I think what most people – especially educated, pampered middle-class white people – consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.
They feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.
There is no such thing as change without pain, no growth without discomfort. It’s why it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.
I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”10.
Intimacy is the feeling you can completely be yourself around someone no matter what.
This fixation on the positive- on what’s better, what’s superior- only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be. After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else” – a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise.
What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you?
Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us. Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.
Because sharing yourself with someone doesn’t mean just physically occupying the same area. It doesn’t mean exchanging facts with one another. It means opening up about your values, desires, feelings, and dreams. It means exposing your shame and insecurities and doubts and fears. It means living with somebody on an emotional plane, inhabiting that same heart-space together because that’s the one thing we can’t ever achieve by ourselves.
Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.
There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.
If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.” Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well.
But these were side effects of a deeper, more primary lesson. And the primary lesson was this: there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever.
I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.
The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.
Emerson once wrote, “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that it’s easy and feels good, while solving problems is hard and often feels bad. Forms of blame and denial give us a quick high. They are a way to temporarily escape our problems, and that escape can provide us a quick rush that makes us feel better.
When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize.16 They become our default expectation.