Do you take life seriously?

[Mayne]

I'm pretty sure I don't. Probably be my downfall.

 

[BoomerD]

Hell no.

 

[sandorski]

Life is a joke, Death is the punchline.

 

[lxskllr]

Nah, none of this shit matters. Empires rise, fall, and are promptly forgotten. No point in worrying about it.

 

[lxskllr]

Life is a joke, Death is the punchline.

 

[Mayne]

The whole psychic horror before dying is making me scared though.

 

[Mayne]

lets not forget this

 

[Mayne]

i've never died, it seems shitty regardless.

 

[Mayne]

much respect to those who have done this...i need food i think

 

[JulesMaximus]

It’s a part of life and it is inevitable. Why fear it? It is what it is.

 

[Kaido]

Yes & no. There's a funny quote attributed to numerous people that goes, "Never take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it alive!". That doesn't mean you need to be suicidal or not care about life, but I think there are some pretty uptight cats out there who don't really get what life is all about.

I do think you should be serious about your work ethic & your commitments, but I also think that life is designed to be enjoyed. From a high level, I think that being a mature adult translates out to getting your work done first, then working on your personal projects, and then being able to enjoy your unstructured time guilt-free. If you goof that formula up, then things go south: you're not meeting your commitments, you're not doing anything to pursue your personal dreams & ambitions, and you're using your free time to engage in avoidance behavior.

I spent a lot of 2018 thinking about how I could better convert my intentions into reality. I fight myself on pretty much everything I do, because I have ADHD. I think I've come up with a pretty good system to funnel myself into the right set of behaviors to achieve the goals I want to pursue. One of the examples I've used previously is that when we're kids, we get a free pass in life - our parents & guardians manage our situation for us. They force us to take care of our physical bodies by going to bed at a reasonable hour, going outside to play & exercise & get some fresh air & sunshine, preparing our meals & making us eat them & eat good food before we have dessert, making sure we do our homework so that we're prepared for school, and so on.

As adults, we don't have anyone babysitting us, and it's really easy to put yourself into a depressed, low-energy state through the choices we make & the habits we create. It's crazy easy to stay up late, not get enough sleep, not feed ourselves well or consistently, never exercise, and get stressed out because we're not staying on top of things. So as far as your question goes, I think you should, at minimum, take life seriously to the point of making yourself happy, which involves a lot of simple things put together to create a bigger picture. If you're falling behind on your commitments at school or work or to your family, if you haven't bothered thinking about any personal projects you'd like to work on, if you're goofing off as avoidance behavior instead of relax-time, if you have poor sleep hygiene, if you're not managing your diet well, if you're not exercising consistently...you're basically choosing to prevent yourself from having an enjoyable, energy-filled, low-stress life. Maybe that's not a conscious decision, but if you look at the actions & the results, many people struggle in life, but don't want to be bothered with the details of the basics of managing their lives to make them good ones.

The bottom line is that we're all chemical beings. Choosing to manage your health well & choosing to manage your stress well means that you, as the gatekeeper of your various happy & energetic chemicals like dopamine & serotonin, are allowing those horses to run their race, instead of keeping them locked up. Granted, that's all foundational stuff. Finding a calling in life, finding a meaningful line of work, choosing who you associate with & removing the toxic people from your life, that's all higher-level stuff that can help you feel better. But if you're not managing the foundational stuff, then it's pretty hard to pursue the higher-level stuff because you'll just never feel very good.

So I think my best answer here is yes, I try to take life seriously from a core commitments & work ethic point of view, and I'm trying to improve those parts of my life to be better, but I think that it's worth having a good attitude & having fun along the way while we do our work.

 

[Chaotic42]

Yep. I'm trying to change, but it's hard. I was very much raised in a "If you're in any way enjoying life, you're a bad person" bubble. It's hard to break out of.

 

[brianmanahan]

i'm glad you just brought your real avatar back

 

[Kaido]

Yep. I'm trying to change, but it's hard. I was very much raised in a "If you're in any way enjoying life, you're a bad person" bubble. It's hard to break out of.

I've been getting into CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) a lot more lately. Two of my favorite ideas are:

1. Thoughts create emotions
2. You have a Twitter feed in your head

Thoughts create emotions:

We operate off emotions day-to-day, but those emotions are reactions to something we experienced at some time. So we ran into a situation, thought about it, and that thought eventually transformed into an emotion. Like when you're a kid & your mom makes you chocolate-chip cookies and you try one fresh out of the oven and go "whooooooa" and then you associate warm cookies with feeling good & happiness & yumminess every time you run into them after that. On the flip side, like in your situation, when you were taught that if you're enjoying things, then you're a bad person, there's a strong emotional tie to that idea. The trick to overcoming it is:

1. Identify the situation that triggers it (i.e. enjoying life)
2. Identify your emotional reaction to it (FeelsBadMan.jpg)
3. Think about what thought created that emotion, i.e. your parents (authority figures in your life, at a young age) proclaiming that statement as fact
4. Decide how you'd rather think about it (ex. it's ok to enjoy life & also be a good person while enjoying life, and your parents beliefs aren't law & don't have to be your beliefs)

Most of the time, the new thought pattern has to act like sandpaper. Your current emotion is a wall or a barrier; in an ideal world, simply realizing that you want to think & thus feel differently about something would work instantly, but for a lot of stuff, especially habits that you've had since you were a kid, like feeling that you're a bad person when you're enjoying life, means that you're going to have to sand that puppy down over time, because you're so used to feeling, thinking, and acting a certain way in that situation. That original structure will basically always exist in your brain, so your job is to create a new structure & pull the switch on your mental train-tracks to drive to the new thought in order to create new emotions.

You have a Twitter feed in your head:

Aside from that, your thinking voice, your Jiminy Cricket, is kind of like a twitter feed, rather than the Undeniable Voice of Truth. It feeds your mind weird & distorted images, i.e. you're fat, you're too skinny, you don't have enough muscles, you're a bad person for enjoying life, whatever. The simple thing to realize here is that (1) that voice is just a data feed, and is incorrect a lot, and (2) you can audit that data feed. Ideas are going to pop into your head randomly, no matter what you do, but it's up to you to choose to entertain them & continue that thought process, or to believe them, or to ignore them, or whatever. So first, realize that you have a voice in your head. Second, realize that that voice doesn't always speak the truth. We all suffer from various cognitive distortions that we believe to be true, when in fact they're only roadblocks in our own minds because we don't realize that our thinking voice is really just a kind of external twitter feed that we can audit & decide what to think about & what to forget about it, and decide what is true & what isn't true.

I've had the strange opportunity to work with both self-made millionaires & homeless people in my adult life. The difference between them (outside of bad breaks, mental illness, etc.) simply boils down to how they think. One of my favorite quotes is by Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." You are basically acting as the gatekeeper in your own life. Like in the Kentucky Derby, which is a horserace, the horses all line up & the racers wait for the gates to open before they can start running the race. If you never open that door, then you'll never take the next step. As much as these forums have dwindled in active user count over the years, I've learned an awful lot from the various sub-forums simply because I'd get bored & poke around in them. I was never athletic growing up & never really got into the whole health & fitness thing until about a decade ago. Same with smarthouse stuff, cooking, and so on. The more stuff you expose yourself to & choose to pursue, the more you can achieve in your life. And in particular, the more you can focus on one thing & get really good at it, the better you can become at it. And all of that goes back to that default voice we have, or what we simply call "thinking", and how we choose to let our thoughts control our actions.

You have to decide what you're going to allow into your life, what gates you're going to open, and what you're going to pursue. Realizing that you have a random data stream in your head & that it just spurts out random crap all day can go a long way to helping you realize that you create a lot of your own problems & that you also create a lot of your own barriers in life. And once you realize how that random data feed works & that you can audit it, you can start making more conscious decision about who you want to be & what you want to do with your life & with your day. I grew up with a lot of anxiety & constantly listened to that voice in my head. Anxiety kind of works like a geyser...it spurts out a little or a lot, depending on the situation, and likes to splash on whatever is conveniently nearby. So if you're in public, then you automatically assume you have social anxiety, simply because you're feeling a negative chemical release (some adrenaline, which kicks in that flight-or-fight feeling). What's really happening is that you're having a physical reaction (body chemicals & neurotransmitters going haywire) & then you start listening to & believing everything that you think.

There's a lot of aspects of your life that this concept applies to...what kind of student you are, what kind of S.O. you are, what kind of ATOT poster you are, etc. Some good examples of how thinking can affect your reality include high-profile people like Donald Trump & Conor McGregor. McGregor, for example, has a pretty keen understanding of how that mental twitter feed works, because he uses some pretty intense psychological warfare against his opponents before & during his fights, and in some cases has completely broken people even before they started fighting. Someone put together a pretty good couple of Youtube videos that show some of his tactics...he attacks people verbally, which gets to them mentally, and that helps give him an advantage during the physical fight. ESPN lists his professional MMA record as 21 wins to 4 losses, which seems pretty dang good for a professional fighter!

Anyway, you're not a bad person if you're enjoying life. We all suffer from weird lines of thinking that we pick up along the path of life; understanding how our brains work & choosing to improve is, I think, one of the keys to getting better at the game of life.

 

[IronWing]

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

I take shit way too serious in life - which is why it took me to a breaking point when I decided to quit my consulting job. At the end of the day instead of constant day torture I would rather be slightly worried about financing than drinking myself to sleep every night.

I'm in all honesty trying to combat it though. Quitting a stressful job that demands insane hours is the first step. Next is putting my health and family above those.

....Not gonna lie, it's fucking nice just thinking of my wife working and not me

 

[Sonikku]

I used to. Now I just don't give a fuck.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Sure. I'm often told I'm too serious

 

[DigDog]

A: yes.

 

[Mai72]

If you want to achieve things than you should. What if Ford, Edison, Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King were like YOLO! Well we wouldn't have the car, the light bulb, the plane, and the civil rights march would had been only an after thought.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy life though.

 

[Mayne]

Kaido I love you man. I read every word. This forum doesn't deserve you.

 

[Mayne]

I woke up this morning realizing I hit rock bottom. Last night i made a can of campbells clam chowder and realized I couldn't make it back to my bedroom to eat it. I got on my hands and knees and pushed the bowl across the living room floor and down to my bedroom...stopping every couple minutes to eat a spoonful off the floor. I need to get to a doctor.

 

[yhelothar]

Yes & no. There's a funny quote attributed to numerous people that goes, "Never take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it alive!". That doesn't mean you need to be suicidal or not care about life, but I think there are some pretty uptight cats out there who don't really get what life is all about.

I do think you should be serious about your work ethic & your commitments, but I also think that life is designed to be enjoyed. From a high level, I think that being a mature adult translates out to getting your work done first, then working on your personal projects, and then being able to enjoy your unstructured time guilt-free. If you goof that formula up, then things go south: you're not meeting your commitments, you're not doing anything to pursue your personal dreams & ambitions, and you're using your free time to engage in avoidance behavior.

*snip*

Great answer. One of the greatest pleasures in life is to work towards your goals and be a part of something bigger than yourself. But at the same time, have fun doing it and enjoy the journey towards it.

 

[zinfamous]

If you want to achieve things than you should. What if Ford, Edison, Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King were like YOLO! Well we wouldn't have the car, the light bulb, the plane, and the civil rights march would had been only an after thought.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy life though.

no, we would have still had all those things. It just would have been different names. Inventions like that don't happen in a vacuum. We simply remember those that are first to the punch with the best concept/product.

Edison was a grifter, anyway.

 

[Kaido]

I'm in all honesty trying to combat it though. Quitting a stressful job that demands insane hours is the first step.

One of the big reasons I moved back into freelance IT was because of a stressful work environment. Not because of the work itself, but because my immediate boss was extremely difficult to work for. I'm a pretty laid-back person & was getting stressed out to the point where even my wife was telling me that it was time to quit & move on. But it's like getting over a relationship...sometimes it's extremely hard to decouple yourself emotionally & make that change in reality. Actual change can be hard!