IGX

Buddhists talk about panacean virtues like right speech, where if you practice it you are almost automatically doing, or compelled to do, other good things. And there are pernicious vices like drug use which lead to other bad things. But it occurred to me that there are panacean vices as well. I say vice because some things are seen as bad, these days especially: anger, aggression, ego, greed, sloth, etc.. But some of these things are good in the right place and time, and can even be good as a driving force. While watching The Wrecking Crew and some extra interviews I was struck by how much ego those musicians had and how much contempt they had for lesser musicians and for lower forms of music like the pop songs they played on. Instead of being baggage they would have been better off without, the ego, greed, competitiveness, and disdain for bad music they all had drove them to achieve great things.

While I do have a number of bad habits that are commonly seen as bad, I think now that I also have pernicious virtues like an excess of patience with the bad people in my life and a lack of panacean vices like anger, aggression, and, for lack of a better term, refusal. I would have been far better off being less considerate in certain ways. I'm better off when I have more aggression as I go about my day.

Thoughts?

I was surfing one day.

It was crowded. I was weak and scared. And the rest of the surfers kept paddling around me and skipping my turn.

Finally, I got angry and channeled all that anger into paddling extremely hard. I barely got into a beautiful wave. As I caught it, it barreled just behind me, and the spray from the tube shot a rainbow out over my shoulder and just in front of me.

I don't think emotions like anger are necessarily bad. They're energy. And you can apply that energy to good things or bad things.

Musicians, poets, and writers take horrible experiences like heartbreak and turn them into beautiful works.

All of my best stories come from deep suffering. I have to put more of it on the page. I feel like I'm losing it but that has been a self fulfilling belief. I have to pour it out like I used to in my log, except in my stories this time.

For a long time I believed that successful people have a better handle on their dark side and to some degree they do or else no one would have heard of them, but the more I read about writers and comics the more I see how dark the dark side often is, and the toll it takes on the people around them.