What He Had Stopped Doing

Notes on the three cancers of the mind, and the freedom of keeping them attached to purpose

Update: this revision adds what the original did not say enough about, the positive side of the three Cs when kept attached to purpose.

Since I can remember, I have always had high standards. For excellence, for meaning, for how things should look and behave and be made. Vocalizing my opinion on those standards throughout my life has been useful in many ways and detrimental in others. The people closest to me have told me, in different tones and over the years, that the way I expressed those standards sometimes came across as criticism of them. Sometimes the explanation reached for was my zodiac sign. I must be a perfectionist or a Virgo, the line goes, as if that resolved the question.

Those lines were convenient because they turn a tendency into an identity, and identity is harder to work on.

It took me a long time to hear the distinction. The standard was about the work. The communication was about the person. So I worked on it. Year after year. I learned, slowly, how different people absorb information. How some need the standard named directly and others need it set up gently. How the timing of a comment can determine whether it sounds like care or judgment. And I think I am better at it than I used to be, but I still miss sometimes. The work is not finished.

This is the context in which my yoga teacher Nikkie said something a few weeks ago that has stayed with me.

She had been in India, where she met a wise man who had almost nothing and seemed to need nothing more. She asked him how he was so joyful. That was when he shared the learnings from a monk named Gauranga Das. Comparing, complaining, and criticizing are the three cancers of the mind, what limits people’s ability to be present and grateful.

His happiness was not from what he had. It was from what he had stopped doing.

When those three patterns take hold, they distort how you see life itself. Nothing looks like enough, even when it is. The work in front of you starts feeling small. Days arrive feeling like they are in the way of something better that should be happening instead, and even genuinely good moments come with a quiet voice underneath asking why this is not more.

The reverse is also true. When the patterns are quiet, the same day reveals itself differently. The work has texture again. The struggle starts making sense on its own terms, and the harder stretches contain things you can actually use, capacities that only get built that way. Not because you decided to be positive about any of it. Because your attention is no longer being pulled away to measure the moment against something better, or at a different time, that does not exist.

The reason this is hard to see clearly is that, like cancer, these patterns grow quietly. You do not notice the first cell. By the time it is visible, it is already organized and dangerous. The three work the same way. They build paths in your attention that get easier to walk every time you walk them. Over time, walking the path stops being a choice. The path shapes your character and becomes the way you see your life: criticizing what is in front of you instead of enjoying it, comparing people, experiences, and things to what they are not, complaining about how things are without doing anything about it.

But here is the part the concept does not name on its own. These three are also essential. Comparing is how I do my work. I am an entrepreneur, a strategist, a designer, a technologist, and across all of those I am constantly comparing what works against what does not. It is how the work gets better. High standards drive the quality of it. Even complaining, when it names a real problem worth solving, is functional.

These are tools.

They become cancers when they are cut loose from practical and constructive purpose.

When the comparing stops serving the work and starts measuring me against other people’s lives. The high standards, when they detach from the outcome they were meant to serve, can land as judgment of a person rather than feedback on a piece of work. The complaining, when it stops naming a problem worth solving, becomes rehearsal. The same story told and retold to whoever will listen, like a cow chewing the same cud over and over. Nothing changes, except how skilled you become at telling it.

That is the pattern. The tool gets disconnected from what it was meant to be about. The behavior keeps happening, with nothing real at the end of it, and the tool that was supposed to work for me starts running on me instead.

The freedom I have been experiencing has two layers.

The first is keeping those three connected to what they were originally there to serve. Comparison in service of the work itself. Standards connected to the thing being built instead of unconsciously spilling onto people. Complaint having somewhere to go other than circles.

The circles are the part I am most cautious about, because they are seductive. Sometimes the circle is just venting, which feels productive but moves nothing. Sometimes it is criticism wearing the costume of complaint, where the real target is a person and the framing is plausible deniability. Sometimes it is the way we connect to someone, where shared frustration becomes a substitute for shared anything else. In each case, the complaint stops being information about a problem and starts being the problem itself.

The second layer is deeper, and I noticed it more recently. The three cancers run on a fuel I had not fully named before. They feed on excess concern about things that do not really matter. Things we cannot control, like the rain, the heat, the traffic, the mood someone walked in carrying. Things that do not change the outcome, like a meeting that already happened or a sentence already spoken. Things that look important on the surface and turn out, when I look closely, to be just noise, like a comment someone made in passing or the way a sentence got phrased in a thread.

When I take my attention off what does not matter, the cancers lose what feeds them.

That is the part the Virgo dismissal misses. The patterns are not fixed personality. They respond to what you are over-investing in, and they shift when the attention shifts.

I am not trying to eliminate the three. They have been useful to me my whole life. The work is keeping them attached to purpose, and keeping my attention off the things that do not deserve it. When the patterns serve what they were meant to serve, they make my work better and my judgment sharper. When they start running without purpose, I can feel it almost immediately. I become harder to be around. Harder inside myself too, honestly. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I quietly stop participating in my own life while I am still inside it.

The work is noticing the difference. Not always. Often enough.

And underneath them, when the noise drops, there is almost always a smaller and quieter thing that was already there.

0/1 ♡