One of my favorites quotes goes something like “No man has ever accumulated enough wealth, knowledge, or power to escape the simple fact that ‘you win some, you lose some’.” Now, the guy who wrote that wrote a lot of stuff I don’t like or agree with, but this quote has always rang deeply true for me. I adapted it into “All life comes with problems, but I have the agency to arrange my life to have better problems than worse ones.” When the worst part of my day is, say, blisters from walking or a rude cashier, I genuinely feel happy to realize, ahhh, these a...
I also take this stance, but with a different framework. I acknowledge that emotions & thoughts are very different biological technologies in action. One is likely extremely older than the other in terms of evolutionary development. Given that, from my perspective, my inner monologue is just not very good at translating — so my self-awareness needs to translate the translation. To me, an emotion is never false; it’s always a valid reaction in some way or another. I just know it’s silly to agree with the first interpretation my mind makes of it.
An... (read more)