Do you trust yourself to make your life decisions, or do you think other people are better at it than you? If you were second-handed, you would choose the latter. What is second-handedness? Second-handedness is the substitution of your judgment for another person’s. This may seem innocuous to some, but it is actually an extraordinarily damaging habit. One has to be able to make one’s own decisions and live one’s own life to be happy. Second-handedness is an attempted short-cut at knowledge, values, and meaning, but it actually destroys your capacity to have any of those things, because it undercuts your ability to reason and come up with solutions. If you were taking a test in school, it may seem easy to cheat off the person next to you, but true knowledge comes from being able to do it yourself. Second-handedness is dangerous, and only independence and reason can remedy it.
Second-handedness is taking another person’s judgment as being more important than your own. A common example of this is accepting your parents’ or teachers’ decision for your career over your own decision for your career. The person often merely assumes the parent or teacher are more qualified to be making that decision, and they should simply “go along to get along.” This leads the person into a career they may not like and can lead to decades of slogging misery. Another example of second-handedness would be accepting peer-pressure to do drugs. The person substitutes their own judgment for the goading and put-downs of other people, even when the drug isn’t safe. Notice in both of these examples the lack of thought that is expected of the second-hander. Why not have a thorough study of careers or drugs before choosing? No. According to second-handedness, one is merely supposed to blindly adopt the prescription from a supposed authority figure.
Only independence and free thought can cure one’s second-handedness. Thinking for yourself and making your own decisions is a surer way to happiness than trying to make a short-cut to it through others (Often those others are really only interested in their power over you). Using one’s own reason is the means by which one lives. Attempting to substitute it for another person’s reason will not work, as you have no direct verification that anything they say is true without your reason. One would have to base all of their understanding on a faith in other people, which isn’t merited. Even when you’re considering expert opinion, you should be actively thinking about it and using your own judgment to determine whether a doctor is to be trusted and whether their diagnosis makes sense.
Second-handedness is a dangerous habit. You are not genuinely yourself when you’re second-handed. Second-handers often end up with a grab bag of different influences from other people but don’t have a genuine interest or life of one’s own. This is because they’ve abandoned the central tool of reason, so they have no mitigating tools when a person suggests something to them. Only reason gives you a true awareness of reality and power over your own life. You have to be able to think for yourself to live, and you have to be able to live your life on your own. It has to be your own life, or you won’t be happy.