influence – sethlewis.ie

Enjoying Your Own Decline

Nobody likes to talk about it, but the decline is coming. I’m not talking about economics, western culture, or common courtesy. I’m talking about us. You and me. Life is a mountain with two sides, and no matter how high you climb, you’ll still end up at the very bottom someday. Even the god-like pharaohs landed there, and the treasure in their tombs was eventually plundered. That’s how it goes. If you’re lucky, you’ll live long enough to experience the decline as a gradual downward slope. For others, it’s more like a cliff. One thing is certain: decline is coming.

It may be your strength. It may be your beauty. It may be your mind. It may be your influence, the relevance of your work, your notoriety, or your social prominence. Eventually, it will be all of the above. I guess it makes sense that we don’t like to talk about this. It sounds dire, doesn’t it? And yet I’ve witnessed people living out the years of their decline with a strange, luminous joy that refused to track with their diminishing abilities and strength—on the contrary, it actually grew stronger and brighter as they weakened and let go. How is this possible? I want to know, because I want that joy.

The Inner Circle

“It’s all who you know,” they say. If you want to get ahead, it really helps to know the right people in the right places. People on the inside, in the inner circle of influence. If they know you, they’ll be more likely to use their positions to help you. If they like you, or if you’ve done something for them, that’s even better.

If I Can Do It, Anyone Can

There’s a lot of helpful how-to content online, and I’m often thankful for it. If I want to fix a broken appliance or learn a new skill, there’s bound to be a video tutorial posted somewhere that I can follow. In some ways it’s sad that our first place to seek advice is now Google instead of a real life social network of family, friends, and neighbours. However, my friends and family have almost certainly never replaced a ball-bearing unit on a Hotpoint X350KW. So I am thankful for strangers who make online tutorials.

They certainly make a lot of them. You can get how-to content on pretty much anything these days. One popular genre, which I’m sure you’ve seen, is successful influencers and millionaires posting about how they made their money or gained their audience, and how you and I could do the same if we would just follow their five-step fail-proof system. First, they talk about how they started with so little (showing their common, ordinary origins), and then they describe their ascent to greatness before coming back around to their humble beginnings and finishing with an encouraging comment like, “If I can do it, anyone can!”

What I Saw On The Edge Of The Room

The new kid was there, effortlessly working the room. He told a joke and everyone laughed, and I laughed. He was nice, and I had no reason not to like him except that everyone liked him and they wouldn’t like me. I had been there years, but when I told a joke they pretended they couldn’t hear. I told it louder and their faces scrunched. I stopped talking and they pretended I didn’t exist. I decided I would take up less space on the edge of the room, with my eyes down. But there was a problem: The edges were already crowded with eyes looking down, trying not to exist too loudly. At first I was annoyed. Then I saw them.