February 2021
“If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.”
“Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.”
“Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.”
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” —Buddhist saying
Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit.
Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
“The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.”
“You are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental effects when you were younger. You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future.”
“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”
When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet.
At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out.
“Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. ”
“If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better. ”
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
The modern struggle:
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising…
Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.
How to be wrong a lot less often? Know the other side of the argument better than they do.
I’m not entitled to have an opinion on any subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.
Self-serving bias; you want to get that out of yourself; thinking that what’s good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on the subconscious tendency to serve one’s self.
“Just because you like it does not mean that the world will necessarily give it to you.”
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.” “Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.”
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ― Mortimer J. Adler
If we are always glued to our phones, even when going to the bathroom, then we can’t tolerate even 5 min of boredom. And if so, how will we do worthwhile things in life?
To do anything meaningful, we have to be willing to slog and make peace with boredom. Good doctors undergo years of mind-numbing studies. Glamorous sounding jobs like consulting and banking can be murderously tedious. To do breakthrough research, scientists read through reams of research papers, filled with dense math, jargon, and technical details.
To do worthwhile things, we have to overcome our addiction to constant excitement. Once in a while, let us do nothing for some time - embrace boredom, and be with our thoughts.
We are always busy connecting with others. Today, why not try connecting with yourself?
It’s too much work to change our minds. It’s too much work to dance with the fear of failure. It’s too much work to imagine walking through the world differently.
That doesn’t have to be the case. We can refuse to be brainwashed into accepting the status quo, and we can commit to finding the others, engaging with them and leveling up.
If we care enough.
Walking for 10 km carrying a heavy bag is misery. But when we call it hiking, we love it.
The experience is the same - it is neither good nor bad. It is what our mind makes it to be.
More often than not, the misery, as well as the happiness we experience, is manufactured by our mind.
Addiction is the inability to control our urge for something we know is harmful and which leaves us dissatisfied after its use. The more we use it, the more desensitized we become and need higher doses to get the same high.
Does it ring a bell?
Those who know themselves and maximize their strengths are the ones who go where they want to go.
Those who don’t know themselves, and avoid the hard work of looking inward, live life by default. They lack the ability to create for themselves their own future.
It is better to be lost and busy in the chase of finding yourself, instead of being lost and busy in the rat race of never knowing yourself.
Wherever you are in life, and based on who is around you, and based on your current aspirations, those are the things that shape your beliefs.
Nobody explains, though, that “beliefs” then are not “fixed.” There is no “right and wrong.” It is all relative.
Find what works for you.
The average person spends 2 hours and 24 minutes every day checking social media. (This can further affect happiness because there’s an association between screen time and depression.) Yet people often wish they had more time to travel, read, exercise, learn a language, spend time with loved ones, etc. — all of which can help boost joy, fulfilment, and positivity.
Something doesn’t add up. Cut out all social media and news consumption for two weeks and see what happens.
What will you do with your extra two hours each day?
Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait.
Paint yourself however you wish.
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” — Bruce Lee
Ultimately, if you can’t be happy without those things, then you can’t be happy with them.
That’s not to say you should never try to achieve anything in life. Instead, try to reach goals without making happiness depend on them — in other words, without attaching happiness to them. It creates far more freedom, ease, and peace.
And if you ever happened to lose what you had, you won’t be as devastated because it was never the source of your happiness in the first place.