I understand how it works. All of the tools you use when you touch an electronic. I understand how a cell phone works, and how it sends your message to facebook. I understand how people connect and disconnect through online conversation, and I understand the structure of those platforms they are built on. I know what colors make people happy and sad and use that to market products to them wherever I need to as income. I know what makes a great internet platform and I know what functionalities make or break user experience. I know how to add and remove the things people like and dislike, and have the analytical skills to steer demographics together or apart through the platform itself!
It’s a combination of education and experience. You do the same with your own skills.
We all have strengths and weaknesses, and when you figure out what they are you can steer your life to use the skills you have and work on or avoid the things we suck at.
You don’t have to be good at everything. You don’t have to know how to do anything, really – besides be a good person.
If you can do that, you’ve opened up infinite possibilities. And if you are physically, mentally, and motivated enough you can do a lot more things. We can’t deny our individual limitations, but the things holding us back are no excuse for us to not do our best to overcome them.
That’s where motivation comes in, and most of the people in the world don’t have it.
You can say “well fuck you Sadrabbit, I do try my best”. No you don’t. No one does. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for, it’s horrifying to think about what would happen if everyone was capable of realizing their true potential.
Motivation can be really easy to keep if you figure out a good way to solve your problem or move forward on something in life. It can become perpetual when the task you are trying to achieve has noticeable progress – you can see your life improving as the days, weeks, or years pass. Looking back towards a previous checkpoint or the original starting line in a personal race can give a sense of awe – an inspiration motivational poster in your brainhole that gives a rush of dopamine you can use like adrenaline to push forward. They do this in war and in your office, it’s called “boosting morale”.
If the task at hand is more long term, it’s difficult to keep that inspiration intact over long periods of time. You need to find a method of keeping your motivation levels high. This could be you leaving a note to look at before you leave the house each day, or a photo of your family in your cubicle. Words and images can be incredibly powerful when attempting to focus on something, especially in repetition.
Which leads me to Pavlov’s experiment. For those who are unaware of what that is, it was a psychological study that analyzes reactions and attempts to curb them through altering controlled variables.
Classical Conditioning came out of this. For those who would like to debate whether conditioning works or not, I used the theories surrounding this subject to reduce my cravings for alcohol to almost nonexistent, and never really stopped going to the bar after I quit drinking.
We don’t even have to dig this deep and use fancy words to explain what I did. It’s also called habit forming. I had a bad habit – and I replaced that bad habit with another bad habit – but less harmful. Then I did it again and again, until my vodka had turned into water. I did it all at a bar, pretending to get loaded with the crew and whoever else is in the room.
You can steer your addictions. We do it all the time in medicine. Heroin becomes morphine, which becomes oxy, which becomes norco, which becomes ibuprophen.
If you are mentally strong – you can bypass the physical dependencies within a very short time.
That said, being mentally strong isn’t something that people casually have. Someone who is mentally strong can sit in front of their biggest vice and not only avoid touching it, they avoid worrying about wanting to touch it.
I don’t ever want to drink again, but sometimes I do miss the sting of vodka. I drink a ginger beer or potent energy drink when that happens. When I miss the pleasure of being intoxicated, I partake in legal substances for relaxation and relief from my day to day stresses. I found what works for me and successfully built a system to manage it.
Things happen though, and systems fail. Anything can happen at anytime, and we can’t be prepared for life’s worst situations. A severe life change could throw my logic out the window, and I jump back into alcohol.
Safety nets – The people you buy all your shit from have these on their factories because the employees are treated so badly and paid so horribly that they constantly try to kill themselves.
Build some safety nets to protect yourself from life problems. Make sure you always have access to someone you can talk to about your feelings – whatever they may be. This may not be one person, such as a therapist or a significant other, but a variety of people experienced and sympathetic to your situation. Targeting the people you spill your beans to is important not only for your privacy, but for the quality of information you receive your information from.
This poses another problem though – hivemind.
Hivemind is in all of your social groups – the neighborhood community online and around the cul-de-sac, the office chat rooms and meeting rooms, service at your location of prayer, or the food drives after.
It’s normal to want to be around people you feel comfortable with, but it creates a closed-mindedness that often times goes unseen, as our exposure to anything opposite in casual conversation dwindles to zero.
This is why everyone fights on social media. It’s you vs. people of opposite thought. It’s easy because you can do it anywhere and no one can throw a punch at you through a phone. If you put these two people in a room with one another, they might have a chance at having a reasonable debate about the subject at hand.
Unfortunately people exist – and on social media anyone can chime in with their own perspectives. It’s difficult to maintain objective thought when others say triggering things, and retaliation comes easier than biting your own tougne. This creates a chaos in that environment and quickly escalates to a split fight between right and wrong. And then these people individually use persuasive tactics to force opinions on other people. A lot of the time people aren’t open to changing their opinions, and lash back either avoiding the issue or adding a new one to the mix, amplifying the issue.
Eventually the environment the debate is in dissolves or explodes into something larger. If the problem or conversation of the subject is large enough or enough of these circulate through our media platforms, it opens up the world for change. Take mental health for example, how well have we looked at this subject over the last 100 years? 50? 10? 5? 1?
Each individual idea or problem can follow this route. You could wake up one morning and say “I’m going to be an advocate for turtle tax exemption. You gather your ideas and tell your online friends that you think turtles shouldn’t have to pay taxes. You make a sound argument that entices others to join your cause. As you continually work to promote this you’re gaining traction as other people do the same and share to others. Eventually the people will see more and more of your activism, and prominence makes them consider where they stand on the problem. They either join you, work against you, or ignore turtle rights.
Another word I like is scale, in the sense of scalability.
Let’s reduce this massive social media activism to something a bit smaller.
You have a turtle, and he doesn’t have food because the tax on the one thing he eats is 40% and it already costs you half of your paycheck. Some people might not have the time to get a second job or switch their current one to something better, so they start a fundraiser to feed their turtle.
The people that contribute to this fundraiser do it because they either like you as an individual or they agree with the reason you are asking for money.
This in itself promotes a local awareness around your turtle tax issue, and opens thought for others. The opportunity to connect is created, and anyone who touches your concerns has the possibility of investing in it.
Growth through Connections.
Things move a lot faster on the internet. I can create and destroy entire websites at will, and anything I put on these websites gets sent to the open internet – available to billions of people all over the globe. Any ideas I have can be laid out wherever I please, and I can link that to existing platforms to connect on a deeper level than my current social groups. It’s infinite opportunity, and that gave me a god complex I cannot get rid of.
I used to scare myself sometimes with the thoughts that crossed my head and the weird dreams that I struggle to interpret.
My own personal beliefs currently steer me away from appealing to a higher power, as I cannot define it with logic. I desire infinite answers and any faith I come across is met with swift research. I’m speaking to the world in hopes someone will find a flaw in my logic that provides the answer I’m looking for.
It’s that silly post death question that I thought I solved back in November.
Right now I distract myself with chaos theory to keep my mind at ease, but my experiences tell me there is an incredible amount of things out there that I do not know, and am not meant to know. The human brain is not stable enough to handle certain shocks – knowledge can become trauma if you aren’t careful.
And that’s what makes faith so appealing. It’s a blissful ignorance and I apologize if that offends you.
I don’t want to ruin people with my writing – I want to be an avenue for people who are lost and have already tried religion. Once you think too deeply about something, you cannot reverse the thoughts you already had without some sort of specialized mental restructuring.
I have to keep writing, and I have to share it to the world. Being stuck in my own head with my own thoughts has been the source of many traumas in my life, as I am responsible for my own actions regardless of my morality and expectations of everyone and everything else.
Backtracking to where I rabbitholed – people have problems that can’t be solved by talking to someone else. It has to come from within.
They say bad things happen if you stare in a mirror too long… I’m here to work to ensure you don’t do this the wrong way after reading what I have to say. The mind is a very sensitive idea to discuss – and should be the most important thing to you as an individual. You can say your kids or job comes first, but that can’t happen if you’re a shitty parent or toxic coworker.
Looking at big ideas can create big problems, and sometimes these problems are so overwhelming we snap and have breakdowns. A lot of times these breakdowns occur when multiple problems collide simultaneously, and create an exponential explosion of chaos.
In these moments we have to decide what happens next – we have to fight until we win or we give up and face the pains that come with loss. “Pain is not a punishment and pleasure is not a reward”, Pema Chodron once said. Loss does not always mean inferiority in any way.
A lot of the time, religion is thrown into the mix when problem solving. “Give your problems to God” is a thin veil for “become one of us”. As stated earlier, this is not for everyone.
Though it doesn’t have to – self help can cross the lines into spirituality. It even says it in the name – Self. It’s acknowledging that you are capable of solving your own problems. If you can do this on a day to day basis – it eliminates the need for a God, and then religion is only used for securing a seat to a good spot in the afterlife.
Generalizing everything is risky and promotes biases, but I feel that most people in religion in 2022 are in their respective religions purely for comfort or to satisfy an imposing family or friend group.
At least in all the areas I have lived – Christianity is massive and nothing else exists under it, but everyone is really shitty and does not live by the words they preach.
My need to find peace of mind and logical answers eventually helped me find support groups I felt comfortable sitting in, that did not impress a deity – while still jumping into cultures I am unfamiliar with. I believe the key to understanding religion is to appreciate it from every level, while still staying objective about the intentions of the community. I can’t say that Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism or Athiesm or Agnostisim is the right answer – because I haven’t found a published piece that answers that question.
Do you have peace in death? My personal site here isn’t meant to be a source of religion for people – but the subjects I talk about connect things in our life that can’t be talked about legally by businesses.
The connection between our mind and our religion is fascinating and no one talks about it.
During an identity crisis I realized I can freely talk about this, where my therapist or my doctor can’t. I also realized that I can help myself by talking about it to myself and my close friends individually. I also realized I can use mental health as a subject to obsess about to pass the time and make some money to live.
So now I’m here, writing, and hoping I can make a few bucks to afford the things that keep me happy and make me smile. I hope that by being transparent about my life I can be honest with myself and help others who aren’t ready to speak to people directly about their own problems.
Eventually we need to share the things that bother us when we can’t get passed them, but until then, the internet is a beautiful source of information that is accessible to so many people worldwide.
A bittersweet tool that can make or break someone’s sanity.
Use it wisely.