What Are You Avoiding?

Do you wake up each day with hope or despair?

For the past year, I’d have to say that I woke up with the latter.

And perhaps it wasn’t just personal issues that were affecting me. I know an unprecedented global pandemic and nonstop political tension certainly didn’t help anyone.

I’m grateful to have lived through the year with minimal financial and physical suffering, and I’m thankful that my friends and family have been able to stay safe as well. I feel sorry for those who do not have the luxury to say the same and consider myself extremely lucky.

But I’m tired of living in this victimhood mindset. I’m tired of using the fear of the unknown to avoid what I know I have to do.

It’s easy to blame the state of the world for neglecting your personal affairs. Some people definitely have suffered more than others, but it doesn’t change the fact that we all have suffered and will continue to suffer throughout our lives.

The more we neglect to follow our bliss and indulge in mindless entertainment and infantile comfort, the more our ability to discipline ourselves atrophies.

By “bliss” I mean the inner voice that calls for us to take action in doing something we have an interest in. This “bliss” is, of course, defined by your own terms.

For some, it’s hard to tell what their bliss might be.

Perhaps it’s because their inner voice was silenced and repressed throughout most of their lives due to parental and societal pressures.

Perhaps they never got to do what they wanted to do and saw that life was about living for other people.

While it’s easy to take them as eternal victims and correctly feel sympathy for them, it is also not entirely the parent’s and society’s fault.

The individual always knows what the truth may be, but it is up to the individual to choose what they will do with that truth.

Maybe the person who felt tyrannized by their parents their entire lives could have rebelled and chosen to live the life that they saw fit. Maybe the person wasn’t willing to sacrifice the comforts of the life that the tyranny provided. (ex. parents provided food, shelter, entertainment as long as the individual listened to them). Maybe the person wanted to stay unconscious and as an infant, because if they chose to rebel then they would realize that the successes and failures of their lives would be entirely up to them.

To take responsibility for your individual life and destiny is to shoulder the burden of responsibility that your parents had taken for you. Your parents are only supposed to provide you the tools to make your way through the world, but they cannot live it for you.

The downside of the individual path is that you will have no one else to blame for the tragedies of your life but yourself.

But the upside is that you will be able to take pride in the successes in your life. And because you know that you are the captain of your life and paving your own path, you will be filled with confidence and meaning. You will accept the circumstances because you know that you knew them when you made the choice to be a sovereign individual.

As you continue to encounter obstacles and overcome them, you will become a versatile and competent problem solver. Everyday will be filled with meaning because you have adopted the mindset of the hero: every problem is a chance for you to encounter the unknown and come out stronger and wiser.

How else can we combat the eternal existential problem, which is that life is suffering? How else do we come to terms with mortality? That everyone who we love will die and we will soon follow?

Escapism and consumerism cannot provide us with meaning. It’s fun to escape from reality, to think that life should always be about being happy, but what happens when something tragic befalls you? What tools will you have to withstand malevolence and tragedy? What makes you confident that you will not sell your soul to gain the whole world?

We’ve come to a point in time where we’d rather pretend like suffering doesn’t exist than acknowledge and figure out antidotes to combat it.

We think depression and anxiety are the normal states of human existence, and relieve the negative emotions through drugs and alcohol.

If we could strengthen each individual in society to embrace and overcome hardship rather than do our best to shield them from it, wouldn’t we have a brighter future?

If we could educate the youth and help them identify with the hero who faces the dragon of chaos to bring wisdom and treasures to society, wouldn’t we have bright individuals who could grow up to potentially fix the issues we currently cannot fix?

If I could offer just one takeaway from this article, it would be this:

Stop Avoiding The Things You Know You Should Be Doing

If each day, you wrote down a list of all the things you THINK you should be doing to live a life that you’d be proud to live, and then actually completed everything on that list for the next few days, weeks, months, and years, what would you be like?

Wouldn’t you like to find out? Perhaps you will find the personal meaning that you need to withstand the tragedy of life along this journey. But you’ll never know until you take that first step.