Virtus #073: The First Thought

I wrote an article about Truth and then realized I was only 70% honest in it. So here is the rest. The part that actually cost me something to say.

Today I want to talk about Truth.

Not a single instance of it. Not some isolated moment where you caught yourself being honest at a dinner party. I mean Truth in its full, stubborn, uncomfortable entirety. The kind that sits underneath everything you do, say, think, and choose. The kind most of us have never actually met face to face.

And more specifically, I want to talk about being true to yourself. Which sounds like something you would find on a motivational poster in a dentist’s waiting room, I know. But stay with me. Because the more I think about it, the more I realize this might be the most important and the most difficult thing a person can pursue. And I know it is the most difficult because I have been failing at it for roughly ten years while writing about it like I have figured something out.

Here is the problem. From the moment we are born, we are trained. And I mean that in the real, mechanical sense of the word. Programmed. We absorb other people’s truths like sponges that never learned how to wring themselves out. Parents, teachers, culture, religion, institutions. Their truths were given to us. Served to us. In many cases, forced down our spiritual throats before we even had the language to push back. And by the time we do have the language, we have already built an entire identity on borrowed blueprints.

I think this is the first inner search experience we should teach our kids. Not math first, not reading first. The awareness that you have a Truth of your own and that finding it is your responsibility. Despite all the formulas floating around the internet, I have no trick or shortcut to offer you. Our God-given uniqueness mandates that each of us makes our own way in digging it up. Your Truth of existence. Your Truth of being. Nobody else can hand it to you, because nobody else has it.

I know. This sounds impossibly profound. But I promise you it is not.

The easiest way I can describe what I am looking for is this: the thing I am about to do, say, make, or create sits perfectly well with me in the first truthful instance. That is the compass. The first thought. Before the noise. Before the second-guessing. Before the committee in my head starts its session.

I have been noticing something about myself over the past few years. The actions that carry a high grade of Truth take almost no decision effort. They just move. There is no friction. You do not negotiate with yourself. You simply act, and it feels clean. That is the ideal.

The moment questions start arriving from the “Should I?” department, or the “What is the best option here?” filing cabinet, that is when the digging needs to start. Why are you questioning it? Which lens are you applying when you look at the action? Society’s lens? Your family’s? Formal education’s? The world’s?

By the way, there is a funny trick for binary decisions. Flip the coin, and while it is in the air, notice what you are rooting for. That is your Truth right there. It is funny how that works.

It sounds easy.

It is the hardest thing I have been trying to do on a consistent basis. And I should probably tell you why I know that so specifically.

For the past ten years, I have been taking projects just to survive. That is one layer of the lie. The deeper layer is telling myself it was necessary. I worked for people and projects I knew were not right for me. I helped sell things I did not believe in. I sat across from people whose ethics I questioned, and I told myself it was fine because nothing I did was technically illegal. Game on. Others do it too. I worked in marketing, so bending reality was kind of the job description. But it was never the mandatory take. It was a choice I made and then dressed up as a circumstance.

I learned from all of those contexts. I am not going to pretend I did not. But I wonder, honestly, how my life would have looked if I had only followed my own path. I am not upset at myself anymore for not doing that. But the cost was real. The cost was a specific kind of restlessness. A lack of peace that follows you into every room, every meeting, every project. The feeling that you are always slightly misaligned, like a wheel that looks fine but vibrates at speed.

And here is the part I find hardest to admit: I am still doing it. Right now. Today. I still make decisions from the survival point of view. I act as a mercenary, taking on work that pays the rent and the school fees, instead of focusing fully on the thing I actually believe in, which is this. Not just this newsletter, but the whole idea behind it. The connections, the circles, the space where men can stop performing and start being honest with each other.

I know I cannot do one without the other. Not yet. But let me not pretend that this arrangement is my Truth. It is my compromise. And there is a difference.

When I started digging deeper into what my Truth actually looks like, what scared me was not some hidden darkness. It was the opposite. What scared me was how little I care about what people think. And I mean that in a way that sounds liberating until you actually try to live it. If I fully stopped doing the untruthful thing, people would call me weird. Arrogant. Strange. My whole life I was taught to behave, to fit, to make others comfortable. And somewhere underneath all of that training, there is a person who is surprisingly indifferent to outside approval. That person has been sitting there for a long time, waiting.

But then survival walks in. Because when I imagine choosing every project, every action, 100% from my Truth, something interesting happens. Part of me is almost certain I would make ten times more money doing it that way. That the alignment itself would generate something. But the other side of my brain, the trained side, says: yes, but there are no guarantees. And I listen to that side. Every time. So far.

We are surrounded by untruthful politeness. “How are you?” And the automatic answer: “Good.” But that is the easy example. Everyone points at that one. The harder version is the one where you sit in a meeting you do not believe in, for a client whose product you would never use, building a strategy you know works but do not respect, and you tell yourself this is professionalism. That is the untruthful politeness that actually shapes your life. The small “Good” is nothing. The big “Good” is the one that takes years off you.

Now, if there were one Big Conspiracy in this world, I think this would be it. Train people not to act from their Truth. Stack beliefs, rules, and laws on top of each other so we can protect the Order. And I agree. For most of human history, that was a reasonable arrangement. You need some structure to stop people from hurting each other just because they feel like it. That served a purpose.

But I also think we have reached a point where most of us are capable of managing whatever we find deep inside ourselves. The person who goes looking and finds something ugly was carrying that ugliness regardless. Truth does not create the problem. It just turns the lights on. And the thing I found when I turned on my own lights was not a monster. It was a pile of empty goals. A house paid in full. A kid who graduates. A nice car. Respect in some academic field. Awards from prestigious organizations. I had built an entire architecture of achievement that, when I really looked at it, had nothing to do with what actually matters to me. Those things are not bad. They might even show up as consequences of doing something truthful. But they were never the point. I just did not know that until I stopped long enough to check.

And here is the other strange thing I found at the bottom. I am almost certain that money comes easier when you are doing things for the true reasons. I cannot prove that. I do not have a spreadsheet for it. But every time I have acted from that first, clean thought, things moved. And every time I negotiated with myself, added layers of justification, played it safe, things got harder. Not dramatically. Just that constant low hum of friction that you learn to live with until you forget it is not normal.

So what if that is where our peace lives? What if the lack of struggle, the end of constantly seeking alignment, purpose, relevance, what if all of that is just sitting quietly inside the thing we keep avoiding?

I want to believe that we have a higher role with this life experience. I choose that story and I make it true for myself. That we are not accidents. That we have a purpose beyond paying taxes and rent and medical bills and raising other humans to do the same. By writing about it, I hope I am sharing my choosing and not forcing it on anyone. But for me, it helped to see how others look at themselves in the mirror. It helped me look at my own.

I also think we are here to learn something higher than our individual selves. That there is a right way and a less right way, not in the sense of punishment or prize, but in the sense that life as an experience is already the reward. We could just have a better quality output of it. More fun. Not easier. More fun. Less struggle, more play, more of that clean feeling when the first thought and the action are the same thing.

I do not have the full answer. I am still digging. And I am still, today, compromising in ways that I know are not fully true. But the moments in my life where I acted from that first thought, where I did not filter or negotiate or perform, those are the moments I felt most alive. Most free. Most like myself.

And I think that might be the key to showing God we got it.

Not as a question this time. As something I am choosing to believe, out loud, with my name on it.

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