Waking Up
The hardest thing to handle when you're working on something as complicated as yourself is this: when you wake up in the morning, you have to start all over again. The conscious thoughts you had yesterday have to be almost rediscovered today.
I've been recently coming to grips with my mind and how it's formed around negativity most of my life. So naturally, I'm trying to pull the unnatural when I'm trying to see all the events that happen to me in a positive light. And it usually takes some time to get back to the good mood I get in when I'm viewing things this way simply because it is so different from the actual makeup of my brain.
I usually wake up in an above-average mood when I fall asleep around people. That might be normal. But I want to be able to wake up and be in an excellent mood regardless.
I'm working on it.
“Offensive” KFC Ads
I'm tired of seeing these kinds of things, something needs to be said.
Here's a post from Mashable, with a completely subjective title reporting a KFC ad from Australia on YouTube which is offending some people. My thoughts: you're all idiots. Otherwise? See for yourself: Is This KFC Ad Racist? [VIDEO].
Look. People. I know there are still some in this country who haven't gained any kind of respect for humanity or considered a perspective from someone other than themselves, despite everything the country's gone through over the past half-century. Maybe there are still hard feelings. Maybe it's just another bad case of ignorance. But this is the time-- to get over yourselves. Whether you know this or not, every time you get offended by something, someone else gets power over you. If equality is what you're looking for, stop getting so offended. A word is a word. A stereotype is a stereotype. You are the ones who are giving it meaning, and a negative one at that.
They bring up how a poll was conducted, 27 percent say the ad is racist, 69 say it isn't, blah blah. Yeah, no shit. There will always be people who are so stuck on a negative idea that they could find spaghetti offensive. Business will never win in this field because they have to please the masses. Tough luck to KFC.
The point is what this means to the individual. Half of the women-friends I have don't get offended by the word "cunt." It's a word used regularly in daily conversation and exchanged both ways, in fact. But I also have friends so drawn back by the word that they'll smack me before I can finish the fourth letter. It's a mixed bag and always will be. But you give a word, stereotype, or idea its power by getting offended. Solution? Don't.
Seeing the Beauty
I like to think of any actions I take as this: something is bound to happen. Anything happening is good (and certainly better than nothing happening). So there's no balance to maintain-- everything becomes worthwhile.
This goes along with constantly thinking positively-- seeing the beauty in everything around you. I just recently took an 800-mile trip to the midwest because I felt trapped at my parents' house in my hometown. It snowed in Ohio and Indiana. Normally I would be upset, cautious, etc. But I enjoyed the light dusting on the road, the slight loss of traction I would encounter at 60 mph as I changed lanes, and even watching a semi jackknife off the road and barely avoid hitting an overpass' column head-on.
It goes along with the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to you if you avoid viewing it as such. This world we live in is too perfect to view anything negatively. So when there's something like a bag laying in the road, it's almost a decoration-- instead of a black segment of roadway (similar to the rest of the road), it's a more interesting piece of road in the world because it now has a white blob there.
It's a different view on life. Something that has, for the past month or so, been bringing me back to something happy when the world around me isn't working out in the way that I thought I wanted it to. We're just a tumbleweed in the wind, it's literally you and the world. And everything in it is, in the right light, beautiful.
Assigning Meaning
When you break everything down in life, you soon learn that nothing in life has an inherent meaning. I might've said this before, but now I'll take it a step further.
The only fool-proof way to have meaning to anything in your life is to assign a meaning to it. By the time you're the age you currently are, reading this, you've already assigned meaning to many things; fairly universal objects you've assigned meaning to would be money, time, your mortality, family, possibly spirituality, etc. But what about those things you don't quite have down so much as these? A common phrase I hear is "I'm [so many] years old and I still don't know what I want."
The truth is you'll never know. In fact, you'll never know anything for sure in your lifetime.1 Scary thought, possibly, but in this case it is a matter of choosing-- realizing that ultimately, all the decisions you make come down to you. Confidence is such an envied personality trait because it take a certain kind of individual to be so certain of oneself. Anyone who has this trait has had the balls to disregard external forces for one second, make a decision on what he/she likes, and just go with it. The same is required when deciding what you want.
On a personal note, when you break existence down as much as I have, you get to the point where you have all the pieces spread out before you and the only thing left to do is find out what to do with them, because they do you no good on their own. This is probably where the cliché "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"2 comes from.3
Some people are content working 9 to 5 all their life, retiring, and dying at a "reasonable" age. Some would rather do what they want to regardless of the standard. Some want kids, some don't want to get married. Some people believe in a higher power, some don't. These are all examples of different assigned meanings, each one specific to the individual who created them; it's in our nature.
1 For example, a discipline such as science involves using precedent and a created method to produce meaning out of rationalizations and logic; essentially nothing says the results produced are correct besides a set of guidelines.
2 In fact, life itself is lemons and, really, lemonade is simply one option.
3 It's always interesting how clichés usually have some kind of ridiculously true meaning to them but aren't ever explained. So when used when giving advice or something similar, the effect is next to nothing due to the fact that the phrase only scratches the surface.
Positive and Negative
This is life in a nutshell: you and the world. Inside you, there are two classifications of thought: positive and negative. Inside the world, you have an infinite amount of you's, each with an infinite amount of thoughts that fit these two classifications except you don't have control of these you's (we'll call them external you's).
You are like a points system. Positive thoughts give you a point and negative thoughts take away two points-- one for the negativity and one because the effortless nature of negative thoughts dictates that you have room for one more negative thought. Naturally, this is a recursively repeating downward spiral.
Negative thoughts don't get the credit they deserve in our world; in fact, they almost always sneak completely below the radar. On an individual basis, negative thoughts are the creators of depressing music; they're the birth of sad movies, paintings, and stories. They're the synthesis of your own negative thoughts and/or negative thoughts from external you's (and only these two things). On a broader scale, they're what most religions would define as "evil." And they come so easily because they are humanity's "default" setting. They are the things that happen to you that make you change yourself (for the worse), rather than enforce your current behavior. In psychology, they're appropriately named negative punishment. In philosophy, they're named subconscious motivations. These are the things that "just happen" early on and by the time you reach adolescence they have become a part of you.
Positive thoughts are the ones that build you up. They are the birth of smiles. They are the birth of laughter. They are a product of freedom from yourself and the world around you. Most of the time, however, they are so fleeting that they only last in these short moments of joy and laughter. And it is the nature of these transient thoughts that makes them the most rare of thoughts that can be thunk-- it makes positivity so rare that it can hardly be said to exist in our world at all.
So, ultimately, you have two ways to view life (since it is all relative to you): positive or negative. If positive thoughts are more appealing, know that they need to be fought for. If you're in the opposite side of the spectrum, step outside of you and view yourself as if you are really an external you. You simply need to realize where you are in relation to where you want to be.
At the end of the day, all that needs to be remembered is this: life is simple. People are complicated. Complication always overpowers simplicity, which is why our world/life "is" so complex. It doesn't have to be for you.
The Human Experience
We should all think twice about our existence. Not everything that is accepted by the crowd is true. The measurement of time and space could simply be a product of our intellect, just as state lines or manufacturing processes for Twinkies are. Our universe could be a tiny electrical spark in someone's mind-- a fleeting thought. We could contain an infinite amount of universes in our own minds. There's too much we don't know about the world we live in to not give what we "know" a second glance. Think. Step outside the norms and "proofs" and consider something only few dare to share with the world.
It's not comfortable. And it's not easy. But it's liberation. It's the closest you can come to heaven without dying. Embrace the thoughts and understand the power you hold simply in your mass of neural connections stored in what you know as your skull. Embrace something you don't know or what is not widely accepted and you will be unbound from the world you know as reality.
You're not the most important thing in the world. You may not have an inherent meaning. But meaning gets assigned as it is learned and experienced, simply by existing as an intellectual being. Run with this and don't let the dark places in your mind overpower the positive, because they will always be the first to occur to you. Nothing bad will ever happen to you in life unless you view it as such.
This is all part of the human experience-- stay thirsty, my friends.
This is why I don’t like society
When it comes down to it, I have one basic complaint about society. We spend the rest of our lives that we aren't so easily manipulated by it dealing with what it has made us into. So instead of living (granted, it doesn't make that very easy anyways), we are stuck wondering why everything doesn't work out for us or how to make the best of some situation we're in or anything you, as a human being, occupy your thoughts with when it concerns yourself.
And it makes life into such a waste of existence because half the time, we're too focused on the bullshit of our environment that we can't focus on ourselves or actually taking advantage of our existence that has been so shortened by society. And if we can just be free from the environmental standards and expectations on an individual basis, we can truly live rather than simply exist.
That's what I really want.
Putting a Title to a Situation
This isn’t the best thing to do. When I say situation, I mean anything that ranges from a state of mind to an environment to a relationship with another person. And this is why it seems, to me, to be a bad way of thinking.
I’m ever-changing; every day in my head is a different one. One day I might think I’m the shit because I can’t find it in me to care about anything anyone around me thinks. Another day I’ll think I haven’t changed at all and am accomplishing nothing. But I should avoid thinking them both. You see, the whole reason for changing myself has been an effect of me realizing that the cards I was dealt until this point in my life [when I finally gained some control] have been shit. Well, this same shit that I speak of occurs when I think of something solid—one of these titles; it essentially does the same thing as the obligations and expectations I’ve learned since birth that have screwed with my head: gives me something to abide by.
And that’s no good. In fact, that’s the whole point of not blindly accepting what you’re told from birth: you become a slave to these ideals and are never truly free (I’ll clarify free later). Yes, of course my parents had some things right that helped me become a good person and someone I actually like; but, just as well, they had some things wrong, similar to the other 6.8 billion of us—none of us have it all down, hence my personal never-ending quest for some kind of answers.
..And my search for freedom. What I mean by free is simple: truly your own thoughts; your own feelings; you. Obviously, in our social world this is a lot more complex than simply stating it. We’re all a product of society in one way or another, and it takes time to differentiate between causes for why you think/act the way you do and what novel conclusions you’ve come to on your own, using all the information you’ve gathered from the outside world. It’s not impossible, just difficult. So what I meant before was that realizing what inside your head is you and what is them will make you free. It keeps you in society but it keeps you above all the unreasonable and non-thoughtful ideas that have become reality in our world. In other words, you’ll be the one at the end of the day who isn’t upset with their life because they don’t have someone or because they are poor or any other so-called “necessity†that has been taught by the masses.
Putting a title on a situation infringes on freedom because it also rules-out flexibility more than it should. I’ll use “dating†as a title for an example.
Let’s say I’m dating a girl. I’ve known her a few months, but only really gotten to know her for the past few weeks. I think I like her; regardless of the reasons, I’ll leave it at that. Now, because of the dating title and inherent obligations (again, they’re already present based on society), if I meet another girl that I start to like, this is “bad.†For one, if I like her more than the girl I’m already with, I have to convince said girl that I want to “leave†her and break the expectations she holds me to as a result of our title. Even if I don’t decide I like New Girl more than Current Girl, if Current was to find out, again (depending on how invested she was in her expectations of me) I would affect her emotions negatively. This all seems silly to me—especially because of the expectations factor.
If you lower your expectations, you can’t be let down—this has been my mindset for a good while, because you can always go up. And once I internalized the fact that I can’t control anyone besides myself, it was even easier to give up all expectations I have in other people. But this is the main problem with having these titles I speak of. If you’re Current Girl in the example I mentioned above, you will have your “heart broken.†This will bring an onslaught of over-analyzations, what-did-I-do-wrong’s, the whole enchilada. This isn’t good for Current Girl, or any other human being, for that matter, that experiences this destruction of their expectations. So, quite simply, why do it?
On those days that I feel like I am completely free from what people around me think, it’s great. I consciously realize that I am, in fact, free from what all these other people think about me, and more subconsciously realize that nothing can bring me down—that is, until I let them in. This only brings me down because I expect that no one will affect me. If instead I walk around feeling free from the people around me and simply ride it—not recognize it—then I can continue to live it, all the while remaining flexible when I have to interact with people close to me, such as friends—people I do have to let it, even if it’s just a bit. In this case, it’s about managing your thoughts and when you start to realize how good of a mood you’re in or how on top of the world you are, you have to stop it and literally distract yourself. This keeps you free from not only others but also the darkest parts of yourself, which is half of the struggle in life.
Making Friends
It seems like I only wake up in a good mood when I’ve spent the night before with people I really enjoy. Other times it’s just a mediocre night, a mediocre day. But my mood this morning got me thinking about how it’s easiest to make friends when you don’t have them. When you have friends, you might gain a sort of lackadaisical attitude: you’re set, you have friends already so why would you need more? I’m not entirely like this, I like to go out and make new friends constantly. But even with this attitude of trying to make new friends as much as possible, there are some unavoidable facets that come with having friends.
It’s like this: if I go to dinner with friends as opposed to being by myself, no stranger is going to approach me and vice-versa. Therefore, no new friends on that occasion. If I’m walking down the sidewalk and see a friend, I may stop and talk with them—for longer if I’m alone than already with friends, more than likely.
There are some philosophical implications I’ve been just gaining knowledge of lately that have to do with this. Seneca, in arguing that life isn’t short if you know how to take advantage of it, basically said that we don’t live when our time is taken up by preoccupations; we simply exist. By preoccupations, he means people, money, trying to achieve a life of leisure, basically things that take away time from yourself and doing what you want to do. People are obviously a big perpetrator of this. Think about all the times you’ve spent waiting on someone to get ready or even “getting ready†when instead you could be out doing what you’re getting ready to do or anything else.
This all comes back to being your own person. Life really should be about living for yourself in my opinion, and just because that makes you a perceivably “selfish†person doesn’t mean it’s wrong; the day you become a douche bag about it is the day it becomes wrong. I think I’m going to take a break from my normal friends, as I have this weekend, and see where life takes me—do my own thing like always, just officially (as far as they’re concerned).
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