For over a decade, my life has been a strug­gle towards becom­ing a bet­ter per­son. I’m not sure why I start­ed to live this way, although I sus­pect that it was the result of a con­fused child­hood, grow­ing up with an almost com­plete­ly unre­strained guid­ance. There was no sense of moral­i­ty, per­spec­tive, and most impor­tant­ly, pur­pose. I start­ed feel­ing out my own world­view with­out being con­scious­ly aware of it at the time, and the result of all of this was a col­lec­tive yearn­ing for self-improve­ment as an effort to define myself and the things around me.

A few years ago, I real­ized that self-improve­ment is the high­est form of liv­ing, that the best some­one can do for him or her­self is to be a bet­ter per­son. No oth­er belief has become as impor­tant in my life. It sets learn­ing as the great­est good, no mat­ter what the means. Pain, lone­li­ness, and hard­ship become ben­e­fi­cial. For years, my strug­gle for self-improve­ment was almost tan­gi­bly man­i­fest­ed. I could under­stand exact­ly the parts of myself that I want­ed to change and make bet­ter, so I would slow­ly turn my life in that direc­tion. As much as all of this helped me, it was still a strug­gle.

But even past this “use­ful” world­view or atti­tude is a more abstract goal (I refrain from using the word “pos­i­tive”, because I feel that my under­stand­ing is more of what I con­sid­er a sim­ple sub­jec­tive real­ism, than the con­no­ta­tion of bias asso­ci­at­ed with “pos­i­tive”). Whereas a poly­math is some­one with a rel­a­tive­ly aca­d­e­m­ic breadth of knowl­edge, I try to be round­ed in a more gen­er­al sense. This means an under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of any­thing, from humour, to wine, to music, to con­ver­sa­tion, to nar­cotics, to rela­tion­ships.

Simply put, I strive to be a bet­ter per­son in as many aspects as pos­si­ble. I strive to be a dynam­ic per­son, who will nev­er stop learn­ing. I want to be able to have a con­ver­sa­tion with any per­son I meet, no mat­ter how dif­fer­ent his walk of life is from mine. I want peo­ple I’ve known for years to be sur­prised by some­thing I may do or say tomor­row, such as Trolley with my orgasm the­o­ries, or Pita with my grow­ing secu­ri­ties. I want to be equal­ly intel­lec­tu­al­ly and emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful. To not have any weak­ness­es. To nev­er stop improv­ing.

To be tru­ly uni­ver­sal.