Not sure how to be happy unless I achieve impossible goals

[Fossa]

Hey, I'm new here and like Leo's content, so I thought I'd give this forum a shot. So basically I've been suffering from severe depression for the past 21 months, and one of the main causes is that I have impossible goals that I believe I need to achieve to be happy. Here are the goals:

• Become a professional rock climber.
• Become a popstar.
• Become either a successful entrepreneur or a top world scientist.

I think I have to achieve all of the above goals simultaneously to be happy. What I think I would get from achieving those goals is positive attention from other people—being seen/noticed, being talked about, praise—and I would also win people over because they would think I'm really smart, really talented, really hard working, etc. The status and reputation I would garner from those goals would also help me get girls or feel like I'm even capable of getting girls. The reason I can't set my sights lower is because if I don't stand out enough, then I won't get enough attention, regard, or status to feel good about myself. If I achieved just one of the goals, I would only stand out in one respect and it wouldn't make up for all my inadequacies.

So to explain my insanity:

• My parents fought a lot and my left when I was 9. I still saw my mom after that, but she was very distant and uninvolved, almost like an indifferent babysitter. My dad was negative, critical, authoritarian, and emotionally neglectful. He showed me no love and affection except for the fact that he would always insist that I go out or watch movies with him.
• My friend group in middle school rejected me and I had trouble fitting in elsewhere. There were two girls that I was close to in middle school, but I was an idiot and totally ruined those relationships, to the point that one of the girls hated me. The significance of the two girls is that they were the only ones that ever fulfilled any of my emotional needs, so losing them hurt a lot. In high school I was a loner and painfully aware of how everyone else had friends and a social life.
• I've never had a girlfriend or even been on a date.
• I was the smartest kid in school, at least when it came to math, and that's what others knew me for. It became my entire identity really. I did well in a few big competitions in grade school, and as a result I got a lot of praise and attention from everyone: teachers, peers, relatives, parents, etc. Those were the few days in my life I felt any sort of appreciation or belonging or esteem. Later on in high school I did get some attention for being above average at sports.
• Because I've been a loser/loner for so long and have had so many negative things said about me by other people, I have a very poor self-image and minimal self-acceptance.

On the surface my life is fine, I have friends, a high paying job, hobbies, savings, and a fit body, but I feel mediocre and undesirable and like I don't belong anywhere.

I've tried shrooms twice but haven't had any insights yet or any intense trips. I think I need to up my dose.

Edited March 31, 2021 by Fossa

[Nahm]

@Fossa

The thoughts don’t feel off because they’re true about you, they feel off because they’re not true. Spiritual work, or the path, is letting beliefs go and realizing truth. I’d start with the belief feeling (happiness) could be in a future. Inspect your logic by proposing to yourself the question, “when did I experience a future?”, and “when did I experience feeling being any other ‘time’ than now?”. 

Also, when thinking and or talking about yourself, point to, locate, who or what you’re thinking or talking about. 

I have friends, a high paying job, hobbies, savings, and a fit body

You could also question if deriving happiness from outside things has worked for you thus far, and consider the logic of trying something new when what you’ve been trying isn’t ‘working’. I would bet that trying something different when what you’re doing isn’t working led to your success in regard to the job, income, hobbies, savings, and fitness. Motivation, having a motive, works for those outside things. However, using motive in regard to your true nature sets you up on a hamster wheel, or like a dog chasing it’s own tail. It’s like trying to find yourself, while wearing blinders to the fact you’re what’s looking. 

Doing all the things you’re doing while holding the belief happiness is in a future, is like vacuuming a room while believing you’ll plug it in, later. You can do that, but it’s really just going through the motions. 

Consider the profundity of this.... 

When a thought arises, you can allow it to come and go. There doesn’t need to be a solution or resolve. There doesn’t need to be a reason to let a thought go. That reason is just another thought. 

Imagine throwing a penny into a wishing well... and sitting there for years expecting something to come back up. If you felt let down by the well, or unhappy with how it’s going, and believed it was because somethings wrong with the well, that’d be kind of silly. The only sensible thing to do, would be to let your beliefs about the well, how it should be, your judging of it, your conditions you need met from it, go. Then there would be the clarity nothing was ever wrong with the well, this is just how beliefs work. They feel off, because they are. 

Consider using the emotional scale to understand emotions. It helps you recognize how you’re creating emotions now, and how you’re creating discord believing in a ‘past’ and or ‘future’. The discord, or suffering, is the feeling of the belief conflicting with the truth, what is actual, of reality, that feeling is not in a past or future. Trade a hundred beliefs for one simple fundamental acknowledgement of what is not a belief. 

As an example...I feel mediocre and undesirable and like I don't belong anywhere....

Mediocre and undesirable aren’t feelings, there judgments, beliefs. 

Let go of the paradigm of motive and believing thoughts, that you know or experience what anyone else thinks....and try out making a dreamboard, filling it with what you want, which is to say, what feels good to you...not what you believe you should do, in accordance with what other people think about you, which you’ve never actually experienced. The more you focus on what you do want, the less you’re focused on the beliefs which feel off, and the more you begin to realize your true nature of happiness. You might discover what you think you want, isn’t what you actually want. 

If you don’t, and I say this only for you to consider and hopefully have some insights... acknowledge that you’re choosing not to focus on what feels good to you. Let that acknowledgement of it be ample. Don’t think of it as something to fix, or something in need of fixing. Just allow realizing this, to simply be, realizing this. 

[Denise Chiccola]

Hello - see the forum that I just posted: There is help.

I hope to hear from you.