Reality Laughs

Victim mentality is pessimism.

Pessimism is easier than optimism.

Social validation for pessimism is easier to accomplish than social validation for optimism.

The reason you get social validation for your victim mentality is because losers see someone of like mind and approve. One of us!

And winners, the optimists, see you for what you are. They give you a dismissive, desultory pat on the head to get you the fuck away from them, and move on.

Or, from a distance, they silently edge away from you without comment, having seen who you are and realizing the danger that lurks there.

Do you wish you were an optimist? Are you sick of seeing bullshit and decay everywhere you look? The problem is you. Not them, whoever they are.

Just start refusing to be a victim.

Every time you have a negative thought, every time you have an opinion, every time you make a judgment, just say to yourself, “Well, that’s a thought. I can have other thoughts.”

Via negativa.

You will, by shoveling the shit out of your head, discover the stable.

And I use that word deliberately. You will arrive at stability, by way of simple, basic, fundamental moral principles that guide your life.

And a life based on basic principles is an optimistic one. Suddenly, beauty is everywhere.

Because typing words on my phone and publishing them here is necessary.

Necessary? To what end? I do not know.

Why are you here? Because it is necessary for you. You arrived here because you are a Seeker.

There is no such thing as “back to basics.”

There is only basic.

Stay there. Stay at basic.

Quoting a quote:

A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up in what the geek subculture thinks. There’s lots of valuable businesses that can be built there, but I think that is where a lot of people tend to spend their wheels, and I’ve been caught up there before. When I’ve had more successful things, I’ve thought, “Back to basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?” And create that.

Seth Godin, quoting Ev Williams, in Linchpin, p. 95.

So.

Don’t say “back to basics” unless you say “it’s all basics.” Why waste your time with the fluffy stuff on top of the basics?

Chop wood, carry water.

I am living in basics now and it feels good. I am the foundry, the steel, and the worker, together forging and being forged.

I have nothing else to say. The title says it all. Act accordingly.

(I’m still not convinced that this website is an experiment worth continuing, but I might as well use it as a Dear Diary to park my thoughts.)

This experiment is coming to a close. I see no particular value for me or anyone else in the stuff I have written here. It’s average.

Time to rethink, retool, refocus, and go another direction.

From Gorilla Mindset.

• You already know how to visualize. You think about the past and evoke emotional responses.
• Memories are just thoughts. Memories are often false. The past isn’t real and memories are not real.

First reaction: since thoughts about past events are manufactured by me, why not manufacture productive, useful thoughts? Find what is useful in memories, useful to me in creating the future.

Try this experiment: look forward only. Every time a thought about the past comes up, say to yourself “this isn’t real” and visualize the future.

Using the past as fuel —this is the strategy. Bring the critical skills forward to today. Actually those skills are not memories. They are present tense, which you can see in how fast they decay if not used. Use emotion evoked by memories to fuel your effort today.

Reframe a memory of an event, previously perceived as painful, as an essential building block. Reframe a recurring painful memory as inert—like a rock sitting in the ground. Then walk away from the rock.

Reframe anxiety and fear as optional by mentally putting those thoughts in a paper bag and carefully folding the top, promising yourself that the thoughts are there waiting for you anytime you want to open the bag and think those thoughts. But in the meantime you can think other thoughts.

Visualization forward: target a specific goal and involve your senses. Imagine the five senses involved in the scenario you are visualizing.

Yeah. Don’t visualize backwards.

Are there obstacles to your action? If you failed to reckon with the possibility, then that would harm you, as a rational being. But if you use common sense, you haven’t been harmed or even obstructed. No one can obstruct the operations of the mind. Nothing can get at them—not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse—nothing.

Meditations 8.41

How many times have I read and reread and re-reread Meditations? Why have I not seen that before? FFS someone (!) highlighted the text in my copy of the book yet for some reason I am reading this for the first time.

As usual, Marcus Aurelius is prescient:

Evil: the same old thing.

No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all.

Familiar, transient.

Meditations 7.1.

Remember that next time you get riled up.

It’s true even for manufactured bad shit: the panicky messaging designed to make you cower and submit to another’s will. It’s the same old thing.

And it’s like drugs: after a while the populace builds up tolerance to the hysteric messaging. Something more is required to get the same effect. Another panic. Another literally Hitler. It’s the same old thing.

Ignore the messages. Look at what’s happening in the real world. (This is hard because facts are distorted or filtered so you’re not getting the whole picture, so look and listen and ask yourself “What might be there that I’m not seeing?”).

Once you start seeing the mask drop, you cannot unsee it.

You’re being told to believe, to obey. You’re being given a picture to look at: there is danger, here is safety. Be safe by doing what we say, by believing what we tell you to believe, by hating who we tell you to hate.

That’s their world. They would make it yours.

Reality laughs.

Reality just laughed in Afghanistan. It will laugh again and again.

Learn. Learn from the ancients. Learn from your own observation.

One more thought from Meditations:

Discard your misperceptions.

Stop being jerked like a puppet.

Limit yourself to the present.

Understand what happens—to you, to others.

Analyze what exists, break it all down: material and cause.

Anticipate your final hours.

Other people’s mistakes? Leave them to their makers.

Meditations 7.29.

Marcus Aurelius:

If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Meditations 6:21.

It’s the jolt that you get when you’re snapping back from fantasy/ignorance to reality that really hurts.

The more you seek reality and stick to it, the smaller the deviation and the impact when reality’s gravity pulls you back. Make a jump from an elevation of 3 inches? It is nothing. Three feet? It’s a thing, but accomplished with ease with a bit of care. Thirty feet? Possibly fatal, certainly painful.

The ultimate snap back to reality, of course, is death. The greatest peril to you is in ignoring your inevitable death. Keep that single thought in mind (“I will die, and I don’t know when”) and you will be amazed at the clarity it brings.

And you would think it brings terror and inaction (“What’s the point?”). Quite the contrary. For me it has brought freedom from fear and impelled me forward to new ventures with glee and abandon. What’s the worst that can happen? I die? I’m already going to die!

Andy Frisella’s math: for would-be entrepreneurs. Out of a random sample of 100 people:

• 70% are pussies. They don’t want to put in the work. They just want the reward. They quit early. These are the tippy-tap people who don’t hammer the nail all the fucking way into the fucking wood.
• 20% aren’t lazy. They work. But they can’t handle obstacles. The first obstacle they hit takes them out.
• 8% work hard. They can take a hard blow and keep going. But the day-to-day grind slacks off over time. They don’t have the discipline to execute every day. They stop executing, whether out of boredom or being pulled by the first taste of success.
• 2%. That’s who is left over.

Be in the 2%.

You may quibble with the numbers but the filters are real and I think his order of magnitude ranking is correct.

Execute. Keep executing. Don’t quit.

I rate myself flipping back and forth between the 8% and the 2%. On the other hand the fact that I’m still cranking 30 years later tells me I trend more to the 2%. But wow I have my moments in the eight.