Comparing Yourself To Others, And Why You Should Do No Such Thing.

Even though the situation in Europe is far less insane, my grandparents just-

My grandmother never worked fulltime a day in her life. She had no education past high school, she just walked up to a place, asked for a job and got it.

My grandfather finished his college degree when he was like 30, and then worked in a completely different industry where his education barely helped him.

They bought a house for dirt cheap, and have lived in it for over 40 years.

Meanwhile my parents both have high positions within companies, and they make (from what i can guess) between 3 and 4 times as much as my grandparents ever did.

Here's the kicker. My grandparents live 2 streets away from my parents. Their house has like septoupled in value and it is truly a testiment to how different the world was in the 70's than it is today.

As for me? I can't afford to move out before my college degree in aerodynamics is completed.

I just want to be able to quietly work on a computer tap tapping away with my cat sitting with me, is that really such a hard thing to come by? It is. Degree this, experience that. I get it, I do. Of course you'd want people who meet certain criteria, that makes perfect sense. If wishes were fishes and all that.

Trying to explain the nature of dicipline.

Dicipline, and especially self dicipline, is not something that you can force through sheer willpower. You have to do useless things to get it. And you can't tell yourself that you're doing it for the sake of dicipline, it doesn't work like that. You have to do things for no reason. And if you find yourself asking: Why am I doing this? you should answer: "I'm doing this unnecessary task because it is unnecessary."

After all, when your boss tells you to do a task that is useless for your work, or you have to learn calculus that you will never, ever use in your adult life, will you have a better time with a brain that is geared towards hating unnecessary things and will feel frustrated over the task, or one that not only is used to dealing with these types of tasks, but can even find meaning in the meaningless, through dicipline.

Taxes?

Their power grows

Stoic excercise: The reverse marshmellow test

Time to train up some dicipline! Remember that real dicipline isn't about muscular men at the gym, or soldiers obeying orders. True dicipline is personal and comes from within yourself, and nobody can force self-dicipline upon you (hence the name). The reverse Marshmellow test Take a piece of candy, chocolate, marshmallow, whatever you want to have. It doesn't have to be candy. It can be anything, so long as you desire it in the moment. Place either 1 or 2 pieces in front of you.

Should you pick 2 pieces: Allow yourself to take one, WITHOUT guilt. You are mature enough to make your own decisions and guilt is the bane of happiness. Set an arbitrary amount of time for yourself. It shouldn't be too long, because this is an active excercise that will take the time you set for yourself. I'd recommend 15 minutes AT MOST, but 2 minutes is much more reasonable. Even just 40 seconds is great! Now place the two pieces in front of you, sit down, and don't do anything. Neither productive nor unproductive. You may let your thoughts run as wild as you like, but you physically have to sit and look at the two pieces (this is the only reason why you shouldn't go for more than 15 minutes. It may take out a chunk of your day if you go any higher). If you manage to wait the time you set for yourself without taking the first piece, you may take the second. You don't have to eat it, but if you do, you can do it with a feeling that you 100% entirely earned that piece. Should you pick 1 piece: Put the piece in front of you and set some amount of time for yourself. Sit down and look at the piece. You don't have to clear your mind, but you may not do any chores/actions, practical or otherwise. You might notice that you aren't focusing on your piece, but instead practical work to do or just whatever it is your brain is thinking of. This is okay. Let the brain do what it wants, this is natural and healthy for a mind to do. It will eventually get these small 'chores' done and you will either be at rest or back to focusing on the piece. It's boring, but just keep waiting until the time is up. When the time is up, take your piece and eat it if you feel like it.

Bonus challenge! Try to convince yourself in your mind to take the piece early, or that you're just wasting your time by sitting idle (you're not, and believe me when I say that you waste much, much more time on other things).

(mid-challenge) What if I rationally don't want to do this anymore, and I'm starting to feel uninvested/in a worse mood? Fair enough! This may happen if the time that was set is too long. Here's what you do in the situation: You cancel the excercise. You haven't done anything wrong and you shouldn't feel guilt or shame. In at least an hour or so, you can try the excercise again if you'd like, with a shorter time. Finally, remember that 30 seconds isn't a bad time, and isn't important how long you can go for. You just have to be willing to challenge yourself with your time.

Classic internet response: "I can bother as many people around me as I want to cuz I have a sacred entitlement to be myself." To a quote about growing as a person while being yourself and not bothering others.

“Seeds do not make a sound when growing, but can even reach the sky. Learn from them.”

— Matshona Dhliwayo

Anyone ever have a day so bad you just start laughing from the absurdity of it?

I remember I had a day that, on paper, was awful. Bike had somehow had both of its wheels punctured, so I had to walk to school (it wasn't too far away from where I lived so if I made haste I wouldn't be late). While I'm walking, Aeolus decides to do everything in his power to ensure I fail. It was like walking against a leafblower, only bigger and proportinally stronger. However, while I pass the only place on the route where there are puddles, a truck speeds by, splashing a small tsunami directly at me. By this point I'm in a seriously bad mood, but it gets worse, as the moment I step foot on school grounds I trip on dogshit and fall in the earth-mud combination that the ground has become after yesterdays rainfall. On the way home I pass under a tree and I kid you not, like 3 acorns fall on my head and fall down my clothes, (these were like, decently heavy, not enough to hurt me but enough to be uncomfortable to be hit by). Then, when I get home, I realise I have lost my keys. By this point I am barely holding it together, but I can still go to my grandparent's house to get a spare and return it. Annoying, yes, but better than standing around in dirty clothes waiting for someone to come home. When I make it up there, I realise that they aren't home either, so I go to retrieve the spare key for their home, and after getting in, i realise that I don't actually know where their keys are. I call my grandmother, and she reveals that alas! The spare key is with them, as they use 1 keychain for all their keys. This was the point when the entire situation became so absurd that I just began laughing at it all, full on belly laughing at how comically unfortonate the day had been. I laughed most of the way home (it's a fairly short walk), and then it happened. As I got home to wait, my mom opened the door. She had been working from home all day, and heard me try to open the door but had been in the bathroom, and by the time she unlocked it I was already off to get the spare key. When I heard this I laughed hysterically she got genuinely worried, and then I showed her the back of my clothes and explained the entire thing, after which we both laughed like hell about it.

So it was a good day in practice, haha

When you get lost and you end up in the enemys spawn

right wing trolls acting up on tumblr always fascinate me like what are you doing making a fuss about pronouns on the pronouns in bio website you’re in enemy territory like are you lost or something

3 am motivation

Guys, do NOT get motivated at 3 am!!! (gone wrong)

Yeah so basically, it's a little tragic to think about. Why do we get it? I can't say I know with certainty, but it's either that we run out of distractions and our brain thinks it's finally time to be productive (which is sad in the way watching a puppy try to play with a cat that's not having it, is sad). The other reason is that our brain doesn't want to send the motivation until it feels confident enough that you won't actually do it, so it does it late at night when you want to sleep. In this case, that's just a serious lack of self-dicipline where it feels uncomfortable to do something productive due the Feeling of Resistance.

I do think it's the first one, which sadly is the less straightforward one of the two to solve. I don't know exactly how to overcome it, but I do know that I have overcome it myself, so it is possible. Make your own conclusions on this one, I'll just explain how productive work usually goes for me (when it goes right)

I get something assigned. I mentally make a note of it, when it's due, and how long it will take.

Later on, I decide when to do it. This may be immedeately after the first step but not always.

5-15 minutes before it's time to do the task, I pull it up and ready myself for it. This basically just means reading up on it, remembering what it's about, and letting my subconsious work a little.

Here's where I usually get that motivation. While I technically don't have to get started yet, I will often pick up on a good way to start, and decide to go immedeately. The entire feeling of resistance is eliminated and the work ends up not being that difficult.

When the time for the task has come, I clear my mind and start working. If I don't know how to get started (meaning that no sudden burst of flow and motivation hit me), I write something terrible until it gets me on a road of productivity, and then I fix the start later.

For the record: This does not always work. At all. Litterally today, as I was writing this, I should have been getting started on an assignment.

So yeah probably don't believe anything you hear me say, the hell do I know.

Love, as always, from Anthony

There's a reason for that, you know. When the body is near death, the brain decides that ultimately, it wants to not die, and so it goes into a special, extremely harmful state where it presses every body on the keyboard and releases as many positive chemicals it can, to try and keep itself awake. What you are doing is effectively the same as huffing gasoline. You are getting high on your body's very last survival mechanism to try and prevent a total organ shutdown. And you enjoy it.

if u starve for long enough u start feeling like ur high sometimes its my fav thing ever