It takes a lot to put a lot in.

Most of us are definitely cowards. Few people ever put their whole selves into actions or tasks. Now, the surface reason for this is that it’s just too hard to invest the combined behemoth of all of a person’s energies into a certain thing. But, really, it takes far more than strength and endurance to devote your one hundred percent.

Why else do we see a lazy legion of slumped teenagers sitting at desks in classes? Why else do we reside in a world soaked with regrets? Why else are we always stopping in our tracks, turning around, and ruminating about the missed trails we could have taken? Why else do few people ever feel fully satisfied?

Because pouring all of the sweat and blood you have into something signifies something huge. Titanic. Mammoth.

It means that you acknowledge that there’s something you can’t do. That even if you try your best, you may not be able to accomplish a certain task. Because if you give it your everything and find that you fail, this means that the task really isn’t yours to conquer. It means facing reality, because in the real world, while many are abetted by other people and told that they can “do anything they put their minds to,” nobody really can.

But it also demonstrates that you care whole-heartedly about something. Which is kind of gross in our world. I mean, nobody wants to see amazing passion from the disgustingly ordinary people! It’s revolting and pathetic. It’s so horribly open and gaping in sincerity that we all just want to shut it and sew it closed before its sappy syrup slips out and spreads to us all.

Nobody likes these realizations – neither that of reality nor of sincerity. How funny that closing ourselves from these two ideas is what we dope ourselves into thinking will actually gift them to us.

Take high school as a case study. Students proudly brandish good grades they say they earned without trying and grimace when they hear the deadened voice of a student who applied his or her everything and failed. It hurts to truly know yourself. So why give everything? Hey, what’s the extent of your ability anyway? What’s the point in trying so hard to find out? Just sit back and have fun and don’t care and watch the world with glazed eyes. After a while this mantra has a lulling effect, making your eyelids flutter and dip to a close. How nice. How convenient. How ignorance-is-bliss-ish.

It may hurt to truly know yourself, but nothing could possibly feel more invigorating or real. Because then that brainwashing muck that society lathers us with of “relaxed is cool” and “not trying hard is cool” will all efface and leave behind a clearer world.

More importantly, we’d be putting the individual and the individual’s power on the pedestal it deserves. A weakened and brainwashed society is far easier to subject, with its individual constituents getting too weak and lazy to stand alone, so weak and lazy that they all sort of fall slowly into each other, a silly, vapid mass.