You must allow yourself to outgrow and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of ruthlessness.”
— Katy Maxwell
I withdraw from people and places from time to time. I need space from a world that is filled with millions of mouths that talk too much, and never have anything to say.”
— Kaitlin Foster
It’s so concerning how social-media has glamourised the worst of human attributes: vanity, exaggerated self-importance, boastfulness, materialism, deception, envy, ostentation, narcissism, superiority. Please don’t be programmed into believing that any of these traits are positive, they’re not.
high standards are pure. protection from unhappiness. nothing wrong with wanting best for yourself.
𓂃 your life revolves around you and it always has. if you feel the need to stop and catch your breath, do it. time moves forward, but your life will never be able to continue without you.
𓂃 the way people talk to you about others is a direct reflection of how they talk to others about you. remember that.
𓂃 life is too short to stay quiet. your voice carries you as much as you carry your voice.
𓂃 nobody pays as much attention to you as you think they do.
𓂃 nobody’s expecting you to do something useful every day. you shouldn’t expect that from yourself either.
𓂃 nothing that matters to you is useless. if it’s important to you then it’s important, period.
𓂃 don’t live every day like it’s your last–rather like it’s your first. get to know your space, get comfortable where you aren’t yet, try new things but not everything at once. and look forward to things that are coming.
𓂃 you’re only responsible for what you can control and influence. focus on that.
𓂃 stop trying to be okay all the time. you do not have to be okay all the time.
𓂃 it’s more common to have a soft and protecting tummy than to have flat abs. both is healthy, both is pretty.
𓂃 your teens are not your only chance on having a good, fulfilled, and social life. if you can’t find your place in high school you will in another environment. this isn’t where it ends.
𓂃 you have the right to change your mind over and over and over again until you’re happy.
things you can do at any stage in life:
- love yourself
- have a fresh start
- go back to school
- recover
- make new friends
- fall in love
- go to therapy
- learn a skill
- discover your passion
- repair relationships
- change the world
- find a new hobby
- be happy
it isn’t too late for you. you’ll be okay. there’s no time limit on happiness.
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.”
— Margaret Mead
Keep on being scared, work with your fear. Stop lying to yourself - always speak the truth, especially internally. Keep on failing but identify why you failed - change your behaviour. Accept the pain, the suffering, the uncertainty. Make your way towards the things that are a struggle but you know - you already know but you might be lying to yourself because you are afraid - will take you towards a bright future.
“But self-knowledge is not the remedy I prescribe to myself. I want as much self-knowledge as I can get —let me not be deceived— but self-knowledge isn’t the goal I seek. Strength, strength is what I want. Strength not to endure, I have that and it has made me weak —but strength to act.”
— Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1964.
If you tend to flit between different interests, learn to focus long enough to develop a skill or make a contribution to your community or field, otherwise your energy will have accomplished nothing but satisfy your curiosity.
- Zadie Smith, NW
“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says-“you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting-it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
— Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
“There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home and writes a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ and 'on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.”
— Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
Don’t demand that your kids find and follow their “passion”.
Don’t demand that your kids become doctors.
Teach them to be curious, seek fulfillment from hard work, and follow through with projects.
“Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. Moreover the writer invents himself [or herself] as a character in this form. He shapes himself from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned.”
— Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” trans. Clare Kavanaugh, Poetry (June 2010)
Relaxation advice from Cal Newport’s most recent habit tune-up:
- Get away from work you normally do
- Focus on projects that don’t have deadlines
- Focus on interesting projects that are not stressful
- The brain needs sleep and variety, not non-activity
- The mind needs regular and sustained freedom from time pressure-induced stress
Quality of Life
I prefer the concept of “quality of life” than the concept of “happiness”. “Pursuing happiness” involves chasing feelings or outcomes that you believe you want, material or nonmaterial. But we often do not pick these wisely. Much of what we pursue is unsatisfying. It is easy to pursue either 1) pleasure, which is momentary or 2) outcomes which may not be more fulfilling than the feelings of satisfaction that accompany any achievement.
It is important to prioritize outcomes that constitute life conditions that will maximize experiences of joy, progress, and peace. It takes wisdom and self-exploration to understand what these outcomes are. We evolved to find health, family, community, and nature rewarding; these are good places to start. Contributing to a cause or developing a passion are good ones as well.
But it’s not always easy to enjoy something fully. How do we even teach ourselves to enjoy these experiences? Mindset comes first. it is equally important to maximize the way you experience. Immerse yourself in small moments of gratitude. Count positives. Keep setting goals, pushing yourself, thriving, and enjoy the feelings of satisfaction. Watch your abilities grow and the sum of the moments in your life become more beautiful.
Quality of life = Mindset -> Conditions -> Outcomes
people ask me all the time how i’m so confident and its because i stopped being afraid of myself. i stopped being afraid of expressing myself in full. i stopped being afraid of being me. i stopped being afraid of my body and the reactions that are out of my hands. i stopped being afraid of my natural features and allowed my hair to flourish and grow in all parts of my body. i turned that anxious energy that thrummed inside of me into excitement and turned my pain into power. i rebuilt my foundation from the ground up and decided that i was going to build an empire for myself because i deserve it. an empire built by my actions, decisions, and the love i choose to show up for myself with.
The simple fact is that people who achieve excellence in their fields didn’t just have a dream. They got up at 4:00 am to practice on parallel bars or had to forgo other desirable activities and paths in order to get in six hours of violin practice a day, or stayed off several million absurd writing advice blogs with their overheated little cliques that dispense useless regurgitated maxims and empty praise and decide to actually confront their own thoughts on a page. Or they read Beowulf and Dante carefully and deeply when they didn’t see any point, since all they were interested in was Sylvia Plath, because someone of more experience and wisdom told them to do so. I don’t know whether we’re overly lazy, stupid, or childish these days. But the idea of preparing oneself for excellence has somehow disappeared. So – my advice to dreamers: Don’t just follow your dreams. Earn them. Do what it takes to achieve it. Work for it. Don’t just sit there and dream because if you do, it will never, ever be yours.”
— Harrison Solow, Don’t Follow Your Dream
- Remove the perverse pressure to enjoy things
- End the need for efficiency and simply be efficient
- Beautiful experiences for their own sake
- Restrict technology use
- More challenge, more exposure, more things to be curious about
“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, from “The artist’s responsibility,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)
The way you treat animals matters to me.
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
“There are two reasons why people don’t talk about things; either it doesn’t mean anything to them, or it means everything.”
— Luna Adriana
One real person is enough.
That dream was planted in your heart for a reason, tend to it, love it, wait for it to bloom.
TO LEARN YOURSELF, ASK YOURSELF:
1. What are my five best qualities?
2. In my life, what do I desire, ultimately?
3. When it comes to life, what ‘moves’ me?
4. What does the evolved “me” look like?
5. Am I ‘proud’ of myself? Why (not)?
[…]
Rereading a treasured and well-used book is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look.
If you genuinely enjoy being alone, do you ever wonder if it is an inherent part of your character or if it stems from feeling inescapably lonely in the first place until you taught yourself to enjoy the peace and happiness one can find in solitude? what if the reason you now prefer & choose solitude at every turn is because you were a very lonely child, or teenager, not by your own choice, and that’s how you learnt to thrive and grow, so you no longer know if you can do that around people? There might also be an element of personal pride, an unconscious “you can’t fire me I quit” point when your brain decided to switch your feelings about solitude from distress to relief. I often find myself defending my love of being alone, to people who worry that I can’t possibly be happy to live in an isolated house in the woods; I insist that I do! I really do specifically enjoy the isolated factor and chose to live here because of it, but then I wonder how to differentiate an ingrained love of solitude from an acquired ability to thrive off unchosen loneliness, to learn from it and be nourished by it; to what extent it might be a form of contentment built on a bedrock of resignation.
Live with your century, but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries, but create what they need, not what they praise.”
— Friedrich Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man
1. Do you ever wish you were someone else?
I wish I could experience others’ lives within my current mind. I would want to interpret them in the context of my value system/knowledge base. Otherwise, not a chance. My mind is a machine that lets me enjoy life. Sometimes I wish I were less cerebral/creative, but that’s usually fleeting and more out of frustration with whether I will ever feel that I’ve reached my potential.
12: What do you think about the most?
How to create conditions of (physical, social, emotional) well-being in a secular society. How a person in xyz circumstances can develop awareness of their thoughts/emotions
21: Do you believe in love at first sight?
No. Even if you think it’s love at first sight, the subsequent falling in love is only possible if they’re meeting your needs/standards in other ways. If you see a beautiful person but then despise their personality, you would never even have to opportunity to retrospectively look back and call it love at first sight. You can only do that if you end up loving them. Therefore, it’s meeting your needs/standards that makes it love, not the first sight. Which isn’t a particularly useful statement.
49: Where’s the most magical place on earth?
Beautiful places are beautiful because they evoke feelings of reverence (for nature, God, etc.). I’m not religious, but the feeling of stepping into a church or mosque is magical. I want to visit a monastery one day.
Hold onto your values until they stop serving you. Question your values often, replace them when you lose conviction in their worth. Pause. Center yourself. Do not compromise your standards, keep raising them and striving upward. Do not live up to your environment, do not escape it either. Create an inner environment that reflects your values and let it radiate outward. Hold your ground. Have the frame to provide influence, but be receptive to those that fit your goals.
from “ask polly: why should i keep going?”
I have never understood people who don’t have aspirations to become the best at whatever field they’re in.
an author i love just tweeted about how “big joy and small joy are the same” and how she was just as content the other night eating chocolate and cuddling her dog as she was on her Big Trip to new york and honestly. i think that’s it. this morning i was listening to an audiobook while baking shortbread in my joggers and i realised i really didn’t care what Big Things happened in my future as long as i could keep baking and reading at the weekend and maybe that is the kind of bar we have to set to guard ourselves against disappointment. just appreciate and cherish the mundane stuff and see everything else as a bonus.
not to be all fake deep but tumblr honestly feels like a home to me. it’s different from any other social media. it’s timeless. it has bought me a lot of comfort and sense of community and belonging during hard times. even just reblogging pretty pictures and poetry feels so soothing and like an escape. the stuff I read on here genuinely inspires and motivates me. I grew up using this site idk it’s like a part of me… I could delete all other social media and not be hugely affected because they’re all just surface level stuff but tumblr is the one that I have an actual attachment to. I would be actually heartbroken if they ever decided to delete this site
as the colder months approach: i wish you all a healthy, calm end of the year. i wish you tasty cups of tea, comfortable clothes, warm beds, nutritious meals in safe homes, good music, new friends and unwavering health. you deserve good things now.
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.
being individuals together is so intimate. let’s read different books but curled up next to each other, let’s visit a coffee shop so you can study & i can write, let’s just be near each other
You will answer your big life questions for yourself. The voices around you will only contribute to your database, and from them you will draw patterns that converge into an answer.
Question your fears. Fears come from intuition, which come from experiences, which cannot be generalized.
If one is ungrateful for what he has, he is unlikely to be grateful to receive anymore.
When someone has no sense for graciousness and instead believes that everything is owed to him, no amount of benefit is enough to impress him.
There are young heirs of millions who despise their parents. This is quite often the fault of those parents themselves, who failed to impart the right kind of values into their children.
To believe that the world owes you everything is to permanently alienate yourself from thankfulness which is the chief joy of this life. It is to chain yourself to a misery that will be exploited by others but produce no benefit for yourself.
“To believe that the world owes you everything is to permanently alienate yourself from thankfulness which is the chief joy of this life.”
You’re ruining someone else
because you want them to be another you.
— Juliet Cook, from “Chicken Corset,” NEO Goddesses
Prioritize character development and all your decisions can be aligned with goals you chose for yourself, based on your values, rather than from external pressure. From this place, progress comes more easily and is more rewarding.
“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
— George Santayana
If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.”
— Umberto Eco, “The Art of Fiction, No. 197”, The Paris Review (Summer 2008, No. 185)
reading about random things. educating yourself on cultures that died ages ago. excitement in learning new languages. having a cup of hot coffee/tea on a rainy sunday morning. staying up late to finish reading that one book. quoting shakespeare for no specific reason. listening to slow music while doing school work. singing your favorite song off key when no one is watching. smiling at animals. wearing clothes that makes you feel comfortable. laying on bed after a long tiring day. late night drives on empty roads. complimenting strangers. helping an elderly person to cross the road. hugging your best friend. smell of earth after rain. making others laugh. holding hands.
What is this place between hopeless romantic and strong independent individual
I call it the Jane Austen heroine
Smoked a cigarette tonight, alone on my balcony.
It felt strange.
It felt as if I was playing a role, the old me, the self I was years ago, in the parisian fog of my late teenage years.
It’s not me anymore.
I’ve never had this feeling before. I’ve changed. It’s not me anymore.
Literally just romanticize your own life. What’s stopping you. Who will care. Commit to enjoying things.
To me, success isn’t outscoring someone, it’s the peace of mind that comes from self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best. That’s something each individual must determine for himself.
— Steve Andreas
0 books I want to read in 2019:
- The Bible and The Book of Mormon (My goal is at least 1 text per major religion)
- To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
- Deep Nutrition (Catherine Shanahan)
- The Anxiety Disease (David Sheehan)
- Maps of Meaning (Jordan Peterson)
- Either/Or (Soren Kierkeegard)
- Notes from Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Dominican Migration (Frank Graziano) (A random textbook I never finished)
- All books I’m currently reading, i.e. The Book of Joy (Douglas Adams), Silver on the Tree (Susan Cooper), Atonement (Ian McEwan), 12 Rules for Life (Jordan Peterson)
- Recipe books so I can nail domesticity before starting graduate school
Overall my goals are
- Finish full novels rather than excerpts. It’s more rewarding to see a book to completion and appreciate the circularity in its themes
- Get through more classic literature
- Start reading books with practical value (i.e. Deep Nutrition)
I’m also gravitating towards books that don’t reflect my values but rather perspectives I don’t have and want to have
Consider yourself tagged if you’re following me and happen to rea
when friedrich nietzsche said “your whole and most personal love: your whole love shelters and saves and nourishes. where your whole love is, there is also your whole virtue”
Recognized how much blank spaces in my day need to be filled with activity rather than anxious contemplation and needless intellectualising
As you get older, your life is not only an outcome of your actions, but you are an EXAMPLE of the consequences, and the values that accompany them (good or bad)
Whatever your morals and whatever your character, you cannot escape embodying them, for you have LIVED THEM OUT.
- Alexander J.A. Cortes
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
— Emerson
Looking back, why have I spent so much of my adolescent and young adult life on poetry, philosophy, literature? On words and affirmations? I relied on them at the time, but not anymore. Did I ever need them? Literature can save people, but action is faster.
And the rest of it on analysis, or deep in nostalgia, or simply not present. A lot of it was beautiful because I love the aesthetics of writing but I wonder whether a lot of it amounts to nothing. I can’t tell. How much life have I sacrificed by living in my head?
Was it wise to make life decisions for the sake of growth? What about knowledge? Those are qualitatively different. The second refers to life decisions I made solely to develop my model of the world via intuitions gained from diverse experiences. At minimum, these decisions led to the contentedness of being justified in the ends, if not the means.
Why didn’t I just do what made me happy? Maybe a simpler concept of happiness is more useful.
Problematic as he may be, Nietzsche was right about will to power: you either push yourself into existence or become increasingly trapped within yourself. I still do think most people today have lost the grand sense of meaning that seems to permeate the writings of our ancestors, but the people I know that seem to experience the most fulfilled lives rarely stop to ask themselves philosophical (cowardly?) questions about metaphysics or an ultimate telos for humanity. They simply act on their convictions—they push their convictions into existence—and that honestly might be enough.
I was deep into philosophy back in the day and it wasn’t until I realized the above that I started to enjoy life and get somewhere.
Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity: posing problems objectively and coolly is part of its inheritance, for Buddhism comes after a philosophic movement which spanned centuries. The concept of ‘God’ had long been disposed of when it arrived. Buddhism is the only genuinely positivistic religion in history. This applies even to its theory of knowledge (a strict phenomenalism): it no longer says ‘struggle against sin’ but, duly respectful of reality, 'struggle against suffering.’ Buddhism is profoundly distinguished from Christianity by the fact that the self-deception of the moral concepts lies far behind it. In my terms, it stands beyond good and evil.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
You need a rest. You need empty moments in which you tolerate your anxiety and circling thoughts until they slow down and stop circling. You need slow, quiet activities that ground you and remind you to accept yourself in spite of huge obstacles and bad thoughts. You need to put solutions out of your mind for now, and engage in activities that have nothing to do with your ego. You need habits that strengthen your patience and focus, but also feel real and not arbitrary. You need to abandon your glorious future and build your imperfect present instead.
Ask Polly: “I’m Lazy, Reckless and Addicted To Social Media. Help!”
https://lithub.com/against-catharsis-writing-is-not-therapy/
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