The No Limits Culture

There are no limits to what you can accomplish, if you just set your mind to it!

How many times have we heard this impassioned proclamation, usually from someone telling an inspiring story about overcoming insurmountable odds.

Maybe there’s a word for this type of phrase, one that everyone knows is patently false, but that everyone bleats out ad infinitum as if it’s an indisputable truth. If there isn’t a word, there should be.

What the phrase is really trying to say is that you shouldn’t set artificial limits on yourself, that you should strive to be the absolute best that you can be. And yes, that’s a laudable and worthy goal. That’s what it’s trying to say – but that’s not what it’s actually saying. The human psyche has a tendency to latch onto such memes and internalize them, and therein lies the problem.

No, you CAN’T necessarily do anything you set your mind to, no matter how hard you might try. I can never jump to the moon, no matter how much I want to, and no matter how much I practice jumping. I’m sixty-seven years old, and have never been particularly athletic. I can never win the Olympic gold medal in the hundred yard dash. It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how many hundreds of hours I put in. It doesn’t matter whether winning that medal is all that makes my life worth living, whether I spend every last breath of my waking life pursuing it. It’s something I can never achieve – period.

Belief that you can do anything, that there’s no limit to what you can accomplish, implies that you are in complete control of the world around you. The planet is dying from pollution and global warming? It’s about to reach a point of no return? Well, there’s no such thing as a point of no return – we can always fix it – after all, there are no limits to what we can do.

In fact, in popular culture, the very idea that there could be any restrictions on our behavior is completely unacceptable. This belief extends from the most simple aspects of personal lifestyle – ‘I can eat all I want and then have liposuction to remove the fat’, or ‘I can eat all the cupcakes I want because these are ‘specially made’ cupcakes that don’t contain sugar’, to macro behavior: ‘We can dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we like – if there’s a problem we can always fix it later’.

What are the long-term effects of liposuction on the body as a whole (not to mention the health effects of being obese in the first place)? What are the long-term effects of the synthetic chemicals used to make a cupcake that has fewer calories (anybody remember trans-fats)? In the decades since scientists first began warning about CO2 in the atmosphere, has anybody actually fixed the problem?

As you go forward in life, I would encourage you to be all that you can be. Believe in yourself, be aware that you may be able to accomplish things you never dreamed of, and don’t allow yourself to be dragged down by artificial limits.

But also be aware that there are things that you, and humanity in general, CANNOT do, and that there are things that CANNOT be fixed once they are broken. Grasp this truth. Embrace it, and never doubt it, no matter how many evangelists proclaim otherwise.