What I’ve Found Pursuing Truth and Knowledge

In trying to find purpose I was advised to go out and look for my personal truth. Personal truth can be interpreted in many ways but as far as I can tell it can be summarised as – what you are experienced in or knowledgeable about that puts you in a unique position to help others. I think that if you are searching for a purpose a good place to start is with this question: what is something I love doing, that am I good at, that seems to come naturally to me, that I could use to help others? Pursuing truth and my personal truth gave me purpose and really helped with my depression.

Intertwined with truth or your personal truth is knowledge, which can be divided into two categories: things that you already know, and things that you don’t know. A lot of my anxiety stemmed from a brain that was hungry for information and remained unfed. I stopped reading books and researching fields I was interested in, and this led to unnecessary suffering as a consequence of me thinking I had problems that didn’t exist. In a world where for the most part you are safe, coupled with an evolutionary predisposition to look for threats or danger, you have to give your brain problems to keep it busy. Once I started to pursue knowledge again I became a lot less anxious.

Truth

Your personal truth does a few things that aid your mental health. Firstly searching for it is a purpose on to which you can acquire more purpose. This is really important because as I’ve said before only you can derive your own meaning from this life to achieve fulfilment. In this search you will inevitably find out who you really are, or remember rather. As Mooji would put it, you will realise that the place you are looking to be is the place in which you are looking from. Once I made the switch in career from something that would get me a lot of money to something that would get me a lot of fulfilment and joy I knew that I was on the right path. This was finding my personal truth and it has had a net positive effect on my life.

Another thing finding your personal truth does is it liberates you from your ego and the judgement of other people. Up until I found purpose I was doing things because I thought it would make people like me, which is not such a bad thing, usually paired with being nice and polite and all those sorts of things. But finding real meaning that came from within helped me understand that what other people think of me is their problem not mine. Once I was more aligned or oriented to what I thought was true and meaningful I stopped caring what everyone else thought – it transcends the social world that we live in. This is important as it made me stronger against the judgement of others and it also taught me not to judge other people.

Lastly, pursuing truth can be interpreted as disciplining yourself to always tell the truth, or the truth as far as you can tell given the information you have at the time. This is really important as to paraphrase Jordan B Peterson; you have reality on your side. People who lie all the time have to keep up with each one of their lies and get tangled up in it all to the point of a mental breakdown. I’ve found that striving to always tell the truth has helped me find out who likes me for me and who my real friends are. A real advantage of telling the truth is that you become a sincere yet robust person who can be trusted. You may not please people with the truth if they aren’t ready to hear it, but if everyone likes you and you’re a liar you have a real problem.

Knowledge

I’ve realised that pursuing knowledge is extremely important for my mental health. As someone who was temperamentally quite impatient and arrogant I had to learn to become humble and grateful. The more knowledge you acquire and the smarter you get the more you realise how little you really know. It’s both terrifying and exciting and it really put me in my place. I now go into interactions with other people not thinking that I know more than them, but thinking that they know something I don’t and I can learn from them. This has taught be to be insightful into other peoples ideas and thoughts and give what they think credit, which can be called being polite and interested I suppose. As I said earlier it also decreases anxiety by giving your brain information to interpret and comprehend rather than just thinking about your own thoughts all the time.

Knowledge is not power, but empowering. The more you know the more prepared you are in life if something unexpected happens. It’s also taught me to throw myself in the deep end and make mistakes; I think the most successful people will tell you that mistakes and failure taught them a lot more than any of their successes. Pursuing knowledge also taught me that you’re almost definitely not going to get things right the first time, and you have to put yourself outside of your comfort in order to develop and grow.

From the ashes, you will rise.

Liam