“This above all: to thine own self be true.”
This classic line is at the end of a monologue from Hamlet. It is the advice that Polonius gives to his son Laertes before sending him off to France. The whole thing is brilliant, but never in all of parenting history has a more important maxim been uttered than “to thine own self be true.” But that advice isn’t as simple as it sounds.
There’s a movie that came out in 1992 called ‘Whispers in the Dark’. It’s a thriller about a psychologist who starts dating this great guy, but then it turns out he might (or might not) be a murderer. One of her long-time patients had this to say (WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT):
“I just want you to imagine that you’re this little girl on another planet, and you were born there and that’s all you know. And nobody makes love there because there’s a law against the love act. But it’s okay with you because you’re just a kid. But then one day pubic hair starts to grow and you’ve got new instincts and you want to go against the law and you want to f**k. Could you stay inside the laws of this planet, Doctor Hecker? Could you stay inside of them for every minute of every hour of every day until the day you died? Well, nature played a real s**t trick on me. I got these instincts inside of me that are real different than the usual ones on this planet. When I see a pretty woman, I don’t want to f**k. I want to hear the sounds that she makes when she’s in her pain.”
Humans are social animals. We don’t live alone, we live in societies. We live in families, neighborhoods, towns, and countries. We need society every bit as viscerally as we need food and shelter. But being a member of society is expensive. You buy your membership by sacrificing parts of your being. It is in the nature of many small children to bite and steal, but instead of being true to themselves, we demand that they learn not to do that. And it is in the nature of John Leguizamo’s character from that movie to torture women, but we demand that he not do that. That’s the deal.
Famously flamboyant and heterodoxical poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once wrote:
“There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world, in its hypocrisy, demands.”
Society wants to mold us into its perfect servant. Society has an opinion on everything about us, our career, our shoes, our families, our hair. If you don’t push back, society will happily make you a miserable slave. If you push back too hard, society will angrily make you a miserable prisoner. The correct balance between allowing yourself to be civilized by society and being true to yourself is not easy to define. But it certainly won’t be found at either extreme.
In addition to all the others that get to temper how much of yourself you are allowed to be true to, there are other selves within you and some deserve more trueness than others.
If you are like me, then the last time you stubbed your toe on a table, you had the powerful desire to smash it into smithereens or throw it out the window. But I imagine you also want very much for that table to still be there next time you need to put something on it, and to not have to pay for a new one. You can only be true to one of those selves, and you have to choose.
The truth is, you have lots of selves. There’s the you that wants to dominate your peers and the you that wants to serve them. There’s the you that wants to spend all day watching YouTube or Netflix and the you that wants to get something accomplished today. There’s the you that wants to be able to play piano and the you that hates practicing piano.
Arguably the two most important selves are “now” you and “future” you. “Now” you has desires like food and sex. “Future” you has desires like skill, discipline, and fitness. And so you have to negotiate. Because “future” you can have better things than “now” you can have, but only if “now” you makes sacrifices.
So it’s impossible to be true to thine own self because thine own self is too complicated.
When Laertes leaves Denmark for France, he is young but he is an adult. Polonius sends him off with a distillation of the advice he has been giving for his son’s entire life. And at the end, Polonius tells his son “to thine own self be true.” This does not mean “do whatever you want to do.” It means, “having lived to adulthood in the real world, having been raised by a wise and loving father, you are now responsible to use your best judgment to decide when to do what you want to do, when to do what other people want you to do, and when doing the right thing means doing neither.”
