On Choosing Your Battles Wisely
A psychoanalytic exploration of a timely aphorism
“Choose your battles wisely.”— C. JoyBell C.
What does it mean to choose your battles wisely? Why do we say this?
On the surface, the answer seems obvious— if you fight every battle, whether it be personal, political, or psychological, this will quickly become very tiresome.
If there isn’t some screening process for which we siphon out those battles we don’t want to fight, then our life would be an endless warzone.
If we select only the battles that are worth fighting, they may even be beneficial to our lives, rather than taking away from it.
Whilst cogent advice, to me the aphorism is more complicated than it at first appears. Consider the following questions:
- Choosing your battles implies you have a choice — are we conscious of this?
- Battles imply suffering — is this inevitable in our lives?
- Choosing the battles wisely — what is wisdom and how do we know if we made the right choice?
Below we will unpack this famous aphorism and see if there is more that we can extract out…
Let’s bear our (psychological) arms and begin!
#1 The ‘Choosing’ of the Battle
“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” — Robin Williams
Life is full of battles.
There is both the outer battle, as interpersonal and political conflict, and the inner battle, the warfare in our own minds.
In many cases, the inner battle is harder for people than the outer. We can avoid outer battles by being careful — but the inner battle is always waiting for us.
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche
Whilst the two battles are different, there is more of a relationship between them than we think.
Projections cause us to cast out that which we don’t like in ourselves, such as bad traits or tendencies, onto another person or group.
Often our feelings of anger, hatred, or frustration toward others can be a case of ‘seeing the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but not the log in your own’.
“Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena…Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.” — Carl Jung
This brings us to the concept of ‘choice’…
To choose something is to imply that we are deciding, we are conscious of the ‘choice’. But what if we aren’t?
For the psychologically uninitiated, we are often unconscious of our own behaviour. We make up reasons for doing things after the fact, but often these are more like excuses, justifications, or rationalisations.
This means that a lot of your external conflicts might actually be caused by your internal conflicts. The parts of yourself you cannot yet look at will instead seek you out everywhere you go.
Frustration or anger on the inside, whether consciously understood or not, will naturally become conflict and division on the outside.
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. — Carl Jung
This is all to say that the concept of ‘choosing’ requires sound psychological judgment and a willingness to explore the depths of our own lives. Who among us has the humility and strength to do this?
Until that happens, it isn’t clear if we are choosing our battles, or if the battles are choosing us…
#2 Battles Will Happen — Suffering is Inevitable
“The poison from which the weaker nature perishes strengthens the strong man — and he does not call it poison.” — Nietzche
The ‘choosing of battles wisely’ suggests that there will be battles. Battles then are inevitable, and as such, suffering is inevitable.
In fact, many leading religious and philosophical schools of thought already know this…
The first truth of Buddhism, for example, is ‘dukkha’, the recognition of suffering as a fundamental tenet of being.
Christianity also suggests that suffering entered the world as a consequence of ‘original sin’ and humanity’s fall from grace.
Existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Satre, and Friedrich Nietzche recognized the inevitability of suffering and the difficulty of finding meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe.
Even if you attempted to avoid all battles, as we have discussed there are still battles within. Battles to overcome our nature, our tendencies to regress and behave in ways that are not conducive to either health or success.
In so much as we ‘choose’ our battles, we also choose our suffering. This means that we will suffer, but we can choose to ‘suffer wisely’.
For instance, in Mark Manson’s bestseller ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”, he highlights that everyone must choose their struggles. Whatever career, vocation, or way to spend your time, there will be difficulty. You must choose the load you wish to bear.
You must ‘carry your cross’ so to speak.
Peterson also talks about the idea of suffering. In a similar vein to Nietzche, he believes that the solution to suffering is to grow larger in the face of it, to not be consumed by the abyss but to find the light that is hidden within. By finding meaning for your suffering, you can navigate the battlefield of life more astutely.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Adopting responsibility in the face of suffering can often embolden the individual to aim at the good, the noble, and the meaningful. This is often accompanied by avoiding what is easy, safe, and expedient.
To choose your battles wisely is to choose your suffering wisely. You will suffer, and life will be tragic one way or another. The onus then is on you as the individual to find meaning in the face of that, to not grow resentful or bitter because of it.
Battle wisely, suffer wisely.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus
#3 On Doing Things ‘Wisely’ — What is Wisdom?
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — William Shakespeare
Let’s say we eliminate our blind spots, and through our battles, we choose what suffering we want to bear. How do we make that choice ‘wisely’?
Wisdom is a complicated word. It’s often associated with reason, intelligence, and rationality, but also kindness, character, intuition, and ethics.
Socrates attributed wisdom to “knowing you know nothing”. This would be a ‘seeing the forest for the trees’ spin, or the paradox of knowledge.
Kant believed wisdom was closely related to moral judgement and making well-founded ethical decisions.
Einstein thought of wisdom as not merely the accumulation of facts, but using creativity and imagination to solve complex problems both in work and life.
I believe it is possible to be wise without being formally educated to a high degree or possessing a great deal of intelligence, just as it is possible to be very intelligent and also a fool.
Wisdom then would be something more akin to wholeness of character, experience, and moral stature.
“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.” — Dostoevsky
Additionally, ‘to battle’ implies there can be some sort of victory or defeat. Choosing battles ‘wisely’ then is to choose battles where you can win.
But, in the spirit of wisdom, what does it mean to win?
We could surely win an intellectual argument with a 5-year-old, or physically win a battle with someone much weaker than ourselves. But is this winning ‘wise’?
This would be (psychologically) akin to “winning the battle but not the war” or winning a “pyrrhic victory”. A non-victory, or victory at great cost.
Likewise, fighting a battle you cannot win or will surely lose is also folly. “Biting off more than we can chew”…
The answer isn’t obvious to me. It could of course be fruitful to win battles against injustice and tragedy. But it could be just as fruitful to lose battles that lead to insight, introspection or transformation.
Perhaps this is a confusion of the term ‘battle’. Fighting and losing one battle externally, such as an argument, could equally be the winning of another battle internally, such as new insight. ‘Battle’, then, is a dualistic term (or ‘duelistic’ if you will), relating to both the inner and the outer.
In this way, the best battles, or the ‘wisest’ battles, might involve both a victory and defeat — a surrendering, and a subsequent overcoming.
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”― Friedrich Nietzsche
How then can we approach these dualistic battles ‘wisely’?
If we take an archetypal battle, like ‘St. George and the Dragon’, we see how a voluntary confrontation with the unknown (chaos, in the form of the dragon), and subsequent victory, can lead to transformation.
Whilst it may not be ‘wise’ to charge in on horseback to a fire-breathing mythical reptile, to align yourself with the ‘spirit of the hero’ is perhaps the mode of being that will allow you to ‘wisely’ choose and fight all battles, or the ‘meta-battle’.
It is this willingness to bravely confront the unknown, with the knowledge that it will involve suffering, that allows us to ‘win’ the ‘meta-battle’, or the ‘battle for all other battles that is, by its nature, always wise’.
To find that which we most need, we will have to go where we least want to look, or, as the famous alchemical dictum states: sterquilinis invenitur — in filth, it will be found.
So what then does it mean to choose our battles wisely?
There is a famous phrase in the Old Testament that reads: “The fear of the Lord is the birthplace of wisdom”.
For the non-religious, we might read this as ‘knowingly transgressing your conscience (highest ideal, Jungian ‘self’) will be psychologically corrosive for you and those around you; thus, being afraid of the consequences of said transgression will lead to what we colloquially refer to as wisdom’.
“Choosing your battles wisely” then is really:
“Consciously selecting, through wholeness of character, moral integrity, and the ‘spirit of the archetypal hero’, the suffering that you will inevitably face both in your outer and inner life, and doing so in a manner that leads to continual victories and defeats, will ultimately bring about a transformation of the individual, and transformation of the world that they wish to ‘wisely’ be manifest, such that said transformation is both true and good.”
Admittedly, though, this doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…
So bear your arms! And know when to dispose of them. Bear your cross! But do so with humility and meaning. And bear to look at that which you cannot face! In the conviction that a life of adventure will serve you better than one of passivity. And most of all — choose your battles wisely.
