“All human beings have three lives – public, private and secret” – Gabriel Garcia Mendez.
In an increasingly public and “social” world, your public life will become less and less valuable. It is abundant, so it becomes worthless.
On the other hand, the private and the secret will become more rare. And what is rare is precious.
The most prized places in the future will be where you can enjoy your private and secret lives.
from “Humans of New York”:
“I live in Havana. For visa reasons, I have to leave the country for 48 hours every two months. I always bring a few boxes of cigars with me. I sell them until I have enough money to buy a plane ticket home.”
“Can I see them?”
“Sure. These are Cohiba cigars. They are legendary. One day Fidel Castro found what he believed to be the perfect cigar. He inquired as to it’s origin, and learned that a very old woman had rolled it. So he sent many workers to learn from that old woman, and he began producing those cigars for himself. Cohiba cigars were only given to diplomats. They were never made available for sale. This is why they are legendary. But you must understand, Castro grew up as a peasant, so Cohibas are very robust. They are not sophisticated cigars. But sophisticated cigars cost less. Because they are not legendary.”
Stay legendary, my friends.
Facebook use predicts declines in affect and life satisfaction over time.
Because most people only post the best aspects of themselves, it makes those reading those posts feel bad about themselves since they never see the other side of the lives of their friends. They only see the weddings, the baby births, the job promotions, the parties and none of the day to day crap everyone has to deal with.
And it is a constant invitation to compare yourself with a biased picture of how other people claim to be doing.
Because of this, social media becomes a toxic cesspool that breeds status anxiety.
Is Love a special gift only to humans?
Or are we giving ourselves too much credit?
I think we’re all just animals.
The difference is we humans are better than Orang Utans at telling ourselves fantastic stories about what “Love” is. So we make it more mystical than what it really is.
So you’re afraid of starting over.
You feel trapped because you tell yourself maybe it’s not so bad after all.
You’re scared to face the story that you wasted all those years.
You are afraid that you might not find any better.
You are hurt that your dreams and fantasies are crumbling before your eyes.
You’re thinking maybe there is no such thing as happiness.
You feel like a dumbass for not seeing it sooner, for hurting yourself, for hurting others.
But if you don’t change anything, nothing will change.
Someone smarter than me said it better: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
But the reality is change is difficult. We resist change in every way we can. Change hurts our brain. So most people don’t change… and then they get old and die. The end.
The thing I tell everyone who’s single is, if you think your relationship is bad now… if you are already unhappy now… wait til you have kids.
Having kids is like climbing Everest. If you’re already having problems at base camp, you’re just asking for trouble if you continue further.
There are losers and winners. 99% of the people you meet will be losers. You are free to choose your climbing partners. You can choose not to spend the rest of your life with a loser. Winners are rare, but they exist.
Choose happiness.
Just a few decades back, people were in awe of things such as: dinosaurs, space travel, aliens, sea travel, flight, robots, etc.
We eagerly hopped on fantastic adventures to strange new worlds.
These days, all people seem to be interested in is other people.
What happened?
I have a theory. “New” things have become harder to come by.
So, without many “new” things to flaunt, all that remains are things we have always and will always be fascinated by:
Good stories involving people we care about (or involving people we can relate to).
“The reminiscence bump involves not only the recall of incidents; we even remember more scenes from the films we saw and the books we read in our late teens and early twenties. … The bump can be broken down even further – the big news events that we remember best tend to have happened earlier in the bump, while our most memorable personal experiences are in the second half. … The key to the reminiscence bump is novelty. The reason we remember our youth so well is that it is a period where we have more new experiences than in our thirties or forties. It’s a time for firsts – first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first experience of living away from home, the first time we get much real choice over the way we spend our days. Novelty has such a strong impact on memory that even within the bump we remember more from the start of each new experience.”
(written by Claudia Hammond)
You might think the smartphone camera is a wonderful invention. It lets you capture moments that would otherwise be lost, because it’s always just a few seconds away, in your pocket.
But the smartphone camera is a sinister Life Stealer. It is convenient, so it tempts us to reach for it often.
Because we reach for it often, we interrupt our precious moments more frequently.
We think that when we capture moments with a camera or camcorder, we can keep them safe. We think we can preserve the perfect moment digitally, permanently.
This does take some stress away. It’s okay if we “miss” something, because we can go back and watch the video. It’s okay if it happened too quickly, because we can relive the moment over and over later.
But imagine if you didn’t have this magic memory capturing tool. Imagine that every moment disappears as quickly as it comes. Imagine that you can never take any special moment lightly, because that moment might never come again.
I think that would force you to pay attention.
Because you won’t think that you can “save it for later”. It would demand that you appreciate every moment because the present is all you have.
But we have the smartphone camera. And so we zip through life never fully experiencing anything, thinking that we can put off living in the moment. And that we can cherish and indulge in our memories some day later.
But of course that “some day” might never come, because when you’re always busy archiving memories, when will there be time to enjoy them? You can only do one thing at a time. If you’re too busy capturing the present or reliving the past, you miss out on right now.
And, what if, when you finally get around to appreciating your archived memories, it might be too late? Your kids might have grown up. Or you might be old. Or gone.
There is something ominous that you have to understand when anyone gives you advice.
They are not really giving you advice.
What they are really doing is two things: imposing their view of the world on you; and desperately reassuring themselves that they made the right choice.
When someone tells you to “settle,” do you know what they’re really telling you? That they settled.
When someone tells you “you’re not getting younger,” you know what they’re REALLY saying? That they have their own demons about their bodies and what their partner thinks of them.
They desperately want you to accept that you should settle, because God forbid – if you actually found happiness without setlling, it means they fucked up and missed out on happiness.
For example, as you discovered, all parents want to tell you their parenting style is the best. Why? Because if they don’t buy that lie, it means they screwed up.
What they’re all saying is PLEASE… PLEASEEEE listen to me. What I’m saying MUST BE TRUE. I AM GOING TO SHOVE MY philosophy down your throat and you will accept it because I CANNOT ACCEPT THAT IT IS NOT TRUE. BECAUSE if I’m wrong, it means I fucked up. It means I am a fool for “settling” for an unhappy life, when I could actually be happy. And I’m not a fool… I have to be right.
What they’re all groaning is, “If I can’t be happy, you can’t be either.”
Refuse that poison. Don’t let anyone deceive you into thinking you can’t be happy, just because they aren’t happy themselves.
Like a baby, an idea starts out pure and full of hope.
But a baby has to learn to crawl, then walk, then talk.
A baby needs to grow. And the only way it can grow is with people.
In the same way, an idea is nothing without its parent. It is frail and vulnerable. It cannot survive by itself. It will quickly vanish if its parent doesn’t nurture it.
But an idea needs more than its parents. It needs people. A person raised in isolation is not a healthy person. A person gains independence after tumbling in the real world.
In the same way, an idea needs to be pushed and bullied and endure and evolve. Only then can it mature.
Only the ideas that survive time and changing moods and hate are the ones that deserve to live.
So if you have an idea, it’s worthless until you do something about it. And then it’ll still be worthless, until you get over yourself… and let it play in the playground with the rowdy kids.