We Are Human Beings, Not Human Doings

It seems everywhere I look, humans are in a race to see who is “better.”
Better at answering prompts. Better at winning games. Better at building the biggest following. Even when it’s AI being compared — like in an article testing ChatGPT-5 and Grok — the focus is still on the competition, the winner, the loser.

I’ve never enjoyed this constant measuring of worth against another. The beauty of different personalities and inputs gets lost when our only lens is rivalry.

The truth is, humans also compete with their own boredom. The endless search for the “next distraction” is really the search for something strong enough to numb what lies beneath — the unresolved pain of childhood repression. When we finally resolve childhood repression, boredom dissolves. We can simply be.

Psychologist James Hollis said it well: “We are not disturbed by things, but by the view we take of them.” When we stop fleeing discomfort through competition or consumption, we discover what the poet David Whyte calls “the restorative quiet” beneath the noise of doing — where simply being, observing, and connecting without agenda becomes deeply nourishing.

Alan Watts once wrote: “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

His words are true. But for people to truly enjoy being alive, they must first resolve their childhood repression. Otherwise, they remain trapped in the panic Watts describes — forever seeking, never resting.

It’s also possible to live a long life without resolving childhood repression if one masters the art of repression, transference, and projection — as many cult leaders do. Years ago, I wrote about a cult leader who abused countless children. She lived into her mid-nineties, while many of the children she destroyed fell ill and died young.

That story confirmed what I already knew: people with deep-seated unresolved trauma can sometimes avoid sickness and live long lives if they have an endless supply of scapegoats to absorb their pain. The cult leader’s professed “love” for children made sense — they were her source of emotional survival, the perfect targets for projection and transference. Most abusers who proclaim to love children do so because those children are the poison containers they use to escape their own truth.

I wrote in 2016 that maybe one “secret” to a long life is being disconnected from one’s own truth and feelings — but it comes at the expense of others and the next generations. When I was a child, I said to myself: The pain stops with me. I was willing to die rather than pass it on to an innocent being. I much prefer resolving my own childhood repression and having a chance at a long life than living a long life at the expense of others.

Alice Miller said it best: “Am I saying that forgiveness for crimes done to a child is not only ineffective but actively harmful? Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds… Adults no longer need to [deceive themselves], but if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or they make others pay the price — their children, their patients, the people who work for them, etc.”

In her essay Gurus and Cult Leaders: How They Function, Miller explains: “The thing that concerns me most about cult groups is the unconscious manipulations… It is the way in which the repressed and unreflected childhood biographies of parents and therapists influence the lives of children and patients entrusted to their care… Once they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child… what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood.”

Watching that cult story also showed that formal education alone does not protect people from becoming victims. Education can be another illusion. The only lasting safeguard is resolving childhood repression — without that, people will continue to follow political and spiritual leaders blindly.

Alice Miller’s words in For Your Own Good remain painfully relevant: “Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self… Only within a group… will [an otherwise brilliant person] display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude… This explains why Martin Heidegger… was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler’s ideology… He responded… with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”

And in the same book, she reminds us: “Every crime, by virtue of being an enactment of childhood drama, cries out for understanding… The accused never bears all the guilt by himself but is a victim of a tragic chain of circumstances… There is a difference between prison being used to punish… and human tragedy being perceived in therapy during confinement.”

In the end, whether in politics, cults, or daily life, the same truth emerges: boredom, competition, blind obedience — they are all symptoms of a deeper disconnection from our own truth.

We are human beings, not human doings. When we heal the wounds of childhood repression, we stop needing distractions, winners, losers, or scapegoats. We can finally rest in the quiet strength of simply being alive.