Dear Racho,
I write you this time because I have been a bit down.
Lately, I have been trying to study education and psychology on my own and in classes, with the goal of finding a field that aligns with my interests and objectives. I have developed a bigger library of information and theories in those fields, but for some reason, even with these new concepts and vocabulary, I have a hard time expressing my ideas in ways that are not too vague or abstract. They are just fuzzy little ideas that seem trivial.
This inability to eloquently express my ideas REALLY REALLY SUCKS because this has made it impossible to build upon and improve them. Building upon and improving my ideas are precisely what I want to do, so I'm sure you can imagine that this has affected me to an unimaginable degree. It seems silly when I write it out. I can't seem to find the right words.
Yesterday, I convinced myself that I was a failure because I could not remember the last time I had an interesting thought.
For the past two months, I have had moments when I felt the passion and excitement to read and to learn, but most of the time, I have felt more like I am just walking on a treadmill, looking at the same scenery, not going anywhere, just getting tired and slowly rotting away.
Yesterday, I came to the conclusion that I am sad because I feel like I've failed, and that in turn is maybe because I identify too much with my ability to think and not enough with other things. Previously, I have found a lot of meaning and enjoyment in listening to and playing music, learning about international affairs, and listening closely and trying to help others. I wonder if spending some time doing these will restore some vitality or sense of purpose or whatever is supposed to help, and maybe I can give my wilted thoughts a second chance.
I want to work hard and learn. But I am weary. And I don't know how to restore some of the...I don't know... thing, the motivating thing.
I guess I wanted to ask you: What do you do when you feel lost? What do you do when it feels like the hard work is fruitless?
I would really appreciate your thoughts.
Thank you, friend.
Love and Peace,
Rina
ponderista
Showing posts with label lifestyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lifestyle. Show all posts
Monday, June 5, 2017
Saturday, March 4, 2017
on excess and me
Picture this. It's Sunday, and you are in your home, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea, looking out the window at the sunset. The sky melts from orange to deep red. It has been a pleasant weekend. You met up with a friend to go to the gelato shop that both of you have been excited to see for the longest time. You finished all of the housework. You paid your neighbor's kid to wash your car, and now that's clean too. Well, clean enough--what do you expect from a nine-year-old, really? You bring the cup of tea to your lips. The sky is a deep indigo now. You feel the steam envelop your nostrils, and you put the cup down as a strange, sinking feeling hits you in the chest. It's a creeping, nagging feeling that seems to come back at dusk, oftentimes on Sundays. What am I doing with my life? What am I trying to achieve, really? You glance around at your apartment. What is this? The sinking feeling spreads to your stomach and you take another gulp, but the tea just doesn't cure it.
Discontentment. Confusion. Shame. By any of the typical ways to measure happiness, you should have happiness. You have a well-paying job, a humble home, and most of the things you've ever wanted. Everything seems to be in place. And yet... With a sigh, you dump the rest of the tea into the sink and close the curtains.Emptiness remains.
I think we all have this experience. At some point, we acquire the things that we've always wanted, and we expect these things to make us happy. Yet, after finally collecting it all, we're left feeling exhausted and famished rather than content.
There's clearly a problem here. Are we so silly that we expect material items to make us happy? The simple answer is: yes. But the issue is far more complicated than that, and upon looking a bit more at the issue and a bit more gently at myself, I find that it's not all my fault. I don't think that demeaning or degrading anyone solves the problem. So, let's investigate.
Firstly, it can't be your fault because you've been tricked! You've been told this your entire life. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, which promise us the world. The perfume ad promises to turn you into the minx of the city. The car ad promises to make you into the family man (which will make your wife the happy lady she was hoping to be). People grow up in these environments that quietly encourage them to remedy their insecurities through shopping, so it is not at all surprising if the seeds of this idea has been planted in your mind as well.
Secondly, there is some truth behind the idea that materials make us happy. A warm cup of hot chocolate after a long day of work can heal the soul. A three piece suit can sometimes give us the confidence we need to assert ourselves at the job interview. It's easy to look at these experiences and extend our conclusions to say that things are the cures to our ailments, but this is obviously not the case, as there are many exceptions. There are certain things that can make us feel better under certain circumstances, but the abstraction to "all things" and "all circumstances" cannot be made.
So the problem here are that people grow up being taught implicitly that shopping can solve their problems, and through experience they notice that sometimes certain things make them feel better. However, they have their expectations consistently betrayed when shopping repeatedly fails to solve their deepest issues. This gap in expectation and the reality leaves us with a damaged psyche and a ruined Sunday afternoon.
This leads me to the soul-crushing truth: items can make us feel things, but most often, they will not solve our important problems. The problems that people face are far too complex and deeply rooted to be fixed with one purchase. If one truly wants to solve life's problems, one will have to face the problems head on.
So how do we reverse our longtime ritual of collecting items for therapeutic reasons? Many people decide to embrace lifestyles like Minimalism or Essentialism, which encourage people to rid their homes and lives of items and activities that are not core necessities, or even asceticism, which encourages people to avoid indulgences entirely. While I have looked into these lifestyles and agree with many of the core assumptions, I have never really found the need to actively identify with them. I decided to boil them down to the key concepts and explain the essence of them here, and then use them make suggestions for little steps we can take to combat materialism without making the big commitment to lifestyles like Minimalism.
Key idea 1) You have a hierarchy of priorities. There are things that are more important to you than others.
Key idea 2) You can make yourself aware of your hierarchy of priorities though careful observation and periodic reflection.
Key idea 3) Having stuff you don't really care about around you has a net negative impact on your life. You have a scarcity of resources (money, time, and space in your apartment), so spending your money or time or space on things that are relatively unimportant necessarily takes away those resources that could be used instead on relatively important things. Spending our resources on our top priorities is more valuable and makes us feel better. Therefore, getting rid of the things you don't care about positively impacts your life.
The issue boils down to this: you have a decision to make. How should you use your resources? You need to make the criteria for decision-making as true to yourself as possible, and as abundantly clear to yourself as possible. Otherwise, you make poor decisions. This is when that emptiness-on-Sunday-afternoon feeling sets in.
So how do you decide on criteria? Practicing careful observation and periodic reflection are key to developing your criteria. Some helpful questions to think about in this process are: What are your aspirations? What could you not live without? Who are your heroes? What specifically are the qualities or achievements of those heroes that you respect? Be cognizant of your feelings and reactions to things; this is how you collect data on yourself. Next, you analyze this data. Compare your feelings about one thing to your feelings about another. Analyze how you thought and felt about things in the past, make comparisons, and identify themes.
How important is it to you to have many pairs of shoes? Is fashion important to you? Or are you just buying those shoes because your friend says that she read that they are going to be the must-have shoes of spring 2017? Reflect. Feel. Think.
After that, it's a problem of developing the habits or rituals that are conducive to efficient use of your resources. You can reverse the effects that your shopping habit has had on your psyche by replacing that habit with a better one. Replace your shopping habit with a jogging habit or a journal-ing habit or whatever it is sensible people do.
In this way, you don't have to be an ascetic to fight back against the temptation of materialism. We can take some time to reflect on what we truly need, and refocus our lenses on our real priorities: the things that give us joy and meaning.
And, full stop, I guess.
I hope you have some time to reflect on your priorities today.
Love and peace,
Rina
Discontentment. Confusion. Shame. By any of the typical ways to measure happiness, you should have happiness. You have a well-paying job, a humble home, and most of the things you've ever wanted. Everything seems to be in place. And yet... With a sigh, you dump the rest of the tea into the sink and close the curtains.Emptiness remains.
I think we all have this experience. At some point, we acquire the things that we've always wanted, and we expect these things to make us happy. Yet, after finally collecting it all, we're left feeling exhausted and famished rather than content.
There's clearly a problem here. Are we so silly that we expect material items to make us happy? The simple answer is: yes. But the issue is far more complicated than that, and upon looking a bit more at the issue and a bit more gently at myself, I find that it's not all my fault. I don't think that demeaning or degrading anyone solves the problem. So, let's investigate.
Firstly, it can't be your fault because you've been tricked! You've been told this your entire life. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, which promise us the world. The perfume ad promises to turn you into the minx of the city. The car ad promises to make you into the family man (which will make your wife the happy lady she was hoping to be). People grow up in these environments that quietly encourage them to remedy their insecurities through shopping, so it is not at all surprising if the seeds of this idea has been planted in your mind as well.
Secondly, there is some truth behind the idea that materials make us happy. A warm cup of hot chocolate after a long day of work can heal the soul. A three piece suit can sometimes give us the confidence we need to assert ourselves at the job interview. It's easy to look at these experiences and extend our conclusions to say that things are the cures to our ailments, but this is obviously not the case, as there are many exceptions. There are certain things that can make us feel better under certain circumstances, but the abstraction to "all things" and "all circumstances" cannot be made.
So the problem here are that people grow up being taught implicitly that shopping can solve their problems, and through experience they notice that sometimes certain things make them feel better. However, they have their expectations consistently betrayed when shopping repeatedly fails to solve their deepest issues. This gap in expectation and the reality leaves us with a damaged psyche and a ruined Sunday afternoon.
This leads me to the soul-crushing truth: items can make us feel things, but most often, they will not solve our important problems. The problems that people face are far too complex and deeply rooted to be fixed with one purchase. If one truly wants to solve life's problems, one will have to face the problems head on.
So how do we reverse our longtime ritual of collecting items for therapeutic reasons? Many people decide to embrace lifestyles like Minimalism or Essentialism, which encourage people to rid their homes and lives of items and activities that are not core necessities, or even asceticism, which encourages people to avoid indulgences entirely. While I have looked into these lifestyles and agree with many of the core assumptions, I have never really found the need to actively identify with them. I decided to boil them down to the key concepts and explain the essence of them here, and then use them make suggestions for little steps we can take to combat materialism without making the big commitment to lifestyles like Minimalism.
Key idea 1) You have a hierarchy of priorities. There are things that are more important to you than others.
Key idea 2) You can make yourself aware of your hierarchy of priorities though careful observation and periodic reflection.
Key idea 3) Having stuff you don't really care about around you has a net negative impact on your life. You have a scarcity of resources (money, time, and space in your apartment), so spending your money or time or space on things that are relatively unimportant necessarily takes away those resources that could be used instead on relatively important things. Spending our resources on our top priorities is more valuable and makes us feel better. Therefore, getting rid of the things you don't care about positively impacts your life.
The issue boils down to this: you have a decision to make. How should you use your resources? You need to make the criteria for decision-making as true to yourself as possible, and as abundantly clear to yourself as possible. Otherwise, you make poor decisions. This is when that emptiness-on-Sunday-afternoon feeling sets in.
So how do you decide on criteria? Practicing careful observation and periodic reflection are key to developing your criteria. Some helpful questions to think about in this process are: What are your aspirations? What could you not live without? Who are your heroes? What specifically are the qualities or achievements of those heroes that you respect? Be cognizant of your feelings and reactions to things; this is how you collect data on yourself. Next, you analyze this data. Compare your feelings about one thing to your feelings about another. Analyze how you thought and felt about things in the past, make comparisons, and identify themes.
How important is it to you to have many pairs of shoes? Is fashion important to you? Or are you just buying those shoes because your friend says that she read that they are going to be the must-have shoes of spring 2017? Reflect. Feel. Think.
After that, it's a problem of developing the habits or rituals that are conducive to efficient use of your resources. You can reverse the effects that your shopping habit has had on your psyche by replacing that habit with a better one. Replace your shopping habit with a jogging habit or a journal-ing habit or whatever it is sensible people do.
In this way, you don't have to be an ascetic to fight back against the temptation of materialism. We can take some time to reflect on what we truly need, and refocus our lenses on our real priorities: the things that give us joy and meaning.
And, full stop, I guess.
I hope you have some time to reflect on your priorities today.
Love and peace,
Rina
Thursday, February 2, 2017
i need to write more
2017 has crept upon me. It’s February already. I almost forgot to pay rent.
One of my resolutions this year is to write more and to talk to people more.
There are a variety of reasons that I chose this resolution: I noticed that I wonder about things a lot. I like making ideas and contemplating them. However, because I don’t write or talk to people much, I’m left with half-baked ideas that I cannot communicate to others, often feeling isolated and powerless. This is how it has been for a long time, since I was small.
When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite pastimes was to go “fishing". I had my very own fishing net and rod. I took those, some ears of bread from the kitchen, and a bucket down to the lake near my home.
I remember sitting down on the rocks by the lake and balancing the bucket precariously next to me. I balled up the bread and casted the line. The breeze tapped a rhythm on my face with my hair. The waves sighed and licked the rocks. It didn’t take long to get swallowed by the rhythm, and within minutes, my eyes glazed over and I was lost in thought.
I wonder why that homeless guy is always at the bus stop by the grocery store in the morning. I wonder how old he is. He looks pretty old. Maybe he has children. Wait, I don't think I've met homeless kids at my school. I wonder what school they go to. What kind of food do they bring for lunch? Probably sandwiches. That's what most kids have. I guess it makes sense that they would have the same.Actually, how would I know if a kid is homeless or not? Maybe I just don't know. Do I need to know? I probably don't really need to know.
And then there was a tug on my rod. My bait was gone. Ball bread. Cast line. Ponder. Repeat cycle until I became hungry and went home.
Oftentimes, through thinking while fishing, I developed a deeper understanding of the world, a person, or myself, and I could extract some kind of conclusion.
But no one could ever come inside my imagination. I could see, smell, taste, hear, and feel my world, but it was so difficult to explain my imagined experiences in it to anyone else. That was my imagination, and that was all. I couldn’t express the conclusions I drew from it or their significance. I experienced and learned by myself. And this left me feeling isolated, lonely, and powerless.
On top of that, my conclusions remained fuzzy rather than defined in words as concepts. As a result I could not always fully understand their implications, and I often couldn’t build upon them.
This is why writing and talking is important for me. I want to turn my thoughts into concepts that I can communicate to others, that I can record and thus fully analyze and understand. Otherwise, my ideas cannot grow. I cannot grow. And I cannot use my ideas to bring changes I want to see in the world. Pondering and blissfully living in a imaginary world that only I can experience is not enough for me any longer. I want to include others in my world. And I want to use my ideas to make the world a better place.
A key step I need to take is to write and speak.
And with that, I introduce my blog.
One of my resolutions this year is to write more and to talk to people more.
There are a variety of reasons that I chose this resolution: I noticed that I wonder about things a lot. I like making ideas and contemplating them. However, because I don’t write or talk to people much, I’m left with half-baked ideas that I cannot communicate to others, often feeling isolated and powerless. This is how it has been for a long time, since I was small.
When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite pastimes was to go “fishing". I had my very own fishing net and rod. I took those, some ears of bread from the kitchen, and a bucket down to the lake near my home.
I remember sitting down on the rocks by the lake and balancing the bucket precariously next to me. I balled up the bread and casted the line. The breeze tapped a rhythm on my face with my hair. The waves sighed and licked the rocks. It didn’t take long to get swallowed by the rhythm, and within minutes, my eyes glazed over and I was lost in thought.
I wonder why that homeless guy is always at the bus stop by the grocery store in the morning. I wonder how old he is. He looks pretty old. Maybe he has children. Wait, I don't think I've met homeless kids at my school. I wonder what school they go to. What kind of food do they bring for lunch? Probably sandwiches. That's what most kids have. I guess it makes sense that they would have the same.Actually, how would I know if a kid is homeless or not? Maybe I just don't know. Do I need to know? I probably don't really need to know.
And then there was a tug on my rod. My bait was gone. Ball bread. Cast line. Ponder. Repeat cycle until I became hungry and went home.
Oftentimes, through thinking while fishing, I developed a deeper understanding of the world, a person, or myself, and I could extract some kind of conclusion.
But no one could ever come inside my imagination. I could see, smell, taste, hear, and feel my world, but it was so difficult to explain my imagined experiences in it to anyone else. That was my imagination, and that was all. I couldn’t express the conclusions I drew from it or their significance. I experienced and learned by myself. And this left me feeling isolated, lonely, and powerless.
On top of that, my conclusions remained fuzzy rather than defined in words as concepts. As a result I could not always fully understand their implications, and I often couldn’t build upon them.
This is why writing and talking is important for me. I want to turn my thoughts into concepts that I can communicate to others, that I can record and thus fully analyze and understand. Otherwise, my ideas cannot grow. I cannot grow. And I cannot use my ideas to bring changes I want to see in the world. Pondering and blissfully living in a imaginary world that only I can experience is not enough for me any longer. I want to include others in my world. And I want to use my ideas to make the world a better place.
A key step I need to take is to write and speak.
And with that, I introduce my blog.
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