#and theres no end in sight like ok the honeymoon phase ends and then i have to listen to them argue I CNT DO THIS

[normiewizard]

in a sawtrap designed to make me kill myself called my roommates are dating

[monoshah]

This is a Selfish Post- Part 1.5

Amongst the many obscene feelings we feel, a very common one is the feeling that time is passing too fast. That, life is passing us by and we’re just..watching.

In fact, the Dictionary of Obscure sorrows has a specific word for this feeling- Zenosyne: the sense that time is going too fast.

Think about it- the last time I wrote this post, it was the start of 2017 and now, we’re already six months in.

So, to make this law of universe seem a little sane, I use my selfish posts as a way to stop and reflect.

The past six months have been pretty eventful and I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to learn a ton, not just form things that happened to me, but, from the people I met.

Here’s a list of those lessons (ps- if you’re a little confused about this title and not sure what its about, I’d suggest starting with the first part).

- All of our problems are so trivial (and so are we):  For the past six months, I had the privilege to live in Sevilla, Spain, for an internship experience. Rest assured, I did not know a word of Spanish, nor was I aware of the Spanish culture. And, although this may seem “irresponsible”, living in a foreign country with new people who speak a language you don’t quite understand fully made me learn something- that, at the end of the day, the problems we face are so trivial. Additionally, this made me realize how small we are; we are just a tiny dot in a circle populated by dots. Now, whenever I feel too “closed up” from my mind, I remind myself this and it helps me open up.  After reading about this a bit more, I found out that The Stoics practiced a similar exercise, it was called “the view from above” and you can watch the video here. 

- Thinking about the “What ifs” may not kill you after all: During my time in Spain, there were so many things I was asked to do, that, normally, I’d say no to because of fear. For instance- on my first weekend, a couple of people from work asked me to go out clubbing with them. Now, I’m very socially anxious and awkward (hey, I write ok!), and find the whole clubbing scene pretty bizarre. And so, when I received this invitation, my mind automatically started producing excuses for not showing up, additionally, it also convinced me how everything would go wrong if I decided to go out. However, instead of solely thinking about failure, I asked myself- “Ok, maybe everything could go wrong and you’d be the most socially awkward guy out there. But- what if, just what if, everything went right for once? What if you actually enjoyed yourself tonight?” . And guess what? I had a pretty good night. I took a similar approach to other opportunities I’d automatically say no to- going away for the weekend, traveling, etc.

Further, this made me curious- why do we think what we think? Why do I, for instance, automatically think about negative things whenever someone asks me to go out clubbing? After reading some books about it I found out that there these automatically patterns are related to things that happened in our past, and, they directly influence our mood. This is why I always felt so depressed when someone mentioned clubbing.

I wrote a post about it (you can read it here).

- We don’t need a lot of money to thrive: The topic of money has always fascinated me, since, by nature, we do so much to gain more: shy away from our initial passions, hold onto toxic relationships, and countless other things that can negatively impact our character. And, since forever, the phrase “that’s how the world works, so get used to it” has been instilled in our minds.

However, what if i told you that you did have the option of not basing your entire life to gain as much money as possible? What if you did have a choice to stay sane, do what you love for a living, thrive, and not worry too much about gaining more money?

During my time in Spain, as an intern, I earned about eighty three cents an hour. That added up to about 200 euros a month, which, compared to America, is nothing. However, I learned that if we wisely distinguish between the things we really need vs things we want, we can not only thrive with less but also improve ourselves in the process without sacrificing a lot. I learned that it all comes down to one question- apart from the basic necessities, what things or services matter to us? So, instead of allocating thirty euros a month on clothes, I allocated the same amount to buying books. Why? Because they give me value.

Further, I read a book that changed my perspective about the psychology of Money. Its called “How to worry less about Money” and is written by John Armstrong. Whether or not money is a worry for you, I recommend this to everyone. It discusses the whole psychology of money and makes us ask important questions like “How much money do we really need (hint- the answer isn’t “as much as possible’).   It also takes a very different approach to discussing what money essentially is, making the readers see the real picture, so, we’re not as intimidated by the topic.

-  Our emotions can be managed: At the start of this year, I started reading a book called Emotional intelligence, written by a psychologist named Daniel Goleman. This book taught me everything there is to know about emotions- what are they, why they are the way they are, and how we can manage them.Further, it also made me understand that today,whether or not one is “smart”, being emotionally intelligent is more important. Why? Not only to live in harmony with everyone, but, to also understand ourselves and our automatic patterns of thought and feeling.

More practically, this book helped me thrive at work, since, I was better able to manage my mood. It also affected my personal life as I got more kinder with the people around me.

Theres a lot to cover here so I wrote a detailed post about it here and here. 

- Crushes are delusional: In December last year, I decided to read more about love. Why? Well, Victor Frankyl’s words about love fascinated me:

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

I wanted to find out- is love really that great? I mean sure, the honeymoon phase is wonderful but what after that? What happens to couples who want to live their lives together? I wondered if there’s a reason why romantic comedies and love stories end when the boy and the girl meet and kiss. The  chase is great, but, real life is after that isn’t it?

So, following that, I read a ton of books- both fiction and non fiction, about love. And, I learned the following things: >We’re all lonely and begging to be understood by someone, and so, we all need love >Jane Austen’s novels were remarkably useful. From It I learned never to judge someone at first sight, especially from just their physical appearance and/or portrayed wealth.   >Life is unfair: Following my second observation, in today’s society, we do judge people by their appearance. Think about it- we go to a club and the only people we notice are the good looking ones. There’s no time for us to sit down with someone and ask them about their story, their vices. No wonder why we’re so focused on exercising our bodies and don’t bother taking care of our minds.

Despite that, however, reading about love is like reading about learning how to swim. Thus, to make things more interesting, I engaged in  deep journaling session whenever I felt attracted to someone. I tried to rationalize the reasons for my crush. And, surprisingly, my reasons were irrational. I learned that when we’re attracted to someone, we let the heart take over. And, although thats great for an actor working on a movie or a writer, writing a love story, for us, in reality, its not that great because it makes us delusional. From their blue eyes to the way they tie their hair.,every thing they do or are makes us believe that they are the one. That this is it, that, it couldn’t get any better.

Unfortunately, that’s not real.  We’re essentially attracted to someone who in reality, isn’t what we think he/she is.

You can read more about this here.

- We will never find the “right” person to marry: Why? Because we ourselves don’t know who we need/ who this “right” individual is.  This may sound a little cliche and if that makes you critical about that statement, I request you to think about it again.

I learned that by nature, none of us truly understand ourselves. We feel emotions and think thoughts we don’t quite understand the reasons for. This is exactly why life seems so “messy”, because we’re trying to understand the world and hack it, while at the same time, struggling to make sense of ourselves.

Then, we find someone who our delusional self thinks is “the right one” and we try to understand them, fully believing after some years that we do.

The goal then, other than striving to achieve a more Socratic level of self knowledge is to stop considering each and everyone partner as the “right one” and instead- acknowledging that because of the unfortunate reality that we don’t really know what kind of person we need, relationships are bound to be messy. And, once the romantic honeymoon phase is over, maintaining a relationship is an art, something that we need to learn.

I repeat- something that we need to learn (here’s a good start).

Here’s The Philosopher Alain De Botton in his popular article “Why you will marry the wrong person” written for the New York Times:

“Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating”

You can read the entire article here.

If you’re intrigued by this concept, I suggest reading this book.

- A hack for overcoming Shyness:I am pretty social anxious and this makes many things difficult as most of life is interacting and dealing with people. Going to networking events needs a lot of planning and courage. And, if you want to convince me to go out clubbing, you need to have the patience to deal with my stupid excuses (trust me, I’m pretty good).

However, being in Spain exposed me to my fear. The Spanish culture admires social relationships and it’s actually considered normal for people to go out clubbing from Wednesday nights. So, as I went out multiple times with my friends, I noticed how I started becoming less anxious. So much so, the initial automatic flow of negative thoughts stopped, whenever someone invited me for a night out.

I wanted to make this a little more concrete and just in time, I was fortunate enough to read something about shyness that made it seem so trivial; cosmopolitism- a new way of relating to strangers.

The concept emerged during the several encounters in the Greece and Rome civilization. Because these encounters were between people who lived very different lives, certain thinkers developed an approach which proposed that all these humans, whatever their surface variations, shared a common core- that they’re all human.

Here’s The School Of Life in the book “On Being Nice”:

Someone becomes a cosmopolitan not on the basis of having a buoyant or gregarious nature but because they re in touch with a fundamental truth about humanity, because they know that, irrespective of appearance, we are the same species beneath, an insight that tongue-tied guest at the party or the awkward seducer in the restaurant are guilty of implicitly refusing./ /The Pimple boy doesn’t discover that he and the high-school beauty share a case in humor and similarly painful relationships with their fathers; the middle-aged lawyers never unearths a shared love of rockets with her neighbor’s eight year old son. Race and ages continue not to mingle, to their collective detriments. Shyness is a touching, yet ultimately excessive and unwarranted, way of feeling special.

Here’s a great video by The School of life that explains this concept.

Lastly, here’s the book I was referring to (it’s great if you’ve ever wondered what it really means to be “nice”).

- Making time vs Having time: Despite the idea that life is pretty unfair, there is something about it that proves otherwise- the fact that we’ve all been given 24 hours in a day. That is, time to do anything we’d like to do. Its a clean slate and we can fill it in anyway we want to.  However, despite knowing this, we don’t spend enough time for self-care.

The past six months I’ve learned a lot of self-care: the whole idea of prioritizing daily activities for yourself that help provide value. In my life, that involves working out five times a week, meditating daily, and reading and writing everyday. I learned that engaging in activities that bring us value doesn’t mean acting selfish. In reality, we’re doing it to make ourselves feel better, which, in a very real sense will help us deal with everyone else calmly. So, if you really think about it, self-care isn’t just for us, its for the people we engage with daily, our family & friends.

It was fascinating to see how my mood was different when I did not work-out in the morning that day, or, if I forgot to mediate. So, for self-care, one has to make time because these things are what’s really important. The rest is trivial.

How about you substitute thirty minutes of TV with a high intensity interval training session? You don’t have time to Meditate? Those extra ten minutes you spent surfing YouTube for cat videos are sufficient to take care of your mind.

Make a list of everything that gives you value and include them in your morning or evening routine. Its not important to check every activity off but the attempt is what makes all the difference.

-Saying “No” is harder for a reason: With the Spanish culture being so outgoing, it was necessary for me to learn how to say “No”. Saying no to partying every weekend, no to travelling every weekend, no to skipping work and taking long coffee breaks. However, more than it being necessary, I noticed how hard it was. I started observing how I started saying “Yes” to things I’d normally want to say no to, just to avoid conflict or get away with it. So much so, I’d started dreading my decision an hour after I accepted a House Party invitation.

Then, for a week, I decided to experiment. In it, I promised myself to do everything opposite. So, if I’d automatically say Yes to things, for this one week, I would have to gather the courage to say no. Fortunately, that week helped me understand that not only is it ok to say not, but, to some extent, it’s necessary to have boundaries.

One week turned into one month and slowly I started really thinking about every invitation. And, if I had a legitimate reason to not attend, I’d happily say no without any guilt or the fear of missing out.

I learned that it’s harder to say no because when we do that, we’re actually saying yes to things that matter to us. Things that grant us value. I said no to a skiing trip with my work friends because I was saying yes to a weekend trip to Barcelona with my best friend. I said no to a Wednesday night partying invite because I was saying yes to the next day’s gym session. I said no to becoming the president of a club at my college because I was saying Yes to other things I’d be focusing on- academics, acting, a part-time job, etc.

-If you master the small, the big picture takes care of itself: I learned to apply this concept everywhere in my life- productivity, becoming fear(less) (not fearless, there’s a difference), and habit setting. Normally, when we think of becoming productive, getting over our fears, or forming new habits, our goals automatically become so grand.

So much so, it overwhelms us and we don’t do anything. I learned that if we focus too much on the big picture, we forget what shapes it- smaller details. And, so, similarly, we forget that by taking care of the smaller details, the grand picture can be influenced.

To give you an example in the area of becoming fear(less), I am very scared of driving in India. When I tried to give my practical exam a couple of years ago, I couldn’t even move the car forward (even if thats what it took to pass the exam). My confidence while driving a motor vehicle is very low. However, the concept of breaking this down into smaller details and goals is helping me get back on track again. Instead of dreaming about becoming the perfect driver with a valid license,  I started to break the ultimate goal down into smaller steps (that, if followed properly, will eventually get me there).

The first goal was to obtain a learners license, which required me to study for it while I was in Spain. Once I passed that, my goal was simply to trust the process and visit my driving school everyday to learn things about driving confidently. And, once that has been done, I will start practicing driving on roads. The goal being that I can practice everyday to build my confidence. Ultimately, the plan is to obtain a license right now and then resuming my practice whenever I am back home for holidays.

You get the idea.

- Unfairness is everywhere (and that’s OK): Pretty recently, I lost a loved one and I couldn’t help but notice how, after a few days, life just went on for everyone. It reminded me that everything is so trivial because at the end of the day, we have the possibility of leaving life right this very moment. And guess what? Once you do, people close to you will feel bad. Of course they will. However, as times goes on, so will life. And just like another old book in the shelf, your time will be over. We will all return to where we came from and to some degree I find that pretty unfair. Life has a way of convincing us to move on.

I learned that life is unfair, and the sooner we get used to it the better. Why? Because it can help us stay sane. When we achieve some sort of success, for example, this can remind us to stay grounded as whether we like it or not- success is not fully in our control. And here’s the better part- this can show us how to rate ourselves, not by success’ or failures, but, by doing what’s in our control everyday.

Ryan Holiday described this perfectly in his book Ego is the Enemy:

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

- Engaging in premeditatio malorum helps: Before I started Meditating everyday, I used to be extremely anxious. It would require a lot of effort from my side to do everyday things like going on a holiday for instance. I would overthink the worst that would happen in every scenario, making me naturally upset and pissed off.

Fortunately, meditation helped me calm down. That said, however, I still find myself tensing over things I cannot control.To fight this, I learned to engage in an exercise that used to be practiced by The Stoics. Its called premeditatio malorum, which roughly translates to premeditating about evil/ admittedly visualizing negative situations. Basically, it means thinking (or better- writing) about possibly everything that could go wrong.

Then, once you have a list, think about how you could possibly avoid such disasters and/or realize that at the end of the day, in reality, regardless of how bad things get, life is going to be ok.

Its basically a “what’s the worst that could happen?” exercise.

I journaled about this whenever there was something that was troubling me and it helped. I realized that 1) not everything we think is going to happen. Infact, most of the times, nothing we think every happens and 2) Even if something does happen, by meditating about it previously, our approach to dealing with it is better.

You can read more about this here.

Further, Tim Ferris had an excellent TED talk about this, wherein, he spoke about how he used this exercise to become fear(less) about life. You can watch that here.

Productivity is simple: No, I mean it. Stop spending hours trying to find the perfect app. Getting work done doesn’t require sophisticated code and good design (it helps, yes, but they’re not necessary).

It requires principles. 

I wrote about this here. 

Things I’m going to experiment with, henceforth:

- Expressing my emotions: To not bottle things up inside - Using the “shyness hack” I described above to speak out - Journaling on a regular basis (daily- either in the morning or evening) - Learning more about relationships - Reading more about Stoicism and using this website to gain knowledge daily: How To Be Stoic

- Seeking Love and Courage. Love for anything that happens in life and the courage to face it. Source- The Daily Stoic newsletter (you can sign up here). 

That’s all for now Folks

To focus a little more on my writing projects, I’m going to be taking a break from writing on my blog till the end of this year.

That said, I will keep updating my Facebook page in case I write any guest posts.

I don’t reckon anyone made it this far, but regardless- Thank you for all your love and support.

See y’all on the other side :)