The human being is a merchant who peddles the self and every merchant should be able to partake in the fruit they peddle. It is worrying, then, how many people indulge themselves on the side and make furtive allowances when more publicly they are strict. The behavior speaks to an incoherent whole, a double standard of existence. There are two ways I know to address incoherent whole. One is to practice the double standard, which shores up the unsustainable aspects of the self like gauze staunches a bleeding wound. Eat healthily, for example, but then stuff your face at night.

The second is to alter the self to achieve coherency: a stable, innately livable self. Human beings are not standalone creatures: we require food and water and oxygen that we cannot generate internally, and these needs make us part of a greater ecology. Perhaps one day all nature will be replaced by machines, but even then we will require those tools to live–that too makes an ecology, if a dismal one. In short, we must rely on others–human and inhuman, dead and alive and inanimate–in order to survive. The acceptance that one persists within an ecology, that self is not fortress, does not absolve one of responsibility, however; does not allow us in good faith to rely totally on others: the double standard solution to the incoherent whole is unacceptable and one must strive to become a livable person.

Why? The double standard is damaging and puts unrealistic pressures on those around the person. If you cannot follow your own rules or respect how you yourself act, you misguide others on how to live: to act in any given way is to throw down a gauntlet to others, put your personage behind a way of life and say 'this is what I am and how!' Unless you accomplish things very great with a double standard, make a kind of tragedy of or cast a dark side to your way of life, it is pathetic. And greatness is unlikely because the double standard also erodes oneself. If my way of life must be supplemented by bits contrary to it, I erode my credibility in my own eyes. After all, we are not singular even in ourselves. The subconscious, the trillions of cells that live and die for the being called 'self' and the reflexive, innate parts of oneself are all part of the journey. I believe we have a duty to these and all aspects of ourselves. Furthermore, the power of the secure, singular self should not be underestimated. The self that can be comfortably lived in not for ignoring things or shoring them up–in short, the self that can partake in itself– creates an immensely powerful base for all the parts of self and even the wider ecology to launch from. It allows us to become greater than ourselves.

The formation of a stable, livable self is fundamental to living and we should learn it as children. How to rest and work and spend our days fairly, like the sea ebbing and flowing, calm and stormy with tide and weather. Do not, to put a last thing in short, betray whatever of yourself you have not yet.

A long nothing I see behind me, for I partake in rust and now I corrode away! My self is clumsy and self-defeating, and putting forth such speculation as that above is unhelpful, but I nevertheless feel the idea of coherent whole is important. The sensation of continuity, that one's entire self comes to bear, is unmatchable.