A few tips to pull you out of a hole or slump.
All the happy, success and self-help stuff we hear is fixated on what you lack
People around us and media do the same thing. Forgetting all the greatness that is nature and life and putting thoughts into our heads and moulding our perceptions of our shortcomings.
You are only learning about how to make money because you perceive that you do not have enough already.
You self-worship and make yourself beautiful in the mirror because you perceive that you are not beautiful already.
You follow relationship advice because you perceive yourself as unlovable.
You visualise and define success because you feel you are not successful already.
This fixation on the positive is really a fixation on the better or superior
In advertising and with social pressures, it is the same thing. Focussing on the better, focussing on the more. Why? because it is good for business.
The trick is to Give less fucks. Or as I prefer detach from mirage of happiness and success you perceive.
Just be.
It is consumer culture and the "Hey look my life is better than yours" social media culture.
Focussing on it and replaying this crap over and over in your mind is making you neurotic, overly-stressed and self-loathing. The problem is not accepting. Acceptance. Just accept that sometimes bad things happen, we feel anxious or just feel kak. Accept it and move on. There is nothing wrong with you.
The desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. The acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Alan Watt’s Backward’s law – the more you pursue feeling better the less satisfied you become. Pursuing it only reinforces that you lack it.
The more desperate you want to be rich or sexy. The poorer and uglier you feel.
The more you want to be happy, loved and enlightened. The unhappier, unloved and self-centered and shallow you become.
When you care less about something, you do better at it.
Being open about your insecurities makes you more confident and charismatic around others. Suffering through your fears and anxieties makes you build more confidence and perseverance. The pain of honest confrontation builds the greatest trust and respect in relationships.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience
Any attempt to escape the negative just backfires. The avoidance of suffering, struggle and failure is in itself suffering, struggle and failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
Avoiding pain, is giving too many fucks about it. Accept the fact of pain and suffering.
You aren’t entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times. So you need not care too much about things.
Not indifference, you need to care about something in life. Overcome adversity. Willingly be different. Don’t give a fuck about adversity, failure, embarrassment or pissing people off. The unimportant stuff doesn’t matter, but important stuff must be taken seriously.
Adversity and failure is there, you need to deal with it.
Find something to care about more than adversity.
Happiness is not algorithmic. It is not a certificate you get after achieving things on a checklist. The premise that it is a puzzle to be solved is the real problem.
The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one
You need to solve problems. Face your problems do not deny (denial) and have a victim mentality (believing there is nothing you can do about your problems)
Negative emotions are a call to action. You need to do something.
The permanent fulfillment and happiness idea, is unattainable. As what makes us happy today, will not make us happy tomorrow. We struggle to attain new and better things and when we get there we are still left in a state where we are inadequate.
Whatever makes us feel good will inevitably also make us feel sad
The path to happiness is apparently littered with pain. So instead of asking what do you want out of life? Ask yourself, what pain and struggle are you willing to go through in life to be happy?
People are in love with the result of struggle. But not the actual struggle that you need to work on now. They don’t love the process.
You need to want both the struggle and the result.
You struggle determines your successes. The joy is the climb itself.
You are not special, entitled or exceptional. Either it is "I am awesome and the rest of you suck" or "I suck and the rest of you are awesome". The middle way is we are all in this together. Your problems are much like everyone else’s, so they can be fixed.
We are all pretty average people. It is the extremes that get the publicity.
The culture of exceptionalism is a problem. It is ok to be in the middle "the middle way"…be rank average. Accept that you are average, keep your head down and work at ways of learning, improving and eventually without noticing your life becomes easier…still not great in the eyes of others though but who cares about them.
Look at people, in the eyes.
Our values determine the metrics and the metrics determine how we measure success and failure.
Stop always being right, it is more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. It helps you stay in a constant state of learning and growth.
To deny negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.
People who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them
Good healthy values can always be achieved internally. Honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility and creativity.
When we have poor values – poor standards – we are giving too much thought and consideration to things that do not matter in our lives and make our lives worse.
Face up to reality. You are 100% responsible for everything in your life, no matter the external circumstances. No excuses, you live it.
You always take an active role in what is occurring in your life.
When we choose your own problems, we feel empowered. When our problems are thrust onto us, we feel victimised and miserable.
The more we choose to accept resposibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.
Don’t pick something about yourself and think people will not like you because of it. That is shallow and self-pitying. You want to be friendly who like you for who you are. That is honesty, authenticity and acceptance.
Have the courage to appear as you truly are – Marcus Aurelius
Fault and blame is past, responsibility is present.
The real game lies in the choices we make with the cards we are dealt, the cards are merely the starting hand.
Being a victim is always a way to pass off solving a problem to others. A temporary high and for moral righteousness.