Rationalization

Now, this topic has been one I've had rolling around in my brain for a very long time. It seems the words may have come to me today while listening to the blabberings from Alan Watts, Joe Rogan,  and Duncan Trussell.  Let's discuss.So, I'll start with Alan Watts. A person who I have listened to quite frequently off and on over the last few years. He speaks about a few concepts that go something like this..."There is something fundamentally wrong...do you realize what goes with the things that you desire?...You will spend your life completely wasting your time, you will be doing things you don't like in order to go on living doing things you don't like doing... ...the record of what you do is more important than what you do." If you want to hear more about this or listen to the whole talk then punch in Alan Watts, law of attraction and if money were no object.What does this mean? First, be careful where you set your sights. Play. Them. Through. Think about what that life, job, hobbies, etc... come with and what those people experience everyday. What comes with what we desire? Which leads to the next thoughts of the vicious cycle. We get "trapped" (talk more later about that) in this seemingly unending cycle of having to go to a job that we hate, to pay for a house we can't afford, to maintain a lifestyle we try to uphold, when you'd rather be painting trees on a canvas living in a van down by the river (I don't want to do that, but maybe you do). The last of these Alan Watts thoughts is the concept of ensuring others know we are doing well or, for that matter, doing ANYTHING. We must always record and demonstrate our value. To our bosses, to our friends, to our "followers", we live in a world where we compare ourselves and our lives to what other people are doing and living constantly. Which not only undermines our confidence in our decisions, but also is the result of an incredible amount of sadness and desperation. We seek to find solitude of acceptance and justification from other people rather than where it matters most, yourself. We always ask, "Do you like this? What do you think?", which isn't in it itself bad, but more so in the context of why I think we ask. Which is in the mindset of seeking others approval. Jordan Peterson says it very well, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today".So, we have this vicious cycle. Let's make a relatable, yet fictional (although it may resonate with you), story. We take a young child who grows up in a normal household with a normal family dynamic. Father is in a corporate job, mother stayed home with the kids, etc etc... Fast forward to 18. You now are faced with the daunting decision of what it is you want to do with your life (insert ridiculous eye roll). Of course to no surprise college is the answer to which you enroll in business school similar to your father. You got to school, meet a wonderful woman/man, get married, climb the ladder, build a house, etc etc... and then you turn 50 years old and have massive reflection on your life one day while drinking your Folgers select coffee and decide that rather than understanding and reflecting on your life's decisions, you buy a sports car to "solve your problems"...rather than asking "is this what I want?"Which now we head into the podcast world of JRE. Some quotes, "...is how much we lie to ourselves... you're addicted to technology... and because you can't stand the fact that you don't have the discipline to stop using it, you would rather make up a story involving some absolutely verifiable bullshit that you are not in full control of yourself... I think it's that you haven't dealt with the fact that you're freaking the F&#! out...your phone is very good at tricking yourself into thinking the reason you feel like S%@$ is because of something else happening in the world." I don't want you take away the feeling from this that it is based just around our technology addiction, it also has to do with our ability to justify our numbness to our situations by surrounding ourselves with comparison and showcasing how "together" we have it. We work so hard at trying to take this big tail feather we have and shaking it around to show that we know what we're doing when in reality we're so beat down from shaking the feather that we don't take a moment to realize we didn't even like feathers (or sports cars).What I'm saying is that we have to question ourselves. You have to realize that where we are at in our life came from a series of decisions we made to get where we are at... and we have to know that if you are seeking a change or a moment of clarity we are probably going to fall (quit, admit defeat, leave). And fall HARD. We have to take your ego out of it, take comparison out of it, in order to begin finding what it is you truly are seeking. When it crashes, it comes from the position of continuously trying to shake "the feather" for so long that the system has nowhere to go, but down. We always have a rationalization or a justification that allows us to accept our position or allows us to be "ok" with where we are at although it may not be where we want to be. And rather than confronting that problem or exploring something new, we stay in a mind numbing circle of boredom that allows us to just experience enough discomfort for a selfie on instagram only to fall back into our repetitive patterns until the next "surprise" we have in our lives to excite us again. We continually rationalize, justify, and seek acceptance of the change we think we want. We fall in order to experience vulnerability, we fall in order to start again.Bhagavad Gita said, "It's better to be an honest street sweeper than a dishonest king." Sometimes in order to make a change in our lives we must make extremely difficult decisions, we must have extremely difficult conversations. Not only with other people, but with ourselves!! The question we have to sit and ask ourselves is, do we want to be the king, or the street sweeper? Is what you are doing what you want to do, or what you're "supposed" to do?On purpose,Matt"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." - Henry David Thoreau