But not thinking about something you don’t want to know about doesn’t make it go away. You.
The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time.
Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover – and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.
We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.
If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.
An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit.
Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect.
But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic – and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings. A dog, a harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog, is clearly more deserving.
You have to be willing to be a fool to advance.
Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
Without free speech there is no true thought.
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.
Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.
If you take the low road than that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger.
A long period of unfreedom – adherence to a singular interpretive structure – is necessary for the development of a free mind.
An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.
Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years and your life will be entirely different.
People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone – in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.
But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?
For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?