Everything we do echoes in eternity
The impossibility of personality fragmentation – being part of the story of life. A person, as a worker, a parent, and a partner, is one and the same personality. Yet the fragmentation that appears on the level of personality is often the result of lacking a vertically unifying ideal that binds a person together. Without a unifying direction, in fragmentation, a person starts to perceive that at the top of their internal hierarchy of values (SIVH) stands only themselves – their own happiness, satisfaction, and a more comfortable life. In such a state, many stories and the narrative logic through which life is perceived start to feel like dogmatic instruction. But in reality – and more and more people are beginning to understand this – these are not guidelines for how to live, but descriptions of the structure of life itself. They point to the essence of life as what “life is”, not to moralizing about how one “should live.”
This is a short essay about becoming a better human being, based on the understanding that a person inevitably places something above themselves. As Bob Dylan said, “You gotta serve somebody” – not in a normative sense, but in the literal one: you will serve someone anyway. And for that reason, this “someone” or “something” should be something with deeper meaning than just the desire to live more easily and with fewer worries – for example, family and children.
Beyond Kant
My British friends recently told me about a scandal in which the police arrested a woman for her private messages—messages in which she used the forbidden f-word (the “worst” one—faggot). As they say in good old Russian stories: either he stole the fur coat, or someone stole it from him, but “что-то с шубой было”—there was definitely something going on with that fur coat. In this case in similar vein, the specifics of why she said it are secondary. What matters is that she repeated the familiar justification: “I wasn’t myself at that moment.” Every child understands that she was—and perhaps even more himself than usual (though I do think the accusations against her were exaggerated). The idea is simple: practically all of us have a deeply human tendency, in certain situations, to drift away from our true nature and personality in the most essential sense. Paradoxically, it is precisely in those moments that this nature reveals itself most accurately.
Kant introduced a Copernican turn into epistemology by explaining that the center of cognition does not lie outside us, in the external world, but that our experience of the world is shaped through our cognitive faculties. The a priori foundations of our perception of the world are the pure intuitions of time and space, through which the phenomenal world becomes perceivable and capable of being ordered.
For years, already, in my lectures on Kant, I have emphasized that alongside these we should place, as an equal counterpart, narrative cosmology—self-perception as the experience of a character in the most evolutionarily plausible stories. This is a thesis in which I have become increasingly convinced over time. I believe that, in the attempt to understand self-consciousness and consciousness as a whole, seeing life through narrative logic has hierarchically greater weight than the intuitions of time and space. Or rather: it is precisely the perception of time and space that makes possible the understanding of the world through stories (narrative cosmology). And although the capacity to perceive the world in this way is universal, people differ only in the degree to which they are aware of it.
The integrity of the person
Even though it is sometimes easier to segment ourselves into parts and distinguish ourselves across different domains, this is in reality nothing more than self-deception. In psychological terms, compartmentalization is often treated in everyday use as a neutral phenomenon, and it cannot be classified unambiguously as either harmful or beneficial as a coping mechanism. It becomes problematic at the exact moment when it is turned into the primary model for interpreting one’s identity — meaning, when a person elevates compartmentalization to the level of conceptualizing who they are. It is precisely at that point that an inner fracture emerges, through which a person tries to distance themselves from themselves.
It is important to understand that a human being is not merely “one whole,” but a whole within a story, and that story largely determines the path that follows (our faith). We have seen this with striking precision in corporate consulting projects, where leaders — often also founders — attempt to construct some kind of professional persona façade that supposedly exists separately from their true nature. Sometimes this façade is reinforced through rituals (changing clothes, for example) or various actions through which they try to transition into a different state in hopes of a broader transformation.
Yet such behavior is, at its core, pathological. Even more — leaders themselves perceive this “shift” most strongly, drastically underestimating how clearly others see through them. “Personal-life immunity” within a company is almost always asymmetrical: employees know and talk far more about the leader than the leader ever knows about any single employee. This is logical — in a hierarchy, the decision-maker has more influence over subordinates, and therefore their decisions, responsibilities, and behavior attract more attention.
A person is still one and the same. Their role as a leader or founder is usually the logical expression of their personal qualities, not a random coincidence of circumstance. Yes, coincidences may exist, but they usually last only a short time. Once someone acts as a leader or entrepreneur for long enough, their work identity becomes an increasingly precise reflection of who they are. For this reason, “changing hats” can only happen on the surface — poses can be taken, but the substance remains the same.
The organization as a reflection of the leader’s ideology
Over the years we have increasingly seen how a company (or any organization) begins to take on the face of its leader — even though this is often masked, especially when the leader’s greatest ambition is to cultivate the myth of equality and expansive tolerance. When a leader directs people to follow something “by example” without actually believing in it or reinforcing it through their own behavioral habits, he misleads both himself and others. Such constructs usually have a short lifespan.
Even more: as mentioned earlier, this type of leader often underestimates how clearly others can see the abyss between his real nature and the values he tries to cultivate. Most of the time, everyone else notices it far more quickly and accurately than the leader thinks.
Just as a father — in the context of hierarchy — is the creator of the family’s culture, or more precisely, the mediator of the culture he considers right, the same applies to a leader within a company. We have seen many leaders who proclaim complete equality, employee autonomy, and the creation of an environment that supposedly “maximizes the expression of individual capability”; who read Guattari and Deleuze, talk about A Thousand Plateaus and the Body without Organs (which I have discussed at length in the article Body Without Organs (BwO) as a Luring Alternative to Rigid Christianity and Extreme DEI: A Critique Through the Lens of Axiomatology), yet magically snap back into a strict hierarchical structure the moment decisions must be made that affect their own income, assets, or liabilities. Put simply: when it comes time to divide profit, Marxist principles — according to which everyone should contribute according to ability and receive according to need — suddenly no longer apply. Decisions are made strictly according to the logic of hierarchy and power dynamics. I am not claiming that there are no companies in which hierarchies truly do not exist. But we have never once seen a company that is successful in a competitive market where hierarchy does not exist de facto.
This is why leaders endure longer as effective mid-level or top-level executives for two reasons:
Their ideology is clear and clearly formulated.
It aligns with the ideology of the company.
I have many friends in America whose political views differ from mine diametrically, yet they have built successful companies. In their teams, nobody idolizes Trump or drinks Black Rifle Coffee — even if it tastes better than the alternatives. The leader’s ideology is clear and has been transmitted to the team; the platform from which the world is viewed is unified. For that reason, the logic is not flawed: complete coherence makes decision-making simple. Culture, in its diversity, can be beautiful — but only when it is clearly defined through a shared hierarchy of values. That is why I have often held in high regard atheists or left-leaning debate opponents when their arguments are logical and free of contradictions.
Two main variants at the top of the hierarchy
In many cases there are unbridgeable chasms between the organization’s claimed hierarchy of values and the leader’s personal hierarchy of values. Such situations are inherently destructive: first for the employee, and eventually for the leader as well. This usually becomes visible at the moment when an employee or a member of the organisation finally finds the time and internal quiet to reflect on what actually matters to them — to understand, at the most elementary level, the relations of subordination between the values that structure their life.
When constructing a hierarchy of values, almost everyone eventually realizes that two values cannot occupy the same horizontal level. Every vertical shift in the order of values obeys the logic of sacrifice. Everything below the highest value becomes, in practice, something that can be sacrificed.
The vast majority of people — including managers, employees, top-executives — arrive, after genuine self-analysis, at hierarchies whose peak contains either “personal happiness” or “family.”
• For women, the former usually yields to the latter in the second half of their twenties.
• For men, the shift depends on the substantive intention to build a family, not so much on age.
Once the logic of hierarchical values is accepted — and this acceptance happens almost without exception — an explanation emerges for the chosen order. And depending on which value is designated as primary, it takes one of two forms:
Constant presence in positive emotional states (happiness) enables one to dedicate oneself to family and be a better parent;
Family creates the preconditions for inner peace, meaning, and long-term satisfaction.
The sincerity with which one adheres to the constructed hierarchy usually depends on life experience and — I will not hide it — the amount of tragedy one has lived through.
A person’s long-term professional capability and psychological balance depend greatly on whether their highest value aligns with that of the organization. The more the hierarchies overlap, the more sustainable the cooperation becomes, without either side experiencing serious discomfort.
There are organizations that succeed (often for a limited period, but still) precisely because their central motive is purely the earning and redistribution of money to ensure optimal customer satisfaction and employee “happiness.” This is a transactional model, where talking about deeper values is a pose, not a reality. Responsibility is normatively bounded, and “personal life” is not discussed. Working in such an organization does not provide any meaningful ideological development — probing deeper value questions would create more problems than unity. I am not saying this is bad in itself — it is simply a transaction-based model. There is also no point speaking of any deeper company culture, even when one has been formulated for the façade.
The second variant is the organization that values “family” as an idea and ideal in a substantive way. In such a case, workplace relationships are inevitably deeper. This does not mean family therapy for every employee, though sometimes even that might be needed. The key difference lies in the fact that the company’s leaders have adopted “family” as a value at the most substantive and hierarchical level. They value loyal, generally very traditional intimate relationships, are mostly married, and raise children.
Equally important — this is not a pose. They did not create a family to become better leaders. They have a family, both in practice and at the top of their hierarchy of values, because as individuals they prefer it to all other values (including the comfortable, problem-free version of “personal happiness” in its ordinary sense).
Such a leader gains a substantive mandate to lead people whose own hierarchy of values places family — both as ideal and as practice — at the highest level.
At this point I will not elaborate on the all-too-common experience leaders have with external consultants and trainers whose understanding of “family” consists of having been a child and currently being childless in their closest relationship. In such cases, the meaning of family can be grasped only intellectually and from a distance.
Pathological contradictions
A substantive — and usually hopelessly unsolvable — problem emerges when the leader’s personal hierarchy of values fundamentally differs from the one he tries to impose on the company. Cases like these exist in every country, far more often than one might think. Most of the time, after mapping the psychometric profiles of key employees and their Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs), we find ourselves facing only two options: distort reality (sometimes in grotesque proportions) and begin cultivating an organizational culture according to what should be, or remain honest and help the leader change — for example, by sending him to therapy. Usually the first option is attempted, and only later — one way or another — people arrive at the second (especially when replacing the leader is harder than helping him change).
Let us look at a few examples. Sometimes the reason is a tragic biological distance from the ideal: being born with an orientation that makes building a sustainable family impossible. In such situations, all options are difficult, and the built-in cognitive dissonance can crush a person’s psyche.
Most commonly, however, the cause is a continued parallel life behind a façade. For example, a company owner with hedonistic tendencies may live a pleasure-filled, constantly shifting lifestyle (wintering in Thailand, for instance), caring little for his biological offspring(s), while simultaneously preaching “the importance of family values” as a supposed organizing logic of the company. This is a comical situation at every level of analysis — unfortunately not a rare one. The same person then wonders (sometimes even sincerely, in his naïveté) why employees keep leaving under various pretexts and why he constantly has to look for new ones.
A football coach who regularly beats his partner may be genuinely surprised why his talk about valuing family doesn’t inspire warmth or conviction in the players, why conflicts emerge with parents, and why he surprises even himself with his impulsiveness. Organizational culture is not built from external activities — it always begins with a structured internal hierarchy of values and behavior consistent with it. Valuing family becomes real only through sacrifices rooted in actual choices: moments where one chooses family above everything else while having tangible alternatives within reach. Without such sacrifices, talk of family-centered development is, at best, a naïve attempt to rephrase someone else’s talking-points, and at worst, deliberate manipulation.
A company owner who lives transactional relationships and pays the car leases of sugar-baby girlfriends twenty-five years younger than himself, in exchange for sex and companionship, may attempt to build a central firm culture where “family” is upheld as the supreme value. But this illusion lasts only until a critical number of employees discover the truth and see behind the carefully pressed-on mask. The contradiction between a personal value hierarchy — with self-centered pleasure at its peak — and the company’s apparent value hierarchy, supposedly built around family as an ideal, is staggering. Leadership through shared values functions only in words and only for those who trust the leader without knowing his actual behavioral logic, emotional oddities, and deviant tendencies that make relationships oriented toward family, marriage, and reciprocal humanity fundamentally impossible.
Likely because of these same unresolved traumas tied to self-betrayal, many such leaders have already killed the ideal of “family” inside themselves — and as a result, they destroy its possibility in others from the very beginning. These sugar-daddies often give emotional, performative speeches at work about the importance of family, speak beautifully about it — and then rush to drive their sugar-baby mistress, with whom they never intend to marry, to get an abortion. It is a heartbreaking pathology, and once it comes to light, everyone with a value-based approach to life inevitably begins to see the leader differently.
Returning to the narrative interpretation, it becomes easy to see how such leaders perform roles in stories that are timeless in nature. Without going into excessive religious detail, one can say that the Bible is one of the sources that helps reveal the meaning of these stories. Once one learns to see life through narrative cosmology, it becomes almost impossible not to notice, in these situations, the motifs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the building of the Tower of Babel, the archetypes of Cain and Judas, and very often the characteristic power-hungry, internally fractured false pharaoh.
I am not claiming your leader is one of these figures; the question is rather whether he has conquered this negative character in himself — or whether this character is the one truly leading him.
Difficult exits
Working for an organization whose leader’s true hierarchy of values differs from your own is difficult without triggering deep inner dissonance. The main reason is the constant awareness that one is investing time and energy into something — or someone — whose internal logic of values one does not respect. It is a corrosive feeling, one that money can compensate for only up to a certain limit.
In such environments, people often begin to face existential questions: thoughts about the long-term trajectory, about where all this leads — where they will be years later not only materially, but mentally and in terms of their internal value hierarchy. Is this job and career-path the example they want to set for their children? This question becomes especially pronounced in those who have built a family and have come to understand how much responsibility and inner weight it carries.
In the worst cases, the work requires lying in the most literal sense: to clients, to students, to colleagues, to the public. I have written extensively about the consequences of this (for example here: Axiomatological Genealogy of Lying). I have seen numerous key employees leave precisely because they cannot participate in a process of lying. Paradoxically, several of our trainings and consultation programs have become, in a sense, self-fulfilling prophecies — but better that than endless suffering. Yet in these situations people almost always fall into the same mechanism that operates in romantic breakups: they want to find the best, almost perfect new beginning, but after a while discover themselves in exactly the same situation. This is a basic fact of existence: through external change we can at best facilitate internal change, but never guarantee it.
The issue is not simply that, once the pressure of the environment disappears, we abandon actions that are deeply repulsive to us. The real question is what we do instead. Just as it is impossible to quit alcoholism without finding heavier, more meaningful values in life (and this applies to every addiction), changing jobs or leaving an organization led by a “suffocating tyrant” does not resolve a person’s inner emptiness.
Leaving a (Work) Relationship
Companies that are led seemingly based on values tend to display a noticeably higher tolerance for mistakes. This resembles families where the father does not take responsibility for creating the family culture: the actual rule system disintegrates, a clear and structured internal value hierarchy is absent, and in its place emerges either emptiness or a constantly shifting, random sequence of values. Each family member then chooses the most convenient, easiest, and usually short-term pleasure–optimized “hierarchy” that requires no sacrifice. The lowest common denominator that connects people in such a family is therefore extremely primitive. Shared values are avoided, because the behavior of the leader or father contains so many violations of absolutes that demanding adherence to those values from others becomes impossible. Such companies resemble failed mafia structures where the “godfather” gives orders only through power and speaks about values even though everyone knows it is pure theatrics.
Leaving such a company is easy — fear of power works only as long as a person lacks inner alignment with something stronger than that limited external power. It is simple to oppose someone whose real values you do not share, whose value hierarchy differs from yours, and differs from what you know to be right. That opposition only strengthens your own internal values.
Leaving an organization (or family) where the value hierarchy is functional and where the leader/father is genuinely aligned with it is always more difficult. Only those who do not share these values follow the one who leaves. Although this example often produces ambivalent reactions in trainings, even the most outwardly “free” and horizontal organizations have their own “godfathers” for whom different violations carry categorically different weight. When an organization’s value hierarchy is clear, spoken aloud, and consistently embodied, it becomes — much like a father’s capacity to forgive within a family — possible to forgive nearly anything (except for betrayal at a level that would destroy the entire structure both within the family and within the individuals who form it). In many well-known organizations, the relationships between the top leader and key individuals are astonishingly similar to a functioning mafia structure. It is no exaggeration to say that starting a job often comes with an unspoken oath: “May my flesh burn if I betray my family.” And although most mistakes are forgiven, returning after a substantive betrayal is almost always impossible — especially when the betrayal has been deliberate and fundamentally opposed to the organization’s core architecture, placing the betrayer outside or even above the structure in their minds at the moment of deciding to betray.
Those who fare best over time are people with a clear internal value hierarchy (SIVH). In difficult situations they do not break, nor do they fall into an endless emotional spiral. If anything makes hierarchies that culminate in values higher than one’s personal wellbeing priceless, it is precisely their power to help a person endure the most complex situations — especially departures and losses which would otherwise turn into chaos. People whose value structure is clear, and culminates in something greater than their own comfort or happiness, experience the same hardships, injustices, and “the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office,” as Shakespeare listed — as all other people, yet they emerge psychologically far healthier.
The reason is simple: when you choose to serve something higher than yourself, the logic of life supports your goals because they are aligned with the fundamental sustainability of reality. But if you try to bend reality so that it serves your personal comfort and happiness, you inevitably swim against life’s natural balance. And this is precisely why it is doubly exhausting for people to enter into conflict with someone whose value hierarchy they secretly believe to be correct. In that case, victory becomes impossible — every attack on the other becomes simultaneously an attack on oneself.
The unbearable lightness of existential freedom
When we bring together seeing life through stories, the question of internal value hierarchies, and their compatibility with the external environment and commitment, we reach the genuinely important question: can free will exist without voluntary obligation — without submitting to something greater than one’s own satisfaction or happiness?
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being offers exceptionally vivid examples here. The characters are believable and powerful precisely because they are humanly weak — vulnerable, fallible, deeply imperfect and insecure (like all people). For the same reason, these characters are also archetypal, similar to many figures in the Bible: human nature reveals itself not in perfection, but in insufficiency.
For me, this book has been a profound warning about the weight carried by every human action. We may try to retreat from responsibility, to “become free,” to separate bodily needs from spiritual loyalty — but in the end, it is always a deep form of self-deception.
Yalom described freedom as one of the core existential fears; we see the same logic in Kundera: freedom from something is only half the solution. If there is nothing one is moving toward — freedom to — a person remains rootless. (I wrote about this in more detail here: Freedom From and Freedom To in Constructing Value Hierarchies.)
This is the point where idealistic story-based perception of life meets practical reality. One can leave an organization, citing “ideological incompatibility,” just as one can leave a relationship with the explanation that “I am not seen” or “I do not feel complete, fulfilled, or happy.” But the question remains: what next? where to?
It is usually at this moment that a person recognizes the need to clarify their hierarchy of values and understand what is worth sacrificing for what. If a person places family as the highest value, suddenly both clarity and the pain of responsibility emerge. Every action gains exponentially greater weight compared to a life optimized for personal happiness — for being a lover, for chasing love, for “flying in the state of lightness,” for the seductive ease of escapism colored by fantasies.
When one places family and marriage at the highest position, the lightness of being is replaced by weight — and this is both good and bad at once. Everything depends on which viewpoint the person chooses.
Identity unification through sacrifice to the family
Family, keeping a family together, and finding and preserving shared values is always a trial, a sacrifice, and a path toward an ideal whose final arrival is impossible. This brings us back to non-fragmentation. Just as the American Declaration of Independence defines a nation as “one people under God,” the family is a phenomenon that surpasses the individual — the family is always larger than any one of its members. Something operates there that connects people transcendently.
I am not claiming that every family moves toward the ideal strictly according to Christian criteria. What matters is the principle of connectedness: that the family has clear, consciously accepted values that are acknowledged axiomatically — such as honesty, keeping agreements, placing family (and why not marriage as well) above personal interests, giving one’s best, and being willing to make sacrifices for one another.
Family is genuinely one of the few domains where not only can Marxist logic function — everyone contributes according to their ability and everyone receives according to their needs — but where it becomes existentially necessary. Many principles that fail at the societal level function naturally within a family.
There is a fascinating horizontal dimension that arises alongside this indivisibility and intersects with the vertical alignment. In debates I have often been accused of smuggling in the “motif of the cross” — I do not intend to do so, but structurally it becomes unavoidable and philosophically logical.
Through the shared values of the family, a person forms a connection with their children, and their identity reorganizes itself from an individual “I” into a collective “we.” For this reason, the metaphysical boundary between parent and child often dissolves: what binds them is more essential than the anatomical fact that they reside in different bodies. This is precisely what we see in many timeless stories: a deeply internalized identity surpasses the borders of individuals — in other words, the parent begins to live in the child, and the child in the parent, because they live together within the family. Figuratively: a parent extends their hand, looks at their playing child, and realizes that the outer boundary of their identity does not end at the fingertips but at the furthest skin cell of the child.
From this follows a logical conclusion: everything a parent does affects not only themselves but the child as well. If a parent drinks, uses drugs, or kills someone, they make the child responsible too — until the corresponding bond is severed. Life operates according to a merciless logic: when a parent acts against natural law (cheats, kills, lies, covets what is not theirs, flees a deserved consequence — essentially violates the prohibitive side of the commandments), the bond with the family breaks, and they drift away from it (provided the family has preserved those values).
By separating and distancing themselves from the family, a person proves through their actions that at the top of their internal hierarchy of values sits personal happiness — not the family as an ideal with its values, for which one would sacrifice oneself. Exactly the same mechanism operates in value-based organizations. For this reason, one can reread this part of the article again, simply replacing the word “family” with “organization” (except for the marxist notion - unless the team is really small).
Sacrifice as an investment into children through everyday choices
People who have thought little about the nature of sacrifice often associate “making a sacrifice” with some ritual or special act, trying to relocate ideal-based living into a category that supposedly exists “outside everyday life, somewhere up in the clouds.” This is a naïve and short-sighted attempt. The essence of sacrifice is an everyday phenomenon. When a person lives according to a clear hierarchy of values, they distribute their time and energy — and therefore also their money — according to that hierarchy. If family is their highest value and the connection with their children (as described earlier) is present, then they know that everything they do or fail to do affects their children both directly and indirectly.
For example: if a single mother faces the choice of selling her body and becoming a sugar-baby to a much older sugar-daddy who pays for her car lease in exchange for sex and travel companionship, she must recognize that she is teaching her child (especially if the child is a daughter) to normalize transactional relationships. She establishes a standard: selling one’s body is a normal way to achieve a more comfortable life — for example, to gain access to a car — “one less worry.”
In doing so, the parent consciously retreats from the family ideal and sacrifices the child’s moral future for her own momentary comfort. If the child does not break this pattern, there is a high likelihood that she will replicate the same behavioral logic later in life, stepping away from the family ideal and normalizing prostitution in her eyes — even if such prostitution consists of just one client.
This is precisely where the realization of an ideal becomes visible in the choices of everyday life: instead of sacrificing her time and energy to work or — which for many comfort-accustomed people seems almost unthinkable — using public transport, the mother sacrifices her dignity and her ability to be a functioning role model in exchange for short-term convenience. A mother who has not abandoned the family at the level of ideal, and who maintains a shared identity with her children, cannot and will not allow herself such behavior. For her, this would be a clear sacrifice of the ideal in favor of personal ease and gratification. The same mother would, in that case, take her car and drive a taxi in her spare time, sell the car and buy a cheaper one, or find another solution among the endless alternatives — anything that does not mean stepping down from the role of a responsible, value-based parent.
Every choice leaves a trace
Whitehead described every moment of experience as an actual occasion, a unit of becoming that arises through the concrescence of many factors: the objective data inherited from the past, the initial aim that provides its moral or value-oriented direction, and the way these elements are integrated in the occasion’s own subjective form. To keep the example accessible for readers unfamiliar with process thought: reality is a continuous sequence of occasions in which multiple inputs “flow together”—including the entire stream of antecedent occasions that shape a person’s present character, as well as the value-oriented lure for feeling that the person may either realize or distort. This lure functions partly “outside” ordinary space and time because it is not physical but pure potentiality: it belongs to the domain of eternal objects that influence what the moment can become before it becomes actual.
One of Whitehead’s more subtle and often overlooked ideas concerns what could be called the negative prehension of unrealized alternatives—the aspect of every occasion that carries within it not only what has been inherited from the past but also what could have happened yet was excluded in concrescence. Each occasion contains, in its structure of prehensions, a record of the eliminated potentials of the past—those possibilities that remained unactualized but were nonetheless part of the occasion’s realm of potential relevance. These include near-accidents, close calls, or the everyday “deliverances” that a person who believes themselves to be “firmly grounded” tends to forget faster than what they ate for breakfast. In Whiteheadian terms, these belong to the graded field of unrealized eternal objects, which are felt in the process of becoming but are ultimately negatively prehended, leaving a kind of metaphysical shadow of what almost occurred but did not.
When one sees life according to this logic, a person becomes exceptionally attentive to everything they do or fail to do daily. Every lie, every unjustified aggression, every moment when we increase someone’s suffering simply because “I’m having a hard time right now,” or every instance in which we continue offering a pathologically deviant example — all of these have weight and meaning.
Just as the fictional but archetypally true Maximus cried out in Gladiator (a leader who demonstrated how an organizational value hierarchy becomes internalized when it aligns with one’s personal hierarchy): “What we do in life echoes in eternity.”
The nature of change
One of the most naïve concepts in American self-help culture is the myth that a person can change themselves and their life in an instant. Usually the necessary potential is not there, and the large, motivational slogans help only for a short while. Action must precede change, and the path toward real transformation is usually far longer than people imagine — even when they consider themselves “realistic.”
A good example is the biblical story of Jacob (later given the name Israel), who, being born second, deceived both his brother and his father. From this emerges a deeper moral dimension: nothing can be done without proportional consequences of suffering. The American self-help culture (largely commercial and dangerous) has nevertheless understood one thing correctly — the significance of the turning point. There is a very specific moment from which change becomes possible; in narrative logic, a moment of returning toward the ideal.
Jacob received the insight in an instant, but what followed were twelve years of labor under Laban — being deceived, keeping agreements inside an unwanted marriage, losses, and suffering. It was precisely out of all this that his role grew, the role that would define Israel. The moral is simple: you may understand that you have lived wrongly, but do not expect an instant reversal — the road toward the ideal usually takes a long time, often at least a decade.
In conclusion.
We should not exclude the possibility that we have a role to carry in a story far larger than ourselves. Our life will be taken from us anyway — we have already lost it in advance. And as Heidegger explained: Dasein always senses the arrival of death (“In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein discloses itself to its ownmost possibility of Being-toward-death.”). The English word anticipation captures this precisely: we do not “wait for” death, yet we cannot turn our awareness away from its certain approach.
In such existential inevitability, a person may be tempted to flee from responsibility and reality — like Tomas or Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But what good would that do? Even in fleeing, one must move toward something. There is nothing wrong if a person finds clarity in their hierarchy of values and decides to begin moving immediately toward a direction where inner intuition and the external environment (including the work environment) are less in conflict.
If one wants, chooses to believe in the possibility of a jointly chosen future ideal becoming real (at least to a substantial degree), and is willing to see the rest of life as it truly is — relatively short, full of unpredictability, but at least rich in suffering and perhaps also meaning — everything is possible.
