Life Goals

All I really want in life is to become a genuinely good, nice, kind, caring, productive person.

I then asked myself why it’s so hard for me to meet the standards I set for those categories. Then I started wondering if it was okay to still celebrate who I am as a person right now even if I’m a less than ideal person by my own standards? No one meets my standards because they’re impossibly high, so if I don’t condemn others not meeting my standards, why do I have to condemn myself for not meeting them if I can acknowledge that I’m not a finished product. I’m a work in progress. I’m cookies still baking in the oven. We all are. That’s literally what it means to be ALIVE. Even when you’re dying. Til the last breath we breathe, we are STILL unfinished works in progress.

So why can’t I let myself just be okay with where I am, accept it, and simultaneously continue to striving to improve myself until the moment I leave my body? And if I’m not meeting my ideal standards, why can’t I allow myself to still be happy even if I’m falling short of my goals and just enjoy the journey, too? Do I think appreciating the hardships in my life is somehow going to lessen my ability to be recognise what is truly worth aspiring for?

Do I think not attaining that which I work for will somehow make me a failure? Even if it does in the eyes of others, doesn’t not doing anything at all make one more of a failure? Even if I don’t care what others think, won’t I be falling short of my own bare minimum standards? If so, do I need to berate & punish myself for not meeting my own IDEAL standards? Is it a sin to not get that which you endeavour toward? Isn’t that part of what “not being attached to the fruits of one’s labour yet still doing one’s best & giving one’s all in every moment when doing their duty in life” means?
Why do I have to set myself up to fail all the time? I know I’m afraid joy, happiness, change, comfort, love, kindness, etc., but can’t we at least be a bit more conscientious about what’s going on? Can’t we just be honest with ourselves, allow ourselves to talk about the deeper levels of what’s going on inside? I guess that would require us to feel & feeling is we’re all afraid of. That’s why we need to be constantly distracted. We’re afraid of feeling anything aside from sensory overloading hyper stimulating mildly dissociative emotional experiences, because then it becomes a thrill or a ride. It’s like a one person drama that we are the protagonist of and it is literally happening inside of ourselves. This is why we’re little thrill seekers, or gamers, or gym addicts, or any other form of addict.

So why are we so afraid to feel? We felt something bad pretty early on. While experiencing something that made us feel super negatively very early on in our lives, coming across things that make us feel uncomfortable or unpleasant sensations in some facet or another will happen again & again throughout the course of our existence. This is a part of life & even in Utopia/heaven, we won’t be able to avoid “less than ecstatic feels” because part of being an individual means having fully unique preferences, perspectives, paradigms, etc. to every single other living entity & thus it is inevitable for someone to encounter at least one thing they dislike/disagree with in practically every single situation in life.

From what we like/dislike to what we think is wrong/right, what we think is pleasant/unpleasant sensorily, our aesthetic preferences, our political views, literally every single aspect of who we are together, there is always going to be a percentage of crossover/mutual agreement/similarity between your preferences/attributes and another living beings. We will obviously often become close with those who are more similar to us, but we sometimes become very close with those who are totally different than us is more ways than most.

Ultimately, the one unifying, underlying aspect that binds us all together, all life forms, humans and otherwise, is that we are all perceivers – protagonists in our own subjective, unique narrative of our perspective of reality. We all are unique, totally different in terms of the sum of all of our parts being fully distinct to any other living entity’s being by definition that it’s a separate being. Just like 1 and 2 are different, each living soul, each human, each dog, each bee, each tree, each flour plant, each amoeba, etc. all are a finite unit of consciousness perceiving & interacting with one particular aspect of infinite reality and that experience is what defines our existence, nothing more & nothing less.

Perhaps the feeling itself is that sense of emptiness, hollowness, aloneness – the void that we’re always looking to fill with some sort of dopamine spike like eating junk food or dating or playing games or going on social media or binge watching TV shows or talking at conferences or going sky diving or whatever it is in the moment. When the feeling of disconnectedness is so deep, so pervasive due to adverse childhood experiences, especially within the first year of life & in utero, the chance of addiction can increase, and this can be an addiction to anything that releases substantial dopamine in our brains. We start to chase after it, oversaturate/overstimulate ourselves, burnout, shutdown, and check out. We’re a species that’s all landed ourselves in traumatised burnout/meltdown/shutdown mode because we’re overstimulating ourselves to distract ourselves from what we’re feeling, which is disconnected.

So the reason question is not how can we come up with even more ways to distract ourselves from the pain of being disconnected like we have been for so long in our materialistic, consumeristic, capitalistic culture, but rather, what can we do to make ourselves become reconnected? What things can we stop doing that perpetuate the feelings of disconnection, and what things can we start doing/do more of that help us feel more connected? And finally, how can we help support our fellow living beings to do the same? I think that’s the real question of how we can change the world through empathy, love, patience, tolerance, humility, respect, compassion, courage, understanding, and kindness.

It’s possible. We simply have to become the change we want to see in the world by prioritising our own self-betterment & self-care (not in that order). By changing the code we’re choosing to run, we will impact the code of those we come into contact with. That’s memetics for ya! And it can be used for good, healthy, wholesome, positive changes just as much as it can be for the reverse, so let’s do our part in helping to rewrite the narrative from the comfort of our beds & couches at home! Let’s change the world without even having to leave our houses! There’s no reason not to. What have we got left to lose by simply trying? ❤