It’s fitting that a phrase for taking a photo of something is to “capture” it. You can never capture a miracle. We only want to believe in something we can record today not understanding by its very nature it works on the opposite principles.
Improvement is not not having bad days because those will always come—it’s about how you change your perception of those days and how you react. You go from internalising them to not. From letting a setback kill your week/month to getting over it by the morning. Your baseline grows. At some point you stop seeing negative emotions as bad and negative days as evil. But both as a nudge towards higher growth.
Ask God to help you with things big and small. Call upon God when you feel tempted, when your thoughts become negative and judgmental. You can’t do everything on your own. Quick prayers during the difficult moments of the day will only energise and refresh you.
There is nothing to chase or achieve. Desperate thinking will get you nowhere. This isn’t a Buddhist message. Follow your passions and desires but the moment you fixate on some arbitrary trophy you’ve lost the joy in the process. The most important part.
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I think it has a lot to do with the destruction of the family unit but also the community. There is a vague idea of community today, especially in the western world but I imagine almost everywhere across the world now.
These corporations, media superpowers, and governments have clawed even more control and dominance over the population. People don’t get ideas and principles from their families or little communities anymore, they get them from the internet, from the media, from celebrities and politicians and online ideologies.
We’ve not only become “split” from nature, but our inner-nature too.
We stopped revering and respecting the natural world and just see it as a byproduct for our own material gain. The media has brainwashed us into believing everything has to be for gain, everything is competition.
You’re only as important and successful as the material you accumulate.
Not only that but by its very nature social media feeds narcissism. Just look at these modern influencers and how damaged the dating world has become because everyone feels like they owe nobody anything.
And on top of all of that, this abundance of information, cheap entertainment, and technology has really left everyone on the whole detached from themselves and each another.
Desiring fame is an admittance you have wounded personal relationships. You want to be appreciated and celebrated and you don’t feel like you are in your intimate circles. Either that or you don’t have intimate circles, and instead of trying to build and nurture those, you seek infamy like praying at the alter of a false god.
Modern man has dulled his senses. His is not in contact with them like he was 200 years ago. We are bombarded with stimuli and desensitised to things that should cause a visceral reaction were we to see them in real life. What is the consequence of this? A blunting of the instincts. A severance of the senses.
People are trying to be what is cool now and by the time they have beaten their psyche into submission society has moved on to thinking something else is cool
Philosophy is a perspective on life
And you need to pick the philosophy that not only energises you the most but gives you peace of mind when you are all alone.
You might fight with your “thinking mind” over this, assuming a less glamorous philosophy is more realistic or common and thus true. But you should know life is made up of many little details which are interpreted by the lens you wear.
There are few objective truths and those stand on their own authority. The rest is up to how you choose to view it.
Each person will naturally align with an outlook that benefits their makeup. The idea that one is “cope” and another is not is all arbitrary. We can actually assume every perspective is cope if you want to play that game.
The doomer finds slight comfort in knowing everything is wrong with the world because it relieves him from personal responsibility, but he will never admit this. Either that or he goes about life totally dejected.
And why should life deject you when you have a perfectly good philosophy you fear wearing? Follow the one that livens your spirit because it is for you. Don’t assume the priest is more holy than the warrior. If both are living according to their nature they are as holy as each other.
Now start to shape your world and stand on your own philosophy.
Nietzsche suggests that forgetfulness is active rather than passive. It’s “positive” in the purest sense of the word. If we could not forget then we could not move forward like a man with an irritable stomach who can’t digest his food.
Chewing on a theory right now that goes something like the bolder and more courageous you are the more the universe gives you grace.
Lowballing and playing it safe to get the “guaranteed result” actually has the seed of failure embedded in
Noticing