Tag Archives: culture

Why So Afraid?

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afraid

“You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.” – Neale Donald Walsch

Afraid. To live. To die. To get hurt. To hurt others. Afraid. Of failure. Of success. Of getting stuck somewhere in between. Afraid of doing nothing at all, afraid of overdoing it. Afraid of yourself, afraid of others. Rationalizing. Being practical. Over-intellectualizing. Holding back. Waiting for the right time and place.

Finding excuses. Blaming yourself. Blaming others. Telling yourself that you’ve got enough time.

“If only…”

“When I…”

“What if…”

“It could have been…” Continue reading →

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“Do What You Love” IS NOT a Cliche. It’s a LIE.

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Do what you love. Love what you do.

Odds are you tried something in your life. A passion. A hobby. Something that got you excited, made you feel alive, like a fire burning inside your chest. It felt amazing doing it. And you did it, and did it, and kept at it, but in time it became more and more difficult to stay with it long enough to achieve true success.

Let’s face it: if you’re not in love anymore with what you’re doing, it feels like an uphill struggle. That’s OK if you’re a hobbyist or a dabbler, but if you want a career, if you want to live your life at the highest level possible, then all this might make you want to stop and try something else…

You want to quit because you weren’t expecting that doing what you loved would be so damn frustrating at times. So infuriating. So full of monotony, and moments of despair.

So damn boring…

Wasn’t this supposed to be about love? About passion?

Well… Continue reading →

The Psychological Impossibility of Tragedy in the Mind of Someone Living in the Twenty-First Century

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“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.” – Ian McEwan

They say the biggest distance between two people is misunderstanding. It creates this gap between people. Or is it a wall? And it’s frustrating, isn’t it? It does make you feel as if you’re alone, the only one who thinks and says and acts in a certain way.

And by feeling so don’t we diminish others as well? Don’t we fail to understand that even though they are different, they’re still inherently the same as us? And they deserve to be treated the same way we’d like to be treated.

I don’t know, it’s a difficult question to answer.

But could you hate someone if you knew why they do what they do? If you could truly understand them? Their thoughts? Their feelings? Know their past? Their struggles? What they want? What they have lost? Continue reading →

What Does It Mean to Love Someone?

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“I will not live without love.” – Vincent van Gogh

Falling in love is easy. Too easy sometimes. We fall in love with someone who’s a little bit different than all the others we have met before, we fall in love when someone tells us something new about ourselves, we fall in love with the way someone acts or talks, we fall in love with people who have traits that are similar or exactly the opposite of ours.

There are just about a million different reasons why we fall in love. Continue reading →

Discipline Your Mind

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“Our actions may be impeded . . . but there caan be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius

We often view philosophy as this dry, complex, and abstract pursuit that is reserved only for the most intelligent among us. It seems quite useless in our day to day lives.

There’s an exception, of course. Stoicism is remarkably clear and practical. And, truth be told, once you understand its main principles you begin to see them in a lot of other aspects of life, from religion to cognitive behavioral therapy.

One of Stoicism’s main ideas is to let go of what you can’t control. In other words, if you are upset by something you can’t control, then you’re suffering needlessly. Continue reading →

Heart and soul

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The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. – Ted Hughes

You’re going to die. No, this is not some metaphorical bullshit. You are going to die. They are going to plant you in the ground, and all that you are will decay until there’s nothing left. Your bones will turn to dust and that dust will get carried on through the ages.

Your time on this earth is limited. How do you want to spend it? Think about it. I mean, really think about it.

Lukewarm is no good. Being fearful is not worth it. Worrying about what other people think or say or do. Talking to yourself in a negative tone, telling yourself bullshit stories of why you can’t do it, complaining that life is hard. No shit, life’s hard. It’s meant to be like that. Continue reading →

We need superheroes

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DeathofsupermanI “created” my first superhero when I was five years old. His name was Captain Hank, and he possessed super-human strength, speed, and he couldn’t age. That was all, basically.

Then, of course, I had to make some villains, and then some other superheroes to aid Hank in his fight against evil.

To some, the concept of  superheroes acts simply as a metaphor for greatness. It can be easily understood by almost anyone, regardless of age, education, culture, and so on. I never actually agreed with this definition.

I believe the concept itself is so primordial that most of us actually miss the point entirely. My definition is that superheroes are characters who possess certain abilities and traits that make them better than normal people in many ways.

But they also have flaws and weaknesses, and they make mistakes. Continue reading →