Three Pieces of Truth

One. "When I grow up, I want to be someone like them." Or: "If you try hard enough, you can become a great person just like them." Around us, there are very few people whom we look at and say, "Oh, if only I could become like them!" On the other side of this coin are those people whose example parents invoke to warn their children: "You're becoming as bad as so-and-so!" Or small children who say, "Everyone thinks I'm as bad as them—when I grow up, no matter what else I become, I don't want to be like them."

Indeed, it bewilders us to encounter such people who are human only in name. Sometimes these worthless sorts even know themselves that they are held up as "examples of badness." Yet watch—they feel not a shred of shame, and nothing anyone says pierces them. They were as they were before; they are as they are now; they will remain so. It never occurs to them to change. And among them are some who are a cut above the rest—they laugh these warnings away entirely. They say, "Go on then, try being as bad as me if you can!" Such people take pride even in their own filth.

The tragic truth is that many of these bad people are themselves someone's parents. They live such wretched lives that after they die, their own children—and countless others—feel secretly relieved, thinking to themselves, "Thank goodness they're gone." Let me illustrate. There are many who borrow and borrow so much in life that while alive, they must endure reproach from their children and relatives for it; when they die, that reproach only multiplies. They bring no peace even in death—often, no one in their family earns enough to repay the debts they left behind. The consequences of one such person's life are visited upon three generations that follow.

Two. If a man claims he understands a woman's mind completely, then either he is some kind of sage, or he is a liar—because a woman does not even fully understand herself. Girls do not know what they want, or why; what they say, or why; what they do, or why; what they think, or why. A man achieves maturity of mind only when he stops taking everything a woman says as literal truth.

Three. Your own immaturity, your recklessness—flaring up at nothing, suspicion, withholding your time to make her dependent on scarcity—you pass all this off as "cute," as if it were love itself. Ah! But the moment she does something reckless, you call her "psycho" in that same cute way, or simply call her "mad" outright. Have you no shame, brother? Or is it that only your feelings count as feelings, and hers do not?