Advice I Sell, and for Myself I Have None

«Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.» Proverbs twenty-six: twelve

Let me take you to an after-dinner table. Any one will do, because the scene repeats itself the same in every house, with a different tablecloth. There is the uncle with the money — the one who, by his own account, does everything right and knows everything, and whom no one contradicts because he pays the bill; he pronounces on politics, medicine, child-rearing, and business in the same breath, and on every subject he is an authority because on none does he have any doubt. Across from him is the aunt who always has something to say and never really knows anything: she pokes her nose into everything but offers no proof, no references, no sources; her entire bibliography is «a relative, a friend, or a friend of a friend,» and deep down she is convinced that everyone is against her or, at best, barely at her level. I'll call her, so she doesn't get lost among so many aunts, Aunt Opinionator — the one with the friend of a friend. And so with the rest of the table: each with an improvised lectern, each a bearer of the truth, each certain that life is merely a matter of doing this or that thing. We always have the positive comment, the ready advice, the exact formula for someone else's life. And yet — and here is where the chapter stops pointing and begins to confess, because I have been each one of them— we are not able to resolve our own.

There is the whole portrait, and I owe it a name, because popular speech already gave it one and the name is half the thesis. In my homeland this figure was christened with a vulgar nickname, and I write it in quotes and with gloves: the «don vergas» — a phallic brag that English can only approximate; «Mr. Big Shot» is its polite cousin, and the Spanish original is considerably cruder—: the one who can do everything, who knows everything, the braggart of the loud vocabulary. And right here let us make a deal, you and I: this term will live only in this chapter — the rest of the book does not speak that way and I do not intend to change its register for a joke—, and we will use it with the respect it is owed, because I do not bring it to mock anyone: in the end, the don vergas was also me. And on many occasions the need to want to be him still rises in me; but now, conscious and awake, now that I inhabit my life, I take care not to act incisively — not to act like the animal, but to build, to create, and to inhabit with love and with delicacy. The nickname stays on the record, because the name itself gives away the mechanism, and that is worth more than the discomfort. Samuel Ramos had already diagnosed it in nineteen thirty-four, in Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico: the «pelado,» he said, reading Alfred Adler, is the man who compensates an intimate feeling of inferiority with verbal explosions of dominance, and it is no accident that his vocabulary of bravado is precisely the phallic one — that it should tie manhood, potency, and courage into the same shouted word. That is to say: the one who lets himself be called that is not proclaiming his strength; he is covering, at the top of his lungs, an insufficiency he never dared to examine. Braggadocio is not an excess of confidence. It is a wound bandaged with noise. Keep that fact, because it changes the way you look at the whole table: they are not enemies to be beaten in the argument — they are people who are afraid, just like you, and who found a louder disguise.

And since the uncle with the money from the first scene was him — of course it was him—, let me introduce you to the don vergas the way he introduces himself, in three or four scenes that are worth an entire dossier. He brags about paying the bills and he brags about having money — both things, and in that order, because the paid bill has witnesses at the table while the fortune, on the other hand, must be declared out loud every so often in order to exist. He always arrives in a great big car, pretending to be someone else — the car comes in first and he comes in after it, holding up the character—; but come a little closer and the miser appears: he says he has money and, when he visits the family for a wedding, he will not pay for so much as a hotel room — he settles in wherever he lands, with the excuse ready before he is even out of the car. He lives on canned food and rations his meals, because money, he says, is «for more important things» — though we will never learn which ones, because his health, of course, is not on the list. He never takes care of himself: not a checkup in time, not a walk, not one well-slept night — taking care of yourself costs, and he does not spend on what cannot be seen from the sidewalk. And time, which argues with no one, eventually charges him for the full show: he falls ill. Keep that last scene, because it is not a detail of the character — it is the thesis of this chapter waiting for its turn.

There is a Spanish proverb that sums up the trade of these people better than any treatise, and that is why it lends the chapter its name: consejos vendo, y para mí no tengo — advice I sell, and for myself I have none. There is the vice complete — the self-adviser who dispenses wisdom door to door and lives out in the cold of his own house. It is no modern discovery: the proverb was already old when Jesus quoted it in Nazareth — «surely you will say to me this proverb: physician, heal thyself» (Luke four: twenty-three)— and Paul threw it in the face of the teacher who does not apply his own lesson: «you then who teach another, do you not teach yourself?» (Romans two: twenty-one). The Pharisees are the greatest portrait in this gallery: «they say, and do not do — they bind heavy burdens and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with a finger» (Matthew twenty-three: three-four). He hands out the load, charges for the advice, and does not move a finger in his own.

And the disconcerting thing is that this vice is no foolishness — it happens to the smart, to the intelligent; and it is not limited to them: it happens to everyone, aware of it or not, and that is one of the affirmations of this chapter. Psychology measured it without mercy and gave it a proper name. The Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning, nineteen ninety-nine) showed that the least competent in a field are, precisely, those who most overestimate their competence, because the very skill they lack to do it well is the one they would need to realize they are doing it badly — the one who doesn't know, doesn't know that he doesn't know. And there is an even finer finding, Solomon's paradox (Grossmann and Kross, twenty fourteen): people reason with more wisdom about others' problems than about their own — more humility, more perspective, more prudence when the mess belongs to someone else. They named it after the wisest king of Israel, who ruined his own house (one Kings eleven): brilliant counselor to an entire kingdom, a disaster under his own roof. It is my thesis in a lab coat — we are good at advising and bad at living, and not because we are hypocrites, but because from the inside we cannot see ourselves. James had said it with an image I have not been able to surpass: the one who hears the word and does not do it «is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for he looks at himself, and goes away, and at once forgets what he was like» (James one: twenty-three-twenty-four). The don vergas looks at himself every day — advises himself tirelessly— and every day, as he turns away, forgets his own face.

Octavio Paz named the national disguise of this in The Labyrinth of Solitude: the cult of the mask, of «no rajarse» — never cracking, never breaking down— of appearance sustained before what people will say. And there, in Paz's mask, is the sentence that gives this chapter the heart of the entire book: they guard what people will say, but they do not guard their time; they guard appearances, but they never guard their thoughts. They guard aesthetics, the decoration of the house, the car, the watch — but they never guard their actions. It is a dimmed life, polished on the outside and unpolished within, and for that very reason the planned party must go on even though it adds nothing to anyone's growth: to cancel it would be to admit that something is not right, and admitting it is forbidden in that house. Here the title of this book stops being a pretty slogan and becomes a diagnosis: the don vergas is, exactly, the man who guards everything except his thoughts. And he does not need to confess anything, because his habits reveal him — they always give him away. Aunt Opinionator can talk for hours without saying anything — that which the language baptized, with poetic justice, cantinflear, to the point of putting it in the dictionary; but you need only watch what she repeats, whom she keeps company with, and where she spends her attention to know who she is. The fruits speak even when the mouth dissembles. (Of the beam in one's own eye while one hunts the speck in another's we'll speak in its place, with the Friend; here it is enough that it peeks over the table: we all carry it, and almost no one looks at it.)

Because the problem, it must be said with care, is not in making mistakes — to err is part of the stage, we are all in development and I did not come to scold anyone for not having arrived. The problem is in never changing; never reviewing why we believe what we believe, why we hold the ideas we hold, why we like the things we like. We never question it. The idea came in one day without passing through customs — no one inspected it, no one weighed it— and over the years we made it part of ourselves, and now defending it feels like defending ourselves. Socrates left the mother-sentence of this whole chapter — «a life without examination is not worth living»— and it is worth remembering that he did not toss it off at a comfortable after-dinner table: he said it at his trial, gambling his life, because for him self-examination was no pastime, it was the very form of being alive. Epictetus brought it down to the height of the day: «it is not things that disturb men, but their opinions about things» — and the unexamined opinion, the one that slipped in without permission and became identity, governs from the shadows without accounting to anyone. There is even a technical name for that swallowing whole of someone else's belief without chewing it: psychologists call it introjection — eating without digesting. And that is why it hurts to examine what is already «part of us»: it doesn't feel like reviewing an idea, it feels like a betrayal of oneself. But until you review it, you did not choose it — someone else chose it and you merely carry it.

And here this chapter owes me a confession deeper than the ones before, because so far I have confessed to having been the man with the improvised lectern — but I also sat on the other side of the table, and of that side almost no one speaks. Throughout my life there were people who treated me badly, in business and in personal relationships: abusive people, people who took advantage, people who used a small agreement — a minor concession, a favor signed in a hurry— to later extract more advantages and more benefits from me, like someone who gets a foot in the door and then moves in, furniture and all. I gave all of that a name that sounds almost like accounting, so I could carry it without poisoning myself: I called it my «financial recomposition» — mi recomposición financiera—. I accepted the changes and I accepted the terms — not because I did not see the play, but because I decided to solve my problems with love and with attention, and that decision was worth more than what the play was taking from me. With time I came to understand that perhaps it was a condition of my being that kept certain prudences in place: I paid with money what others collected with cunning, because I was always open-handed — generous, if you want the table word: money was never my god, and letting it go always cost me less than getting dirty. And thanks to the opportunities life kept placing in front of me, I was able to resolve each one of those accounts carefully, with no quarrel in the middle and no resentment stored away in the warehouse.

But let no one mistake my open hands for amnesia, because from those years I kept a conviction I have not been able — nor willing— to let go: doing harm gets paid for. Abusing trust gets paid for. Taking advantage of another — in work, in the personal, or in money— gets paid for. In my house I say it with a sentence that appears in no treatise, and I leave it here exactly as I say it: «si te portas mal, por eso se te revienta la vena» — if you do people wrong, that is why the vein bursts on you. And the sentence has an owner, though it carries no name. I knew, up close, an advantage-taking man — a grasping one, the kind who charges for every favor and invoices every gesture, the kind who turns any agreement into a lever. He took care of himself, moreover, like few people do: he ate well, he exercised, he boasted of his health. And one day, at an early age, the vein burst on him — a massive stroke, the kind that splits a life into before and after— and today he lives with the repercussions of that grasping, advantage-taking, abusive way of living. Can I prove to you that the one thing caused the other? No, and I will not pretend that I can.

That is why I must ask you for the pause of honesty, with the same care with which I presented saudade to you — because what follows is my vision, not medicine, and I mark it for you in full. I am convinced that the misaligned life does not stay in the soul: that when we live wounding so many without realizing it, when we do not live with love and with respect, the body falls out of alignment, collapses, and even rejects us; personally I have come to think it even of the harshest illnesses — and of that man's burst vein. But I cannot — and I do not want to— sell you that as science, because science says something else and in this house the sources are declared. The literature that in the eighties and nineties tried to link personality with causing cancer turned out to be one of the greatest frauds in academic psychology: a King's College London investigation in twenty nineteen declared «unreliable» dozens of those publications, and the serious studies of tens of thousands of people find no relation between character and the risk of falling ill with cancer. To repeat that causality would be to lie, and it would be worse: it would be to blame the illness on the one who suffers it today — «whom did I wound?» and this is a loving chapter, not a tribunal. What is proven, and it is plenty, is its first cousin: chronic stress measurably degrades the body's defenses (there are meta-analyses of hundreds of studies that hold it up), and a life in conflict accumulates a real physiological wear — they call it allostatic load. Sustained anguish, ruminated resentment, the maintained lie do not stay in the conscience: they charge in blood pressure, in sleep, in inflammation, in immunity. And look closely at the order of the chain, because it is the order of this book's motto read from its dark side: the mind and the bad habits fail first; the body falls ill afterward. The unguarded thought defines the act — resentment thought is already resentment acted—; the repeated act becomes habit — the canned dinner of every night, the appearance kept up at every party, the advantage taken in every agreement—; and the habit, the one that no longer asks permission, is the one that one day sits down to negotiate with the body — and the body always collects last, because it stands at the end of the line and it is the only one that does not know how to look the other way. That is why the don vergas falls ill at the end of his own movie, and not out of bad luck: he arrived at that bed through the door of his habits — the rationed food «because money is for more important things,» the health never once attended to, the appearance always first. And that is why the man of the burst vein arrived at his through the other door — he cared for the body and neglected the way of living. Two different roads to the same hospital bed, and both began where they all begin: in the thoughts no one was guarding. Keep the version your skepticism allows you — mine or the meta-analyses'—; either of the two says the same thing: the body bills the life you don't care for, and the don vergas pays that bill even as he swears he is healthy and boasts that he has more than enough to cover it.

I asked for help with this part, and I ask for it here by name: I want to philosophize with you a little, between life, body, mind, and soul — because I believe in the existence of being beyond life, and I want to bring it into this book without turning it into a treatise or a sermon. Follow me calmly, it's worth the while.

I begin with the root, because the root orders everything. Genesis does not say that man has a soul; it says that man is «a living being» — in Hebrew, néfesh: not a ghost stuck inside a machine of flesh, but a living, undivided unity. That changes everything for this book: if we are a single thing, then guarding thoughts is not mental hygiene, a luxury of the head — it is care of the whole being— and a misaligned life sickens the whole because the whole is one. That is why the body bills what the mind neglects.

The tradition, it is only fair to say, argued for centuries about how that being is assembled, and I do not come to close the dispute but to show it to you. Some read a trichotomy — «your whole being, spirit, soul, and body» (one Thessalonians five: twenty-three), and that Word that «pierces to the division of soul and spirit» (Hebrews four: twelve): three dimensions. Others read a dichotomy — the material and the immaterial, and «soul» and «spirit» as two names for one same depth. I take no academic side; I keep what both readings share and what is enough for me: we are more than flesh, and that «more» is real, not decoration.

And since philosophy walked alongside, I leave you the staircase in four steps, one author per step, without forcing you up any of them. Plato, in the Phaedo, imagined the soul that preexists the body and outlives it — the body as a temporary garment the soul takes off. Aristotle, in De Anima, corrected the course with an idea that anchors me: the soul is not a ghost inside the machine, it is the form of the living — that which makes a body be alive and not a heap of matter; soul and body are not two things glued together, they are one single living thing. Thomas Aquinas laid the bridge that holds my faith with reason and not only with dogma: the soul is the form of the body and, at the same time, subsists — so that one can be a living unity here and, nonetheless, hope for something beyond. And Descartes, already at the door of the modern, split in two again what Aristotle had joined — the thinking thing and the extended thing— and bequeathed us the mind-body problem that to this day no one has closed; I name it and I do not open the file, because this book believes, with Aristotle and with Thomas, in the unity. My declared faith — that there is being beyond life— I do not ground here in neuroscience; I ground it where I already grounded it, in that «it is sown a natural body, it will rise a spiritual body» (one Corinthians fifteen) that I worked through with you in the chapter on rebirth. Thomas gives me the scaffolding of reason; Paul gives me the hope. And the don vergas, who guards the big car and neglects the soul, is neglecting — without knowing it— the one thing he carries with him when everything else stays behind.

Here is where this chapter rises from its chair, because it did not come to describe the vice but to get out of it, and this — I warned you— is a chapter of action, not a legend of self-improvement. The way out has a movement and I borrowed it from the sister chapter: we die in our defects and are reborn in our virtues — we stop being the engineer, the scientist, the teacher that served us as a mask, and we begin to be, simply, the individual; we cultivate in ourselves the man and leave behind the animal. And not by decree nor by good wishes, but with a plan: one that transforms vices and bad customs into virtues and good habits, one at a time, with the patience of the one who builds and not of the one who promises.

Science even handed us the exact tool, and it is beautiful for its simplicity. If we reason better about others' problems than about our own — Solomon's paradox— then the way out is to turn the trick around: advise yourself as you would advise your best friend. Take a step outside yourself, speak to yourself by name, look at yourself from without with the same prudence you hand out for free at the table — and at last spend on your own life the good advice you have spent years giving away. The don vergas has the wisdom; he only has it pointed outward. Turn it around.

But beware of a trap, because it is subtle and it is the one that decides everything. To align your thoughts is not to sit and fantasize a future «where I am the best» — that is, exactly, the vice, not the plan. «Tomorrow I'll do it, I can do it, I'm the best» is the same catastrophe we already hung on the animal: living in the future-self so as to be no one today. And this book does not believe in the future-self — I've told you from the start: you are not what you swear you'll be, you are what you do and repeat today. That is why we do not align in order to stay in a permanent search, nor to attend with urgency and fanfare to every problem; we align in order to do, as I like to say, the conscious delivery — the delivery of today, the task fulfilled in the present, the fruit set on the table and not promised for the next dinner. Constant progress, not perfection; intention and delivery, the two words. Because the goal is not to become perfect — that is another fantasy of the don vergas; the goal is to deliver today, and again tomorrow, and thus to raise, stone upon stone, the pyramid of self-belonging: the life that does belong to you because you inhabit it, not the one you only feign because you decorate it.

And let me tie off a thread that comes from far away, from saudade. One does not appreciate what one has until one sees it lost — that is how we are made, and it is a shame; but there is a remedy, and it is to become aware of the progress while you live it, not when it is already gone. If you enjoy each conscious delivery in the moment, if you inhabit it instead of running toward the next, then you will not have to lose it in order to value it: saudade stops being nostalgia for what is lost and becomes gratitude for what is present. That is the don vergas cured — not the one who stopped knowing, but the one who at last applied to himself what he knew, and found that life is not won by winning the argument, it is won by inhabiting it.

And I close where you, dictating this chapter to me, wanted to close: with the Tao. Not out of fashion nor Oriental ornament — you brought it, and it is quoted from its source. The Tao Te Ching calls wu wei «acting without forcing»: it is not laziness nor passivity, it is not interrupting what is not yours and executing cleanly what is — «in non-doing, nothing is left undone.» And it turns out our own Stoic house says the same by the other river: Epictetus opens his manual by distinguishing what depends on us from what does not, and all serenity fits in placing your force where it fits and releasing the rest. Two rivers, one single water: do what is yours to do, let be what is not yours to do.

The astonishing thing is that this same Tao Te Ching, twenty-four centuries ago, had already portrayed the don vergas without knowing him: «he who displays himself does not shine; he who justifies himself does not glow; he who boasts has no merit; he who takes pride does not endure» (chapter twenty-four). There was no need to wait for Ramos or for Dunning: humanity has known this character forever, and always knew that noise is not strength. Epictetus said it with a country image that I keep for the end: sheep do not vomit up the grass before the shepherd to prove how much they ate — they digest it in silence, and give wool and milk. There, whole, is the reverse of the don vergas. Do not show off the grass. Give wool and milk. Do not proclaim your principles: show them in works, because your habits will speak for you even if you stay silent — and they will speak better.

The whole philosophy of this book, if I had to squeeze it into three verbs, fits here: think, act, inhabit. Think — and guard your thoughts, for there everything begins. Act — and guard the results, for there it is proven. And with good habits, inhabit your life — for there, at last, it is lived. The rest is after-dinner talk. I tell you this the way I tell it to myself every day: loving, because we owe it to ourselves; hard as a father, because affection without an edge lifts no one; and wise as a grandfather, who has lived long enough to know that life is not won against anyone — it is handed over to oneself, one conscious day at a time.