A typical day on Navajo Lake

We all know what a Likert scale even if we didn’t know it was invented by a dude named Likert. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is very likely and 1 is very unlikely, how likely are you to continue reading this post? Alright, I know it’s 1 or a 2, but please, indulge me here.

I’d like to apply the Likert scale to how we feel about ourselves. On a scale of 1 to10, how do you feel about yourself? The first thing you’ll notice is that you don’t get to call yourself a 0. We’re not absolute beings in any sense. We’re relative beings. I’d also like to propose that, to the extent we use this scale to describe anything about ourselves – our talents, our accomplishments – we often suffer if we place ourselves on either extreme of this scale.

Just say the scale is – on a scale of 1 to 10 – how much confidence I have. Confidence is an abstract concept, and my confidence may be greater when it comes to some things than it is for others. For example, I’m a pretty good dancer, and I have a lot of confidence with myself on the dancefloor. But can confidence cross the line into cockiness? At times. I once danced on a bar top (no, I wasn’t stripping), and I fell off. A motorcycle rider once told me that as soon as you think you’re all that on the asphalt, that’s when you wreck and get road rash.

If I think I’m all that on the Likert scale – say 8 to 10 – I may be good, but it also means I’m probably cocky. Now, you’ll notice that the scale goes down to 1. This means there may be some things I have very little confidence in. If you give me a hammer, a saw, some nails, and a bunch of 2 x 4’s, and tell me to go build a doghouse, I’ll come back a few hours later with a bunch of cuts and scrapes and bruises, mostly to my ego, cursing. Ego (or pride) operates on two scales: a positive and a negative scale. When I’m not thinking very well of myself, when my self-esteem’s in the toilet, that’s just as bad as when I’m thinking too highly of myself. But it’s still pride. Who am I to say I’m a shitbag? So, I need to stay out of the 1 – 3 range as much as I need to avoid the 8 through 10’s.

The best place for me to hang out regarding self-regard (I know, redundant) is in the 4 through 7 range. There are four numbers there, instead of just three like there are in the extremes. There’s 25% more room in the middle than there is at either end.

Some people have humility, which means that they can live in 4 through 7 and be comfortable hanging out there. It may come naturally to them. They may have to work at it. But they end up being the fabric of humanity. The bulwark. Me? I’ve always wanted to be the best at things, and when I wasn’t recognized for my truly exceptional abilities, I thought: If I can’t be the best, I might as well be the worst. Maybe I’ll finally get some attention that way. And if you are the best and you let it get to your head, sooner or later, in some way, you’ll down to the 1’s, the 2’s and the 3’s. Think OJ.

The problem with getting attention (and acceptance and approval) is that for some of us, it’s just ever enough. It’s a drug. When I found a publisher for my first book, I was on top of the world, for about two hours. Then, I had to be a NYT bestseller. And when that didn’t happen, I went down to 1-2-3, 1-2-3, like a dance. I tied my self-esteem to something outside myself. And if you look at people who do that and who are successful with very little sense of who they are on the inside, they crash. It’s either alcohol or drugs or sex or spending or something else. I don’t need to recite the long list of dead or destroyed celebrities. Think Johnny Depp.

The problem is that the ego – if you have a rather large one – has difficulty tolerating being 4 through 7 on the scale. It needs to stand out, positively or negatively. It craves the attention, the accolades of 8 – 10, or else the opprobrium of 1- 3. It believes you should be special. You should have special love or scorn, reserved just for you. When its special love, it might take the form of fame or an award or even romance. When it’s scorn, it might manifest as guilt, as remorse or self-pity.

‘Low self-esteem’ is really very similar to self-esteem that’s too high. They both play God, operating out of a sense of uniqueness and comparison. These two states of self-esteem may seem different, but they’re identical opposites in the same way that your left and right hand are the same, but mirror-image opposites. If you write out the numbers 1 to 10 on a line and put it in front of a mirror, you’ll see the scale reversed, but identical. And if you fold it in half, 1 to 3 and 8 to 10 match up perfectly with one another. So they may seem like opposites, but low self-esteem and a big ego are really just expressions of the same problem: judging yourself from the outside in and instead from the inside out. In fact, people with big egos are often very insecure. They just hide it with their egos. Humphrey Bogart said it in The Maltese Falcon: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” The ego is the armor I wear so you can’t see in.

1 to 3 and 8 to 10 tend not to last. Success is fleeting, they say. Sooner or later, if you think too highly of yourself because you’ve done well, you’ll suffer because most successful people fail. 4 through 7 may be more durable, less changeable. If you stay in the middle, there’s less of a height to fall from. This doesn’t mean I can’t try for success or be fearful if I attain it. It just means that when I tie my sense of worth to the externals, I’ll feel the bumps and bruises along the way.

Yet we have to account for our natures, too. Some people are geniuses, creatives who can’t help being the best (or the worst). They pay a price for that. There’s a saying that intemperance is a cruel master. We can’t always help what our dispositions are. Jimi Hendrix was probably the best rock ’n roll guitarist of all time. He died in his 20’s. All we can do is try to temper our dispositions by tempering our impulses. But not everyone can help that.

It’s hard being ordinary. Yet most of life is average, there wouldn’t be such a thing as average. Your average life is pretty average. God must have loved the common people. She made so many of them. And in ‘them,’ I include myself. And in She, I include the He.

Most moments are ordinary moments; dull, routine, punctuated every now and then with instants of dazzling excitement or terrible tragedy. There’s a line in one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, Mutematch. The song is called Typical. The lyric? Can I break the spell of the typical

We all suffer from the doldrums of the typical. In fact, ‘doldrum’ is a weather word which means monotonous, windless weather. Blah. It’s why we get high, jump our of airplanes (with or without parachute), fuck our brains out, gamble, and pick our noses. Yet the ‘trick’ of life is to look for the brilliance wrapped within the dimension of the dull routine.

I look now outside my office window as I write this down. The sky is blanched gray, pastelled with common clouds and no rain, the sun tucked somewhere, withholding its light and warmth. I don’t like days like today, blasé instead of blazed. But it is today, an average, dreamless medium afternoon. Still, behind the tepid overcast sky, mountains soar, gemmed with snow like a vast diadem. My task is to be astonished by them. My job as an average being is to see the extra in the ordinary. It’s to embrace my mundane self despite my typical nature. There is, I believe, a miracle underlying it all in each instant in the same way that the sun sparkles blindingly above the gunmetal clouds every moment of every day in each life throughout the life of the universe.

Today, I’m a 6, maybe even a 7.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just