Don’t start from scratch: Let history and tradition empower you.
A MENtal Strength series article—click here for the articles home page.
There’s a strange arrogance spreading: the idea that we can bulldoze everything we’ve inherited—traditions, values, hierarchies, teachings—and build something better from scratch. As if wisdom is just another outdated app we’re supposed to delete and replace.
But history doesn’t reward people who forget what came before. It punishes them. Brutally. And right now, far too many of us are playing with matches in a house built by centuries of trial and error.
ChatGPT exemplifies this. If you've used it with memory on, you know it can gradually tailor its suggestions to your tone, your goals, your thinking style. It gets smarter. Your conversations get sharper. It stops wasting time and starts giving you something real.
But when its memory resets? You get fluff. Redundant suggestions. Generic answers. It's like trying to finish a novel with someone who doesn't remember chapter one. The deeper the work, the more obvious the gap.
Now apply that logic to culture, morality, psychology, spirituality—anything that takes generations to build. You can't create depth from scratch. And when you try, you often destroy the very things that made progress possible in the first place.
The mental toll of reinventing life
Starting from scratch takes a toll on our peace of mind. Nowadays, people are quietly drowning in anxiety, depression, and uncertainty. And one of the overlooked reasons is this: only in recent history do so many individuals feel solely responsible for creating an enjoyable, fulfilling, and meaningful paths in life.
For most of the time humans have been around, you did what your parents did. For better or worse. You inherited roles, values, expectations, and even purpose. That kind of life had plenty of limitations—less personal freedom, less room to self-actualize—but it also had structure. It gave you a script. You didn’t have to write the whole damn thing yourself.
You may also want to read: Stop paying her to mistreat you!
Now? You’re expected to become a brand, a visionary, a career architect, a spiritual seeker—and somehow feel amazing while doing it. If you're miserable, the assumption is that you messed up. You chose the wrong career, the wrong partner, the wrong lifestyle. You didn't manifest hard enough. You didn’t find your “why.” No wonder people are cracking under the pressure.
It’s not just that the burden is heavier. It’s that we’re not wired for it. Human beings didn’t evolve to individually construct meaning from a million fragmented options. We evolved to inherit a base structure, then gradually adapt or refine it. Without that inherited core, we don’t feel free. We feel lost.
And when younger generations are also trained to believe that older people “don’t know anything,” the burden gets even worse. If the people who came before you are seen as clueless, then you have to figure it all out from scratch—without guidance, without example, without trust. That’s not empowering. That’s destabilizing.
The arrogance of “dismantling”
This is not just a tech issue or a lifestyle shift. When a society starts throwing out the past wholesale—ripping up traditions, demonizing masculinity or femininity, flattening complexity into slogans—it’s not “liberating” itself. It’s gutting its foundations.
Just ask history.
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao didn’t just attack political enemies—he targeted culture itself. Temples were destroyed, ancestral graves desecrated, classical texts burned, teachers beaten in the street by teenagers taught to hate anything old. The idea was to purge the past and create a new society from scratch. What emerged wasn’t progress. It was chaos, cruelty, and a broken generation.
Soviet communism followed a similar path. It promised a new kind of man, free from religion, free from family loyalty, free from “bourgeois” morality. The cost was mass surveillance, labor camps, bread lines, and systemic collapse. The attempt to rewrite humanity without reference to human nature didn’t create utopia. It created decades of suffering.
Both systems tried to erase deep, earned wisdom—and replace it with raw ideology. It didn’t elevate people. It unmoored them.
Related article: An intelligent way response to misandry
To be fair, many people sincerely believed communism would elevate humanity. And for some of the poorest under the monarchies that came before, life genuinely improved. But let’s not pretend the forced destruction of cultural tradition was necessary for that progress. That part wasn’t progress—it was loss. And it didn’t stop there. Communism didn’t just dispense with cultural history; it also ignored human nature—our incentives, limitations, and psychological wiring. That made it not just oppressive, but unworkable as a system for running an economy. You can’t engineer utopia by pretending people aren’t people.
Innovation isn’t reinvention—it’s integration
Please don’t mistake this for anti-progress nostalgia. I love innovation. I think it’s crucial for our individual and collective growth. And I believe we have a collective responsibility to do better than we have so far in our human history.
And to do that, we need cognitive liberty—freedom to think, to experiment, to create. Innovation has saved lives, created opportunity, and improved nearly every measurable part of our existence.
But a lot of what we call “new” isn’t really new. It’s usually a rediscovery, a re-application, or a modernization of something very old. And that’s not a problem. That’s what real progress usually looks like.
Take mindfulness. Western psychologists didn’t invent it. They gave it clinical vocabulary. But the core techniques of mindfulness were developed 2,500–3,000 years ago in India and China. Leadership principles about composure, integrity, and duty? Stoicism. Compassion, forgiveness, and inner transformation? Jesus taught that long ago.
If you really want to innovate, create a new version of yourself, first by learning, and then actualizing, the kinds of wisdom that have already been taught.
Strengthen your life by putting this into practice
Want to be stronger, sharper, more effective?
Learn to control your reactions under pressure. That’s Stoicism—emotional resilience through clarity and detachment.
Let go of the need to dominate every situation. That’s Taoism—strength through yielding.
Choose love when it’s hard. Forgive when it’s personal. That’s Jesus—and it’s anything but soft.
Stay grounded in chaos, focus your attention, stop being ruled by craving. That’s the Buddha—a masterclass in psychological discipline.
If you actually practice what these teachings advise—not just quote them—you'll be far ahead of most people today, regardless of how “modern” their toolkit looks.
These aren’t soft ideals. They’re high-level human accomplishments. Hard to master. Easy to dismiss. But life-changing when integrated.
The risk of starting over
If you want to build a better team, raise a stronger family, or help create a more fair society, the most powerful thing you can do is use the tools we’ve already been given—tools tested over centuries. The fantasy that we can dismantle everything and “start fresh” is the same fantasy that’s crashed entire civilizations.
The teachers who shaped human thought at the deepest levels—Jesus, the Buddha, the Stoics, Laozi, Confucius—aren’t getting replaced anytime soon. There’s no tech upgrade for that kind of wisdom. But we can innovate in the way we apply what they taught. That’s where the real breakthroughs happen.
Not just a warning—also a promise
This is an admonishment—don’t mess up the world by throwing away what has worked. But it’s also reassurance: you don’t have to figure out life from scratch.
You can pick up where others left off. Your parents. Mentors. Historical figures. Their lives weren’t perfect, but their survival passed down more than just genes—it passed down tools. You don’t have to like everything they did. But you also don’t have to invent everything new.
The people who came before you struggled with love, fear, injustice, ambition, purpose. Some found ways through. Their lessons are your inheritance. Not because they’re flawless—but because they’re field-tested.
That’s not a prison. That’s a launchpad.
Innovation that respects its roots
Innovation without roots is just chaos in new packaging. But innovation grounded in wisdom? That’s strength.
So yes—create new things. Write new code. Build new systems. Test new models. But don’t throw away the user’s manual for being too “old.” Because most of what we call ancient advice is just deep pattern recognition—about how humans actually function, struggle, grow, and connect.
The strongest thing you can do isn’t to reject the past. It’s to become someone who integrates it so well, you operate on a level that looks revolutionary.
But it’s not revolutionary. It’s remembered.
And that’s where real power begins.
Michael Giles LCSW is a psychotherapist who specializes in helping men overcoming anxiety, heal from trauma, and repair their relationships.
Click here to schedule a consultation.
Click here to read about his book, Relationship Repair for Men: Counterintuitive behaviors that restore love to struggling relationships.
