Admire for Ignition, but Be Careful of Captivity

Admiration is a powerful force in the development of an individual. It is a fire that ignites our preliminary motivations: someone gives form to a possibility that, until then, we had not known how to desire. We see what a person has become, and our own becoming acquires urgency.

It can allow you to grow quicker than you would have grown alone, and perhaps even quicker than the one you admire. Their life has already made visible a path that they themselves had to discover.

Yet admiration is a dangerous substance, closer to a drug, that can soothe the very worries and limitations it first encouraged you to overcome. If it is not coupled with a strong individuality, it can lead you towards captivity.

Humans are often drawn towards the path of least resistance, the most energetically economical path. Belonging offers one such economy. A group can lend you its judgments, its ambitions, even a language in which to mistake those ambitions for your own. It is easy to fall under the spell of the will to cowardice when it arrives disguised as devotion to something great.

We want to belong. But to belong to the first group we find, to remain with the easiest form of belonging available, is to let proximity decide what we might become. There must also be room for solitude: the willingness to pursue a desire before there is a group prepared to recognise it.

Admiration readily becomes a form of belonging. Around the admired person gather others who identify with them, repeat their words and defend their choices. The person at the centre becomes a measure of what is worth thinking, attempting and desiring.

This is why individuality is of utmost importance. You will never be the person you admire, and you should not seek to become them. Their greatness, if it is greatness, belongs to the particular life through which they became themselves. Your repetition of that life cannot give you the same thing.

At some point, what first accelerated your growth may begin to stabilise it, or even turn it backwards. You stop pursuing a possibility because they did not pursue it. You abandon a thought because they would not recognise it. The force that awakened your desire has acquired authority over its limits.

Admiration should not become an obsession in which the admired person matters more than the individual doing the admiring. When preserving their image becomes more important than pursuing what their image first awakened in you, captivity has begun.

Admiration must remain answerable to your individuality, your progress and your desire. What does this person ignite in you? What might you become because you encountered them? These questions cannot be settled by knowing more about the person alone.

When they become the reason you admire them, all is lost.

You must be the reason you admire this person—not the person themselves.