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What path do you take when your authentic thoughts and opinions (your unique point of view) will alienate your audience?
The predicament feels binary: stay true to yourself and risk being ostracized, or compromise yourself to maintain the audience and personal relationships. Any no-win scenario becomes a tautology. Compromising or silence is equally non-authentic, and thus not creatively productive.
This seems to be the goal of a double-bind or double-blackmail: to regulate through loss.
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Narcissism is an internal protection, a selfishness that paradoxically closes others out while demanding from them.
To encounter one who somehow dismantles the walls to provoke genuine concern becomes the narcissist’s scariest moment: to care is an infinitely more difficult a journey.
From Walter Kern
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We often dislike the creators of cultural artifacts we enjoy, such as disdaining hippies or baristas while appreciating the Beatles or a well-made espresso.
This contradiction can provoke an openness that can change biases.
The gap between the distasteful interactions and tasteful consumption, harbors compelling evidence that we are socially conservative and desiringly decadent.
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Comedy often employs the technique of contrasting highbrow symbols with vulgar ones.
The highbrow symbol, which is essentially a façade, is flipped or inverted to create a sense of ridicule. This juxtaposition allows us to rediscover our humanity by highlighting the absurdity of high-mindedness and the relatability of vulgarity.
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If you have godlike demands, your feelings of inferiority are ironically the result of them.
This means that if you didn’t feel entitled to anything, you wouldn’t feel as if you were somehow lesser than you are.
The paradox: expectations create your feelings, and your ambition creates lack.
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Thoughts have an amplifying power, reinforcing themself, until we believe.
However, once you recognize a thought as a transient, often false, assumption it loses its power to define you. (Belief/ideas dissolve upon investigation.)
The paradox is that we are who we think we are until we recognize the belief (ourself) as thought.
When we see “we” cease.
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Some people are not interesting, and that used to be a prized character trait.
It is easy to confuse having “character” with “being a character:” to be “interesting,” we exaggerate our smallest foibles, which amplifies our failures, but we can’t apologize as it is our only unique aspect of self, so we must double down.
We become cartoons of ourselves, grotesque clowns: humorous and sad, entertaining but not trusted.
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When you “go with the flow,” you abdicate control to access emotions to release stress.
The problem is we cannot control our moods: they pass through us, and when safeguards are unleashed, some toxic rage or wallowing despair bubbles up, causing self-damaging behavior.
Yet, we want to be free, lively, and spontaneous, not in a gray, restrictive, robotic life. The paradox is needing control to allow freedom.
Consider going with the flow, similar to surfing or painting: a masterfully developed skill that does not let go as much as channel attentive excitement into expressive action.
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Cycles of stress present themselves as waves in which we must surf rather than be pulled under.
Judging the swell of the peaking bundle of energetic stressors determines if they are personal, interpersonal, corporate, or global anxiety. Discernment requires a paradoxical release: holistic subjectivity is available only when you release intellectualization.
The right brain feels and gauges, recognizing patterns, while the left focuses, which blots out the ability for meta-awareness. To cope with stressors, you must release to acknowledge the wave you must ride.
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By gaining more information, we will see patterns more completely, which will allow us to understand how complicated reality functions. More data is the path to truth.
However, most spiritual traditions teach us we find “truth” when we drop our labels and our opinions, our illusions.
The reliance on intelligence to perceive truth has a paradoxical quality: The more knowledge you add grants you a better understanding, which also adds a layer of bias (an extra opinion or delusion) that blocks you from the truth.
And yet, this additional knowledge allows you to, over time, recognize and subtract misleading positions, guiding you back to truth.
