Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, or a little bit more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they’re right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy?
How will the world be different and better when vou’re gone? What mark will you have made? What influence will vou have caused? They say that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida; well, what hurricanes will you leave in your wake?
As Becker pointed out, this is arguably the only truly important question in our life. Yet we avoid thinking about it. One. because it’s hard. Two, because it’s scary. Three, because we have no fucking clue what we’re doing.
And when we avoid this question, we let trivial and hateful values hijack our brains and take control of our desires and ambitions. Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial. Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty. And as such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do.
The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness.
Whether you’re listening to Aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or the goddamn Beatles, they all say that happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.
This feeling is what people go to church for; it’s what they fight in wars for; it’s what they raise families and save pensions and build bridges and invent mobile phones for, this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves.
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the fucking problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others.
As alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us. Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience. This feels sexy and enticing and may feel good for a while and sells a lot of tickets, but it’s spiritual poison.
It’s these dynamics that plague us now. We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others. often violently, in the name of some made up righteous cause.
People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at
The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it. People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.
Our culture today confuses great attention and great success assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not,
You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not, Whether anybody else realises it or not. And it’s not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass BMW or Audi. These things do not define greatness.
You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.
This mere fact, this simple optioning for your own values in life, already makes you beautiful, already makes you successful and already makes you loved. Even if you don’t realize it. Even if you’re sleeping rough and starving your ass off. You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived. You may not feel this. But go stand on a cliff sometime, feel that sudden rush of adrenaline, the wind hitting you in the fucking face, and maybe you will.
Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
Get your shit together this week, get your mindset right, get your mentality right and remember to feel ALIVE.
oh and don’t forget to drink your damn coffee, it’ll help with all of the above 😏
#getyourshitdone #positivepsychology #positivity #mortality #death #dealing #lifecoach #liferules #mondayvibe #mondays #goodenergy
Tactical Psychology 