Minimalist.me

We must learn what’s already known, and build upon that. Every once in a while we should reeval­u­ate the foun­da­tions and ques­tion what we know. Thought is an evo­lu­tion process. The ideas with the most fit­ting answers (or enough belief to have blind faith), sur­vive. While oth­ers die off. So a hint of truth is gen­er­ally in all sur­viv­ing beliefs. New ideas must be pre­sented and com­bined with cur­rent ideas or else human­ity will always be on the same level.

Alot of peo­ple are scared of new ideas. Can you peg it as scared? No they can’t com­pre­hend the idea of not under­stand­ing an envi­ron­ment in the same way. Same stage, mood change audi­ence. We mark off peo­ple with rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent ideas as insane, but look how often we have been wrong. The sane peo­ple are really insane by not lis­ten­ing to “insan­ity”. They will bend and shape the way the world works to fit their view. Sci­ence does it, Reli­gion does it, humans do it naturally.

It’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence between a prophet and crack pot.

It is impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate our­selves from our ego. We can become dis­tant and emo­tional detached of the out­come, and eval­u­ate our posi­tion like that. Still the per­cep­tion is one of ego.

This is the way it is meant to be. The only lim­i­ta­tion we have is a point of view, and that we base real­ity on that point of view. Which is crazy because no one else has that exact point of view.

So our lim­i­ta­tion is our view-point, yet there remains a loop­hole; our imag­i­na­tion. Our imag­i­na­tion is cul­tur­ally bound to limit orig­i­nal­ity, so this is too much over looked. How­ever our brains are pow­er­ful enough to cre­ate orig­i­nal thought, and thus cre­ate new per­cep­tions and real­i­ties. The stage stays the same, but the audi­ence has mood changes.

It’s easy to put down your own ego to feel hum­ble, but in all real­ity you are feed­ing your ego. There is no sep­a­ra­tion, you must for­get your ego; yet remem­ber what it can do to your thought process.

Don’t make goals, make direc­tions.
Every step for­ward is a step worth cel­e­brat­ing.
Stuff doesn’t mat­ter.
Dance, just do it.
Music can be replayed in your head.
Dwell on what you enjoy.
Mod­er­a­tion.
Pro­duce more, con­sume less.
Be the change.
Speak in Cliché.
Speak to your­self.
Speak to no one.
Be no one.
Be every­one.
Be who you want to be.
Dis­re­gard rude­ness.
Cut out the fat.
Don’t do what you feel you shouldn’t.
Some­times you must.
Do it well then.
Fail. Learn.
Think. Do.
If. Be.

Women are emo­tional, men are logical.

I am sex­ist. To the very core I am sex­ist. We func­tion dif­fer­ently, and that is okay. How­ever in mod­ern soci­ety, it is easy for these func­tions to be dys­func­tional and be a dis­ad­van­tage to both sexes; con­sid­er­ing our bod­ies are nat­u­rally respond­ing to unnat­ural stim­uli. The biggest dif­fer­ence between men and women is that women base actions on emo­tion, while men base actions on logic. This causes women to seem over emo­tional to us at ran­dom moments, while men seem to lack emo­tion even at appro­pri­ate times.

A lot of men are emotional.

As a man, I suf­fer no short­age of emo­tions. I almost feel as if I am cursed to be more emo­tional than other men, but I have encoun­tered many men who feel the same way. Well guess what? It is a weak­ness. We do have an advan­tage of really expe­ri­enc­ing life, but we also expose our­selves to the enemy; that is the enemy and women. I recently started pay­ing atten­tion to how guys use emoti­cons, and I real­ized how much it exposes you. This may not seem like a big deal and it might seem like I am stereo­typ­ing manly men, but think about it.

So emo­tions are bad?

Women do not want an overly sen­si­tive man, as much as they wish you would relate more to them. This is not to say that expos­ing your emo­tions is always wrong, far from it. Show­ing your true emo­tions and being vul­ner­a­ble at the right time is pow­er­ful. How­ever typ­ing in an emoti­con to show your emo­tion, is actu­ally going out-of-the-way to tell peo­ple how you feel.  This sub­con­sciously affects women in a neg­a­tive way. Is it a huge deal? Not most of the time. How­ever if you already have a prob­lem with women, it may be one thing you should try cut­ting back on.  The key to remem­ber is that show­ing your emo­tions is attrac­tive, going out of your way to show your emo­tion isn’t (Espe­cially if it is to just any­one.); since it really just rep­re­sents the need for atten­tion, which trans­lates to being needy (We don’t even need to cover why that is bad.).

Okay, any­thing else?

As an addi­tion to cut­ting out emoti­con usage, I sug­gest you prac­tice writ­ing in more effec­tive ways. Effec­tive writ­ing will relay your emo­tion much bet­ter since women are so in tuned to emo­tion. This will come off as more sin­cere, instead of show­ing what emo­tion you are feel­ing, she will just feel it.

So why should every­one give up emoticons?

Effec­tive writ­ing works well with both men and women. Shar­ing your feel­ings in this way will cre­ate a much stronger bond, since you have to work to relate.  Which would make you feel closer to some­one? Two “=)” smiles exchanged to show both are happy, or hear­ing why some­one is doing well (with­out even hav­ing to say they are doing well.).

Con­clu­sion

While emoti­cons aren’t inher­ently bad, the state of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is. With short atten­tion spans, we try to deliver con­tent as rapid as pos­si­ble; so why not state the emo­tion in a flash. These emoti­cons are dis­tant from any real con­nec­tion. A few smi­ley faces here and there won’t hurt, but I rather aim to get the other per­son to show a happy emoticon.

We all have addic­tions, but we don’t always view them that way. An addic­tion doesn’t always have to be directly harm­ful, and if it isn’t we are less likely to rec­og­nize them. Here are three com­mon addic­tions (There’s a good chance you have all three of these to some extent.), they are all harm­ful in some way, even if they don’t seem to have a neg­a­tive influence.

1.Approval

This addic­tion is worth cut­ting off com­pletely. We all seek approval to val­i­date our own self-worth, and it is essen­tially prob­lem­atic. It can com­pletely destroy our cre­ativ­ity and indi­vid­u­al­ity, though that is not the under­ly­ing fun­da­men­tal rea­son; we do not have inter­nal con­fi­dence if we are con­stantly seek­ing exter­nal appre­ci­a­tion. I exist, for myself. I do not exist, for you.

The best way to elim­i­nate this addic­tion is not nec­es­sar­ily to focus on stop­ping the actions you take to seek approval; though being aware of these actions will be of great help. The best way to really tackle this issue is to build your own self-confidence, and actively pur­su­ing this con­fi­dence from within and not from with­out. When you approve of your­self from within, you will most likely stop car­ing if you get approval from without.

2.Television

Grow­ing up on tele­vi­sion, this is an easy con­cept but hard to pur­sue idea. It sounds more like an ideal, then some­thing you would really do. Cut­ting it out is com­pletely doable, and prob­a­bly one of the eas­i­est addic­tions to cut if you make the jump. How many count­less hours do you waste watch­ing tele­vi­sion? There are prob­a­bly a good amount of seem­ingly accept­able rea­sons to doing so, rather than address those specif­i­cally; I will just make a sim­ple state­ment. There is an extremely high prob­a­bil­ity that even with your rea­son­ing, there is a time you watched T.V., and it was not nec­es­sary; it was just some­thing to do. That is time wasted, when you could have done some­thing a lot more pro­duc­tive or/and gratifying.

This is an addic­tion that can be attacked many dif­fer­ent ways, here are a few: get rid of your T.V., dis­con­nect your cable-box and only watch videos, use your parental set­tings to estab­lish a lim­ited view­ing time. There are a lot of options, I per­son­ally dis­con­nected my cable box; I can watch DVD’s and catch up on any tele­vi­sion I really want online. This one was a hard one for me, but I did not feel I could write this in the arti­cle unless I did it myself, I will see in time what happens.

3.Connection

This would be the hard­est one to elim­i­nate com­pletely, and in this day and age I do not advo­cate it com­pletely. I am talk­ing con­nec­tion to the inter­net and social stream. The ben­e­fits of this are really an odd con­cept to me. Grow­ing up, inter­net is how I con­nected to the world; it’s how I con­nected to friends; even before web 2.0. Now I have a lot more friend’s offline than I did when I was younger, but I still con­nect to most of them online. So why would you elim­i­nated being con­nected to peo­ple online; to become more con­nected to peo­ple offline. Sure there are a lot of time-wasting things to do, but I am talk­ing the con­stant con­nec­tion we main­tain these days with hav­ing our cell phones fully Face­book and Twit­ter compatible.

So I pro­pose a tech­nol­ogy fast. I admit this is not one I have con­sciously applied, but one step at a time and it is def­i­nitely on my list of things to do. For 1 to 3 days a week, I say elim­i­nate tech­nol­ogy as much as pos­si­ble. Do stuff with your hands instead, con­nect to peo­ple in per­son instead, or even med­i­tate instead. Let’s remind our­selves that tech­nol­ogy is a tool and not our life.

My jour­ney started half a year ago. Wow, just writ­ing that feels pow­er­ful. It was an intense time,  a cou­ple of weeks after my 22nd birth­day; The worst birth­day I had, gave me the best present I would have never asked for. The love of my life broke up with me. To really put that into con­text, it was like that first crush, first love, first long-term rela­tion ship com­bined kind of thing. The inten­sity of pain caused me to develop panic dis­or­der, with daily attacks. I actu­ally went tem­porar­ily blind at one point.

How­ever I did not lay in bed and cry about it, oh yeah I did for a short while.  Things really started to click for me dur­ing this time, I had lost myself. The 2 and a half years together had delayed all my ambi­tion. At the heart of this, it was my fault; I take respon­si­bil­ity. Oh how pow­er­ful it is to take respon­si­bil­ity, to no longer be a victim.

My death is where I was born.

And so I will leave the story there, for the moment.