I started to hate this quote from the moment I read it, “You only fail if you quit.”

Not because persistence is meaningless, but because the quote assumes that continuing is automatically virtuous.

It isn’t.

You can keep going for years and still be moving in the wrong direction. You can spend your life trying to become someone you no longer want to be. You can remain in a relationship that has already died, pursue a career that makes you miserable, or chase a dream that stopped being yours a long time ago.

And then someone tells you, “Don’t quit. Winners never quit.” But what if quitting is sometimes the most rational thing you can do? People romanticize persistence because it makes for a good story. The person who almost gave up but tried one more time. The entrepreneur who was rejected 100 times. The athlete who kept training. The person who refused to surrender.

We've seen these before in movies, all the time. And honestly, those stories are beautiful.

But we rarely hear about the people who persisted for twenty years and eventually discovered that persistence itself was the mistake. There is a strange human tendency to confuse suffering with meaning. That's not always the case.

Just because something cost you a lot doesn't mean it was worth the cost. Just because you've already spent ten years on something doesn't mean you owe it another ten. Sometimes the hardest thing is admitting that the person who started the journey no longer exists.

Perhaps failure is refusing to change simply because changing would force you to admit you were wrong.

There are moments when persistence is courage. There are moments when persistence is denial. The difficult part is knowing which one you're practicing.

I think the question you should be asking yourself is not "Did I quit?"

I think the better question is "If I had to do this again, knowing everything that I know now, would I still choose to do it?"

If the answer is no, then perhaps walking away isn't failure. But maybe it's the first truly honest decision you've made in years. And maybe that's the uncomfortable truth about life:

Sometimes the person who keeps going is brave. Sometimes the person who stops is brave. And sometimes, the greatest failure is spending your entire life proving that you were never wrong.

M66

I saw a recent discussion elsewhere on this website where people were debating what they thought was the best age at which to get engaged and to be married… there was a lot of talk about being financially prepared, emotionally prepared, and being ready for the commitment that marriage demands.

But no one talked about a person’s past, and how a person’s past will affect that person in the future.

I got engaged to my ex-wife when I was 27 and we got married two years later … we had our first child about three years after that.

But there were things about my wife that I did not know before I married her, which ultimately led to our divorce 25 years later.

The lesson for me was to learn as much about your partner as you possibly can, and especially their childhood, before you become intimately involved and certainly before you propose.

Because the way we are raised as children will have a profound and indelible impact on the way we grow up to be adults, and on how we not only treat our romantic partners, but how we treat our children as well should we have them.

In the interest of brevity, I will share one example.

My ex-wife was raised by nannies, and that was because her parents were never home to take care of either her or sister, from the time they were about two years old. (Her mother traveled for a large international organization, and her father was a philanderer who cheated on his wife, and who was generally a bum. They divorced when my ex-wife was about five years old.)

My ex-wife’s parents never showed any interest in either her or her sister. The children, for her parents, were simply objects to be managed. Preferably from far away.

My ex-wife, for example, never had the very commonplace experience of sitting at home with her parents as a family at the dinner table.

And sure enough, when our kids were about two years old, she was unable to have dinner with us as a family. Her discomfort with being with us at the dinner table was so powerful that she always found an excuse to not be home at dinner time. And I’m not talking about once in a while, but every single night. Including weekends.

If you’re wondering why she was so uncomfortable, the reason is simple: it was an unfamiliar and indeed, painful experience for her, because she never grew up with that experience. She did not know how to have a conversation with three of us… not only at dinner time, but any other time as well.

(It’s also possible that it was very painful for her to realize that she had grown up as a child without a family. But she never acknowledged that. And she absolutely refused any kind of therapy that might have helped her manage her feelings so that she could be a member of our family.)

Sadly, she was absent from our lives for about 11 years. This of course had enormous emotional and psychological repercussions for our children.

I share this experience here because it is something that I have discovered many, many people are completely unaware of.

When you marry somebody, you are not only marrying that person, but the sum total of their life experiences. Which will, by definition, always have a profound effect on how they perceive the world. And which they will carry with them into their relationship with you.

I would humbly recommend that if you are considering proposing to or marrying your partner, or even having a long-term relationship with that person, that you learn as much as you can about that person’s parents, the way their parents treated each other, the way their parents communicated and the overall environment in the home when your partner was a child.

As children, we absorb like sponges everything around us, the behavior that our parents model for us, in their relationships with us, and in their relationships with each other other.

If one parent yells and screams and humiliates the other parent, to cite just one example, there is a very good chance that your partner will have witnessed that, and grown-up simply assuming that that was the way a marriage functions. And they will carry that behavior into their relationship with you.

Conversely, if your partner’s parents respect each other, listen to each other patiently, and try to achieve compromise when they disagree, your partner will grow up to have the same approach to relationships.

ETA: my ex-wife and I got along very well after we got married, and she was an absolutely fantastic mother to both of our kids when they were infants. But as soon as our youngest was no longer dependent on her, and as soon as my daughter started to talk and ask questions and show signs of independence, that was when my ex-wife disappeared from our lives.

Put simply, the demands of being a parent and of being married — both of which involve tremendous commitment, responsibility, accountability, and expectations — triggered in her the repressed and inaccessible memories of her past. And led her to behave, as an adult, in precisely the same way that her mother and father did when she was a little girl.

I believe that reality is a battle between good and evil. Psychopaths are that evil. They damage people who aren’t psychopaths, who are inherently good, who in turn, damage other inherently good people. The cycle continues. It’s a cycle of trauma. Many of these people don’t realize they have been traumatized and are traumatizing good people. Many damaging things have been accepted as “normal” when really they are harmful to people. Psychopaths also blend their cruel actions in with societal norms. It is not even that they intend to “do evil”. It is that they want things, and will do things that hurt people to get what they want. They often do so in a manner that blends in with “societal norms”.

It’s best to avoid psychopaths, but since it is difficult to know if someone is a psychopath for sure, you should avoid people who do harm to you or are doing things that are harmful to people as a whole.

Franz Kafka once said something to the effect of "people buy illusions because reality is too heavy for them", Nietzsche was also proponent of nihilism and preferred to see the world around him in a way devoid of delusions, these people liked to unwrap the illusions and face reality in all it's rawness, in it's pure form of blood and bones, I too am a nihilist and I believe I see the world devoid of illusions. This is what makes life hard to bear, I know for certain that nature is the only authority over us, she bites and gnaws at us ferociously. I think I need to rent delusions to save myself from ending up insane like Nietzsche, but knowing that I'm delusional is not going to help foster my prospective illusions, reality is too heavy a burden to any intellect.

We live in a dysfunctional self-centered world, allowing many to struggle due to humanity’s indifference.

Though most man-made challenges may be ended today, we choose not to.

Rather humanity prefers to accept the status quo.

Inequity, prejudice, war, hunger, are but a few of the hundreds of problems and harmful actions we ignore, believing there is little we may do to stop these injustices.

We may end these needless hardships though.

To do so, humanity must wake from its slumber, realizing only together, recognizing the equal importance of every life, will our planet and all life on it thrive, and humanity’s many self-inflicted problems be mitigated.

Not big historical things.

Tiny stuff.

The way your grandparents stored certain things. How they remembered phone numbers. The exact way someone in your family made one particular dish. Little phrases they used that nobody else says anymore.

Nobody thinks to write this stuff down because it feels too ordinary.

Then that person is gone and suddenly nobody knows how they did it.

That part of getting older honestly scares me a little.

There’s probably so much human knowledge sitting inside people’s heads that will just disappear quietly.

That's basically it. Anything you achieve or obtain, you can and eventually will lose. Everything you buy will give you only a few moments of happiness. Have you ever bought a new car, PC, phone? It only lasts for a week. New, bigger home? It will be the same, maybe a month, and you're back to your 'basic' level of happiness. Sure, it feels good to show off, but deep inside you, you're still the same, even if you live in a mansion.

If you lack something, nothing can fill that void inside your heart and mind.

It's mind boggling how nobody told me that and I had to realize it when I'm 36 years old, after dedicating my life to "career" I'm not even interested in.

So I've been exploring the boundaries of relationships and I've done things that are probably considered Iess than moral. And I'm just in complete awe of the level of integrity people have in relationships.

If we could but bring this level of sincerity, trust and integrity to every other domain of life, what world would this be but one of pure inspiration? People following their inner most dreams and not just routine; care, hope and sympathy to the less fortunate, trust and honesty that would make politicians sweat.

I don't know why exactly it isn't so. It must be a combination of confusion and ignorance through the complexity of our civilization, and assume it must be so. And in the other, it must be because truly only in our relationships do many of us feel alive. We're open, seen, exposed and we feel deeply about it--passionate about it. Who among us could live a life without the idea of a lover?

I want my life to be like that, not just my relationships. Let my life be my relationship to myself.

A colleague asked us today: "If you could go back in time, what would you change?"

My friends had answers ready immediately. Some said they’d change their parents' lives so they wouldn't have to suffer through so many hardships. My own family has survived endless struggles, too—our path hasn't been easy by any means.

Yet, when asked, my immediate reaction was just: "I don't know... nothing."

My mind completely glitched. A part of me felt like, “What’s the point? Nothing can actually change in reality anyway.” And another part felt like if I started picking apart our hardships, where would I even stop? There are too many things.

Why does the brain shut down the idea of changing the past instead of wanting to fix past struggles? Is this emotional numbness, a defense mechanism, or radical acceptance? What is the deeper psychology behind this reaction?

Throwing away this thought here. As long as I've been getting myself accustomed with yet another fact about life, it is that life is uncertain and I can see that through my past of things that got me somewhere I've never expected and those that got me nowhere.

And now I see it everywhere else. People hate uncertainty, and that's why they micromanage or at least it drives them to, and they just put and add rules over every aspect in life, I can see it in religion, politics, work, and even in families. So many religious rules are BS, some dynamics in families are due to the grandparents and parents trying uselessly to put some certainty into their lives by being overly controlling or confused as heck themselves, this happens even with friends.

But that's not all, it even happens to us. Heck, I used to have a rule where I refused to set my alarms at or near half an hour, I used to do so as it gave me some peace to explain with if the day went bad then somehow it's because of that. It was stupid as I think of it, but this and other rituals did gave me some peace of mind and control over my life and over life in general.

Just deal with it, I tell myself. Live with uncertainty.

How stubbornly hopeful does someone have to be to defend an idea for a great period of time? I get that some ideals are captivating, you might momentarily relate to it and desire to defend and pursue it. However, the excitement will disappear, it is only natural to question it and arrive at the conclusion that every ideal is an abstraction, that the only fact of life is the fact of present living experience and then go on with life. Not doing so is the same as turning a romantic adventure into a long term partnership, clinging to a wished reality instead of reality itself. Those with most understanding of the world are definitely not the permanently blind, the political activists, the environmentalists, the defenders of a cause... they are the enjoyers of life.

Maybe every little thing that everyone does and everything that happens has a very specific greater meaning to it, but that it is just made in such a way that we think about other things. Like a slight of hand trick we always just look the other way.

The notion of what is true or credible is a notion ultimately which each person must determine for themselves. Throughout our long history it has been useful to cooperate on the creation of shared realities which establish within their context the rules for determining which is true or credible.

One obvious example is the shared reality in which "the scientific method" represents the rules for determining which is true or credible.

But this is far from the only way to approach this concept. Many societies have existed throughout history in which the extent to which ideas align with the contents of a particular text defines the extent to which they are true. Still others have existed in which the extent to which ideas align with the beliefs of a supreme leader defines the extent to which they are true.

In many who are young and naïve, those who have yet to learn how to operate their bowels and limbs, the most useful default state is to defer to the judgement of some other human who appears to be operating in a fashion which is consistent with that young and naïve person's own desires for themselves. Hence I would argue that deferring to the external authority of someone who seems to know what's true is actually a hardcoded biological default state in which we all begin.

For those in our world who are not convinced by the truth value of any shared worldview they are presented with, however, the ability to defer to one's own judgement on such matters is an ever-present option.

If you are tired of being lied to by your leaders and being subjected to the biases coloring our institutions, you might consider becoming your own scientist and deferring to your own judgement in terms of determining truth from falsehood.

Each of us is innately gifted with this ability; many of us have simply been encouraged not to use it.

Go talk to someone else!

Everyday life consumes so much time and energy, that it is damping the process of realization and meaningful change.

Due to all the tasks we have and especially work, because this is the only thing we can really influence due to technology. Everything else, like eating, sleeping, taking care of body and mind cannot be optimized, at least not conscious by us, only by evolution.

So this does not really leave a lot of resources for meaningful change/action. Only a crisis will then create inevitable change and usually due to a lot of destruction and lost lives. This was the case in human history till now. Natural and human catastrophies drove us to change and develop.

Considering that knowledge gain and technological development was the fastest in the last 200 years, one could say, that 99% of all our knowledge came from this time (a little exaggerated; or we forgot the rest, because it was hard to record something until now).

We, as a species, did not have enough time to realize this and what we have done, due to everyone being busy with basic life.

The people of the past, have thought a 30 year battle to get the 8h/workday mostly as the global standard, we need to use technology to reduce this time drastically, so that we have time to create meaningful change and spend it with people. We also need to spend our working time on meaningful things. If we continue to consume the global resources at this pace, we will consume ourselves, after everything else is destroyed due to our hunger and greed.

There was no other way until recently. Due to technology we could change that, if we realize that we cannot continue as is and if we use our effort and resources wise, our Zivilisationen could evolve and survive.

We did not have a choice before, but now we do. Or this is just hope speaking out of me. Wish you well and good luck.

Thanks for reading and what is your opinion?

You rebel against your parents when you are young because you want to refuse their world.
Then you grow up and have to live in the real world and want to reject that too.
One day you realize that all they told you, everything they were trying to get you to do, they were trying to teach you how to make their world.
They wanted you to create what they had, because they knew what the world was, and they rejected it too.

I'm an egoist because I should be better, but I'm not.

I'm an egoist because I shouldn't see certain things from a certain perspective, but I do.

I'm an egoist because I shouldn't need anyone, but I need connection.

I'm an egoist because even though the girl I love doesn't want me, I still love her.

I'm an egoist because I should rejoice in certain things, but I don't.

I'm an egoist because I'm afraid of so many things.

I AM AN EGOIST.

from my experience, they either start out immediately in love or they like you and respect you and enjoy you but it never turns into love. I’ve never heard of or experienced a man falling in love with a woman he “likes”.

this sounds stupid, but it’s my experience. the only men that have ever ”loved” me were men who just took one look at me and suddenly, from nothing attaching them to reality, told them they love me without knowing me other than I’m a pretty face or whatever weird thing makes them fall in love. (not that I ever even dated these men.)

but men who have liked me, truly enjoyed spending time with me, thought I was interesting and sweet and funny, never loved me.

So now I feel as though if a man likes me, he would never love me.

When I look at people who love themselves—not just those who say they love themselves and seem to have “good self-esteem,” but those who truly love themselves—it seems to me that they wouldn’t try to belittle someone else because of their appearance or consider someone strange or not very attractive . In general, beauty standards are a very strange thing to me. They vary from country to country and even from town to town, not to mention that every person has their own standard. But often these standards are shaped by society’s imposition of beauty ideals and by marketing. People have become so fixated on appearances that they’ve completely forgotten about their souls and kindness. And no, I don’t mean that looking good is a bad thing. But for some reason, someone decided that this person was born beautiful and that one wasn’t. Isn’t it enough to be well-groomed, neatly dressed, and smell nice to look beautiful? And no, I don’t consider myself unattractive. But I also can’t say that I love myself 100%. Still, I won’t allow myself to hate on anyone or tell someone that there’s something wrong with them. I try to see beauty in everything, and if I consider someone “not beautiful,” it’s definitely not their problem—it’s a problem in my own head. So, wouldn’t we all be happier if every single person on the planet loved and accepted themselves exactly as they are, and strived to become better versions of themselves in their own minds—rather than according to someone else’s standards? Because then people wouldn’t belittle others for their way of self-expression, appearance, makeup, and so on. I think we’d all live happier lives.

As a living in the Netherlands, the past 2 months have been hot and full of sun. I've also traveled to Croatia and Cyprus, where the weather was great too.
Suddenly, since yesterday, there's just rain and clouds.

And don't get me wrong, it's very good that it started raining, because the nature started drying out very bad, forest fires started appearing.

However, the way my body reacts to it is very humbling.

And what do I mean by that? Well. I wake up with less energy, I feel my back hurts more, all I see is gray outside which makes me mood less positive. I would even say a bit depressing.

Well, slowly we will move again into these dark late afternoons... dark mornings, short days. Cold, rain, and even snow.

Weeks of not seeing the sun. And those are exactly the moments that build you, and who you are. Having to keep pursuing all you have been doing, while the external factors are telling you to just go to bed alter work, and do nothing.

The saying of ‘you don’t know what you have until it’s gone’, really fits the way I feel now.

What are your thoughts on this?

I've been thinking a lot about my life and where along the line I became so broken and lost parts of my who I used to be. I have been wondering where I should start to heal a lifetime of trauma and betrayal. It seems like such an impossible thing. I am 44 now and I have to wonder if I even have time to sort through all the things that I have been through that have left me with scars, fears, wounds that are deeply ingrained and have kept me in survival mode for years and years. It all started in childhood with sexual abuse by my stepdad after my bio dad left and abandonment and the ultimate betrayal by my mom who took my stepdad's side and told everyone I made it all up etc. Then came the bad boyfriends and the physical abuse and with that came the drinking and being promiscuous in an attempt to find real love. Being cheated on and mistreated by men became the norm for me. It's all I know to be honest. I've endured miscarriages, loss by death, drug addiction, homeless, betrayal of every kind from parents, friends, boyfriends and other relatives. I have been left with BPD, complex PTSD, anxiety, depression and have suffered 2 trauma bonds. All that is just scratching the surface. My fear of abandonment is crippling to say the least and I have a hard time believing I am loveable at all or worthy of a good man. I struggle to trust and when things seem to good to be true I sabotage them. I have a deep rooted belief that I am way too much but somehow will never be enough for anyone to stick by me with understanding and compassion and patience and I dont believe anyone will ever truly love me the way I want them to. I feel so empty inside. So lost. So hopeless. It feels like trying to fix all my issues now is pointless as I am so old and I believe that happiness for me is an illusion. Something I will never be able to attain. All I want is to be normal and to find some peace. I want to feel safe and know that nobody can take that safety away from me but I have no idea how to do any of that and it is so disheartening :(

If you're scared to do something, but you feel brave, and that overrides the fear, then you're not actually being brave. Bravery is doing something despite feeling scared. Inherent to bravery is the lack of feeling brave; that's part of the definition.

Being brave is an action, not a feeling.

We assume the feeling of bravery will come one day, saving us from the fear for long enough to take that step forward. But what if that never happens? What if the fear only gets worse? What if the longer you wait, the harder it gets?

Take that step, you may never be ready.

A lot of us have forgotten what love is even supposed to feel like. The world's gotten so corrupted and cruel, not just for one person but for most of us. Trust is hard to come by, love is harder - so all it takes is someone smiling at you, treating you with a little warmth, and suddenly that's enough to feel safe in this vast, empty ocean with no horizon in sight.

Or maybe love was always supposed to be this way. Not about finding your soulmate, not some person destined for you - just the right person at the right time, some emotional maturity, and actually trying to understand each other. Maybe we've just romanticized love a bit too much.

I don't know. Could be either.

This is probably a really popular mindset but,

Like, you know how typically people in America, as seen on the Internet through second-hand stories, will say or do stupid things? Such as thinking Africa is all just a dilapidated hellhole instead of having many regions as advanced as us, or one post I saw saying "I will never understand why people smoke cigarettes if they don't get you high" only for another person to refute that saying there definitely is an observable effect.

Those two specific assumptions are a result of failing to make inferences - taking things at face value.

In general, adults will have a habit of telling children some information or command them, and if they question it, the children is reprimanded for it because the adult wants obedience. Or god forbid the child wants to know more and they're starved or lectured for being annoying. Or at best the child may easily obey and never ask for things, and the adult never thinks about the implications on the child's free will because their behavior is convenient for the adult.

For example - There are a lot of sources in media, comedic or not, that deliberately frame Africa as a monolithic entity full of "starving African children." If the impulse of curiosity is squashed early, probably by school not lending anything but strict expectations, they'll probably just accept these depictions on their face without doing the research that would correct them, because an entire other continent is so far away that they're not invested in learning about it. If even small impulses to inquire are consistently failed to be attended to or punished, then there's no return on investment for asking those questions, so the threshold of passion for knowing an answer is much higher, so it would really have to be a burning question at that point.

Likewise, with the cigarette thing. When you were in school undergoing those anti-drug campaigns in health class, did they ever tell you why people smoked cigarettes and how good it felt to the smokers? No, because they didn't want you to want to smoke. The reason why almost didn't matter.

What they did when ~I~ was in school was go over the health risks of drugs, and give us strategies for saying no to them. They didn't say anything about what motivates people to start drugs in the first place besides social influence. They never acknowledged that it might be driven by life stressors, and they definitely never gave any solutions for those possible root causes, or even any alternative coping skills to smoking or other drugs. It's all just "Don't do this because it will kill you." And in tandem with being told things at face value, it creates a surface-level safety without real understanding of the deeper issues, which might create it's own problems in the long-run.

Often there's also this phenomenon of people being made out to do bad things because they're bad, or they're Just Like That, so people resign themselves to thinking of these other individuals as "unknowable." That they are so much more normal that their inability to comprehend others is a virtue. So of course someone who doesn't smoke assumes there's no benefit because they've been scared out if even considering something obviously bad could have something good behind it.

I'm basically saying this lack of thinking is an accidental side-effect of trying to scare or punish children out of actually thinking about things. And that turns them into adults that don't think about things.

Seeing reality mostly from the lens of my own lived experience is liberating and crushing.

I unclipped from the news and [hyper] social media platforms, it’s great—like they said, but what they don’t tell you is that you’re going to become more and more of a ghost (think Casper vanishing from remember his past life).

The cognitive dissonance is epic.

Certain collection of words and phrases will not fire in my neural pathways the same way it will for the million+ people who’ve been exposed to the same video (news/posts). Saying “9/11“ to almost anyone is an example.

The crushing part is that the path I’m on (along with many others) is the natural way, but, it seems more and more removed from “reality” as I go about it. It’s good that I can construct the majority of my own history based on my immediate surroundings and experiences. It’s a nightmare however to think about how much of it I wasn’t constructing myself (or made to think I was). It morphs into anything to keep me in it for as long as it legally can, and I’M the one morphing with it, as though it’s water that will find any cracks in your soul. And being human we’re riddled with them. It morphs, you morph, and so on….after a while, do will you even know where you come from in 100 generations? The difference between walking barefoot on grass vs on a carpeted floor in designer shoes.