Notes from Sunday, 17.3.2024. Today, I walked for approximately 6 hours, 32 kilometers. The weather was perfect, it was sunny, and the temperature was just right. I took many beautiful photos. After walking for 4 hours, I stopped to eat ice cream. I enjoyed it without my conscience thrashing me for being undisciplined. Instead, I ate the ice cream as if I were a normal 16-year-old. Something unbelievable a few months ago.
Let me start with a little story.
A couple of days ago, I drove, via driving school, to a town around one hour away from where I live. It was a sunny day, and the car's open roof allowed the warm air to flow in, creating a blissful atmosphere. The sun, hanging low in the sky, added a golden hue to the journey. The villages we drove through were quiet and peaceful. The rivers, reflecting the late afternoon sky, were a deep, saturated blue. As we drove, the energetic music filled us with speed and exhilaration. Driving is a feeling like no other; the effortless speed amazes me. Eventually, we arrived. The driving instructor and I took a break at a parking lot while ordering coffee and fries. Not having eaten fries in five years, the taste made me reminiscent of my childhood. As we stood outside of the bistro, I felt happy. Music, speed, relaxation, warm weather, birds singing, golden light, and magnificent villages. It’s impossible to be melancholic when the sun shines, and you eat fries in a parking lot.
I did not have a voice annoying me about the shallowness of this pleasure. I simply enjoyed this Friday afternoon and was fully present while doing so.
This event got me thinking. Why do I need riches, hot blondes, the gym, meditation, and monumental success if I can be happy with fries in the parking lot?
What push hard for if, in the end, I end up liking the shallower forms of existence? I can go for walks without being successful. I can look at the sun without a million in the bank. I can play with my future children without living in a palace. Quite the opposite - getting successful could rob me of the things I enjoy.
This is my fourth year of self-improvement. I'm at a level where I'm kind of happy with what I have. I don’t have any real problems anymore. It seems I’ve reached my ideal lifestyle. So, what should I try hard for? But the problem is that this stagnation makes me rot from within; only a silent voice keeps telling me I should be more. The problem is that this whisper can be ignored. It may not be painful enough to cause change. If this voice is ignored long enough, it fades away. That’s when one forgets one had dreams in the first place.
This is a journey where I discover how to keep going after arriving.
The enemy, a mighty one, is complacency.
This is my first time combating complacency; here’s how I got there.
2.1. Painful start
When I was 13, at the end of 2020, I had nothing except problems. I had zero social skills, no muscle, negative status, and no income. My body was so weak that I couldn’t run any distance without getting a side stitch. I was bitter and isolated. Neither did I have any passions; nothing really interested me. I didn’t even read. I was annoyed with all the trauma I had. I didn’t like how I had no independence either.
I had many problems. I was deeply dissatisfied with my life.
That’s why I started to grip my life. I wanted to get more out of it. I didn't want to live the average life under any circumstances. I didn't want to peak at a party. I had amassed infinite dissatisfaction. I tried to distance myself from all of the nonsense. I couldn't imagine myself living an ordinary life. - This dissatisfaction gave me energy and purpose. That was the start of my self-improvement.
2.2. Pushing super hard
When I was 13, I had a vision. I would create apps and market them on social media. That’s perspicacity at its finest because, in 2020, no one was talking about entrepreneurship and self-improvement online. I even skipped 9th grade to finish 12th grade at 16 years old and have more time to become monumentally successful. I had the perfect conditions to push super hard. My stark superiority complex made me want more. Deep dissatisfaction justified any hardship. Traumas – cool, that’s motivation. Coupled with a vision, I kept myself on track.
I worked up to 14 hours a day, mostly dedicated to programming. After three months, I needed a short break, and I focused on studying Chinese and creating videos. By then, it was mid-2021, and my programming course had started. My life got hard. I enrolled in a programming course designed for professionals. I struggled to keep up. In parallel, I had skipped 9th grade and wasn’t used to the new expectations; I was two years younger than the other 10th graders. My mother worsened my situation by forcing me to go to a swimming club and she made me to waste time with math tutors – that’s the last thing I needed. I can’t describe the resentment I built. – Yet, this very resentment made me withstand the stress. The pressure kept rising, but I kept going.
When you are under pressure, there’s no time to be sad. When you are under pressure, life feels like you’re walking on a narrow, hot sand trail surrounded by cacti. Behind you, there’s a tiger. Blood is guaranteed, but much less if you keep going.
My mother wanted me to quit my dreams. I refused to listen, as that would undo a year of self-improvement. I kept going, and I was proven right. Eventually, the pressure got less because I got stronger and faster. I’m infinitely grateful I didn’t quit. If I had, I would not have been; my bitterness would have eaten me.
I remember nothing taught by this programming course, but I learned how to learn. After that course ended, I started to focus on videos for the second time. I created 375 timelapse and slow-motion short videos in 60 days to demonstrate my power and got over 600.000 views. I abandoned this project as I failed to innovate and began to stagnate. Then, I started to work on my first app.
2.3. Don’t forget this story is about pain
My story could have ended at any time; things weren’t as straightforward as I described them to be. In my childhood, I wanted to be a scientist, and everyone kept reinforcing that identity – teachers, parents, and classmates. After my entrepreneurial vision at age 13, I still had a not-so-small desire to be a scientist, a relic from a bygone era.
It was part of the 10th-grade school curriculum to do an internship. I interned at my local university in the computer science and electronics department for two weeks.
Dear heavens!
Nothing less than my entire reality collapsed in on itself.
I never wanted anything to do with science ever again. I can see how someone can like science, there’s nothing wrong with it, but that was not me. I didn't exactly hate the internship, but it felt dramatically out of place. I didn’t like the mentality of the people there. Neither did I like their lifestyles. I didn’t want to spend my life in a lab. I realized that I actually hated science, technology, and engineering. My entire childhood was an illusion. Searching for ‘the truth’ using the scientific method seemed like a joke to me. What truth? – A checkered shirt and glasses? That’s not me. I couldn’t imagine spending my life in a cubic building trying to look purposeful. Everything I valued turned out to be a lie.
I had enough. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than doing science. Hence, generating enough energy to get out of bed seemed trivial. From now on, I had to commit every lived second to ensure this was not my destiny. This is not how I wanted to live.
Removing the possibility of failure establishes the certainty of success.
2.4. The hardest I had ever worked
After this internship, my summer holidays started. I got back to work on my first app—a mental math app with games. Full of pain once more, I pushed harder than ever before. My days became grueling because I cut out the cute and shallow work. Retrospectively, I don’t know how I was able to do it, because now I couldn’t do it. After two months of tedious, arduous, never-ending work, I published my first app.
2.5. The best time of my life
My app was far from done, and as 11th grade started, I was still very annoyed. I may have worked like a psychopath. But I looked like a geek. I had never done any sports, I had severe acne and a chubby face, my health was bad, and my body couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even do five pushups. I hated being weak. So, I did pushups whenever I ran into an issue while developing my app. Whenever I wanted to quit, I ran outside to the playground and did some pullups. That’s how I started to do 50 pullups and 150 pushups a day. Because my mind was already hardened, I didn’t need rest days. This would continue for 90 days, until December 2022, when I was 15 years old.
In December 2022, many things began to change. I was fed up with wasting hours a day scrolling social media. My screen time was around two hours a day, and before I got on self-improvement at the age of 13, it was more like 6 or 8 hours. I estimated to have wasted a year's worth of my time online, which was painful enough for me to break free three months later. I was also fed up with no social skills, so I began to develop them.
Skipping a few amazing months ahead, I fell in love with a girl, which motivated me to develop even faster because I knew I wasn’t attractive enough to get her.
I thought I had reached the ideal life. I had eliminated every bad habit. I progressed in my projects and social skills quickly. I had a purpose. I trained like a beast in the gym, and I started to read, journal, and meditate…
2.6. How we got to where I am today
After 31 months, or around 900 days of work and uninterrupted self-improvement, I was 16 years old. I hit a point where everything went downhill. I started to feel sad at random. What was I missing?
I got my first rejection in June 2023. This time, the phrase “hot blonde” is literal and not a metaphor for love and having a purpose. From my current perspective, I also know that the purpose of my app business had started to end because I had changed too much. Now, I wanted love—hot blonde—not riches.
Because my purpose ended, burning out was inevitable. I was completely useless for ten days, and my performance stayed low for an entire month.
Still, I used that pain to grow. For three months, I had a discipline I had never seen before. I was strong enough to cut out everything, even music. I had an absolutely beautiful summer.
Then, in August 2023, as a 16-year-old, I wanted to close the chapter with the apps. After confronting my biggest fears, I was ready. I started several ad campaigns; I concluded that my apps weren’t in demand.
After a few blissful weeks, my life started to go downhill. I completely lost my discipline already at the beginning of September, to the death time of my first app. I grew weaker by the day. I started to wonder why I was working hard when the girl bragged about an alcoholic vape loser and how much time they wanted to spend together. I wasn’t even close to overcoming her and so it hurt badly. Being surrounded by my classmates on a school trip to Venice weakened my spirit. Back in Germany, that inner conflict around that girl started to eat me from within, especially because I was already weakened because my first business failed.
There was a lot of dissatisfaction, but I could not transmute it into productivity. I kept trying to get up but fell down frequently. At one point, I couldn’t even go to the gym anymore because I was so sick.
Getting up at 3:30 helped strengthen me because it made me write beautiful texts. The 50 videos in 90 days project, which ended successfully on February 29th, also helped me.
Suffering from heartbreak for months on end also weakened my superiority complex. God Himself must have sent her to make that clear. I’ve been humbled.
At the same time, I loved my lifestyle of reading, thinking, writing, going to the gym, and recording videos. But because writing and creating videos is difficult, you can’t do it for more than three hours daily. So having nothing better to do, I started spending more time with friends. I also started becoming more interested in spirituality, literature, and philosophy. My life felt good; for example, one time in January, I went to the opera with a few classmates, and I liked it very much.
I had no burning pain anymore, as I did at the beginning of my journey. I seemed to have fixed every flaw. I had now developed social skills, skills to put on a resume, and a six-pack. I was now getting quite comfortable. Was the purpose of my self-improvement complete? Was I now able to return to the normal path? Remembering what nine hundred days of work felt like, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted them ever again. What do I need success for if I can have fun without it?
Growing content wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.
You see, why cut out friends, sacrifice cake, get up at three, and work all day long? This is not meant as a rhetorical question. Genuinely. Why give up everything to reach success? Everyone knows that a goal turns indifferent the second you reach it, so why try? Why not get comfortable with the simple life?
Maybe a simple life is all one needs.
Maybe that’s how life was meant to be lived.
Sigh…
But then,
I realized that this was just a test. I got tempted by comfort. I don’t want a normal life; it’s boring and unfulfilling. I’m not meant to live an ordinary life. I almost would have failed. This was a test of whether I could hold the frame. This was a test of whether my journey was about fixing my life or about more. This was a test of whether I could keep going without pain.
I realized it was a test, and now I'm back.
Did I pass?
After my meditation, I concluded that I could summarize this text in one sentence.
“Let’s go and buy some furniture on the weekend.”
This statement is the epitome of an emasculating existence. Here’s why: Normal people like to work boring jobs to buy things they don’t need. Decade-long risk aversion, coupled with an insatiable desire for instant gratification, indeed kills the soul. The man who, against his will, spends his weekend in a furniture store has lost his direction in life, the very definition of a masculine core. Forced into submission by his mediocre wife, he becomes the embodiment of complacency.
I struggle to believe that comfort is the solution to life’s inherent discomfort.
Let’s dive deeper into the realm of philosophy. One of my core values is ‘the deepest realization,’ in other words, ‘life is paradise,’ ‘only reality is good,’ or ‘only pursue what is meaningful.’ – I don’t think that life is about pleasure. There are no stories in the absence of pain. If you were put in paradise, you would probably be miserable. There’s nothing meaningful to do in paradise. Hence, anyone trying to optimize their life for comfort and happiness usually grows miserable.
From another philosophical perspective, things need to evolve continually. Complacency is standstill, and standstill is deadly. Things either grow or deteriorate. A house doesn’t grow; hence it breaks apart after a few decades of neglect. A tree does grow, and it can survive for millennia. I believe the same concept applies to humans.
The body works best if trained. Most people don’t train anything. The mind works performs if it is fed. Many people haven’t read a book in years. Adventure nurtures the soul. Most live boring lives. When was the last time your parents did something outstanding? Let me hypothesize something. I think think that the number of real books your father reads is correlated with how much sex your parents have. Why do I believe that, you may ask? Well, the man who stops learning and who gives up on life is inherently unattractive. There’s no purpose left.
Complacency is a very special form of weakness. Normal weakness is not being brave enough to ask out your crush. Complacency is a step above that. It’s not wanting to ask her out in the first place. Somehow, the life energy gets turned off. That means to cure complacency, one needs to rethink everything.
Before we rethink everything, let me explain two concepts.
Contentment means being happy with one’s life. There’s nothing wrong with being happy in life. Some people work a fulfilling job, have a beautiful wife, sometimes even a hot blonde, and are satisfied. I think that playing board games with friends on a Friday afternoon, having hobbies, going to the gym, and reading brings almost complete—95%—life satisfaction.
Complacency means settling for less because one gave up. Complacency means not having enough energy to leave the bed. Complacency is comfort on a paralyzing level. Complacency is categorically bad. Life is meant to be lived in motion. Life is striving; life is energy. But complacency turns that energy off. Thus, complacency kills the soul.
To give a practical example, if I were to go to university and become some random employee, I would be complacent because that’s not my dream. I would need to give up on my dreams to become an engineer. Someone may aspire to be an engineer and be content – happy – once they are.
So, now let’s reinvent the universe.
Let’s start simply before we dive very deep into what creates complacency.
4.1. Complacency happens to everyone
Before we get super deep again, I want to introduce a rather practical concept. Complacency comes in stages. Understanding these stages is crucial to break them.
Here’s an example.
Here’s a second example.
How can this cycle be broken? By doing regardless of how you feel. That means you keep trying, no matter if you succeed or not. You keep training no matter how fit you feel. You keep recording videos, even if you start getting views. You keep doing impressive things, even after you get your hot blonde.
4.2. Fake exhaustion
Let me give you a very practical tip. Has your life felt seemingly sad for no reason? Have you ever felt as if life isn’t fun anymore? I’ve learned that there’s most likely no deeper problem. I could fix my low drive by eating and sleeping more. That’s how I left my philosophical phase in the winter. Literally – by eating more. So, a potential solution to your complacency can be eating more.
4.3. Growing up, in other words, losing one's passion.
“I refuse to accept the normal life. I want more. Growing up is a lie. Everything is a lie. Everything is trying to strip me of my energy. I refuse to let that happen.”
“No, you will grow up and realize that you’re wrong. The world is not as straightforward as it's tempting to think. Enjoy the wonders of being young and innocent. Sunsets are vibrant, but when you grow up, not so much anymore. Love is passionate as a kid, but then it all evaporates. That's how life is. The sky is starry when you are young.”
I look out the window when I’m on a train, bus, or car. I enjoy seeing the shiny drops when it rains and the sun shines. It's a moment of intimacy with nature when these drops change color, especially when they turn a warm golden, leaving a simple and beautiful impression. Often, I'm the only person truly present. Everyone else has “grown up” and now sits on their phone, busy.
No child will authentically state they want their parent's lives. I’ve never seen someone desiring to spend their life filling out documents and attending pointless meetings. That has never happened.
“Can’t have a purposeful life? Here, eat some fries in the parking lot instead. You will never make it; you’re not a part of the elite. The elites aren’t happy anyway. Here, grow up.”
What’s faster, going three miles or one? Going three miles is faster in practice because walking it would take too long.
I'm scared of university. Currently, I hate science, engineering, and being a nerd. I feel disgusted when I reflect on who I was before my four-year self-improvement. – Being asexual, analytical, and asocial was terrible. But, then, there’s a problem. I may get used to it. I may go back to the easy path. I may not reach the disgust threshold to risk it all. Eating sweets doesn't kill you. Growing up means losing one’s energy. Growing up means losing one’s speed. Growing up means losing one’s flexibility. That’s why university is an existential threat to me. If I indeed become an employee, I will delete every text and video and give away my camera and microphone because my philosophy would turn out incorrect. Amen.
4.4. Time to let go of friends
Now let’s go deep again.
I used to be supremely elitist, arrogant, cold, and judgmental. Simultaneously, I progressed very quickly in my self-improvement. However, that changed in late October 2023, year three of my journey. I felt broken after that girl bragged about an alcoholic and how great he supposedly was. In the next few months, I fluctuated between humility and arrogance. Towards the end, humility won. Now I'm at a point where people don’t believe me when I tell them I'm arrogant. I became warm, charismatic, and open. I started to like people.
Yet, that humility was very expensive. Why push hard if you don’t see yourself as destined for more? What do you need to compensate for? Why push hard if you’re insignificant and no one awaits you? Why push hard when love is in abundance? A crushed ego may have made me social, warm, and charming, but at what cost?
Being social was expensive, too. Suddenly, I let in weakness. Suddenly, I spent time with undisciplined, purposeless, and unambitious people. Now, it was normal to be mediocre. I allowed myself to get infected by weakness. That weakness opened the gate for negativity to enter, and I paid the price. – A stark decline in my discipline, performance, and, ultimately, well-being. Now my mind was no longer a castle, fortified against demons. Previously, I would have judged their weakness so hard that it would be impossible to be friends. But now, I accepted them for who they were. My protective wall of arrogance collapsed.
At the same time, having friends was beautiful.
So, how do I solve this problem? – How do I make sure I don’t absorb weak energy? – How can I marry performance and friendships? – How do I stop friends from making me complacent?
Firstly, I rethought what humility meant because a crushed ego made my life depressive. From now on, humility doesn’t mean ‘crushed ego’ but ‘caring more about others.’ That should make being social and driven possible at the same time.
Secondly, I will now only discuss self-improvement, discipline, and purpose with my friends. If I cut out talking about communism, feminism, and climate change – I know, my all-time favorite topics – it should become clear who cares about me as a person.
Perhaps I should raise my standards.
Thirdly, I will restore my broken ego by pushing harder on my self-improvement. I will also stop bending myself to please others. If others want less, they can go and find less somewhere different.
As I thought deeply, I found another issue on the social front. How do I ensure that I won't grow complacent if I get a woman? I can be romantic without millions. I’m supremely motivated because I want to become attractive, so getting a woman will pose a new threat. I guess the temptation to grow complacent will only grow bigger. Now it’s a battle. Who will win? Will uncompromising excellence remain a testament to my spirit's indomitability, or will my spirit break? I don’t know.
4.5. Distractions
“I never liked water, the beach, or the sea. One may think I should like the beach; after all, seeing young women without bras is almost a sublime experience as a teenager. The glances from everyone looking at the physique my lifestyle gave me were also nice. Unfortunately, that isn’t very meaningful. You know, young braless women are nice, but I would rather work.”
I wrote that at the height of my discipline in the summer of 2023.
Spending an hour on the beach can be nice. But three hours…?
People like to be busy. Having nothing to do is one of the worst feelings one can have. That’s another reason paradise is undesirable; there’s nothing to do there. This is a law of the universe. Where there’s nothing to do, people will find ways to busy themselves. The magnum opus – the prime example – of pointless tasks are hobbies. For example, pets, gardening, or the volleyball club. Those things don’t produce anything, and neither do they add value. Although, … in my opinion, a garden is worse than useless because helping my parents actively wastes my time. Yet still, working in a garden is almost like being productive. When we broaden this point, almost everything people do is pointless. I suppose humans planted seeds so that they could feel productive.
Now, let’s think deeper. I want success in life because normal life is boring. That means if we make the average person busy, the desire for success should go away. If we are busy and distract the average person, they will not feel bored, so stupendously, they will pursue success in life.
Why not do the laundry?
Why not pick up the children from kindergarten?
Why not buy some furniture on the weekend?
After hundreds of hours of meditation, I discovered for myself that people do pretty much everything to be busy, even if it means arguing for fun. Their mind craves presence. Most don’t give their mind presence and try to distract themselves.
Do you see how everything is trying to distract you? Do you see how distractions rob your energy? Do you see the value of your attention? Do you know what you need to let go of? Do you see how to reignite your flame?
4.6. Hyperreality: Fine-tuned misalignment
It seems the world is fine-tuned to steal your energy. Everything wants you to give up on life, and everything is designed to keep you down.
What’s actually real? Most photos and words lie. Most jobs don’t add value. Most books don’t teach. Most friends don’t encourage. Most leaders don’t lead. Most clocks don’t tell time.
Are named days real? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…? The universe is not built with seven days of the week. If it was, I imagine there to be a magnificent sunset every Sunday. It’s easy to forget that weekends are a metaphor. They don’t actually exist; they are made up. But you’ve heard about the weekend so often that now it’s become a part of reality. Hence, we can call weekends a hyperreality. I categorically hate all hyperrealities. I hate weekends, I hate hobbies, I hate movies. Weekends - that’s when all of the peasants leave their houses and interrupt my silence. My days, they all look exactly the same. I do not believe in named days. For that matter, named days are one of many illusions trying to instill complacency.
Here's another example. Music and alcohol are the only forces able to make spending time with idiots enjoyable. That means music has the power to turn off thinking. Who are people who can’t think? Slaves. Even the most mundane moment can feel special with music’s help. Most people have a music addiction – and they do exactly nothing about it. Some go a step further and wear headphones everywhere. The problem with listening to music is that it makes your life feel good when it shouldn’t; happiness must be earned. The same applies to alcohol, sweets, and other stimuli; they provoke artificial happiness and are deeply ingrained into society. Let’s focus on music. Where is most music listened to? In the car. Where do most people take their car? To their job. Do you see how that fake pleasure makes people complacent? Let’s think further. I think music is a psychological weapon. Most songs inject narratives that don’t add purpose to your life. Even if you don’t analyze the lyrics, your mind still absorbs their energy. Do you think an earworm of ‘shake your ass’ will bring you closer to abundance, wealth, and enlightenment? Why is there music everywhere nowadays? Think about it.
It genuinely puzzles me how some people live ‘happy’ lives and don’t even exercise. When I didn’t exercise, I was depressed. … Every German’s favorite phrase is ‘Sport is Mord,’ literally meaning ‘sports kill.’ Do you think this is a societally encouraged weakness?
Have you ever tried to eat oats with water, pure cottage cheese, or an onion with a piece of bread? For the longest period of my life, I couldn’t eat food. It was too boring. Isn’t that madness that I'm being called the mad one for eating bread with onions? I find it pathetic that most foods aren’t actually foods nowadays. No wonder everyone is so sick, apathetic, and tired. I want to point out another fallacy. In Germany, people go to the bakery in the morning. How can that be real? Eating carbs kills creativity. Why do they do that first thing in the morning? Dear heavens. It’s hopeless.
Those were just a few examples. I would argue that everything about modern life makes you content with it. Now you don’t need friends, now you can just go online. Now you don’t need adventure. Just play a video game. Now you don’t need purpose. Just listen to some music. Well, what about balance? To hell with balance! I don’t have technology stripping my will to live!
Balance, the way most people see it, is another hyperreality. They will use balance to hide their monumental laziness and disguise that as a goal. If people can’t get something, they pretend to never have wanted it. Couldn’t break free from your social media addiction? Well, you need balance! Two hours of mindless doom-scrolling a day is okay, don’t be so extreme! Why? Who says balancing your job with an addiction adds harmony to the universe? You need to balance your balance – that’s the golden middle.
How do you escape this artificial nonsense? It’s simple. Stop indulging in warm water, movies, sweets, and music, and see how your will to live returns. I don’t mean this as an ideal; I mean, actually, do it. Go and stare at the ceiling for a few hours. That’s the truth. That’s how you overcome complacency. By removing fake comfort, you awaken your soul.
It’s pretty hard to be complacent when you’re stripped of comfort.
4.7. The cope you’ve been sold as the truth
I’ve been interested in spirituality for a very long time. The problem is that spirituality offers comfort. For most people, spirituality is cope. They don’t want to follow strict religious laws, so they say they are spiritual. They don’t like the real world, so they try to create alternative truths. To hide their lazy cowardice, they delude themselves into thinking that God has some plan for them. Guess what. God may have a plan, but most are too much of a coward to execute it. Most people are so busy trying to find meaning in nothing instead of finding meaning in something.
Meditation is nice, and so is praying. But when you start to think that it’s better to never have been because pain outweighs pleasure and some other nonsense, you need to wake up! Why would you want to give up on life in search of some nirvana?
So, do not overdo the spiritual affairs. Don't mess up the orders. First, master the material. Then, master the spiritual. What the hell do you need spirituality for as a 16-year-old?
4.8. The gratitude drug
For over a year now, I’ve trained myself to look at the things I'm grateful for. The problem is that this gratitude numbed me; it made me happy. Again, why push hard when you can instead appreciate what you already have? Why go to work when you can be grateful for the warm bed and soft pillow? For change to occur, you need pain, not joy.
Don’t get me wrong. Gratitude is necessary to be alive; not being grateful can even lead to suicide. Not being grateful for anything is a certain way to live a miserable life. Please never hesitate to express gratitude. Enjoy the blink of an eye called life.
Be grateful, but don’t stop wanting more. Look at the things you want. Look at the things that you want to improve. Look at the level you want to get to. Do this, while being grateful for what you have.
In the morning, I look at what needs to be completed, improved, or developed. In the evening, I look at what I'm grateful for. You can train yourself to look for problems just as you can train yourself to feel gratitude. I realized that one can be both grateful and hungry – no matter how successful. Looking at problems brings your mind to work.
5.1. A cute little test
Here’s is the stoic concept of eternal return. Imagine that if you died, you would forget everything and be instantly reborn as yourself. So, you would your exact life an infinite number of times. Nothing would be different, every time, you make the same choices. You wouldn’t know your life repeats. Does this idea scare or excite you? It’s a test.
5.2. Always moving
Humans have an innate drive to constantly pursue new goals. Once a goal is achieved, it quickly fades in significance, and we're eager for the next one – “That’s it?” After overcoming challenges, we enjoy a brief moment of peace before seeking the next objective. We enjoy the second of perfect stillness when the sun shines for the last time in the year, illuminating the golden leaves dancing in the mildly warm air. I will finish this text and feel bliss for a second – and I will be ready for the next thing. This is life. We aren’t supposed to stop.
5.3. A million in the bank
What's the highest pleasure in life? Is it that of a purpose finding completion… Well, one of the highest pleasures is sitting with your boys at a campfire. That’s the best thing; it always will be. The difference is which stories you’re going to have. Let me tell you, if you live a life, sitting at a campfire with your boys is ten times more fun.
5.4. The flame
If you’re content with an average life, truly happy with your “home sweet home,” then you’ve made it. But many have a burning desire to progress—a flame inside them. If you can act on it, success makes life beautiful. If not, unfulfilled potential leads to a dark existence. Most try to extinguish this flame, fearing the risk. But I believe it’s your duty to strive for more, to avoid a life of regret. If you try and fail, at least you’ll find peace knowing you gave it your all. Initially, I thought I changed and matured - like everyone wanted me to. After this little reflection, I realized I was wrong. I won't extinguish my flame. I’m making it brighter.
Pretty much the only reason you’re complacent is because of technology, it robs your desire.
Complacency has three allies: distractions, lesser pleasures, and comfort. These enemies are strong, unbelievably strong. But so are their enemies: purpose and desire. To rediscover purpose and unlock desire, one ought to cut out comfort, lesser pleasures, and distractions.
I want to share the method I use to recalibrate my desires and combat complacency. For two days, deprive yourself of all distractions and pleasures—no music, no warm water, no reading, nothing. I want you to stare at your wall. Once you learn to go without pleasure, complacency will be no enemy. Learn to be bored. Stillness adds clarity. Clarity adds purpose.
Most won’t dare to put this text into practice. Are you ready? You already know what to do.