Vices

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. Abraham Lincoln

It turns out that a vice is actually the other side of a virtue. A weakness is actually the other side of a strength. If you pick any one of your character strengths, you will see that it can be a character weakness in certain situations. What works great in one situation can be a disaster in another. Being very talkative, for example, can be great for situations where nobody knows what to say, but if they do it can be very annoying because other people want their chance to speak too. It has been said that when couples get divorced, it was typically the thing that first attracted them to their partner that is now the thing that is so annoying that they just want to leave.

But I think that Abraham Lincoln may have had something else in mind. Those people who have no vices are probably people who stay at home quietly doing nothing, because the truth is that whenever we are out doing something we beleive in we are going to annoy some people who don't share our beleifs. And the more we do for the cause we beleive in, the more we are going to annoy them. Abraham Lincoln himself was shot for his beleifs. But of course anyone who quietly stays at home for fear of annoying people isn't going to be helping anyone either. Virtues are expressed when you are passionate about some cause and about helping other people.

Folks who have no vices have very few virtues. They are not very interesting people because they don't beleive in any meaningful cause enough to stand up for it against skeptical or even very angry people. Quite likely they don't even know who they really are. When you try to be what other people want all the time, having no vices, you lose sight of who you really are. You may lose your vices but there is a heavy price to pay. Because you lose your virtues as well.