An Eternal Struggle of Staying Humble

Staying humble has always been a moral struggle for humanity. We are always told from our childhood to stay modest and never to brag about our achievements or possessions. Our elders tell us to not let our success get in the head.

It is believed that a person who is down to earth at the prime of his/her life, can only digest success and failure. People around us would be praising us if we are not bragging about those small things which we bought, did or achieved!

This mentality is so ingrained in the belief system that we consider people like Bill Gates, Ratan Tata, or Warren Buffett as some of the greatest and generous because they lead a humble and simple life.

We worship these people to such a great extent, that all the others who may or may not have achieved the same are overlooked! We feel that people like Donald Trump, The Kardashians, and Ambani’s are evil just because they are unapologetic about their lifestyle and their achievements and we dislike their guts.

Such people are trolled daily to a great extent! There is a popular phrase in my country, “Simple Living and High Thinking”. Even though we are all taught the same way of life, we are unable to hold back ourselves from bragging over a bag or a pair of jeans we purchased of a premium brand, a summer vacation we had in an exotic place or the amount of wealth we’ve accumulated!

The irony of our belief system is, we’ve created ranks for almost everything from a race to exam grades, and “who is wealthier than whom?” How can we have the sense of humility when all the things we do in life feels like a race and all we ever do is to chase that mirage of being the first in everything!

Evolutionary matter of the fact is, we ‘Homo Sapiens’ are social animals and it is important for us to be liked by others. Which somehow leads us to create an illusion of humility around us just so that our colleagues, friends and family can love us.

But, we all like to brag and feel that sense of pride for being us! It is an emotion which we all appreciate in the form of medals, ranks and certificates, but still, we teach others not to let that sense of pride get over our head.

When it comes to physiology, our brain releases four different chemicals i.e. endorphin, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine whenever we feel good about anything. So, it is completely natural to experience pride as emotion and we should never oppress that just to be likeable.

There is one brilliant and insightful article based on a psychological study of pride as an emotion, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2007/06/two-face-of-pride.cfm

If we truly want to be diffident even with all the chemicals released by our brain to feel good, then we should change the way we think and believe.

We always think of our lives and are trapped in the limitation of our consciousness, we never really develop the capacity of thinking about the world in terms of a giant puzzle where we are just a small piece of it!

Such a limiting thought process leads us to teach ourselves and others to be humble. But external factors can only affect us so much! We should accept the fact that even though our lives have a substantial impact on people around us for decades, the significance of our existence is quite limited.

Whatever knowledge we have about this world or whichever materialistic need we have fulfilled, it is important to remember that we are mere creatures on the face of the planet, let alone be of the universe!

It is important to introspect our self and reflect upon the things we’ve done or achieved and the ephemeral impact of it on the galaxy.

A book named “Pale Blue Dot — A Vision of the Human Future in Space” by Carl Sagan describes our planet earth from the outer space as a small blue dot, which makes it clear that even the earth’s significance compared to the universe or the galaxy is quite negligible and so as ours!

There is a great quote by a Japanese philosopher Miyamoto Musashi, “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”. The day we start changing our thought process like this, it will help us achieve humility in its truest sense and we’d be more considerate of not only other people but also, our mother nature! I would end this chain of thoughts here with another quote by Confucius, “Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues”.