In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.
Life is a big and complex game. It's the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats, and we're placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages.
When people lay around whining to their therapists and ex-wives that they're finally going to 'change' themselves, they are promising something imaginary and made up.
What's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I'm going to get.
I hate calendars, and after running my own online business for almost 10 years, I still don't have one.
When most people set out to change their lives, they often focus on all the external stuff, like a new job or a new location or new friends or a new romantic prospects and on and on. The reality is that changing your life starts with changing the way you see everything in your life.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.
At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms.
Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.
Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.