Letter
Not everyone is king
Dear Ema,
I have been reading Schopenhauer this week. The Wisdom of Life. The first part draws a simple line — what a man is, and what a man has. Most people spend their lives chasing the second and ignoring the first. I have done that. Most people I know have done that.
But what stayed with me was something else.
He says every person is cast in a role. Not in a religious sense. In the way an actor is given a part in a play. You are born with a particular set of abilities, a particular temperament, a particular shape of mind. That is your role. The work of a life is to play it as fully as you can.
It does not matter if the role is small. A beggar who lives his role completely has done what was asked of him. A king who never grows into his role has failed, even on a throne.
I want you to hear that carefully.
For most of my life I believed everyone owes the world greatness. That if you have a brain and a body and time, you should use them to climb something — money, status, recognition. I argued this with friends. I argued it with myself. I am still trying to unlearn it.
The scale was wrong.
Money, fame, success — these are scales we invented. They are useful for organizing societies, not for measuring lives. The only scale that means anything is whether you used what you were given. Not "did you become someone everyone has heard of," but "did you become the most you that you could be."
Schopenhauer gives an example I keep thinking about. A man with a body built for movement, stuck at a desk doing paperwork. He will spend his life ghosted by what he could have done. His real self runs in the background, visiting him as a hobby on weekends. Most people I know are some version of this man. I have been some version of this man.
You will be tempted to compare yourself to others. Everyone is. Comparison is how we orient ourselves when we don't know who we are yet. It is fine for a while. It becomes dangerous as a habit. Because if you measure yourself against someone else's role, you will feel either falsely above them or unfairly below them, and neither is the truth. You were not cast in their part.
This idea also changes what it means to judge other people.
I have judged people. You will too. It makes the mind feel powerful for a moment. But if every person is playing a role you cannot see — with abilities you cannot inventory and a history you do not know — then judgment is mostly a guess.
The only honest question to ask of someone else is whether they are doing their best with what they have. And you cannot answer that. You don't know what they have. You don't know what they were given.
That should be a relief. It removes a job that was never yours.
When I am honest, most of my judgment comes from envy. Sometimes it comes from fear — if I can place this person below me, I do not have to ask whether I am wasting myself. Either way, judgment is mostly noise from inside, projected outward.
I doubt anyone was born to judge others. I have not seen anyone made happy by it. I have seen a lot of people made small.
So here is what I want for you, if any of this is useful one day.
Find what you were given. Not what the world rewards. Not what your friends are doing. What is in you, specifically — the things that come easy, the things you cannot stop returning to. Take that seriously. Build with it.
If you become known for it, that is fine. If you do not, that is also fine. Nietzsche was barely read while he lived. Van Gogh sold almost nothing. They played their part anyway. You will know either way that you played yours. That is the only score that matters in this game.
I am 32 and I still invent scales, then resent them. The work now is to catch myself sooner.
—Dad