"Terrible Values that are ruining your life "...
There always has been a handful of common values which create a really poor problems for people. Problems that can hardly be solved according to Author Mark Manson
Let’s go over them quickly.
1. Pleasure:
Pleasure is great but at the same time a horrible value to prioritize life around.
Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children what pleasure that ultimately made her happy.
Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how pleasure helped him solved his problems. Pleasure is a false God. Research shows that people who focus on superficial pleasure end up being anxious, more emotionally unstable and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life’s satisfaction and therefore easiest to obtain and also easiest to lose. And yet pleasure is that marketed to us 24/7.
It’s what we fixate on, it’s what we use normally to distract ourselves.
Pleasure well necessary in life in certain doses isn’t buy its self-sufficient. Pleasure is not a cause of happiness rather it is the effect if you get the other stuffs right if you get the other values in the metrics right then pleasure will act as the by product.
2. Material Success:
Many people measure themselves with what kind of money they make or what kind of car they drive or whether their front lawn is greener & prettier than their next-door neighbor’s. Research shows that once one is able to provide for their basic physical needs like food shelter and so on correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. So, if you are starving and living on a street in the middle of India an extra ten thousand dollars will affect you a lot but if you are sitting somewhere in the middle class in any developed country couple of ten thousand dollars won’t affect anything much meaning you are killing yourselves working overtime in the weekends for nothing. The danger of material success is overprioritizing it over other values such as honesty, non- violence & compassion. People measure themselves not by their behavior but the status symbols that they are able to collect not only that they are shallow but probably assholes as well.
3. Always being right:
Our brains are inefficient machines, we can make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts given to cognitive biases and make decision based on our emotional whims. We are wrong pretty much constantly, if your metric of life’s success is always to be right then you might have a difficult time rationalizing all the bullshit to yourself. The fact is people who think right about themselves will eventually prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They will miss out on taking new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves to new and important information. It’s far more helpful to assume that you are ignorant and don’t know a lot. It keeps you unattached to superstitious and poorly informed believes and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.
4. Staying Positive:
Then there are those who measure their life about being positive as well pretty much about everything. Lost your job great that’s an opportunity to explore your passions. Husband cheated on with your sister at least you are learning about what you mean to people around you. Child dying because of flood or cancer, at least you don’t have to pay for college anymore. Well, there is something to be said of staying on the sunny side of life the truth is sometimes life sucks and the healthiest thing that you can do is admit. Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance and not valid solutions to life’s problems which by the way if you are choosing right value in the metrics should be invigorating you and motivating you. Things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit and that’s fine. Negative emotions are necessary components of emotional health. Denying negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solving. Trick of negative emotions is to express them in a socially acceptable and helpful manner and express them in a way that it aligns with your values. Emotions are just feedbacks. Staying positive at all times means denying the existence of our problems, we rob ourselves to solve our problems and generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus, to duck our problems to lead a meaningless even its supposedly pleasant existence. Negative emotions involve pain anger struggle and despair but once they are accomplished, we look back and get misty eyed telling our grandkids about them.
Sigmund Freud once said:
“ One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”.
This is a passage taken from a book "the subtle art of not giving a f*ck"
You can find the description given in the link below to get this book : https://amzn.to/3eocs9W
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