Do I know me?

Our mind is the most deceitful character we ever meet in our lives. As we grow up transitioning from childhood this monster starts taking more control over our thoughts. We listen to it like a loyal servant. We end up making shit load of mistakes as we progress in life. Some look smart but are disastrous while some are dumb but serendipitous. We reach a point where we are about to break ourself up for all the fuckups we have done. Then we start seeking help, some reach for therapy, some figure out by themselves and some implode into crisis. In my case it was by myself. I drowned myself reading and consuming blogs, articles, podcasts, books till I got overwhelmed with them to a point I had to stop consuming it else it would exactly do the reverse of what it was intended too and end up throwing me into an abyss of depression. After a point consumption of these content becomes equivalent to getting hooked to any drug.

3 good years passed. 3 rounds of heart breaking. 3 rounds of job changes. I didn't stop making mistakes, but I recognised why I was making mistakes. The pattern of thoughts in my head started changing, I started catching my vicious mind misguiding me, tricking me. The current time where we are bombarded and exposed to shit load of attention seeking stimuli around like social media, news, movies and what not. This is like food for our mind. It enjoys it. Another thought pattern is the infatuation of material things around us. Mind says you want everything what we see, what everyone has. Mind wants validation and attention for our existence. I believed everything what was sold to me by this monster. I was unaware of all of these happening all this time. I had lost control to it. Someone else was running the circus show inside my head.

The idea of self awareness made no sense to me for a long fucking time. I was laughing at the people who said they are self aware. Call it mindfulness or ton of other words meaning the same. It is this tiny superpower you acquire where you are completely aware of what's going on in your head when this monster takes over. The next time you see a Bentley or a Nike Jordan in-front you, your mind starts doing the regular action of planting an idea in your head of materialistic possessing. But this time you catch him and laugh at him. You mock him and say fuck you, I know what you are trying to do. Why you really want those. It's not because you really need them, it's because of the association you want to make by possessing these materialistic things. Evolution hasn't transformed us to something new, we still are monkeys deep down inside. Craving every second of attention from everything around us.

Let's talk about slacking off. You have to stop listening to your mind when it says "No don't do this", "No you don't like this", "Screw this, I'm gonna skip it". Rather your mindset should be fuck I'll do it, I'll figure it out. Do the thing right fucking now. Here's a excerpt for an article on productivity advice I read recently by Slava Akhmechet.

Do the work. That's all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you're ever going to get. You can direct your attention to a million optimizations— email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, todo lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling. But don't. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.

You can checkout the post here.

Stop listening to your mind, is it tired? does it wanna rest? fuck you. Get the task done and move onto the next one. This should be the change in your mindset. And stop getting emotional with the task, detach any obsessions with a task, doesn't matter if you like it or not, tell yourself it doesn't matter. You are gonna do it. All the dislikes, prejudices have to be discarded. All the baseless irrational thoughts that has shaped your beliefs from the reality are mostly flawed. Nothing is absolute reality. You have a problem in-front of you or come one, think and you can solve it. Stop listening to the negative thoughts in your head. That thing is cunning and vicious, if you listen to you it it will never let you do what you aspire. Identify it and tame yourself to ignore them. It's not gonna happen in a day or a week or a month. It's gonna take a good amount of time. After around 5-6 months I started noticing my thought patterns have changed. Don't beat yourself for the mistakes or fuckups you make. Just do the right thing at the time with the available information you have. Accept the mistake if you have done before or if you have done one just now and move the fuck on. If you have a habit of reading, after a point stop the fuck and start applying what you have learnt. Learning something new and not applying is almost same as not having read anything.

Every thoughts/assumptions/prejudice is all not necessarily true. Our mind is a broken machine which uses emotions as lubricant to function. Sometimes the rational and emotional mind fight with each other.

I wonder is it only me who is so abnormally worried and anxious of what am I going to do today, tomorrow, next week, next year. I did learn that everybody got shit going on inside their head. Everybody is figuring out life. Nobody has a fucking clue what they want to do or want to be. I also believe pop culture tries to sell us falsehood and unrealistic expectations about love, life, relationship and to be honest everything. It sells hope and happiness. In reality life is a rollercoaster. In the journey sometimes you get candy and sometimes you get crap. Laugh and smile when candy is given, cry and hold your shit together when crap is given. Pop culture says you gotta figure out your passion, your thing, your purpose. I don’t know how much of it is really true. What about people who have had success? Were they going through a similar phase or they did figure out things and their head was clear? We will never know if we are fed only one side of the story. We are being sold bullshit from the mainstream media. Seeking truth is getting ever harder than before. It's all perspectives again.

Anyways this will be all. End of my rant. This essay's gonna be a nudge for me to continue writing after slacking off for a year. I didn't care much about the structure or formatting in this. Raw dump from my mind. Will improve as I write more.

I'm starting 27 today and I feel happy. I didn't go low this time like the last few times.

Cheers 🥂

Bye for now 👋🏻