Disclaimer: The purpose of the catharsis is to find what is right instead of focusing on who is right. I believe we should act like scientists, which are committed to the ‘pursuit of truth’, even if it ends up proving ourselves wrong. Thoughts of a lifelong learner, proponent of leadership, well-being and mindfulness. Being human, I have tried my best to limit my confirmation and desirability bias in collating and summing up the post above – which makes us ignorant of our own ignorance.
Happiness:
True happiness is finding something more important than your own happiness.
- Happiness is not an emotion in itself, but rather it is the lack of any other emotion such as insufficiency, fear, sadness, discontentment and/or need to be someone or something.
- In life there is two ways to have enough, one is to chase constantly more and more, the other way is to develop a capacity to be happy with less. “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less” — Socrates, lived in 450 BC
- An unorthodox way of saying this is happeniness is like orgasm, the more you think about it, the further out of reach it becomes.
- Pleasure. Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around. Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer how it shattered her family and lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how pleasure helped him solve his problems. Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people superficial pleasures end up who focus their energy on depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. And yet, pleasure is what’s marketed to us, twenty four/seven. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), isn’t, by itself, sufficient. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product (Mark Manson)
- As a rule of thumb, happiness = reality – expectations. People who completely accept reality and have no expectations are the most happy people in the world. They believe the cards they are dealt with are the cards they always wanted. Amor Fati – hope for nothing, hope for what is as all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is required. A lot of people think that happiness comes from thinking positive all the time. But it doesn’t. Happiness comes from embracing reality and accepting life as it is. When we stop deceiving ourselves, more possibilities open up to experience the beauty of the present moment.
Religion:
- Religion is a spectrum, a construct, where we consider anyone more practising than us as fanatic & closed minded and anyone less practising than us as immoral, sinner and bound for hell fire.
- I say, you were born in a Muslim (any other religion), were given a name, you do some rituals and have social identity related to it, but deep down your definition of life and success is the same as a Hindu, Christian, Jew, Buddhist etc etc. Religions like anything else, rely on ‘us against them’ mentality to generate ‘hope’, sense of belonging and self-confidence – but the same things also drive hatred and divide. Perhaps, we should rethink our way of gathering hope or feeling important, rather than promoting/projecting a religion that you do not practice yourself.
- The human need to connect to something bigger and beyond than themselves is a human knack, same as finding love, perseverance, antifragility, seeking validation or gambling. We must all believe in something, you believe your health matters so you try to live healthy and more passionately. You believe that your job matters, you spend day in and day out perfecting your craft and purpose. So there is no such thing as a atheist.
- 40% of Australians say they do not have a religion. On the contrary, you have a religion, you just do not know how you contribute to the commercial function attached to it. You want to know what is your religion? Write down where you have spent most of your time in the past 3 years, is it family, money, relationships, socialisation, self-aggrandisement, gathering followers, chasing pleasures, moral righteousness, health and or all of above in varying degrees – that is your true religion instead of what you say! How you define success/life approach is much more important than you actually achieving it.
- Capitalism = base religion of the world. It initiated as giving ppl prosthetic limbs, now it just sells you 100 flavours of toothpaste as fake freedom. This is the religion of relentless pursuit of happiness/consumerism/self aggrandisement is the base religion of the world – if you do not become self aware, clarify your values, question how you spend your attention and time, either you accept it or not – that is your religion too. Sometimes the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to ditch the curve! You have to hand it to them, they don’t care what you are or what you believe in, they’ll sell from praying mats to sex toys to the same people. You might be a freedom fighter or a dictator, they do not care who you fight or what you fight for as long as you buy their weapon, they sell tanning creams to Caucasian people and whitening cream to brown/black people – whatever your insecurity is they have a product for it. You accept it or not, you’re part of the economic function.
- No matter what you think of stringently compliant religious people – the most surprising stat is that they have the lowest suicide rate in the world. Because, their belief requires them to believe in what they cannot see, what they cannot test, what they cannot control and submit to it – ability to look beyond themselves. This inherent comfort with uncertainty gives them a inherent mechanism to deal with anxiety and other forms of emotion suffering – as mentioned above finding happiness and meaning in ‘what is’ instead of constantly wanting ‘ what ought to be’.
Emotions:
- Emotions run the world – try wishing pain away, try talking to heart ache, try to tell yourself you not be afraid. They are messengers from God and a superpower, but not for the reason you think they are!
- Emotions are merely the signals that tell us to pay attention to something. We can then decide whether or not that “something” is important and choose the best course of action in addressing it—or not.
There's no such thing as a "good" or "bad" emotion—there are only "good" and "bad" reactions to your emotions.
- When it comes to dealing with emotions, I find that people often run into one of two problems on opposing sides of the spectrum. On one end, you have people who believe that their emotions are everything. They think that their emotions are wiser or more accurate or more important than anything else in life.
- You see this a lot in the new age, “woo woo” crowd who believe that emotions are some sort of conduit to the universe and its grand scheme for us in life or whatever. Gag me with a fucking soup ladle.
- On the other end, you have people who try to avoid their emotions altogether. These people tend to think it’s best to “control” their emotions—but what they end up doing instead is burying them until they don’t know what they’re feeling at all. Yeah I hate myself, have fledging self esteem and have internalised abuse as survival mechanism and want to commit suicide but losers go to the psychologists.
- Dealing with emotions in a healthy way is not about getting super sappy with everyone you meet and gushing feelings all the time. Yes, you probably need to “get in touch” with some of your emotions, but you don’t need to tell every single person in your life about them.
- It’s also not about “controlling” your emotions. It’s about channeling emotions into healthy and productive actions – Mark Manson
Emotional Vampires:
At the risk of sounding a little glum. This new breed of peeps is partially bred through pervasiveness of entitlement in the social media age. I see these individuals with an unwarranted exaggerated sense of self, who need to feel special at others expense. Worse, they don’t get that they don’t get it.
3 Ways To Spot An Emotional Vampire:
- An excessive need for validation and/or attention from others
- The belief that little to nothing that occurs is their fault
- Complete lack of self-awareness
The main problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them by chronic venting, needing someone to taking responsibility of their actions or emotions or constantly blame others for their actions and emotions – which rightly sucks the life out of you.
As a rule of thumb, these people bleed on everyone and everything around them because someone in the past cut them and they feel the world including all humans in their surrounding owe them to compensate for that injustice & should make them feel special as they have internalised that abuse as a base rhythm. The fun part, these assholes see everything as an ‘Affirmation’ or ‘Threat’ to their ‘hypothetical greatness’ aka If something good happens, it because they are amazing, smart, beautiful and awesome. If something bad happens, then its because someone is jealous or trying to bring them down – there is no merit, context or reflection in any life situation. They fail to acknowledge, a life like this is just another high, more like a 25/8 feedback loop of self-fellatio & pleasure – its not happiness and doesn’t freaking progress the world.
Some examples of above listed unnecessary blessings to the world are as follows:
- It is the boss, who believes that he is merit and be it all and end it all in a 1000+ people company. For him, being a competent jerk means more than kindness, empathy and humility. He needs to oppress, dominate and in extreme cases psychologically abuse people to feel good about himself. Sadly, any person having such needs have much more bigger issues in life to deal with than just work related interactions.
- It is the guy, who believes every girl wants his money, hotness and is dying to be his arms. Every mate, friend, colleague, neighbour, random dude on street is jealous of his success and everyone wants to socialise with him to feel important.
- It is that girl, who believes that it is the world’s responsibility to bend time & reality as per her needs or whatever mummy daddy promised her as growing up (entitlement/inherited narcissism) and/or attention equals admiration.
- It is that parent, who procreates to become & play God with the created human – despite the fact the child is born for another time, has needs, emotions and unique set of advantages & disadvantages. But the parent fundamentally believes that the responsibility of that child is to support the unfulfilled dreams, work around their mental health issues, fill the insatiable gaping hole in their psyche (money, security, fame, prestige, notoriety, solve all problems in old & all ages), insecurities and sustenance they cannot do for themselves.
But foremost of all, they are humans who are deeply insecure and have harboured toxic self-esteem as a default stance to approach life & interactions. We can all develop compassion for such an individual who is never at peace, they constantly do label, judgement, comparisons, make up compensatory statements for situations no one asked them about and spend all life chasing highs – just like a junkie to his next needle until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of changing – thus invoking, the most sacred thing in universe – consciousness. I will say, inclusion requires, inclusion of everyone – a right for self acceptance and self improvements for emotional vampires to emotionally mature healthy human beings.
Pain:
How much pain can you take? “The amount of pain that is just right”
Everyone remembers the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, this porridge is too hot, this one is too cold, this one is just right. Well, pain kind of works in the same way.
Too much pain will lead to trauma and helplessness. Too little pain will lead to entitlement and selfishness. But just the right amount of pain and struggle: that’s what allows us to feel a sense of accomplishment and meaning in our lives, which then builds up our sense of autonomy and self-worth—the bedrock of a mentally healthy and happy person.
So, how do you define the Goldilocks Zone of Pain? How do you know how much pain is “just right?”
Generally, research finds that when we’re challenged or struggle in ways that WE BELIEVE WE’RE CAPABLE OF OVERCOMING, those struggles eventually invigorate us and lead to a sense of meaning and accomplishment.
But when confronted with struggles and challenges that WE FEEL POWERLESS TO OVERCOME, that’s when we get demoralized, and in extreme cases, experience trauma.
The sympathy/compassion confusion:
I believe the problem today can be summed up simply: people mistake sympathy for compassion.
Sympathy is feeling bad for someone and wishing they didn’t feel so bad. Sympathy is noble on the surface (“people should suffer less!”) but can often end up being subtly self-serving (“people should suffer less because I don’t want to feel bad for them anymore.”)
Compassion is similar to sympathy but different in an important way. Like sympathy, compassion begins with feeling bad for someone. But instead of simply wanting the person’s suffering to go away, compassion involves someone who is willing to suffer alongside that person so that they may overcome their challenges.
- Sympathy is sending flowers and a card to a friend when a parent dies. Compassion is driving to their house and holding them as they cry.
- Sympathy is letting a screaming child have that toy they want so they’ll stop screaming. Compassion is letting them cry because you know they will be better off once they understand that they can’t always get what they want.
- Sympathy is changing your profile picture on social media for whatever the new cause du jour is. Compassion is actually giving time or money to victims, listening to their stories, helping them rebuild their lives.
How to undertake the Trauma Journey:
When confronting trauma, much like physiotherapy, you have to introduce tiny amounts of challenge extremely gradually. If you broke your back, you wouldn’t get up and run a marathon.
The goal is to first get up and take a step. Then two steps. Then walk down the hall. The marathon is likely not an option without years of consistent effort.
The problem is that psychological trauma is much more difficult to diagnose than a physical injury.
It’s difficult to tell the depth and scope of one’s emotional pain. It doesn’t help that the definition of trauma has pretty much expanded to include anyone who is emotionally triggered by anything, no matter how mundane or irrelevant.
Therefore, it’s often difficult to know exactly what is just enough challenge for that person to heal and what is too much. This is why self-awareness is so important.
And this doesn’t even get into managing the emotional side of growth — i.e., how to better handle our emotions after we’ve been triggered and become incredibly hurt and upset
Solution:
If we have a WHY for our struggle, we can endure almost any amount of the pain and suffering that comes with it - Nietzsche .
- Too much pain and trauma fucks us up in the long run. Too little pain in our lives can make us fragile and ill-equipped to take on life’s inherent challenges.And in fact, it’s only through the pain and the struggles of life that we find this kind of meaning.
- Parents give up their freedom and time and money because they find greater meaning in raising children.
- University students often give up years of their younger lives (and at least in the US, a lot of money) to secure a better future for themselves and their families.
- Many entrepreneurs and artists give up the comforts of a stable job and a “normal” life because they want to create something of value and/or beauty in the world.
- The marathon runner and the powerlifter gladly trade the pain of sore muscles for the sense of meaning they get from challenging themselves, from becoming a more disciplined person, from becoming the best version of themselves they can be.
Well, notice that in the examples above, people actually seek out uncomfortable experiences because they have a reason to do so. They have a “why” to endure the “how.” Having a higher purpose for their pain makes these people more resilient.To put it another way, they’ve chosen their pain and so they don’t see it as suffering—they see it as sacrifice.“The difference between being fragile and being resilient hinges on the ability to turn suffering into sacrifice” — Newsletter from Mark Manson
Sources:
- These are all not my words, I have listed the applicable sources on best endeavours basis. Most of the information is publicly available on search engines and easily accessible by readers.
- The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
- Mark Manson – The subtle art of not giving a f*ck and Everything is f*cked
- Think Again – Adam Grant
- Wisdom of Insecurity – Allan Watts
- Solitude & Intimacy – Stephanie Dowrick
- Evolution of Desire – David M Buss
