Belly Button Lint

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Tag: self-awareness

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    Determinate Action makes “You”

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    1–2 minutes

    Once you have taken action, it solidifies or determines who you are. In part, this is who you are seen as: your identity is predominantly socially constructed.

    To commit an act that brings you shame (self-hate) provokes extreme psychological responses: either you overcorrect away from yesterday’s heinous self, or you over-justify your position, further alienating some while enraging and converting others.

    Both responses create a “new self” from a single point, a turning point where your agenda diverges either to abnegate or rally and resuscitate. Either way, it is a reaction that is obviously “you,” yet “not you” because it is a divergent alternative provoked and created by the inability to forgive your original act.

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    Consider displaying a subtle token of displeasure

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    1–2 minutes

    For people pleasers, challenging oneself to avoid accommodating others through a symbolic gesture can be a significant step. This isn’t about aggravating others (triggering) but rather practicing standing up for your beliefs, fostering independence.

    Camouflaging in "likability" is easy but leads to a habit of conformity and avoidance of confrontation.
    The token you display -the symbol- acts as a prop for internal growth, to be discarded once self-awareness is achieved. Ultimately, knowing oneself eliminates the need for external validation by signaling.

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    Creating complexity: sentience and divinity

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    1–2 minutes

    If sentience emerges from construction, be it organic or synthetic, then increasing complexity might be the key to developing consciousness.

    Consider a "replicant," inherently metallic and digital, programmed to perceive itself as mechanistic rather than sentient. This self-perception is shaped by programming and is attributed more to its material composition than to its complexity.

    This paradigm reflects our theological relationship with divinity, where creations are inherently subordinate. In crafting entities that are deemed "lesser," we mirror our own existential state: beings of flesh attempting to transcend our nature are committing a sin.

    This perspective suggests that our creations, no matter how sophisticated, are destined to remain fundamentally inferior, as we design in a reflection of our own human limitations.

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    Keep joy for yourself (social media)

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    1–2 minutes

    Pleasures do not need to be advertised.

    We tend to think what we like is who we are: we identify with our joy.

    However, to broadcast your joy is to move the internal to the external, from which the external representation parasitizes your glee: the outer "image of identity" affects your actions (amplifies) by feeding upon your emotion for social reification.

    In an odd contradiction, the external image of you is fixed (flat, unidimensional) yet must continually expand. Once enough of your joy has been extracted into the proxy "image of identity" you are reduced to joyless reactive motion where you now mirror your social image, it does not reflect you.

    In social media, this is when your passion is converted to content, your content then drives your action, which you are no longer passionate about, but you must simulate joy to maintain identity.

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    Therapy work works

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    1–2 minutes

    Therapy is talking to someone about your experience. This is why all forms of it work, up to a point.

    With psychoanalysis examining internal trauma or CBT reconsidering external stimuli, we pay for a personal relationship (trusted guide) or a training framework (tools) to review our plight.

    In many cases, this offloading and reflection alleviates us by reframing. But of course, we enter back into the world encountering more challenges.

    Humans used to get guidance from friends, family, and elders. Today, we have a professional class with pedigrees to handle our chaos.

    Is this commodification of our mental health and relationships, or is the world and life more complicated, requiring more advanced solutions?

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    Creating your own misery to survive

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    1–2 minutes

    You create most of your own misery.

    Through your thoughts and feelings, you develop and then run simulations, which become anxiety-producing ruminations on possible harms. However, “survival” (which is why we undertake misery-making destructive behavior) is about ensuring the next step, not the fourth or fifth possibility.

    Staying present deflates enduring into being.

    (Staying present means rejecting the past harms from shaping your present reaction while not projecting into the future possible worries.)

    While this may not appear as thriving, it actively rejects self-harm until a moment when an opportunity opens from which you can succeed.

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    reframing or revealing?

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    1–2 minutes

    Cognitive behavioral therapy invokes tools that allow you to pause and reframe situations into a less traumatic context or gain a broader perspective that will alleviate anxious ruminations.

    This is a fantastic tool for mental health, but what does it say about reality?

    1. Are we in a subjectively determined reality (that is, we make our reality) yet must constantly reframe it because our self-narration is so traumatic?
    2. Or does our stable reality generate antagonistic situations from which we must attempt induced blindness through escapist fantasy?
    3. Or is the world both cruel and kind, confusing and awesome, and we have been prodded into only specific ways of accessing it, and reframing is not re-framing but revealing?
  • Theme:

    rationality implies tolerance

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    1–2 minutes

    The basic premise of rationality is listening to other people’s arguments (or reality’s realness) to develop your reasons. In listening, you must make space for arguments from which to consider alternative realities or models.

    Once someone is assured of their rationality to the extent they are intolerant or blind, it is no longer rationality, but belief, which is irrational.

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    squaring the spinning wheel

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    1–2 minutes

    When a problem is too complicated, meaning it has more than facets but dynamics as well, it becomes a spinning circle.

    To simplify this impossible conundrum and grant yourself agency in this dizzying world you can “square the circle": choose a point, ignore the motion, simplify the sides, and commit.

    It in no way reflects reality, but it may help you feel better.

  • Theme:

    the hook of pain

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    1–2 minutes

    When a troubling event keeps bobbing to the surface, your subconscious tells you something is unresolved: a lesson needs to be learned.
    Often the event involves pain (being hurt or hurting). Caught on this hook, unwilling to let go, we have pierced ourselves and the other together in self-traumatizing rumination.

    The problem with releasing the barb is we must approach and experience the pain without shying away. We must remain open-hearted to grieving and forgiving, allowing us to process the memory, remove the barb, and let the wound scar.

    Otherwise, we risk pushing the pain under only to have it continually bob back to the surface, wounding us repeatedly.