075 • Miscellaneous thoughts about living a fulfilling life
A few short ideas I've been pondering...
I’m nobody to tell a person how to live, but these are just some observations that I’ve had recently. With that aside, here you go…
Does everyone believe they’re right?
There's a difference between being truthful and being subjectively right. But I think that the closer you can get to making both of them the same in your head, the happier you're going to be because you'll be, on average, as in tune as possible with the rest of the world.
I like to think that the truth in my head is quite closely aligned with reality (the map being a partly-accurate representation of the territory, as it were). But then again it might be way off. And we’re pretty limited in terms of ways to build up this map of truth…
The only truth is in action
When not action, what is a thing? Just a thought? And how much do you trust thoughts to be true? You can trick your mind into thinking anything; it’s much harder to actually go out and do what you believe is right at your core.
When you’re considering yourself, you’re more exposed to delusions because your brain tries to keep you safe. But have a look what you’ve done and what you continue to do to see the real truth about your nature.
Don't go by what you think about yourself, go by what you do yourself. And to change the truth about your nature, change these things that you do.
Having said this, it might be useful to delude yourself at times…
You don’t need reason, you just need belief
Anything that encourages you to start is fundamentally better than anything that encourages you to stop.
Thus, belief is often better than reason - with reason, you can reason yourself out of doing things. With belief, you think you’re going to succeed, pushing forwards into doing the action, and therefore forward to improving the truth of your situation in the world.
(This one was a hard one to edit - I realised that the above point went somewhat against what I said here. To patch over this I went and added the italicised line at the bottom. Maybe I’ll come back to these ideas to make a better pass at untangling them and explaining them in the future. For now, I’m sorry if you’re a little confused. I am as well.)
Find the right questions to ask
The last one I was working on - the issue was going to be entirely about this idea but I couldn’t articulate it well enough. Maybe you can reply or comment and tell me what you think…
It’s very easy to be caught up in the world of taking action, graft and putting your head down in mindless work. The problem comes when you’re not sure where the work is going to take you.
Everything stems from finding the right questions to ask, whether this is ‘What problems do I want to solve?’ or ‘What would I keep doing even if I knew I was going to fail?’.
The best knowledge doesn’t help if you don’t know how you’re going to apply it, so the best questions to ask are the ones that give you clarity on the direction you want to take your life in.
Why did I share these ideas with you today?
In all honesty, I’m not sure - they’ve been the working notes that have been floating around in my Obsidian vault for some time now and more than anything, I thought this would be a good opportunity to work them out a little more.
All I think I’ve done is give myself a proper challenge when it comes to doing next week’s video issue. I can hardly write about these things, let alone talk about them. But we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks as always for reading,
— Theo
