conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack.
The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Why? because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.
The Feedback Loop from Hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing.
Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering.
Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress. People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that it’s easy and feels good. Because happiness requires struggle.
Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for. Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.
Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. And yet, pleasure is what’s marketed to us, twenty- four/seven. It’s what we fixate on.
people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
if the people in your relationships are selfish and doing hurtful things, it’s likely you are too, you just don’t realize it.
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.
Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others. The human mind is a jumble of inaccuracy. Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. Action → Inspiration → Motivation. If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant.
Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting. there is a freedom and liberation in commitment. I’ve found increased opportunity and upside in rejecting alternatives and distractions in favor of what I’ve chosen to let truly matter to me.