All success is driven by unhappiness

[enchanted]

If you were perfectly content you would sit in silence and not do anything. Well that's what Alain de botton argues in this interview. This man is extremely fascinating. Check it out.

As for people looking for original insights sorry to let you down.use this video as grist for the original insight mill of your own.

Edited 4 hours ago by enchanted

[Joseph Maynor]

This is kind of true.  But it is a paradox.  There is a certain amount of work you want to do too!  It is important IMO to not get hung up here.  You do want to work hard on some level.  

[LordFall]

I think that's a false dichotomy.

Sure, a lot of gurus just meditate at home or sit in caves and don't do much and I'm sure are blissing out and happy. To me that's a very stagnant version of a human being and a low impact life. It's not very helpful to their community or the rest of humanity. Also in terms of logistic what are we talking about here? How is the rent getting paid and food? You mean having a low stress job that let's you have an easy life and not worry about much so you can chill at home and do nothing? You're seriously gonna pitch to us that this is a great life?

There is a very clear insight that starting from a baseline of internal fulfillment and not chasing satisfaction will lead to a more authentic life than just being a hamster in a wheel unconsciousy chaging stuff without understand why. Mimetic desire theory is a phenomena concept to understand here, basically most humans don't know what they want and will just default to chasing what other humans they look up to seem to be chasing. Keeping up with the joneses is one phrasing of it. Beyond that though with introspection you can connect to authentic goals and aspirations that you wish to achieve for yourself and others. I think you should be happy and then build a life purpose from that state.

It's all about self-awareness and knowing what you want though, to each person his own destiny is an open path.  

Edited 3 hours ago by LordFall

[Natasha Tori Maru]

I used to feel unhappiness or negativity motived me.  Negative inner dialogue was a powerful force in the first phase of my life. I was motivated through self evaluation. Now I do the things I do because. I just do them. A wisdom has been gained.

The relationship I had to my actions became more powerful - I stopped judging or moralising how I acted and behaved. I still acknowledge and see where I transgressed, or made an error. But it comes from discernment now. Fear, worry, negativity, judgement, moralising (as a way to interact with my feelings, thoughts & behaviours) - they were necessary feedback mechanisms to assist in my growth.

Initially, pain is an incredibly useful signal - it can tell us "this is dangerous; don't do this". Through repeated experience, we learn the pattern. We integrate the information. Eventually, we don't need to touch the fire and feel the pain every time in order to know that it's dangerous.

The pain delivered the information but the wisdom makes the pain unnecessary.

I think psychological growth can work the same way.

Edited 2 hours ago by Natasha Tori Maru

[Joseph Maynor]

Doing things aligned with authentic will is different than trying to force yourself to do something.  And there are pros and cons to this because even if you are operating on passion, you still want to do hard things to improve your performance.  This is what work is -- improvement of artistry.  

[Jirh]

I think comfort zone is a better framework to consider here.

You want to do things that make you happy, but at the same time you shouldn't want to avoid discomfort.

Discomfort is just part of happiness.

[oOo]

The structure is basically right, though @enchanted, the anthropomorphic terms are not, and that's an important read given many are likely to be easily influenced by speakers like these into falsity. “Success” is only one possible terminal outcome, while “unhappiness” is better understood as salient disequilibrium, so a discrepancy between current and, say, preferred states of being. “Driven by” is the conversion of that discrepancy into directional activation, so:

disequilibrium > salience > activation > momentum > stabilisation or threshold transition

That said, neither stability nor threshold-crossing is intrinsically positive. Because stability is neutral, without sufficient awareness a system can stabilise around a maladaptive attractor state and then simply drift through entropy into almost any negative state you want to imagine, from depression to, Ellen DeGeneres drinking baby blood between stage appearances  [ Look it up! It's all real I tell you! ]

Threshold here is an even more important distinction because transition can go up or down. Further degradation can move toward major depression, upward movement can recover prior stability, or activation can enter an expulsive state that opens the possibility of corrective energetic action, like lots of physical exercise as one crude BDNF-positive example.

That is the deeper error in “success is driven by unhappiness.” Frustration > thought, deprivation > pursuit, rejection > fame-seeking, and conflict > creation are all manifestations of the same regulatory architecture. Achievement does not necessarily resolve the originating disequilibrium and/or instability. People can repeatedly discharge the same “itch” while preserving the meaning-field generating it. If drinking baby blood was a bad idea to begin with, drinking more of it is never going to satisfy the underlying instability.

If a consciousness’s meaning-field is fucked, i.e. the subconscious values inherited from its respective culture, then it can become even more fucked if it never develops the awareness required to interrogate its perspectives on itself, what it is capable of, and reality in general, then consciously integrate the new values it needs. Awareness cannot merely be cognitive either. Emotional awareness and emotional agency matter because awareness acts as a catalyst for integrating new values into consciousness. Lack of awareness does the opposite, shifting someone from enjoying a bit of metaphorical baby blood here and there to becoming leader of the blood tribe, or who knows, maybe getting downgraded to Trump blood donations as tribal punishment.

Overall then, disequilibrium generates directional momentum toward apparent stability or transition, while awareness helps determine whether that trajectory becomes adaptive, pathological or destructive.

For intellectual growth it is important to find the motif behind the motif, especially in subjects already heavily loaded by culture. This thread is a perfect example of how consciousness can accept a contextualisation because its logic looks accurate on the surface while remaining false underneath the hood, and by that degree unintentionally damage itself precisely because it initially “feels right.” The relationship between cultural value correction and self-reality perception is therefore a good example for the **Re-contextualisation Mega-Thread.**

All energy is seeking a fate. Which one are you going to consciously give it? This is why we invent instrumental physical actions from types of meditation to extremely regimented psychedelic use to physical exercise to get a desired energetic outcome. They are tools we have learned to use to lever energy in particular directions, with salience determining its desired momentum.

The bigger epistemic error is that people are not being taught how to fully own that WHOLE physical process. Instead they are indoctrinated into treating regulation as though it exists outside physical processes, through things like buying shit.

How “buying shit” becomes the medium is itself important because the social is still a physical process. Until people learn to make their social process something that is not substituted for the self, however instead internally regulated and grown through the self, social adaptation can replace rather than develop self-integration.

The survival interest has been activated by social influence through a perceived potential decrease or increase in agency, though it has not necessarily been integrated through self-appraisal by emotional and cognitive awareness. That integration is where agency loss or gain, and substitutive versus direct interaction, can be reformalised within one’s meaning hierarchy rather than simply inherited as another culturalised adaptation.

 

Edited 23 minutes ago by oOo