Your second answer could be: I am doing nothing that would fall under stability, but I do read, watch, and learn from things that would come under cultivation.
That’s great, that you invest in the cultivation of your mind. This means that you have come in contact with something that not only made sense to you but took you to a place where you were alone and thinking.
But here’s a problem, at times, when people find something that makes them think as an individual, they don’t hold on to it, instead they do something that ruins this particular experience entirely for them.
This is what they do: you found something that made you think, but then you shared it with the person closest to you, expecting them to either feel the same thing you did, or start thinking that way, or be impressed by you for sharing it.
When they don’t express the same excitement, chances are you put the whole thing behind you. I guess they didn’t like it. Basically, they spoiled it for you.
When they don’t agree with the idea, you might see the idea as a failure because it didn’t work on them.
When they are impressed by you, you feel kind of smart for having sent them content that they thought was clever and deep—and that’s where your focus stays. In all three cases, the idea is not further discussed, debated or developed in your mind; instead, it is forgotten in a matter of days. Always remember: the true test of any idea is not its popularity, but how deeply it makes you think.
From now on, any time you feel anything is making you think, it’s an indication that you need to look into it more. Don’t move on. Do not care about the responses of others if you share it with them. It speaks to you; therefore, develop it further in your mind. It could be about anything—religion, relationships, social work, dating, or human behaviour. You need to test the idea by imagining if this was a strict want or rule in your life, does it make you more in control and more secure, or not? This could lead you to discover an actual want of yours.
The point of cultivation is not storing knowledge in your mind so you can use it later to impress people. That might make you knowledgeable, not intelligent. It’s pointless if it doesn’t reflect in your actions. Cultivation of the mind means keeping what makes you think and applying what makes sense.
So, you need to ask yourself right now, how many daily wants and actions of yours are geared toward serving stability and cultivation? If ‘not many’ or ‘none’ is your answer, it’s a serious concern, my friend. Sooner or later, you will have to take hold of the steering wheel of your life, you might as well start thinking about it now.
Let’s talk about the second category.
SHORT-TERM PLEASURES
The second category, called ‘interest’, would be further divided into two sections: experiential joys and intellectual joys.
Experiential joy: Doing these things gives you a genuine sense of joy that separates you from the world or makes you forget the world, for example, riding a bicycle, lifting weights, running, writing, playing an instrument, dancing, spending time with a certain friend, cooking, reading about a subject or creating something. There’s a deep connection you have with these activities, and you possessively call them ‘yours’, therefore, these are wants spawning from your ‘self’.
So, out of all your actions and activities that you may call your daily wants, how many fall under experiential joys?
You may say: I can think of many things that give me immense joy.
Do these give you a sense of thrill, excitement, a rush of happiness? Of course. Do these also give you satisfaction, a personal connection and a freedom of sorts? Those are the ones that would come under ‘interest’.
There are a lot of things you do on a daily basis that are either done out of habit or an addiction to the short bursts of pleasure. They may not necessarily be requested by your self. They are done because, if you thought about your current state of affairs, you’d be pretty bummed out—they serve as an escape. They are activities you do to squeeze out some happiness because you wanna run away from facing the truth. So, watching videos endlessly, gaming out of a crippling need to secure a rush of excitement, hanging around with your friends out of habit, or desperately texting random people to get some sex may seem like they fall under experiential joys, but in reality it’s just you unable to deal with your shit, and therefore finding a person to solve it for you, or an activity to make you forget about it.
Your wants and actions come under the category ‘interest’ only when they are controlled by you, not you by them. Only then can they be comparable to things like working out, riding a bike, cooking, playing an instrument, most of which are highly controlled activities. The thing to remember is: they don’t tend to take over you.
So, from today, start noticing what activities and wants of yours are controlled by you, and give you satisfaction in doing them, not just a short burst of pleasure; the activities you feel positively possessive and sure about. And screw those activities you do to escape from the duties and responsibilities of your life—they are gonna fuck you over in the long run.
Let’s move on to intellectual joys.
Intellectual joy: Doing these things stimulates your mind, thereby captivating your interest, for example: solving somebody’s problem, having intellectual discussions, collecting information about people’s lives and using them at opportune moments—no need to be embarrassed in admitting that to yourself—learning and reading about whatever it is that draws your curiosity and interest.
Ask yourself what stimulates your mind and captures your interest. Those would be your real interests. So, out of all your actions and wants, how many fall under intellectual joys?
Your answer could be: I can think of some activities that definitely capture my interest, but I have never thought of putting time in them.
Well, it’s because time is limited, and your time is already divided between shit you do to fit in this weird world and stuff you have to do in life, such as school or a job. You have a limited number of hours in a day that you can spend on only a certain number of activities. Therefore, you are presented with a choice: either do what everybody around you is doing, or focus on what interests you.
Focusing on what interests you may separate you from others as that choice deviates from the things that people around you are generally doing. This would mean isolating yourself from time to time, risking losing your position in your friend circle, becoming a ‘weirdo’ in the eyes of others because you are always doing your thing, and saying no to activities that people want you to do with them.
So, we have a problem: on one hand, you want to belong, you want to be a part of something, you want to be accepted; on the other, choosing what interests you requires you to say fuck that to all of the above. That’s what individuality is—breaking out of the group identity and becoming your own person.
So, what is it that you want? Do you want to be an individual or a fucking follower? If you choose individual, then start investing in whatever draws the attention and interest of your self. That is your thing, dude. Investing in it and growing it is what separates you from everybody—that is what makes you an individual, because you are doing your own thing. Put whatever you find intellectually stimulating above what everybody else is doing. Fuck them and fuck that.
And while we are at it, let’s look at this group bullshit too.
WOULD COOL FRIENDS MAKE YOU HAPPY?
What do people do in groups? Who decides what is to be done? Is it really democratic or some moron making all the decisions? Are your interests and betterment considered or is it just focused on having fun? Do these people even know what the fuck they are talking about, or are they making shit up as it goes?
Whatever groups you are a part of, think about it.
Most of the stuff you do with people is done for two reasons:
To be liked by people. A lot of activities that you do may not necessarily give you great joy. You may not even understand why people do them, but you don’t say no becau
se their mass appeal is too strong. In certain cases, you don’t even entertain saying no. There is a chance that you might have convinced yourself that something is wrong with you for not understanding the appeal of it, so you force yourself to do that thing.
To stay in a group. This group may have nothing to do with like-mindedness, sensibility, boundaries or goals and exist simply to fulfil the purpose of having fun. Your fear is that if you stayed out of this group for a while, you might lose out on fun-filled activities, fall behind on whatever the group is ‘thinking’, and will be replaced.
At the end, it’s about acceptance. You don’t want to be lonely and discarded, so you are willing to do any stupid shit—regardless of whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not you want to do it—because you think being in a group and having a lot of friends is a great statement about you. You are accepted, hence you are of value. Isn’t that herd-thinking?!
That is why, even if you are not in a group, you are still doing the same things that everybody around you is doing—to fit in. You are super scared of being a loner. You have the wants and fantasies of having cool friends and cool experiences. You are reading and watching videos on how to be awesome, impressive and an extrovert. How do I stop being shy? Because that will change everything, right? Once that is out of the way and you have the approval of people, everything will be great, right? That’s some epic-level bullshit.
People go away, they don’t give a shit about you, people give a shit about themselves; so you better start giving a shit about yourself the right way. Time passes, people leave, and you are the one who stays with yourself. Therefore, people are not the answer, it is you who has to find the answers from within you.
So, in case you are called weirdo, strange, nerd, geek, crazy, loner, were unpopular while growing up because you chose to do what wasn’t regarded as popular, chose against mindlessly participating in general happiness, gave attention and time to what interested you and stimulated your mind, then you are on the right path.
Lastly, as far as friendship is concerned, a single person who truly gives a shit about you can replace thousands who claim friendship. So, you know whom to keep.
KNOWING YOURSELF IS A SUPERPOWER
In your answers to what wants of yours came under ‘value’ and ‘interest’, there might have been confusion in your mind regarding their placement. You’re not supposed to get it right away. It takes time. But at least the process of thinking has begun, which is much better than being a blind follower. Thinking gets you closer to knowing, which is a superpower. Knowing yourself is single-handedly the greatest superpower any person can have. So, try to know thyself as much as you can.
CHAPTER TEN
SCREW PLEASING PEOPLE
DOES YOUR SELF-WORTH COME FROM SELF?
Let’s talk about self-worth. What does it mean? It means that you are valuable. How do we get this? It is self-worth after all; the first thing it requires is a ‘self’. When you have a self to serve, the self tells you what the worth is. When you don’t, you have to depend on others. When they give you confirmation of having worth, you feel happiness. Let me repeat that once again: you depend on others to tell you what your worth is, and this arrangement makes you happy. Out-fucking-standing, mate.
Let’s see in how many ways it is done:
1. By seeking the approval and acceptance of people who are capable and awesome in your eyes.
You know who they are. He told me I am capable, doing great, and deserve to be on top. It makes me feel great and more motivated than ever.
Side note: we are gonna be talking about this at great length in the coming chapters. For now, let’s just leave it here and move on to the next thing.
THOSE WHO FEEL SUPERIOR TO OTHERS
2. By assuming a sense of superiority.
Think about people you’ve met who gave you this vibe: I have a lot of knowledge about things. I love learning about interesting things. I watch clever, obscure movies only meant for intelligent people. I like to watch lectures and documentaries on subjects. My views are really interesting and unique. I have a highly developed taste in movies, art, and music. You get the idea.
All of this is actually fine until the motive of expressing the above becomes: I am better than normal people because I am very interesting—basically accumulating self-worth from assuming you are superior to others.
This involves showing off whatever you think is impressive about yourself to others as a need. Without it, you won’t feel good about yourself. Therefore, it becomes a habit. This is not seeking encouragement, not looking for constructive criticism, nor having a dialogue—actually, far from it. This is a pure display of superiority meant to satisfy the ego.
This is the case of a person whose entire identity is whatever people generally find interesting, so naturally he/she becomes someone who is knowledgeable, interested in arts and politics, has achievements, and has an opinion on just about anything popular. Yes, this is our self-proclaimed modern-day intellectual. This poor person has no relationship with his or her self; their attention is wholly dedicated to how people see them.
Instead of focusing on the self and asking, what am I interested in, what matters to me, what doesn’t interest me regardless of how popular it may be, their self-worth comes from feeling significant and interesting in the eyes of others. In short, they are dependent on an audience to feel good about themselves.
It’s basically being liked on a whole different level. For example, they will refuse to watch or consume something that is widely popular and liked in pop culture by almost everybody. They do this because, if they joined in too, then they would be like everybody else, hence not interesting. Their dismissal might have nothing to do with their actual taste, past choices and true feelings towards that thing. These dismissals simply give them the opportunity to be a contrarian for the sake of being different. That’s how desperate they are to be interesting.
Other examples of this would be people saying, music nowadays is complete shit, even though they have no knowledge of music or what they actually like. Just because they heard some ‘cool’ person they follow or older people say that modern music sucks, they do too.
They might even say, I love listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, you know, real music, even though, whenever they are alone, they never do, except on occasions in which they have forced themselves to listen to it so they can like it.
Then there are also those who say: I love watching old movies, especially the ones in black and white, they are classics. They might have a collection of these movies, which they love to show to people, but actually they haven’t watched half of them, and cringe at the idea of re-watching those they have.
There are plenty of people like these; it wouldn’t be a surprise if you have met some. Such behaviour exists only because you care about how people see you more than who you are, despite the impression it creates.
Now, it is normal to expect people to like you, but to rely on people to determine your self-worth comes at great risk. What if one day you meet someone who is not impressed? What lengths will you go to impress them, because it’s the only way for you to feel you are worthy? What happens the day you meet a person more knowledgeable than you? Does your worth become zero in front of them?
Your depending on others to make you feel worthy carries the equal risk of others making you feel unworthy. Why don’t you give all that power to yourself?
Here’s the third way we give this power to others:
THOSE WHO COMPARE THEMSELVES TO OTHERS
3. By comparing yourself to people, and winning.
Before we get into this, why do we compare ourselves to others? And more importantly, when do we do this the most?
We compare ourselves because we want to be better than them. And we do this the most when we want to be better than them in the eyes of someone. So, in this case, your self-worth comes from people in the eyes of whom you want to be amazing. These people are the ones with the power, and
their approval and appreciation is what gives you self-worth. So, what happens the day you have to work with someone better than you, or someone who has the potential to become better?
You put a target on their back and start competing with them. This, more often than not, is a different type of competition. You are competing with their potential to steal attention and approval, which you believe only you deserve and desperately need. Therefore, such competitions tend to become personal, ugly and filled with animosity.
Ideally, competitions are about proving your capabilities, and losing should culminate in self-reflection. But in these cases, you want to be better than them at any cost. To achieve this, you go beyond their capabilities, you start comparing yourself to them with regard to their personal life, the way they talk, the way they behave, their weight, height, looks, their partner, their dress sense and anything else you find worth establishing a superiority in. You talk badly about them and make fun of them to your friends, not realising they now occupy a major portion of your daily thoughts. In your mind, they have become your nemesis.
Now, remember: you are doing all of this because deep down you are threatened that they might take away the source from which you feel worthy. All you need to do is, shift that source. You don’t need to rely on others to tell you whether you are worthy or not. Are you an adult? Are you capable or not? Fucking decide on your own what standards you want to meet in life, and that’s it. Once that’s done, you decide what your worth is based on those standards. At least they are coming from your own mind.
Instead, you are busy cock-fighting with this person you have no beef with. It’s fucking pointless for three simple reasons: they have nothing to do with you; they don’t impact your success at all, only your actions do; and lastly, most of the ways in which you think they are better are based on assumptions.
The Rudest Book Ever Page 8