An Anonymous friend of Buck had these poetic words to say about living.
I'm watching a life. I think it's mine, but i can't philosophically tell. I'm randomly thinking dance moves, yet I've i can't quite grasp that concept of movement. Frazzlement comes to mind, along with astronauts, and I float to the floor. Among the clouds there are too many dryers and too few thoughts. "I am thinking it's a sign" that life, a broad and emotionless word, is too far away. "come down now, but we'll stay" It's grasping towards zero, but i'm sweating, yet they're tears of love. Phasing in and out, and in again, importance? I think, therefore I have the brain pathaway capable of transferring thought. Skyworks. Waterworks. Monopoly on psuedonyms. Categories of phrases, clips, and quantums of tripods. ZZzip, the longest baseline conquered by firings from an introspective pysche. Losing my metaphorical steam...
lucid words, lucid words
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Unhappiness may just be a state of many low-grade problems, each of which can't be corrected easily.
How does this work?
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Change on various scales is an important part of the happiness module in humans. We have various algorithms that seek to regulate us: we relax when stressed, eat when hungry, and work/play when bored. Being good at regulating oneself is an important skill of the happy.
So how does change occur to one's personality. From what I've been reading, people do change when they find that their personality conflicts with their expectations for life. A lazy person may find himself hurting his new family, and subsequently he would adapt through strict self-discipline. Or somebody may find their reckless alcoholism is tearing their life apart, and then they "see God" as Bush did.
But it seems like change only occurs either as a slow, evolutionary/maturation process (one that happens to you and is a function of your environment), otherwise it comes from large exogenous shocks.
But what if you want to change and don't have the benefit of large shocks, and don't want to surrender to the luck of large tectonic environmental shifts (which you usually don't have direct control over)?
Henceforth is my theory of lingering unhappiness... What if we are stuck with a bunch of low-grade problems that don't shock us and we can bear individually. For example, you could be insecure, lazy, and rude, and none of those traits are enough to make you lose your job or lose your boyfriend, but they are enough to perpetutally frustrate you. And so you try to go, "okay, new years resolution, blah blah" and you try to tackle all of them.. but without strong external pressure acting on one trait, it's hard to carry through beyond the first wave.
So unhappiness may just be like having a disease that never hurts you so much that your anti-bodies launch an offensive, but irritating enough to bring you down, one small notch at a time.
In another light, change is all about motivation. And if you are mildly motivated about many things, rather than strongly motivated about one thing, you may never have enough gusto to change any one trait in a significant way.
Usually adults give up and accept their faults. Sucks.
I wonder how many people are living vicariously through Jesus (or bin Laden, or Bush, or Ann Coulter, or Wesley Clark).
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I've been on this "pursue passion" bent for about a year now (amazing, given that I was on a "pursue $" bent for the previous arc of my life)... but.. according to McLuhan, our media and technology are mere extended appendages of processes that we already do... i.e. the train extends the foot...
now, if your passions are projects that are manifestations of your identity, which in most cases they become, and you are inspired to do them because you "love them" then aren't you loving yourself?
Doesn't that leave you empty like the legend of Narcissism instructs us to believe?
Can anything you "do" and "love" not imply a love yourself? Maybe depends on whether the love of doing something is such because you feel good at the end of the day and stand proud of "what you have done."
I guess self-less love is what I'm reaching in the dark here for
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Ask any smart person a tough quetsion, sure they got the answer. But then ask them, how did they become a smart person in the first place? Maybe the answer is, "academics" or "I studied hard"...
... ah okay, fair enough. But what if you ask them, how did you become a person that pursued academics that sought studying hard in order to become smart? How did you become the person that you are now? Did you actively control your development, or did you just follow the path that was already laid before you?
Well, you can always argue, "personal responsibility" but my response is then how did you become a person that cared so much about "personal responsibility."
It's so politically/intellectually incorrect to say that we don't have free will or that we are not responsible, but the more I look at life and people, the more I see pigeonholes and clear-cut paths.
Proof? Because people will be most likely doing tomorrow what they're doing now.
Take Bill Gates for example, he has jillions of cash, so he's not constrained by much except himself, yet regularity will follow him for the next 10-20 years. If he truly had free will, wouldn't the probability of him stumbling upon new information and then subsequently deciding to be a different person be pretty high?
Okay, maybe that's just one example. But if we are so free to craft our own paths in lives, then why across the board, after the age of 26, people pretty much do the same thing. Okay sure, careers change you say, not for everybody though,.... and that's nothing anyways. The real thing would be to see if personalities change, or if habits change... in other words, can people fundamentally change? I know ppl change, but can they change themselves? For as much as people complain about human faults, I'm surprised by how little ppl then go from their desire to change to actual change.
THAT has always scared me. Maybe this book, will give me the answers I seek.