideas and philosophies that are difficult and challenging, and then making the hard decision to make the hard changes to our ingrained behavior.
Conflict becomes easy to engage in when we lack self-awareness (or are allergic to our behavioral need for such self-awareness) because conflict becomes the way of life that makes meaning out of the confusing flotsam and jetsam of a life only barely lived.
Constructing a behavioral existence focused around avoiding the allergen of self-awareness results in the construction of elaborate mental and behavioral echo chambers, silos of information that the challenges of new knowledge cannot penetrate.
And all the intentional emotional and psychological energy that goes toward constructing this existence (which could instead be deployed against a lack of self-awareness) transmogrifies conflicts in our lives from events to be managed to problems itching to be resolved.
And always in ways that work for us, allowing a continuance of avoiding the allergen of self-awareness.
Learning, adaptation, gaining new knowledge and then deploying it to accomplish an outcome.
What’s really triggering your allergies?
