When you arrive to a surprise party it is a thrill. When you find out your job has been outsourced you are appalled, shocked, bewildered, and hurt.
What if we greeted each surprise without insecurity? Instead of your responsibility stolen as a personal indictment, what if we could see it as a burden lifted? A cause for celebration.
Tag: identity
- Theme: Growth
Kept in the dark
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
Self-help is not a fix, but a focus
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1–2 minutesReading self-help or jumping into therapy doesn’t fix you; it focuses you.
You will not remember or fulfill all the advice: we change slowly with vast effort over extended periods.
Our biological imperative is to bypass the hard work of change in favor of novelty and laziness, and we must surround ourselves with persistent reminders. - Theme: Self
Self-sufficient from love
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1–2 minutesThe problem with being self-sufficient is that you teach yourself never to ask for help. Pretty soon, you never ask for anything.
The problem is, how do you teach someone how to love you when you don’t share or even talk?
- Theme: Self
Losing your self to find joy
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1–2 minutesHappiness is found when “I” disappear.
The paradox of identity is we identify with something, which often has desires, demands, and behaviors (attachments).The paradox is to consider who you are making happy by trying to be happy: demanding “I” want to be happy sabotages happiness, while to dissolve the self and its desires you uncover happiness.
- Theme: Self
The greater good
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1–2 minutesTo zoom out and see the larger picture over the long term is to abstract the individuals into system components.
Our current ideology, focused on the value of individuals, is at odds with the classic authoritarian willingness to sacrifice to progress.
Now progress must come through the demands of individuals: we must be slyly persuaded to believe in the “good” of the larger picture, subordinating ourselves into cogs determined to make more cogs.
- Theme: Self
Getting lost to find yourself
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1–2 minutesThe only way to find your purpose or true self is to shed your social conditioning to look to others for affirmation.
Once you enjoy something without needing to share it, you are on the right track.
It is a paradox of giving up trying and getting lost, which allows you to find. - Theme: Systems
Product fetish as self-production
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1–2 minutesHumans can now only relate to others as objects, as commodities: the human relation is now a product-driven object-obsessed interaction. Worse, how you relate to others is how you relate to yourself.
The seduction is easy: I love working with tools whose smooth functioning moves into a frictionless joy of goal achievement. I am a product fetishist, producing myself as a proximate object for consumption. - Theme: Self
Does self preservation make you miserable?
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1–2 minutesSelfishness seems to bloom from self-preservation, says Anthony DeMello. And to be selfless seems to "opt for nonbeing."
What is interesting is to consider how you could ever not be yourself unless you were operating from fear: self-preservation would then be the only thing that could destroy the self. - Theme: Growth
Guided by Fantasy
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1–2 minutesTo change the character of the world you must envision it and let it guide you.
To manifest the change you must forego the comfort of the idealistic fantasy and undertake to meet the demands of the growth your previous self desired.
from Bataille - Theme: Growth
Self-bootstrapping
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1–2 minutesBaron Munchausen once pulled himself and his horse out of a swamp by pulling upward on his own hair.
While this fantastical feat is humorous because it is impossible in reality, bootstrapping is precisely what we must do in the spiritual realm: lift ourselves through moxy and determination alone.
(idea from Slavoj Žižek)