No One Will Stop You

This was a tweet or something, but trying to search it again I can't find any origin, so, thank you anonymous contributor who put this into my brain:

No one will help you, but no one will stop you.

Which always stuck with me.

It's sort of similar to Beg forgiveness, not permission but maybe slightly more hands-off: quite often there's no one to beg permission or forgiveness from and so just doing the thing you want unimpeded is wholly more freeing than the assumption that there even is some higher authority to ask.

I like that the two clauses are both for personal responsibility and against personal conspiracy.

And it should be noted that 'no one will help you' isn't too literal, very specific people might help you if you ask them and set things up and allow for their help - the quote says to me more a commentary on the groups and passive 'other' of people around you. Random people won't help you.

Which is just fine. They're often not much help anyway, not when it comes to our most personal goals.

On the whole, I don't think random people actually care that much. They're too busy running their own lives to really notice or stop anyone else around them, just like we are of them.

Especially where energy is concerned. Humans by default want to spend the least amount of energy possible: that includes both activity and thinking. If you want to go off and do something that doesn't effect them, why would they get in your way? That'd be work. So there's an asymmetrical output for the amount of energy we can put into something we want vs the amount of energy someone will spend to deny our doing so. When was the last time you tried to shut down someone else's hobbies.

Likewise for helping: if the amount of energy it takes to help outweighs whatever motivation or incentive they have to do it, we can hardly blame them for the inevitable disappointment when they cancel on us.

It's like how we can be embarrassed over something we did and hold it in ourselves for years, and when we talk to that same person again later on they completely don't remember the event. Why were we so embarrassed anyway? Why did we hold onto that? They probably have their own things being held onto that we don't remember at all. Everyone holds asymmetrical information biased inwards.

So I think it's encouraging. Freeing to realize.

Most of us aren't pining to do crimes of legal or moral standing. I'm obviously not advocating that. I do think we're allowed to be way weirder than we give ourselves credit for, to do the things we want to do, to be the humans we want to be with less restriction and self-censorship.

Simply "being different" or "being authentic" sounds like a big step up to counter-culture courage or whatever, but really I'm not convinced anyone is spending more than a second of judgment on you, and certainly not more than a second to stop you. They're scrolling past, just like we are of them.

So go, be free. Find the things you want to do and do them, because you want to do them.

After all, who's going to stop you?