"If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't. "

A rewatching of "Fight Club" left me thinking about the alter ego Tyler Durden's we'd all like to muster. What would push us to the point we needed to reach? Would they be the opposite of us? A better version? What do we want to be? Why aren't we that person already? I once went to a brainiac summer fellowship where people took the liberty to try on different versions of themselves. People do it a lot. Through travel. Through acting. Through changing the people in their lives. Move on. Reinvent. There's always a later, better version of everything. Upgrade.

I find the trying on of other selves a bit strange. If I really wanted to be someone else, then I think I'd just be that person. I never really felt like I chose this version anyway. It just kind of evolved and felt right and I went with it. I've thought that I could do what I do better and be a bigger person in some ways, but I don't think about reinvention. I don't remember thinking "I am someone I do not want to be". Of course I've done things I wish I didn't do or said things I wish I'd remained silent about, but scraping the whole thing doesn't cross my mind.

There's a definition of insanity that's something like "repeating the same behavior and expecting different results" I know a lot of those people. The details change, the people perhaps, but the set up and situation remain the same - each time leaving the person to think "it'll be different this time." Do they want it to be different, really? Or do they like the game and the results of it? To go with Chuck Palahniuk again:

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

I'd add to that "big scary responsibility for themselves," which is the great unknown. Doing what you are comfortable with, even if the results are less than satisfactory, is satisfying. That safety becomes it's own reward. It's an addiction of sorts (addiction and recovery being my newest obsession) . Addictions feed us while keeping us in some predetermined, invisible box we are convinced we don't deserve to get out of...and often don't want to. Completely filling a box too small is much less ego-trying than finding oneself in a box with no idea how to fill it. We all have addictions - that's my fascination. We all keep ourselves from the better version we could be. The version we already are, but mute.

If your ideal is your opposite, are you strangled by who you are? How so? Even real Tyler kills the idealized alter ego one - it's just too much. It pushed him in the right way, but needing it as a version of himself dissolved at some point. The addictions and delusions and need for emergency exits left...leaving only one full, real Tyler. Where is that point and who's strong enough to get there? Who's brave enough to even try?