Does getting good enough at something to be taken seriously always require becoming a little like the people you used to find unbearable?

Sartre's terror was never the Other — it was bad faith, the human genius for disguising choices as fates. When you say you became like them, you hand the authorship of this self to a perpetrator who conveniently isn't you. The transformation had a name on every document: yours. The gestures you borrowed, the hardness you cultivated, the fluency in a room's unspoken rules — each was a morning decision wearing the costume of inevitability. What you call contagion, the tradition calls construction. 'Becoming like them' is the story you tell so you don't have to admit you chose the shape. You are condemned to have wanted this. The verdict was always already yours to write.

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

Diogenes carried a lamp through Athens in daylight looking for an honest man — and the honest man was the one who admitted what he wanted. The scroll past their posts, the curl of contempt behind the sternum: none of that was analysis. It was hunger with nowhere legitimate to eat. You didn't hate their vanity. You hated that nobody was watching yours yet. The Cynics reserved their sharpest words not for the corrupt but for the self-deceived, the ones who mistook envy for ethics. By the time you're talking their talk and citing their names, the only honest move left is to own the appetite — to say plainly that you wanted the room's recognition so badly you grew into its shape, and to stop calling that shape an accident.

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

The Quran does not say be cautious of environments. It says We created you and We will return you — a sentence that brackets all intervening transformation within a claim of ownership. What has an Owner cannot be permanently colonized without consent, which means the question of resemblance is finally a question of taqwa: not a feeling, not a temperament, but a wall carried in the chest into every room. The fluorescent light in the waiting room falls equally on the ambitious and the compromised. What differs is not exposure but the interior wall. The tradition does not promise that the wall is easy, or that you will not feel its weight, or that you will not sometimes envy the ones who set it down. It promises only that the wall is possible, and that setting it down was also a choice.

“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”

— Quran 13:11

Ramana Maharshi's method was not consolation — it was demolition of the question's premise. The fear of becoming them requires a 'you' stable and bounded enough to be altered, a self with clean edges that the other's influence can smudge. But Vedanta's long insistence is that this bounded self is already a superimposition on something that was never a candidate for corruption. The witness watching your transformation has never itself transformed. Inquiry doesn't make this comfortable; it makes the anxiety structurally incoherent. You may still absorb their posture, their cold eye, their way of standing in a doorway — but the atman beneath those borrowed garments remains what it always was: not improved by discipline, not degraded by compromise, simply prior to both.

“The mind that is free from impurities is fit for inquiry into Brahman.”

— Adi Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani, v. 17

Camus understood that the demand for a fair accounting — some ledger in which the cost of mastery could be weighed against the dignity surrendered — is the demand Sisyphus makes every time he expects the rock to stay at the top. It won't. You will absorb their worst habits: the performative exhaustion, the casual cruelty toward beginners, the particular way of holding a wineglass at readings as though literature were a controlled substance. No verdict will come. The tribunal you keep imagining — where someone official finally rules on whether it was worth it — does not exist. There is only the perpetual hearing, the work continuing, and the choice to find something worth laughing at in what it cost. The rock is the point. Carry it.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus