Are you living deliberately? Or are you just a thing?

Whether you are living deliberately or not is an important question to answer.

If the answer is yes, then you’re striving to live the life that you want to live.

If the answer is no, you’re just like everybody else, going with the flow of life.

Most people don’t live deliberately

The funny thing is that most people think that they are living deliberately, but they’re really not.

They make choices that aren’t aligned with their goals. They fall into bad habits rather than creating good habits that will lead them to success.

But all the while they really believe that they’re choosing the life they want to live when sadly they are not.

So how do you know which category you fall under?

Answering a better question

To answer the question, I believe it’s important to first answer a question on the other end of the spectrum.

This question is one that you’ve probably never been asked before. One that you’ve never even thought to ask yourself:

Are you a thing?

Yes, I know, this question seems ridiculous. Human beings are not things. Right?

I don’t believe they are, but I do believe that people can act like things.

Let me explain…

What defines a “thing”?

There are many things in this world. Lots and lots of things.

Although there are billions of people in the world today, there an immeasurable amount of things that we can classify as, well, things.

Things are rocks, tables, messages in bottles drifting thousands of miles between distant coasts, going through the currents of our mightiest oceans.

Leaves that fall from trees and are blown across forests, backyards, parks, carried away by updrafts to the greatest heights miles away in the air.

If you define a thing as an object that doesn’t consciously direct it’s own path in life and is rather driven towards a path by a number of influences, than what can be a thing expands even to living beings.

Ants following scent trails looking for food, mistakenly boarding cars, buses, and trains only to find themselves states and even countries away from their colonial home. Lost in oblivion.

Birds following migratory paths, driven by instinct and social habit alone by flocks of the thousands and millions.

These creatures in our universe are things too, thrown too and fro by the ever-changing environment and the pre-determined biology of their being.

And then there are humans.

Are humans things?

Are we things that are pushed and pulled by psychological, biological, social, and environmental forces?

Only moving about in pre-determined motions, with no real conscious choices of our own?

Or do we move about this world deliberately, driven by a sense of autonomy and purpose — towards a destiny that is fulfilled only by breaking through the forces that bombard us daily and push us away from what we set off to do?

My answer to this question is simple and personally cultivated.

Personally chosen — for a reason.

People are things, but they can choose to not be things.

Let me explain why I chose this as my answer.

Choosing not be to a thing

Victor Frankl writes that “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes — within the limits of endowment and environment — he has made out of himself.”

I agree with this wholeheartedly. We have the power to determine who we are and what we set out to do in life.

There are thousands of stories of people starting from rags and making it to riches, beating out the odds against them. Champions throughout history who succeed even as the status quo wasn’t in their favor.

Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old, and his teachers in elementary school thought he was lazy and would be unsuccessful.

Benjamin Frankin’s parents couldn’t afford to keep him in school and he had to drop out of school at the age of 10.

Thomas Edison failed 6,000 times to create the lightbulb.

And these are just the most popular examples of humans winning out over the influences of their environment, society, and most importantly, over what holds them back within themselves.

In spite of what is possible, and what has already been proven to be possible, one thing is sadly still true:

Most people behave like things and therefore are tossed about in any and every direction by the forces that act upon them.

They cannot see or worse — choose not to see — the forces that drive them away from where they want to go.

A statement to yourself

Because of this trend, I have decided to personally categorize myself as a thing unless I can observe what is happening around me and say to myself:

“I am not a thing. I can choose whether or not this problem, situation, person, or weakness will turn me off my path. And that it does not matter if it’s biological, psychological, social, or environmental. I can and will decide not to be a thing, and stay on my path regardless.”

My reason for choosing to see myself (not others) in this light is so that my fear of becoming just another thing in life will be greater than my fear of going against any obstacle that I come across on the way.

“Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear.” — The Spartan officer Dienekes

Now that we have defined what a thing is, and what separates a person from being a thing. We can lay out the answer to what it means to live deliberately.