Sufficiency and Deficiency

Society will always sell you the vision that you are deficient, insufficient in some fundamental way. This is particularly true of contemporary market- and competition-driven society. It has to. It's the most powerful sales tactic. It will question whether your insufficiency is so great that your entire existence is in peril.

You can see this in the way we sell goods and services and how our healthcare and defence industries are created. This isn't to say that the actors across a modern economy are malicious. Most are not. Most are striving in the same way as you. But if their identification with the system is deeper than yours, then their pursuit of these ends is earnest, and with that, dangerous.

Why? Because you are not insufficient. There was no original sin. You are not deficient. You have not failed. You cannot fail. Once you remove the lens of ultimate purpose, end goal, or achievement, most, if not all, of these concepts fall away. You are left with something far more pure, far more innocent.

Reflecting on the children in our society, it seems almost evil to refer to a child as having failed for simply being themselves. It is very clear to us that their innocence transcends that overbearing nature of competition and achievement. But over time, the system bleeds into our thinking, and they are exposed to the same cold-edged steel that defines much of contemporary life.

The challenge here is not to reformulate society in your own image, to force a sort of innocence onto it, but to hold it, realise its minimal value, and pass through it. It doesn't define you; its dictats don't change your interiority, and its aspersions are to be taken with the smallest grain of salt you have available to you.

Resilience and confidence come not through achievement—the external world is plenty proof of that. They come from a certainty borne of known sufficiency: That you are enough, you will always be enough, and you need do nothing more.

That also destroys the system in its entirety.