Month: July 2012

It’s a good thing that I took a vacation recently, or I would have run out of things to share! Driving around the countryside of Ireland, hours at a time, really gave me some great time to reflect on life, and pay attention to the small things.

Looking at my journal (the manly word for diary), I now have enough creative ideas to last another month!  In fact, I don’t quite know where to begin.  I guess I’ll write them up in the order I wrote them down – even though the later ideas are much more interesting if you ask me.  In fact, now that I think about it, the train of thought is taking me directly to my last day of my trip and a conversation I had with a random person somewhere on the street near Trinity College.  So I guess (as you will see) ironically, the first lesson I will share, was really the last one I learned.

It’s a beautiful day in Ireland, about 10AM and the weather is just perfect.  I am walking from my hotel to, well, I had no plans that day, so I was really just walking towards the center of town.  There I see a man sitting on the ground.  Well dressed in casual clothes, one of those really cool European book bags, and reading Moliere with his back up to a monument. Now, I don’t know anything about plays or playwrights (something that will be changing soon by the way), but I do know that the book didn’t look like a best seller, and as such, I was interested in talking to this person.  Something looked off, the clothes looked expensive, but they looked grimy.  So with no agenda, I walked over to him, and started chatting about his book.

A few minutes later, we are talking about life.

His story was that he was a owner of a Chipper (where they sell fish and chips; I didn’t know that either.) but then the recession came, and he lost his business.  And with that he went into a deep depression, and spent the next two years in a clinic.  Skipping over the fact that he got out of it by finding meaning, he is now on his way to becoming a psychologist, he learned an important lesson about life that he shared with me.

What drove him crazy (so to say), was that life seemed incongruent.  Things came and went, but there was no rhyme or reason to the parts of his life where they abutted.

However, what he learned, and taught me, was that really life can be seen like a movie.  The scenes don’t necessarily make sense from one to the next if you take two scenes from the middle, but if you watch the entire movie, you see that there is a common thread that runs through the whole thing, tying everything together.

So when things don’t make sense, he says to himself, “Of course they don’t, I haven’t seen the next scene yet!”

I think this is a powerful message that we can remind ourselves of in life, as we wander through time.

I was browsing a bookstore on a recent trip and bumped into a book that sounded interesting.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the book, but it was a whole book dedicated to one idea – meaning that the content of the book, can basically be boiled down into one sentance, but since that won’t sell, publishers make the author drive home the point in 250 pages instead.

This book, in essance introduced me to a powerful idea, which he called something like “The *** off principle.”  For simplicity sake, I’ll reference this at TFOP, for the rest of this post.  It was a great idea, and I want to share it.

Since I don’t remember what I have written about over the past year, I will assume that at some point I discussed my interest in “The Nice Guy Syndrome,” due to the fact that I am a nice guy, which is the idea that some people are looking for the constant approval of others, and in search of this approval, they are nice guys to everyone but themselves.

[Editor’s note: At this point I went off to try and find some old posts to crosslink, and found that I wrote a very similar idea a few months back, so please read that for my thoughts on the topic. Instead, I need to take the rest of this post to complete the idea.]

As humans, we recognize things we agree with, and are quick to bring external proofs in to butress our beliefs.  Those beliefs that go against our thought, we ignore, or say are simply silly.  So ironically, when I saw the book which was in sync with what I already believed, I was excited by the idea, thinking his belief was brilliant, since it was (apparently) already in line with my own thinking.

The real take away, is to recognize that we are apt to do this, so that we can not knee-jerk reject things that go against our current beliefs, rather give them  some time to stew, and see if we really might need to reject our own current belief, instead of the the new one.

 

 

I have talked quite a bit about fear in the past, and my belief that fear is the primary thing that prevents personal growth, but I never gave much thought to what causes fear.

Interestingly, as I was riding to work today, I heard a snippet on NPR, that spelled things out for me (more importantly brought it to consciousness) very well.  Uncertainty creates fear.

So now, we can spell out the emotion (fear) an the thought that creates it (uncertainty), which makes this a very powerful idea to keep in mind.

Of course, we see this in play out on a daily basis.

When one of my kids had a minor procedure, there was a lady that came into explain exactly what they would be doing, so my child would understand what was going on.  It really helped alleviate fear.

Even my dental hygienist has started telling me each step as she cleans my teeth.  Personally, I find it exceedingly annoying, but I’m sure there are plenty of people with dentist anxiety that find it helpful!

Beyond healthcare, it also helps explain our deep seated fear of death, the ultimate unknown, or the performance anxiety felt by a performer before they go out on stage, uncertain if they will forget their lines.

As the NPR production pointed out, it helps instill fear between groups of people that don’t know each other.  Which is why introducing disparate people via social activities, helps sooth the fear, as the people become people and not unknowns others, leading to friendships.

So lets learn a few things.

When we are fearful, or anxious, we need to ask ourselves, what is the unknown that we are fearful or anxious about.  We can then fill in the details in our mind, and make it less unknown or uncertain.  Additionally, by exercising our imagination, and envisioning success we can lesson the amount of uncertainty but proactively envisioning a positive outcome.

However, the main takeaway is to remember that fear is caused by uncertainty and that if you want to divest yourself of fear and live bravely, work on your comfort with uncertainty.  After all, nothing is certain in life.

I am a fan of vintage clothing.

As a fan, I have my choice of two great options to purchase things.

A trendy vintage clothing store in Virginia Highlands or … Goodwill.

What is interesting to me is that the prices in the trendy store are about 10 times the price I find in Goodwill.  However, I have an aversion to wearing someone else’s clothes that I buy in Goodwill, while the price stops me from buying from the trendy place.

What is ironic is that I know full well that the buyer for the trendy store is simply going thought the racks at Goodwill, perhaps even the exact same one that I stop at.

Personally, my aversion to spending money is greater than my aversion to wearing used clothes, so I end up buying at Goodwill.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on why my brain differentiates between the two stores.

My gut is that it is due to exclusivity.  When I go to Goodwill, most anyone can afford the shirt I am buying, but when I go to the trendy store, the price is a barrier to entry, to all but the middle-class and up.

We can learn from this that exclusivity creates value for an object.

It is the same premise that keeps the De Beers diamond empire running as they monopolize the diamond market and keep the price artificially high (and therefore exclusive) by stockpiling diamonds and controlling the supply.

This is also, why I predict that new artificially produced diamonds which are of superior quality but lower price will never be given to your honey as an engagement ring en mass.

Perhaps I should start charging for access to my blog…  It might improve my readership. 🙂

I had a very nice discussion with a kindred soul, who spent some time fighting depression.  When he got to the bottom of his rope, he had to make a decision, should he live or not, and the way he found his answer (which ended up being yes apparently!) was through finding his own personal meaning.

We have discussed how meaning is arbitrary, and looking at my own depressive episodes, I would tend to think that for many people depression comes due to a lack of passion for living.  Of course, this is obvious, but since we generally just title people as depressed, it doesn’t really help them solve their problem.  Depression is the outcome, but not the issue.  The real issue is that they need to find a reason for living.  Otherwise, to some extent they are already dead, which depression is a symptom of.

If you think about it, this makes sense, what is the opposite of the person who is displaying depressive symptoms?  Someone who is excited about life!  Someone with passion for whatever they find themselves doing!  And how does someone become passionate about something?  When they say to themselves, this is what I am here in this world to do.  That is what creates passion.  So depression and passion are the two ends of the same emotional continuum.

So I would propose a new type of therapy for depression, called Meaning Therapy.  In this therapy, the focus is figuring out what the individual wants to do in their life, but is holding themselves back from doing (probably fear!), and helping them achieve their own arbitrary goals – and find passion.  It might just be giving them options that they haven’t already thought of that they might find meaningful.

However, it is my belief that Meaning Therapy is probably the answer to depression in most cases.  The only issue is that I’m not sure who is asking the question.

P.S. If you have been reading my blog you know that I believe that meaning is really just a red herring.  I need to figure out how these two ideas fit together.