Pride

"Fuck Pride. Pride never helps. It only hurts." - Marcellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction.

How right is a fictional gangster? In this unforgiving world where nobody cares about you, how important is it to be proud of your accomplishments, to make yourself feel good and valid? Do our achievements even mean anything in the long run, in the scope of the universe? How much pride is too much? These questions and more in the following entry!

Being proud of your accomplishments is certainly important, if only for your own happiness. But we all know that pride leads to arrogance, ethnocentric tendencies (as evidenced throughout history, manipulation of nationalism can lead to some horrifying results, such as the Reign of Terror and Nazi Germany). I suppose that one has to strike a balance, to stay proud of oneself, for that little bit of confidence, to know you're doing well, but keep it on the downlow enough for it not to blindside everyone else with arrogance. Pride certainly helps, it doesn't hurt, but too much of it and you've got a recipe for fuck-ups.

But how can we truly ever be proud of our achievements? They have no meaning. A kid who gets an A on his spelling test doesn't matter to the rest of the world. To the universe, he's just an ant crawling on the sidewalk, we all are. Our accomplishments are meaningless. The only exceptions are the ones that do affect everyone - the scientists at CERN and their hadron collider, the expeditions to new planets: the ones that impact the universe are ultimately the only acts of consequence. But there's the thing. An achievement that is meaningless to the rest of the world holds a world of meaning to the person who accomplished the feat. That person may feel good about what they did, and who cares what everyone else thinks? While nothing we do ever matters in the eyes of Mother Nature, it matters to us. And that's how we build our happiness.

Sounds like a bunch of existentialist bullshit, right?

Yeah, that's because it is.

Ultimately my rant boils down to the simple fact that too much pride leads to bad things. Hubris, nationalism, what have you. Be proud of yourself, but don't be too proud. Don't catch the arrogant and be irredeemable to the world. Don't be Adolf Hitler. Don't be Napoleon Bonaparte. Don't be George W. Bush. Shit sucks that way.