Thanks for writing this, it's a brave and open and honest thing to do where people are afraid of doing those things. At a certain point, we have to get over what others think and get to figuring out what we think, and how it should be.
I believe a person does whatever they do to find a certain amount of peace in themselves and their lives.
I'd like to share some scraps I've scraped together on finding, and keeping a positive and healthy inner-dialogue and energy. This discipline has helped me more than any education, talent, skill that I have. It fuels them all. The below is not perfect, no one is perfect, there is no perfection to attain, only better discipline.
I put the pursuit of a better-self like taking a shower, I have to remind myself daily, in my words that have meaning to me, or my energy will stink.
Every action, every choice we take is ultimately geared at getting to a peaceful flow, focused and purposeful.
Whether the actions are dietary, physical, sensory, emotional, mental input, all aim at getting a neurological hit of the great peace that comes from great understanding / accomplishment.
Deep, meaningful, fulfilling, satisfying, lasting peace and contentment that fuels us forward. Soak that idea up.
The thing is, the things we pursue to find this peace / flow / focus / presence in the present / attention don't provide it. The things that we need to do (build healthy habits and discipline to over-ride and reset us when we're in a rut), we don't build enough muscles of.
Strengthening weaknesses and weakening what we need our strengths to be doesn't work, and ends up feeding the monster of ineffectualness. Sounds easy enough to understand, but pay attention to what you say, do, and say you do and increase the discipline of consistency between those three.
Whenever I look around me and say this sucks, it's usually because everything around me is moving, and I'm not.
My most favorite reminder; Keep moving. Inward, onward, upward.
A lot of folks take logical thinking to the extreme of building so many doubts that they seem so insurmountable that they lose the spark of possibility in themselves. They then turn to spreading their belief in the insurmountability of their doubts by helping others doubt themselves, partially to validate the fact that their own doubts were insurmountable. I call this spreading confusion and doubt. Everyone does it, some worse than others.
Filters and finding doubts in something are really important. Having it be the only way you see life fuels imbalance.
I like living in possibility and creativity, more than doubt and elimination of possibility. So I try to stay there more, than doubt.
Consider if a lack of peace comes from trying to understand something with our mind when we should be trying to understand it with our heart, or our gut, or vice versa. A lot of pain happens here and wears anyone down.
If something is becoming a zombie like experience, throw a wrench into it. Change your perspective. Get out, Get away, change it up. Instead of fuelling doubts in a negative downward spiral, learn, and then remember to hit the reset button to start fuelling possibility and forever spiral upward.
What if, instead of why not. How can, instead of how can't. The mind is amazing. It will see what you want, connection, or disconnection, relation, or unrelatedness and deliver time and time again.
I'm a big fan of logic. I'm a bigger fan of awareness and understanding, which isn't black and white, but a lot of colours that make up the picture.
If we don't like what we see, change how we see it. It's all there.
Our dominant world viewpoint is the true religion through which we see and process the world inside, and outside of us.
A threatened person lives in a threatening world.
A scared person lives in a scary world.
An untrustworthy person lives in an untrusting world.
A trusting person lives in a trusting world.
Prolonged visits in one ups or downs aren't productive, or fun. I pick centered, serene, calm, focus over ups or downs any day and try to saturate my life with it. Reminders all around me.
Why peace? It's the closest to the flow. We keep getting what we've been getting, when we keep what we've been doing. If we don't want what we have, we have to change what we're doing. It's important to work on your awareness of your awareness, and your awareness of your thinking to catch it.
The main culprit; thinking. We aren't supposed to figure things out before we do them all the time, or where would the journey and discovery of ourselves be? All we can work on is developing the best mindset for the journey and head in the best direction we know how.
It's too easy to get into a cycle of analysis paralysis. Of trying to understand everything to the end, before doing anything.
For me, I tend to notice thinking rarely solves problems worth solving. Problems worth solving come from going on the path of experiencing them, not staying in them,and going through them.
An absolute gem. If there is something I could possibly add to this wonderful summary, it'd be to further stress the importance of peace in our lives.
I am yet to really experience a startup first-hand but have had a strong bipolar commotion only recently. I really can connect with what Zak feels and no amount of persuasion can repel that feeling of emptiness.
When you go through the lows it's hard not to get hit by the enormity of it all. You begin to see just how puny an existence you truly are. And at the same time how lucky to have all those people who are there for you no matter what. Deep gratitude overwhelms you.
I don't think I can add much about fighting startup depression though I wish to share this one thing I came to learn. And that is that peace cannot be bought. You have to earn it. And that success does not cut it. You have to let go of things that hold you back.
Happiness is essentially a habit. Fall in love again. Do crazy things. Life is hard and startups harder. But kudos to friends that make the gloomy bits easier to handle. :)
Thanks, that was the one reminder I gave myself for a few years.
Contemplating and realizing the puny existence we live is truly emancipating, we're free to be free and create. What a gift.
I don't think there is a 'startup' depression, just not paying attention to your thoughts, actions to see if it's getting us what we want in a lasting and fulfilling way. If we get into a rut and aren't paying attention, that rut gets bigger, wider, deeper.
Discipline and paying attention are 2 skills that are so important and ones I fight to keep improving every day.
"A threatened person lives in a threatening world. A scared person lives in a scary world. An untrustworthy person lives in an untrusting world. A trusting person lives in a trusting world."
plenty of gems in there, but this one takes the cake. I've been trying to verbalize this exact thought for a while. tnx.
I'm sorry your link got downvoted and killed, it shouldn't have been.
I hope this reaches you: What I wrote isn't hokey self help. It's also not blind faith or following.
We can't know HOW to pursue peace, or discipline in our lives, without first learning WHY.
That's the first change that sets up the rest. Learning to understand peace, and discipline is vital to turning on the light bulb that will let you see your path forward.
I'm not hurt or anything by what you said. But, I am not sure if you were consciously aware of how you just spread doubts instead of clarity yourself.
You didn't offer an alternative, a process, or anything yourself. And I think everyone is capable of that.
I appreciate you doubt what I'm speaking about. Feel free to email me, I will talk to you forever about this, most important, topic in my life.
Over and above my work in life, becoming the most I can by learning about myself is my life's true work.
I'm dead serious. I don't believe in hokey self help shit either.
We all have a compass inside of us, maybe our heart. Finding, learning to read, and follow that compass using our mind and gut is our goal. It's not all logical, or we would be able to think our way out of whatever we get into :)
Hi, I haven't heard of Ken McLeod, but I'll look him up. I like reading.
I'm not a Buddhist per say, I did go through my Dalai Lama phase and saw him speak in person.. but we should be able to learn from every great teaching.
Universal truths exist in all great writings, spiritual, or not, and it's up to us to subdue our ego to learn to take the good from everything with our so called open-mindedness. Doubt really is the enemy.
I should have added one thing: My problems aren't unique, nor are my thoughts unique. No one's are. Very little thought or problems are unique or though about for the first time.
Man has been trying to figure their shit out for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Their journeys exist in books.
IF with our our ego we feel we have to locate and connect all the dots ourselves, so be it. But, not everyones doing this at the same time, or on the same page, or see the same picture from connecting their dots.
Too often we feel we don't have a single soul to talk to, and my words are more to reach anyone feeling that. It's not right.
All of this begins with an always growing and improving relationship with ourselves, fuelled by curiosity.
Are there Ken McLeod essays I should check out first? Feel free to email :)
The emphasis on peace and on understanding and connecting to problems through experience rather than logic and doubt is what reminded me of him. He hasn't written much about these things, they come up more in his talks for long-time students. They're in A Trackless Path somewhere, for instance:
but that's approximately 25 hours of audio, and I can't pin it down more precisely that. (But the whole thing is good, and a concrete approach to the desiderata you outlined.)
Of his essays, probably the most conceptually interesting is his series on karma as an evolutionary process.
Thanks for writing this, it's a brave and open and honest thing to do where people are afraid of doing those things. At a certain point, we have to get over what others think and get to figuring out what we think, and how it should be.
I believe a person does whatever they do to find a certain amount of peace in themselves and their lives.
I'd like to share some scraps I've scraped together on finding, and keeping a positive and healthy inner-dialogue and energy. This discipline has helped me more than any education, talent, skill that I have. It fuels them all. The below is not perfect, no one is perfect, there is no perfection to attain, only better discipline.
I put the pursuit of a better-self like taking a shower, I have to remind myself daily, in my words that have meaning to me, or my energy will stink.
Every action, every choice we take is ultimately geared at getting to a peaceful flow, focused and purposeful.
Whether the actions are dietary, physical, sensory, emotional, mental input, all aim at getting a neurological hit of the great peace that comes from great understanding / accomplishment.
Deep, meaningful, fulfilling, satisfying, lasting peace and contentment that fuels us forward. Soak that idea up.
The thing is, the things we pursue to find this peace / flow / focus / presence in the present / attention don't provide it. The things that we need to do (build healthy habits and discipline to over-ride and reset us when we're in a rut), we don't build enough muscles of.
Strengthening weaknesses and weakening what we need our strengths to be doesn't work, and ends up feeding the monster of ineffectualness. Sounds easy enough to understand, but pay attention to what you say, do, and say you do and increase the discipline of consistency between those three.
Whenever I look around me and say this sucks, it's usually because everything around me is moving, and I'm not.
My most favorite reminder; Keep moving. Inward, onward, upward.
A lot of folks take logical thinking to the extreme of building so many doubts that they seem so insurmountable that they lose the spark of possibility in themselves. They then turn to spreading their belief in the insurmountability of their doubts by helping others doubt themselves, partially to validate the fact that their own doubts were insurmountable. I call this spreading confusion and doubt. Everyone does it, some worse than others.
Filters and finding doubts in something are really important. Having it be the only way you see life fuels imbalance.
I like living in possibility and creativity, more than doubt and elimination of possibility. So I try to stay there more, than doubt.
Consider if a lack of peace comes from trying to understand something with our mind when we should be trying to understand it with our heart, or our gut, or vice versa. A lot of pain happens here and wears anyone down.
If something is becoming a zombie like experience, throw a wrench into it. Change your perspective. Get out, Get away, change it up. Instead of fuelling doubts in a negative downward spiral, learn, and then remember to hit the reset button to start fuelling possibility and forever spiral upward.
What if, instead of why not. How can, instead of how can't. The mind is amazing. It will see what you want, connection, or disconnection, relation, or unrelatedness and deliver time and time again.
I'm a big fan of logic. I'm a bigger fan of awareness and understanding, which isn't black and white, but a lot of colours that make up the picture.
If we don't like what we see, change how we see it. It's all there.
Our dominant world viewpoint is the true religion through which we see and process the world inside, and outside of us.
A threatened person lives in a threatening world. A scared person lives in a scary world. An untrustworthy person lives in an untrusting world. A trusting person lives in a trusting world.
Prolonged visits in one ups or downs aren't productive, or fun. I pick centered, serene, calm, focus over ups or downs any day and try to saturate my life with it. Reminders all around me.
Why peace? It's the closest to the flow. We keep getting what we've been getting, when we keep what we've been doing. If we don't want what we have, we have to change what we're doing. It's important to work on your awareness of your awareness, and your awareness of your thinking to catch it.
The main culprit; thinking. We aren't supposed to figure things out before we do them all the time, or where would the journey and discovery of ourselves be? All we can work on is developing the best mindset for the journey and head in the best direction we know how.
It's too easy to get into a cycle of analysis paralysis. Of trying to understand everything to the end, before doing anything.
For me, I tend to notice thinking rarely solves problems worth solving. Problems worth solving come from going on the path of experiencing them, not staying in them,and going through them.
Let me know what you like, or don't.
0.02