Category Archives: Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

Signs You’re Mature… But Not Necessarily Old

By wise sloth

1. Accepting responsibility for your fate.

If you’re lucky enough to be born into the right family at the right time and place you can achieve professional success while still being a whiny, co-dependent, indignant, incorrigible little bitch. You can get pulled through life kicking and screaming and have a place of success set up for you despite yourself. If you’re born into the wrong family at the wrong time you can have every advantage in the world stolen from you. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be born into poverty and oppression than prosperity and freedom.

That’s unfortunate, but that’s life. The universe doesn’t owe you an ass wiping, and even if it did, you can’t count on the universe to give it to you. Part of growing up is realizing that ultimately you’re the only person who is responsible for ensuring that you survive and make the most of your life. No other human truly owes you anything, and even if they did, you owe the world more than that. You stand on the shoulders of giants, and you owe a debt to everyone who played any role in creating a world where you don’t have to dress in loincloths and hunt rats in caves for dinner.

The goal of life isn’t to come up with the most valid excuses for why you failed. If you want to make the most out of your life and there’s a valid reason why that’s not possible then it’s your responsibility to beat the odds. Death doesn’t care about your excuses. You’re a walking, talking cosmic supercomputer. You’re designed to solve problems, and if you’re good at reverse engineering excuses then you’ve already proven how clever and resourceful you are.

You’ve got one life, and it’s your responsibility to prove the excuses wrong and make the most of your life and the world you’re going to pass down to the next generation. You don’t have to be old to understand that. If/when that lesson sinks in then you’ll be firmly on the path of maturity. Regardless of your age or position in society, if you’re a sniveling, selfish, spoiled coward then you’re immature.

 

2. Figuring out you don’t know shit about shit.

Humans are brilliant for the first few years of our lives. As children, we’re painfully aware of the fact that we don’t know a fraction of the information in the universe, but before we’re even out of high school, we convince ourselves we’re smarter than everyone who doesn’t think exactly like us. Then we get a few years older and realize how stupid we were in high school. Then we laugh at high school kids for thinking they’re smart while we congratulate ourselves for being smarter than them. Then when we’re elderly we laugh at mid-life adults for how arrogant they are and congratulate ourselves for being wise old men. If we lived to be 150 we’d undoubtedly look back at 80 and realize we didn’t know shit about shit then either.

No matter how much we learn we’ll only ever know an infinitesimal percentage of what there is to know. No matter what we accomplish, we’re still just a microscopic speck of dust on a slightly bigger microscopic piece of dust on a slightly bigger microscopic piece of dust.

You grow up a little when you figure out that life isn’t a pissing contest. It’s a maze with no beginning, no end, no warning and no instructions. So humility isn’t so much of a virtue one needs to exert effort to maintain, as it is the common sense response to acknowledging how hopelessly naïve you, and everyone else, truly is.

You knew this when you were a child. Hopefully, it doesn’t take you too long to figure it out again, because it really puts your life into perspective and helps you make the most of it.

 

3. Realizing all the adults in the world are lost little kids living in their own private self-centric fantasy world just like you.

You were born lost. You were raised on archaic, obsolete customs invented by monkeys.  All of humanity’s greatest heroes evolved from butt sniffing monkeys, and we’re still very close to that branch of the family tree.

Granted, humans sent a robot to Mars. We’re some pretty clever monkeys, but at the end of the day, all the congressional blue banners and tailored designer suits in the world don’t change the fact that the world is run by monkeys (of all colors) who have access to apocalyptic weapons.

But we’re not told that as kids. We’re told adults are a higher form of life than children, and our leaders are approved by God. And kids grow up believing that…to varying degrees.

Think of the world like an amusement park roller coaster ride. Some kids will ride any roller coaster with absolute faith in their safety because they know that roller coasters are marvels of human engineering, and they’re tested regularly by professional safety inspectors. Other kids will ride the ride but be terrified the whole time the roller coaster will fall apart and kill everyone on board because they noticed the wooden beams look rotted and the amusement park doesn’t hide the fact that it’s maintained by disenfranchised alcoholic carnies.

In the real world, sometimes amusement rides break and kill real people. The world isn’t run by the cast of “Full House.” The world is run by arrogant monkeys with more money than they know what to do with and access to the best drugs in history. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start choosing which rides you go on a little more carefully and stop putting so much faith in the carnies.

 

4. Reading a book on a very important topic.

Want to be mature? Then read a book on a very important topic. If you don’t know how to read then the most mature thing you can do is learn how to read. The fact that older people already know how to read doesn’t make them better than you. Fate just gave them an earlier start. And if they haven’t read a book on a very important topic lately then no matter how many books they’ve read previously…you’re being more mature than them right now if you’re reading and growing while they’re stagnating mentally.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do. There’s only one correct answer to the question, “Have you learned more about something very important lately?” If you answer “yes” then you get a maturity badge for today. If you answered “no” then you get a badge of shame. That’s how growing up and getting smarter works.

 

 

 

5. You think multiple steps ahead.

In order to behave like a mature adult who is making the most of your life, you first have to think like a mature adult. Mature thinking involves observing the world attentively, analyzing it objectively, breaking it down logically and drawing conclusions from supporting evidence. This requires looking outside your little bubble and thinking multiple steps ahead.

Think of life as a big chess game. We’re all competing for resources, chasing after our own personal goals, bumping into each other as we get in each other’s ways. Sometimes it may feel like we’re just drifting through life, but we’re drifting through a global waltz. Some people are so aware of the global dance they’ve identified and are tracking patterns in our movements and profiting from predicting where we’ll drift to next. At the very least, they can see trouble coming a mile away because they’ve read the writing on the wall, and they won’t be there when disaster strikes.

The point is not that we should all be market analysts. The point is that if you’re not thinking about where you’re headed in life and planning multiple steps ahead then you’re a hapless pawn. Mature people don’t drift through life. They plot the shortest distance to the Promised Land. If you’re 12 then this means you should be figuring out the most efficient way to master your classes and utilize your free time. If you’re 42 this means you should be advancing the limits of human knowledge and achievement.

 

6. Devising a life plan.

Thinking multiple steps ahead is a useful tool for solving day to day problems, but it’s also necessary to accomplish the specific responsibility of creating your 100-year plan.

Yes, spontaneity can be a virtue, but so can foresight. Someone once told me “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” That can be true at the same time as spontaneity is a virtue.

Look. You’ve got one life to live. You have a better chance of accomplishing more if you plan ahead. If you already have a plan, great! You get a maturity achievement badge. If you don’t have anything mapped out then you get a badge that says, “I’m lost, and I don’t care.”

 

7. Choosing your passion and dedicating yourself to it.

If you don’t figure out anything else about your life then the least you could do for yourself is find your passion and dedicate yourself to it. If you never identify your passion then what the hell are you doing with your life? You’re just going through the motions of life until you die and get replaced by the next automaton.

It’s irresponsible to spend your life doing things you’re not passionate about. You’ve got one life. You’ve got one chance to choose how you’re going to spend it. The goal of life isn’t to survive it. There ain’t no surviving life. The goal is to be here now making the most of it by doing the things we’re most passionate about…not just because that’s the most enjoyable way to spend one’s life but also because it’s the closest thing to immortality we may get. The way we spend our lives is how we go down in history. Maybe after the past gets flushed down the drain of time it comes out somewhere on the underside of the universe where it’s stored on faded, dusty cosmic microfilm that just sits there untouched for the rest of eternity.

Do you want to go down in history for eternity as the guy who sat there with his thumb up his ass while he played devil’s advocate his entire life and never grabbed life by the balls and threw an existential touchdown pass for the record books?

The universe didn’t go through 13.75 billion years of trouble bringing you into existence for you to sit here with your thumb up your ass or to settle for demeaning work at a boring job. I’m not saying to quit your job tomorrow and sink your life savings into a backyard oil wrestling league. I’m just saying, if you’re not doing what you want to them what the hell are you doing here? What’s all the sacrifice for if you’re just going to die unhappy and unfulfilled?

 

8. Refining your style.

You’re probably not going to get your face carved into a mountain, and even if you did, that mountain is just a speck of dust on a bigger speck of dust. That carving is going to get erased by time in a twinkle of an eye. Nothing you ever do will last for eternity. But you do have this moment right now. Life is like a piece of falling dust caught in a sunbeam for a moment. It’s brief and meaningless, but it’s your moment in the limelight. It might even be an audition. Strike a pose.

Despite all reason or likelihood you exist, and for some reason, you didn’t get to choose what you are, but you can choose who you are. You’re born with a microphone in your mouth announcing to all of history eternal who you are, and nobody warns you that as long as the clock is ticking the microphone is on. Is eternity going to hear you mumbling lame excuses or singing your ballad?

Why would you be here if not to be you? Think about it.

Being bland and cold and boring makes you look scary and authoritarian and adult. But that’s just because dead, lifeless robots look like that. It’s not really mature. It’s just dead and lifeless and scary looking.

 

9. Creating and correcting your philosophy on life.

Before you can plot out your life plan or personalize your identity you’re going to need to figure out what you believe about life and death. Growing up we’re told that only prophets and geniuses get to decide that, but it turns out that we all have to live our lives and suffer the consequences of our actions and inactions on our own. So since you’re ultimately responsible for living your life and making the most out of it you need to figure out what you believe and why. And you should really write it down just to be sure you really believe in something more concrete and useful than a few overgeneralized fortune cookie quotes.

Once you figure out what you’re doing here and express what that is and why then you can spend the rest of your life doing that meaningful thing you decided would make the most out of your life.

You’re going to patch together your own philosophy on life anyway. The only question is whether or not you’re going to be conscious of it. If you’re not conscious of it then you’ll likely end up basing your life on a hand full of random beliefs pushed onto you by other people who want to control and exploit you. If you don’t put an exemplary effort into figuring out and correcting your life philosophy you’ll end up like a FOX NEWS junky; even if you’re successful enough to buy a yellow Hummer you’ll still be a tool.

 

10. Defining your personal ethics.

You’ve got to learn more than 10 rules to navigate your way through life. There are rules for everything. There are rules at school, at work, on the road, in our banks, on our televisions, on our iPods. God never said, “Though Shalt not run at the pool.” But more people believe that than believe you should be able to get a refund if you purchase a wife who doesn’t please you.

We barely get any ethics from religion, and nobody believes every rule written in any religious book. For the most part we make up our own ethics. We patch together commandments other people told us. We filter that through our prejudices and experiences and subconsciously weave together the real list of rules we use to guide us through life.

If you just drift through life on autopilot you’re going to end up with a flotsam pile of ethics that you’re probably not going to follow yourself. You’ll just spend your life feeling guilty for doing things you don’t understand why you keep doing.

The difference between right and wrong is not the forbidden question. It’s actually the first question on the test. If you want to spend your life right then you need to figure out the difference between right and wrong, a task complicated by the fact that everyone in the world has a different answer. But that just means it’s all the more important for you to ask the hard, forbidden questions yourself.

 

 

11. Expanding the limits of human knowledge and achievement.

I’m not impressed by the Jeopardy champion or the guy who beat a supercomputer at chess. I’m not impressed if you can sell 42 used cars in a month. I’m not impressed how many clients you have. But I’ll be impressed if you expand the limits of human knowledge by say, solving an unsolved mathematical problem or finding the cure for cancer.

Glen Beck is a very successful family man by Utah standards, but from a cosmic perspective, his life will have meant far, far less than Carl Sagan’s life. That’s because Carl Sagan spent his life expanding the limits of human knowledge and achievement while Glen Beck spent his life sensationalizing disinformation to exploit gullible people’s fears for his own personal gain.

 

12. Helping other people.

Have you helped anyone lately? If so, that’s mature of you. If not, that’s immature of you. If you’re helping someone then you can take credit for behaving maturely regardless of how old or accomplished in the ways of the world you are.

Sometimes life isn’t complicated. This is one of those times. It’s mature to help people.

 

13. Coming to terms with your past. Finding absolution for your sins and regrets.

Old people act sanctimonious and demand respect, but they all messed up somewhere, and so will you. Everybody makes mistakes. We even feel guilty for things that weren’t anyone’s fault or that just don’t matter. Guilt, remorse, and regret are human emotions that appear across cultures and religions.

If you look at the mythologies humans have invented you can see patterns in how humans view guilt, remorse, and regret. We’ve come up with some pretty elaborate rituals to process those emotions, but at the end of the day, we’re just dancing monkeys wishing away an existential dilemma we’re not smart or brave enough to confront directly.

How do you deal with your regrets? Part of growing up is figuring that out. If you don’t have any regrets yet then congratulations. In the meantime, it would be mature of you to get a head start on figuring out how human beings find absolution when the need arises.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

Signs You’re Old… But Not Necessarily Mature

By wise sloth

1. You’ve held a job for a long time!

That’s not going above and beyond expectations. That’s the bare minimum you have to do to survive. Even if you have a good job, that just means you can afford to buy yourself more crap you don’t need. I’m happy for you, but that only guarantees you’re accomplishing the bare minimum of your own personal responsibilities required to survive. You may as well give yourself a parade for not being in jail or not committing suicide.

 

2. You got promoted at your job!

The world operates under this assumption: Society makes up the economy’s workforce, and through social Darwinism, the alpha members of society are destined to rise to the top of the corporate ladder; one way or another, the best, smartest people work their ways into the highest positions in every organization. So if you ever meet anyone who has a better job than you then you can just assume that they’re better, smarter and just all around more alpha than you.

The problem with that philosophy is that human beings aren’t tactical wolves, they’re butt-sniffing monkeys. There are a billion ways to get ahead in the world. Acting/thinking like a mature adult is just one of them, and not many people take that route because it will get you in trouble with the butt sniffing monkeys you work for as often as it will help you. At any rate, the mundane task you get paid to do to stay alive is not the purpose or measure of life. It doesn’t reflect the total sum of your character. It’s naïve to believe that rank always equates to maturity.

 

3. You got an award!

In the bureaucratic world we live in, someday you’re going to get a piece of a paper from someone saying how great you are. They’ll give one to you every couple of years you stay in school. When you get a permanent job you’ll get at least one per year. If you do any volunteering you’ll pick a few up, especially if you make sure everyone knows how selfless you are. You can even get a world famous award for putting a ball in a hoop over and over and over like a lab rat. Awards are a dime a dozen. The only thing they guarantee is that somebody likes you, and you feel the need to let other people know that you feel the need to impress other people.

That’s not impressive. That’s not mature…on multiple levels. That’s great if you got an award, and I’m sure you put a lot of effort into earning whichever one you got, but that’s not a milestone of maturity in and of itself. And mature people don’t gloat over their achievements privately or publicly.

 

 

4. You got married!

As a child I imagined getting married was like leveling up in a video game. Or your wedding clothes were like a cocoon that you spent the day in, and the next morning after a night of cosmic sex you emerged a new, upgraded human being. After all, if that’s not what happens then what’s all the fuss about?

The fuss is about convincing ourselves we’re cosmic creatures taking part in a cosmic ritual when in reality we’re just butt sniffing monkeys reinforcing the behavioral standards set by our butt sniffing monkey ancestors.

Great. So you decided to commit to spending the rest of your constantly changing life with another constantly changing person you just happen to want to rub your genitals against right now. You believe you’re fulfilling some God-given mandate by signing a piece of paper printed out by a bureaucrat who charged you $300 for that piece of paper. You think tomorrow you’re going to glow in the mirror because that piece of paper will change you who and what you are inside overnight?

And you’re going to love the other person forever. That’s beautiful, but it’s a conflict of interest to take credit for selflessly sacrificing yourself to the person you’re going to get to rub your genitals against every couple of days for as long as you give them everything they want and don’t piss them off. I’m glad you could come to a legal agreement with another human being that allows you to swap resources for sex for as long as it’s convenient for both parties. That would be clever except it’s what everyone expects you to do.

Getting into an archaic legal contract with another person after being pressured to your entire life doesn’t make you king of the world. It makes you unoriginal, and if you bought a diamond ring it also makes you a sucker for paying thousands of dollars for a worthless rock, and it makes you complicit in the human rights abuses being committed by the diamond cartels. That diamond ring is not an indicator of maturity either.

 

5. You had a child!

Parents act like they had to carry a ring to Mordor to have a child. Granted, pregnancy is hard, but getting pregnant is neither difficult nor novel. Everybody has sex. Having sex without a condom doesn’t make you better than anyone else.

If you had a child before you were financially secure, then you screwed up. You shouldn’t get to take credit for being an adult for making an irresponsible decision that is going to cost you your life’s dreams and force you to raise a human being in a less stable home than you could have if you hadn’t messed up. If you had a child before you were prepared then the existence of your child is a badge of your shame, not your maturity.

Even if you had a child on time, that’s not a sign that you’re mature. That’s just a sign you better get hurry up and get it together.

 

6. You kept a child alive for 18 years!

If you had a child then you better keep it alive for at least 18 years. Bragging about that is like bragging about not burning down your house for 18 years. That’s the least you can do. You only get to take credit for doing your best. If you had your child before you were prepared then you didn’t do you best. If you didn’t read every single child psychology book they sell on Amazon.com then you didn’t do your best. If your child is a screwup, then you didn’t do your best.

If you’ve ever said something like, “I don’t know what went wrong with my child. I did my best to raise him/her. Some kids are just born unreachable,” that really means you were a bad parent, and you’re in denial because you can’t accept responsibility for your failures. You’ve always been immature, but since you’ve spent so long asserting your superiority based on your title as a parent, you’ve blinded your ego from recognizing your obvious flaws.

You can impress stupid people by telling them you’re a parent who did their best. A mature person will just raise their eyebrow at you like Spock.

 

7. You have the power to command and punish others!

As long as you put an average amount of effort into not being an idiot, then at some point in your life, you’ll be handed authority over a group of people younger than you.  It’s just going to happen. And if you want to go out of your way to make it happen, you can pick a career field that leans more towards command than others. As a matter of fact, you only need a G.E.D. to get a job as a police officer. It’s not hard to get in a position of authority, and it’s even easier to yell at people whose only two options in life are homelessness and taking your abuse.

 

 

8. You hurt other people.

We’ve all got monkey brains with monkey brain cortexes. Sometimes it feels good to hurt other monkeys, but civilized modern, mature monkeys control themselves and find intellectual ways to work around hurting others. They certainly don’t take joy in hurting others or go out of their way to do it.

Everyone who hurts others thinks it makes them the alpha pack member. It doesn’t make you the alpha pack member. It makes you a waste of animated stardust.

 

9. You’re an ascetic.

Religions tend to promise that if you follow a strict moral code you’ll get to go to a paradise after you die. That moral code tends to boil down to never having any fun or experiencing any pleasure. Implied in that ascetic moral code is that the more free and happy you are the worse of a person you are. Thus, the more cold and rigid of a person you are the better you are, and you should be sad and remorseful all the time anyway for all the bad things you did in the past and know you’re going to do in the future.

Being silent and miserable makes you look serious and mature, but what’s the point in growing old if it’s just to bemoan and regret the time we spent here? Devoting your life to asceticism is as immature as devoting your life to rain dancing. There’s no point. It just wastes all the time you’ve been given to make the most of your life.

 

10. You’ve proven yourself obedient and faithful.

Obedience and faith are the two best traits you can ask for in a slave. As much human history and culture revolved around the use of slaves it’s not surprising that obedience and faith are held in such high regard. It’s been written in a billion books and pounded into every poor person’s head that it’s mature to be obedient and never question the people who were born before you to richer parents.

Modern psychology politely disagrees. It’s not mature to turn your brain off because it’s not healthy or productive to turn your brain off. It just makes you a slave.

 

11. You dress professionally at work and wear designer clothes in the evening.

Smart people in professional circles will tell you that “the clothes make the man.” And you can prove this by doing an easy, fun experiment. Dress up in a sharp, casual suit and go run errands around town. Then shave your head and put on some sweatpants and a stained Looney Tunes T-shirt and go run some more errands around town.

When you dress sharp, fortune seeks you out. When you dress sloppy, you repel fortune. There are a thousand psychological reasons for this that marketers understand better than the rest of us, but it all boils down to us being gullible monkeys. We’re so gullible we’ll even trick ourselves into believing we’re more alpha simply by dressing more alpha. And if we keep up the lie long enough, sometimes the lie ceases to be a lie.

For some people though, wearing designer clothes is just covering a turd with gold paint. If your conscience is fine with spending thousands of dollars on an outfit while people are dying in the streets from starvation then you’re probably a gold-painted turd.

 

12. You’re older than someone else.

When I was a child I was told to respect my elders. Nobody ever told me why because it went without saying that the older you were the more respect you deserved.

That’s simply not true. There’s no rational justification for that rule. Nobody owes you anything for staying alive. You were supposed to be doing that anyway, and everyone else who is alive has been doing just as well at staying alive as you. You don’t get extra points for being born before someone else. Everyone has equal worth in the universe.

You can be an old dumb ass. You don’t deserve respect just for being old. And if you did truly deserve respect you wouldn’t have to ask for it, much less try to demand it.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

The Importance Of Style

By wise sloth

Picture of Marylin Monroe praying, with the caption, "Lord, help these basic bitches."

 

Style is a virtue,  and any virtue taken too far becomes a vice. There are people who are so obsessed with style and vanity that it negatively impacts their ability to achieve the rest of life’s important goals, but there are also those who are so obsessed with austerity and self-suppression that it affects their lives just as seriously. Humans need to define and express themselves. Our DNA compels us to the same way it compels us to want sex, and just like with sex, too much or too little causes us to go a little crazy and screw up other things in life.

Before you can understand how much style is healthy, you need to understand what style is. That’s a subjective question that everyone has to answer for themselves. I’ll give you my philosophy, and you can use that as a sounding board.

 

The dictionary defines style as:

  1. a particular kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form, appearance, or character
  2. a particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode of action or manner of acting
  3. 3.a mode of living, as with respect to expense or display.

 

Anything that has style has a unique set of attributes that all have something in common. You are a unique individual. For the entire gigantic history of the universe, there will only ever be one of you. You’re basically a one-in-infinity phenomenon. You possess a unique set of attributes that all have something in common. That’s something to celebrate, and by nurturing your uniqueness you can make yourself more elegantly unique.

You’re a canvas, a piece of art, a flower that gets to choose its petals. You’re a work to be completed. That’s an opportunity and a responsibility. Abstaining is not an option. If you don’t exercise that instinct, it shuts down, and then you shut down. Prisoners held in solitary confinement, who have all their basic needs met, but no way to define, express or experience themselves, quickly go mad and can even die. Elderly people who are allowed to decorate their rooms live longer than people who don’t have any control over the style of their environment.

Your style is the sum of your identity. It’s your signature on the universe. It’s the expression of who you are. It’s what you probably hope will exist after death. The less of it you have, the less of you there is to exist. The more of you have, the more real you are.

Think of your style as the grain of sand that The Childlike Empress holds in her hand at the end of The Never Ending Story. Your mind is an entire private universe. If you don’t decide what you want to wish for, and then make that wish, then your universe will be empty at worst or a thoughtless imitation of someone else’s at best.

 

 

In order to live your life to the fullest, you need to know what you want out of life. In order to know what you want you need to define who you are. Once you have a philosophy and a refined list of likes and dislikes, your internal universe will compel you to project it onto the external world. By consciously defining the external objects in your life such as your clothes, furniture, decorations, vehicle, vocabulary, vocations, behavioral idiosyncrasies, and music, you not only validate your existence, but you create a feedback loop to further define your internal universe.

Whether or not you put any effort into defining yourself, your subconscious will do it automatically, but to fully experience the benefits, you need to make a conscious effort yourself. Instead of buying whatever clothes, furniture and decorations are cheapest and quickest to get, sit down and think about what style of objects reflect who you are as a person. Project your mind onto the world by the things you surround yourself with. As you grow and your identity evolves, periodically update your surroundings to match your internal changes.

There could be some higher philosophical or theological value in creating evidence that you exist, but even without that, defining and expressing yourself is the only way to give your life personal meaning. Fulfilling your subjective purpose is the only thing that’s going to make you feel fulfilled or even just have fun. If the nihilists were right, and life really is one big, empty, pointless existential dilemma, the least you can do with your short time here is enjoy yourself. In order to do that to the fullest, you need to explore what’s fun to you. The alternative is to be basic, and a basic life is a life unlived.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

10 Things You Need To Know About Yourself

By wise sloth

1. Your personality type

Personality tests aren’t 100% perfect, but understanding your personality type will give you a whole new level of self-awareness. The first thing it will do for you is give you permission to have all the quirks that make you different from everyone else. It will also help you identify your innate strengths and weaknesses, which will help you understand how to navigate life using your unique mental toolkit. There are companies that offer full spectrum personality and aptitude tests that will tell you more about yourself than you ever thought there was to know. If you’ve never taken one of these I strongly recommend it. Unfortunately, they can cost hundreds of dollars, but it’s worth it. If you don’t have that kind of money you can take free tests online and then research your personality type online. Below are a couple of links to free tests.

Human Metrics

Free Personality Test

 

 

2. Your mission statement

If you’ve never summed up the purpose of your life in a brief statement then you can’t prove that you know what you’re doing with your life. Even if you have a vague idea, if you’ve never stated it then you don’t have a solid compass to guide your actions when life gets complicated. I’m not saying you have to know the definitive answer to the question of the meaning of life. I’m just saying that you need some kind of direction, and the better you articulate it the better you can follow it and improve it.

 

3. Your top 5 goals in life 

Having an overarching theoretical purpose in life is nice, but there’s not much point unless you have a plan on how to achieve that goal. If you’ve never articulated what exactly you want to accomplish in life then you’re just going to waffle through life like a lost explorer slashing through the jungle with no direction hoping to randomly stumble upon the promised land.

 

4. Your 5, 10, 20 and 30-year plan

Life takes a long time, and you can accomplish a lot in one year, but some goals take decades to achieve. The more completely you have your life plan mapped out the more likely you are to achieve your goals. This doesn’t mean you can’t be spontaneous or change your plans repeatedly. In fact, as you grow your plans should change, but you should still have a plan. It will help give your life and actions meaning, and having a clear plan will mitigate the hopelessness of floundering through life haphazardly.

 

5. Your 5 greatest strengths and 5 greatest weaknesses

Taking a professional personality/aptitude test will pretty much answer this question for you. Regardless of whether or not you take one you’re still going to change as you grow. Thus your strengths and weaknesses will change. The better you understand your evolving mental skill sets the better you can adapt your approach to life to them.

 

 

6. The 5 biggest turning points in your life

Who you are today and where you’re going in life was shaped by who you were previously and what happened to you in your past. The better you understand your past the better you can make sense of the present and the future. The best way to understand your past is to tell your life story to a professional therapist and get their feedback. If you can’t afford that though, you at least need to understand that your life is like a billiard’s ball. It moves in a set direction until an equal or greater force acts against it and changes its direction. Studying the turning points in your life will help you understand how you got to where you are today. That knowledge will empower you to take control of your destiny instead of getting knocked around by external forces until you fall into a hole.

 

7. Your 5 worst and 5 best memories

Something relatively traumatic has happened to everyone, and you carry the memory of those events with you to this day. If you never identify those experiences and confront them they will haunt you and cripple you for the rest of your life. Part of growing up and making the most of life is dealing with past traumas. I strongly recommend exploring those experiences with a professional therapist, but if you can’t afford help you’re still responsible for making the most of your life. You can’t fix yourself if you don’t identify what broke you.

On the other side of the coin, life is more majestic than it is tragic. Despite the bad things that have happened to you there is immeasurable beauty in life. Pinpoint the best parts of your life and carry those in your pocket so you can pull them out and bask in their warmth on the bad days.

 

8. Your top 10 moral guides (5 good and 5 bad)

Most of the human population claims to believe in one of the mythologies invented by our primitive ancestors. So when you ask them what their moral code is they just point to a religious book and say, “That.” But most people don’t follow even half of their religion’s moral code. They cherry pick the rules that conform to their modern cultural values. Even then they still break those whenever it serves their purposes. Effectively, most people don’t live their lives according to a concrete moral code. They just waffle through life fulfilling their base desires and reverse engineering excuses for their actions along the way. This approach yields chaotic results. This doesn’t mean that everyone should write their own religion or double down and make a more concentrated effort to live according to the primitive values of our blood-thirsty, chauvinistic, uneducated ancestors. But you will find it incredibly useful to articulate (and improve upon) a list of the top rules that define the difference between right and wrong.

 

9. The 5 pieces of advice you would pass onto the world

When I was 18 I asked every adult I knew what single piece of advice they would pass on to a young person just striking out into the real world. None of them had a coherent, premeditated answer. None. That’s when I first realized the majority of the adult world has no idea what they’re doing and are just making it all up as they go along. That’s no way to go through life, and it’s not fair to the younger generation. Boil down the lessons you’ve learned in life into at least five pieces of useful advice for yourself and the rest of society so that we can all live wiser, happier lives.

 

10. 5 things you’re going to teach yourself

Knowledge is like a superpower. After you graduate from school nobody is going to be cramming superpowers down your throat; it’s up to you to seek out and consume knowledge yourself. If you haven’t identified what you want to learn you’re not going to seek that information out. So put a lot of thought into that and articulate what you want to know. You may want to start by asking yourself what the most important information a human being can know is.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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October 4, 2017

My Advice To The Younger Generation

By wise sloth

My senior year of high school I asked as many adults as I could for the single, best piece of advice they could give to a young man just about to enter the real world. I probably asked around 30 or 40 adults this question, and I never met one who had an answer ready. They all had to stop and think about it. Most of them acted like that was the first time anyone ever asked them to sum up what they’d learned in life.

I don’t specifically remember any of the advice they gave me because most of it was generic and watered down to the point of being useless like, “Do your best.” “Don’t have any regrets.” or “Love everybody.” What I did learn from them and what did stick with me was that not having an explanation for who you are, where you’re going, where you’ve been and what you’ve learned is no way to go through life.

 

Grown ups are stupid. You have no idea.

 

Since I don’t want to be that guy I’m going to give my speech to the younger generation right now. The most important thing I can tell young people is that your life is your responsibility. Life isn’t a bowl of cherries. Life is hard, and it’s going to knock you down. You can blame the whole world for all your problems, but even if you’re right, your life is still your responsibility and nobody else’s. Once you’re dead all excuses are moot. Death doesn’t ask you how the world treated you. Death asks you how you lived your life.

If you want to make the most of out of your life you need to plot a goal, lay out a plan in writing and focus the rest of your life on it. In order to know what you want out of life you have to do two things. First, you need to define yourself.

Everyone can tell you their name and where they’re from, but most people don’t spend enough time reflecting on who they are, take time to meditate and feel what it’s like to be them or express themselves through the things they create with their hands. They let the world tell them who and what they are. They associate their identity with the institutions around them. They let the world burn its image onto them instead of burning their image onto the world.

This causes them to spend their entire lives chasing circles trying to find happiness but never truly getting what they want… because they never truly defined what they wanted. They just drifted where the currents took them and then simultaneously cursed and defended where the undertow took them.

Don’t be that guy. Find yourself. Do that by writing your life story. Analyze your past. Map out your journey so far and analyze the patterns. Use that to figure out what made you who you are.  Then once you’ve taken control of your growth, create yourself into who you want to be.

Keep pounding away at finding/creating yourself. Take personality tests and start studying psychology as early as possible. You are your mind. If you don’t know how your mind works then you don’t know how you work. Not only will studying psychology help you understand and take control of yourself, but it’ll help you understand other people, and that will be the most important job skill you’ll ever learn no matter what you do for a living.

 

 

The second thing you need to do before you can say where your life is going is to learn to think. Thinking is asking questions. Everything you’ll ever do will be done because of a question you asked yourself in your head. The quality of your answers and thus your actions will be determined by your ability to ask the most important questions, analyze the variables logically, perform cost/benefit analysis and formulate answers.

Nobody else can answer all your questions for you, and for the most part, nobody will even try to help you figure out life. People will (intentionally and unintentionally) give you bad advice, and there’s no way to check to make sure your answers are correct. People will use fear and bribery to coerce you into living your life based on mythology and contrived doctrines. If you choose to follow that path, question it like your life depends on it. If it’s true it’ll stand the most objective test for factual accuracy possible. If it fails the test then you’ll be free.

 

 

But don’t think freedom from delusion will set you on the one true path; you’ll never find the one true path because you’ll never be able to prove you’re on the right path, but if you keep questioning life and improving your ability to ask/answer questions, then at least you can live your life for yourself. And if there’s any hope of anyone ever figuring out the universe, the only way any progress towards that goal is going to happen is if someone, preferably you, questions what the hell is going on around here.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

The Prime Prerogative

By wise sloth

"If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you'll find an excuse."

 

There’s more information in the world than your brain can possibly store or process. Not only are there obscure factoids about South American tree frogs you’ll never know (and don’t care to know), but there are libraries of very important, very pertinent information that you really, really should know but simply don’t have the capacity to learn. Even in our daily lives, we have to ration out what we apply our brain to. We’d all love to learn 10 foreign languages and all of our friends’ phone numbers, but we don’t have the mental capacity. Our brains are already overclocked, and the fact that we live in the digital age, where information fights for our attention in a world already over-saturated with information, makes it all the harder to manage the clutter accumulating in our brains.

Luckily our brains are smarter than we are, and our brains have done an exemplary job of streamlining the process of collecting, storing, processing and retrieving data. But again, it can only do so much. When you’ve got too much to do and not enough resources to do it all, you prioritize. Consciously and subconsciously we break life down into a kaleidoscope of shifting priority schemes. We’ve got long-term priorities, mid-term goals, short-term desires, side projects, and fantasies. We prioritize our friends, our lovers, our sins, our strengths. We construct our perception of reality on all of these imagined lists and hierarchies. Our understanding of these lists becomes who we are.

That process is extremely tumultuous, especially for people who live in inhuman environments. It’s pretty simple to knock a person’s priorities out of whack. Just don’t teach them anything. Don’t let them do anything they want, and scare them all the time. Everyone you’ll ever meet (yourself included) is arguably a little broken, but broken minds still operate using the same operating system as nurtured minds. Everybody’s minds still have to break life down into a hierarchy of priorities in order to manage processing all the data required to propel a semi-autonomous, bi-pedal, organic supercomputer.

This means that everyone you will ever meet will have their own unique, pyramid-shaped daydream in their head about who, where, what, when and why they are. Those pyramids are built from the unique amalgamation of information their minds happened to get cluttered with. So everyone has their own imperfect perception of reality, and each of our universes are ultimately built around a center point, which I call the “Prime Prerogative.”

 

 

Your life is a question that your brain is trying to solve. Your prime prerogative is the answer it has come up with based on the information it has been able to gather. It’s you doing what you think is most important in life based on your values. It’s the direction that the boundaries you set for yourself are taking your life in…. and that direction may or may not have any resemblance to what you say you believe the meaning of life is.

Uneducated people raised on processed, homogenized consumer culture don’t tend to take the time to meditate on the meaning of life, and if/when they don’t exercise their ability to think for themselves for long enough then their brains default to auto-pilot. Then their prime prerogative defaults to seducing a mate and fighting their way as far up the social hierarchy as their monkey claws will take them. A worst-case scenario would be someone who has been so stonewalled and crippled by their environment that they’ve given up all hope of ever achieving any of their own personal priorities. When prisoners in P.O.W. or concentration camps lose their prime prerogative they just lie down and die. Or if you work in a sweatshop for long enough you just die inside and sleepwalk until your body stops moving, but if you ever meet a person who is still alive and breathing, you can predict they have a prime prerogative.

A person’s prime prerogative is typically set by the time they’re in their mid-twenties, but it can change, especially if the environment changes since that upsets the equation of life the brain is trying to solve and forces it to recalculate its priorities. People’s priorities also tend to change when a hot piece of ass walks by or someone offers them a lot of money. So even if you think you’ve figured out someone’s primary prerogative, you might be basing your answer on information the person gave you when they were pursuing a side goal, but if you spend enough time with a person then their prime prerogative will shine through even if they try to hide it (or because they try to hide it). You still won’t be able to see it through people’s facades if you’re not looking, and to make matters more confusing, our own prerogatives often blind us from seeing other people for who they are and understanding what they want.

If nothing else, understanding other people’s prime prerogatives is useful because it allows you to spot douche bags, con men and psychopaths from a mile away. It’s also useful, because if you ever need something from someone and you know what they want most in life then you can make it in their best interest to help you remove an obstacle between you and your prime prerogative by helping them achieve their prime prerogative.

Of course, there’s a dark side to all of this too. If you work for a marketing firm you can use this understanding of basic human motivation to mind fuck consumers into buying products they don’t need with money they don’t have. If your prime prerogative is to have sex then you can appeal to your sexual prey’s prime prerogative to seduce them. You can even design a cult that uses traumatic brainwashing techniques to reprogram unsuspecting recruits’ prime prerogative so that they’ll want to be your doting, suicidal slave.

But as Isaac Asimov said, “If knowledge is dangerous, the solution is not ignorance.” (paraphrased) The fact of the matter is that anyone who doesn’t understand the principle of the prime prerogative is navigating their way through society half blind.

How do you figure out other people’s prime prerogative? You just start with the assumption that no action is an island, and then you watch people to find patterns in their behavior. Once you start spotting patterns you simply extrapolate them. When multiple behavior patterns all lead to the same conclusion then you can be fairly sure you’ve found their prime prerogative.

 

"Action expresses priorities." Mohandas Gandhi

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 4, 2017

Advice On Life

By wise sloth

1: Know/create yourself.

You can’t not be you, but if you choose not to understand yourself, identify areas you want to grow in and follow through with a plan to constantly reinvent/upgrade yourself then you’re just going to go with the flow your whole life on autopilot. You’re going to get stuck in an unfulfilling job. You’re going to fall in love with the first person who touches your genitals. You’re going to have children to try to fill the void in your life, and you’re going to be a terrible parent because your own life lacks purpose. You’re going to look back on life in old age and wonder what the point of it all was. But if you’d known who you were and actively set personalized goals then you would have lived with purpose.

 

 

2: Be curious and pay attention.

All of the answers to all of your problems are out there in the universe. Problems aside, there are more wonders in this cosmic playground than you could possibly experience or understand, but in order to solve any problem or get the most out of your play time, you need to look at the world around you and study it.

Every time you see something new you should wonder why it is the way it is. Finding out why will empower you. Not knowing will cripple you. Not finding things out is like choosing not to have any superpowers. So find out as much as you can about as much as you can, and never lose your passion for learning, because the moment you stop learning is the moment you start regressing back to a thirsty, hungry, horny monkey on autopilot.

 

3: Never trust authority.

There will always be someone with authority over you. At any given point in your life, you’ll be subject to multiple authority structures simultaneously: your parents, teachers, bosses, police, politicians. They can all give a good reason why they should have authority over your free will, and most of them will have a fancy looking piece of paper that says they’re more alpha than you.

While these authority figures may deserve a pat on the back or two for something they did, all men were created equal. Everyone will always be equally valuable, and no matter how much knowledge, experience or age someone has, they still don’t know the meaning of life. Ultimately we’re all just bullshitting our way through life and mimicking random cultural norms we take for granted. And no matter how much anyone knows, our knowledge is dwarfed by what we don’t know.

Since we’re all equal and we’re all idiots that means you would be a fool to have faith in anything anyone says. I’m not saying not to listen to people. Listen to everyone. Learn from everyone. Just doubt everything. And when someone tells you that you have to obey them, recognize that they’re bullying you into submission. That’s all that’s happening there.

Your life is your responsibility. Your authority leaders aren’t going to live it for you. They’re not going to do your work or suffer the consequences of your mistakes. Your life is in your hands. I’m not saying you should disobey everyone. I’m just saying, authority isn’t ordained by God. It’s invented by men. The only authority anyone has over you is the authority you give them.  Don’t give it away carelessly.

 

4: Get a skill and a certification.

The world is a cut-throat place these days, and since the poor are the most defenseless they get their throats cut more than anybody. You can’t live a good life on minimum wage because you can’t afford the basic necessities of life. If you can’t afford the basic necessities of life then you certainly can’t afford to take years off of work to go to school much less pay the extortionate fees every adult education institution charges. But if you don’t have a skill and a piece of paper that says you graduated from somewhere then it will be almost impossible for you to get a job that pays a living wage. Thus poverty becomes inescapable real quick, and the older you get the harder it is to get out of. Seriously, life is hell without a skill and a certificate. Get a forklift license if nothing else. Just get something, because if you don’t then you’ll most likely end up a beaten down wage slave for the rest of your degrading, exhausted existence.

 

5: The world doesn’t owe you anything, and life isn’t fair.

You can scream at the heavens until your lungs blow out and pray on your knees until they bleed, but it won’t change anything. Throughout your life, you’ll suffer repeated injustices. You’ll get the short end of the stick time and time again. That’s going to happen. Crying about it isn’t going to change anything. The only way to change anything is to do something. The sooner you accept that the world doesn’t owe you anything and life isn’t fair the sooner you can dry your face and start getting your hands dirty doing something about the problem.

 

 

6: Don’t be a consumer whore.

Just because you can afford to be stupid doesn’t mean you should. Paying too much for things you don’t need is ignorant. It’s immature. The cost/benefit analysis doesn’t add up. You earn money by spending time working. Money comes from time. Time is fleeting and irreplaceable. The time in your life is the most valuable thing in the universe. Trading it for a $150 shirt that cost $8 to make is giving your life away for nothing, and it makes you a chump. It also means you’re going to have a lot less money in old age, and less money means less security. Less security means more anxiety. More anxiety means more problems. If every consumer whore had done something useful with their money such as donating it to a free online school that covers every topic in academia then the world would be one giant leap closer to Utopia. But as it stands we’ve chosen sports cars, name brand shirts and blood diamonds over Utopia.

 

7: Have high intellectual standards.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your mind. Life sucks for stupid people, and life is limitless for smart people. Being smart isn’t just about memorizing all the keywords in every university textbook. Books just tell you about what’s going on around you. Once you understand what’s going on around you the next step is to engage with the world, study it and try to navigate and operate it. Since you’re going to die someday relatively soon you don’t have any time to lose. If you can choose what kind of environment and stimulation you expose yourself to, you should choose to expose yourself to intelligent, edifying things. Celebrating stupidity by acting brainless and watching brainless television and listening to brainless music and talking about brainless things is a waste of time. You’re letting the mysteries of the universe slip through your fingers. To make matters worse, the more you do it the more you reinforce your own brainless behavior  and since all your brainless friends don’t study the world around them and they just mimic whatever the people around them are doing they’re going to see your brainlessness and assume that being brainless is what we’re all supposed to be doing. Then, as a group, you’re going to be an intellectual drag on society. You’ll become the brainless consumer whore sheeple who politicians and marketers can manipulate into squandering society’s potential for the benefit of a few sociopaths.

 

8: People are important.

You’re an animate, sentient, bipedal, autonomous cosmic supercomputer. You’re stranded in an elegantly designed universe for a relatively short time, and even if you could find a logical explanation for the absurd, existential question of life you probably couldn’t empirically prove your answer. That sucks and is made worse by the fact that we’re stranded in a cold, harsh universe that isn’t fair and doesn’t owe us anything. Life is hard, but there’s one warm light in the darkness. That light is the other people in the world you’re surrounded by. Each one of us is an existential question, and we have a universe in our minds. We’re the only thing in the universe we can connect with. We make life worth living. We’re the most important thing in the universe. There’s nothing more important we can do than taking care of each other. Hurting, killing, exploiting, bullying, manipulating and abandoning each other is the worst thing we can do.

 

9: Today is what it’s all been leading up to.

About 14.7 billion years ago an infinitely dense point of energy expanded inexplicably creating time and space as we know it in the process. Since then the atoms in your body have been flying through space. After traveling through gas clouds, stars and oceans they’ve finally come to rest in your body. The atoms inside you have been a cloud, a meteor, a fish, a plant, a cough. The matter in your body has been amazing places and done amazing things. It’s been an incredible journey, and it has all been leading up to one final step. The last step is the step you choose. At the very least it warrants raising your hands to the sky and shouting, “I’m here!”

The time to celebrate life is now, not after you graduate, get promoted or retire. Life isn’t around the corner. It’s here. Now. Today.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

September 28, 2017

Tweets by The Wise Sloth #3: Maturity, Adulting, Growing Up and Parenting

By wise sloth

Cartoon image of a sloth sitting on a mountain top. He is wearing a yellow robe. His head is bowed with his eyes shut, and beams of light shine from around his head. With his left arm, he is holding one finger in the air. Above him are the words, "Tweets by The Wise Sloth."

Think of humans as wind-up chimps on autopilot who don’t realize they’re on autopilot. Everything everyone does will make much more sense.

Everyone is: 1.Insane 2. A child 3. So lost they don’t know how lost they are. When you understand that, dealing with people gets easier

If you can find out where a person came from and where they want to go, then you can predict what they’ll likely do in-between.

How to be an adult: Don’t get hurt, defensive and belligerent when someone informs you you’re wrong about something. Instead, say thank you.

The dumber the individual, the dumber the whole. We all have a personal and civic responsibility to not be stupid.

Part of growing up is learning to bring closure to bad memories without the involvement of the people who gave you those memories.

If you call me, “sir,” I won’t think you’re respectful. I’ll think you’ve been brainwashed into subjugating yourself.

Responsibility is doing what you need before doing what you want.

FYI: Just because you had a child doesn’t mean you’re an adult.

To better understand why you are the way you are, ask your parents to explain in detail what your life was like between ages 1-5.

Adulting consists mainly of fulfilling contrived responsibilities that exist only because governments, bosses, and bankers are exploiting us.

Kids, don’t get too excited about getting into the adult world and being treated like an adult. You never stop getting treated like a kid.

Statistically speaking, you should be gravely concerned about your inability to accept responsibility for your actions.

Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re right. More likely it means you’ve been wrong a long time.

You can’t pretend you’re not old anymore after you start meeting kids who are too young to remember the things that defined your childhood.

How to be an adult: Realize that your age has no bearing on how much other people should respect you or how much you should respect them.

Hurting someone all the time trains them to feel hurt and angry all the time.

It’s baffling how few parents have written instruction books for life to give to their children.

Your kids will freak out over the same size problems as you, to the same extent as you. Don’t show them how to be a spoiled, whiny bitch.

If you had shitty parents, you should seek therapy. If you know someone who had shitty parents, they should seek therapy.

Children need and want answers just as much as adults, but all they get from adults are mythologies and psychotic cartoons.

The way you make your children feel when they’re young is pretty much how they’ll feel when they’re old.

 

 

If you enjoyed these Tweets, you’ll also like these:

 

My Tweets About Self-Help
My Tweets About Romance
My Tweets About Philosophy 
My Tweets About Religion
My Tweets About Politics
My Tweets About Economics
My Tweets About Pop Culture

 

Leave a comment   |  tags: | posted in Growing up and Becoming You, Tweets

October 30, 2009

Where Do Heroes Come From?

By wise sloth

Outline of Superman. The crest on his shirt has a question mark instead of an "S."

I have this theory about where heroes come from. Look throughout American history, and you can find some incredible heroes who fought in the name of social justice. There are no great leaders today. America is so starved for real heroes that it’s resorted to looking up to sports players and TV characters as substitutes. Why don’t we have any heroes, and why were there so many in the past? What was different?

As cliché as it is to pull the “Fight Club” card, I think Chuck Palahniuk touched on it when he wrote that we have no great war to fight. If you look back through history at any hero anywhere you’ll notice that they all had great wars to fight. Think about Winston Churchill. He was a great orator, a capable leader, and a massive alcoholic. Ask yourself this, if it weren’t for Hitler, would many American know Winston Churchill’s name?

There are rarely heroes without a war to respond to because human nature is to sit around docilely as long as nothing is bothering you. The more something bothers you the more you respond to it. However, depending on how house-broken you are, you’ll put up with degrading levels of abuse before you stand up for yourself. Some people are so housebroken they’d let themselves get poked to death with a stick. Some people are so housebroken they’d kill to keep getting poked by that familiar stick.

Some people get fed up with getting poked by the stick and stand up and take the stick away. From an evolutionary standpoint, it sort of makes sense. If there’s no need for heroes then nobody would be motivated to become a hero. Unfortunately, heroes don’t seem to stand up until the poking has turned into bloody beatings.

So you have to ask yourself, how much are you getting poked? Have you ever seen anyone getting hurt or killed from the poking around you? And at what level would you actually stand up and be a hero? Or would you take your beatings to the grave?

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Be Better People, Growing up and Becoming You

October 28, 2009

No Action Is An Island

By wise sloth

 

Have you ever known anyone who dated an asshole and was miserable because of it? Did it ever annoy you how they’d constantly make excuses for why their significant other was an asshole and why they were going to put up with it? The whole time they were making excuses you were probably thinking, “That person was an asshole yesterday. That person is an asshole today. That person is going to be an asshole tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?” Well, your friend was oblivious yesterday. They’re oblivious today, and they’re going to be oblivious tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?

How you act in a given situation is how you can be expected to act in any other similar situation. Everything you do or think is a piece of a pattern of thoughts and behavior that has existed in your past and will exist in your future.

No action is an isolated incident. Everything is part of a pattern. This is why psychologists and fake psychics understand you so well even if they only know a little bit about you. They understand that every little detail they know about you is indicative of a larger whole.

This is why bad drivers and people who stand in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store blocking 15 shoppers while they stare mindlessly at a jar of pickles should piss you off. If they’re dumb enough to do that one seemingly idiotic thing, then how far does that pattern stretch throughout the rest of their lives?

So you have to ask yourself, what are your tendencies? Are there any tendencies you have that you try to minimalize or make excuses for? The next time you do some small irrational thing, stop and try to find how that irrational action fits into a pattern in your life because I guarantee it does.

Next time someone is mean to you and comes up with a seemingly valid excuse for why their meanness was an accident, don’t believe them. The only accident was that they let you see the real pattern beneath the mask they’re wearing.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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