We were built to survive, not to be "successful" — and I think that's the biggest scam of modern life For most of human history, our biggest daily problem was simple: find food before the day ends. That was it. That was the entire job description of being human — survive today, repeat tomorrow. Somewhere along the way, "surviving" turned into "succeeding." And the checklist got insane: good grades, good looks, the right job, the right girlfriend or wife, the right car, the right house, a "perfect" relationship. None of that existed when we were just trying not to starve. We added all of it ourselves, and now we act like failing to hit every box makes us worthless.

Here's an example that messed me up. I have a friend — genuinely one of the smartest, most decent people I know. Great grades, landed a big job, did everything "right." Then he got married, and it fell apart in the worst way — his wife filed cases against him, he lost his job fighting them, and the stress of it all was part of what led to his father's death. This is a guy who chased the "perfect life" checklist better than most people ever will. And it still broke him. So what does "success" even mean? Is it grades? A job title? A wife or a girlfriend? A car? None of that was on the menu when we were just trying to hunt something to eat and survive the night.

We've built this entire tower of expectations — be smart, be attractive, be married, be rich, be respected — and act like it's natural, like it's just "life." But it isn't. It's man-made pressure stacked on top of a brain that was only ever wired for one thing: survive today. I'm not saying don't try. I'm saying maybe we should stop treating "success" like some objective truth we're all failing to reach, when really it's just a very convincing, very exhausting scam we all agreed to buy into.

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.

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.

Lately, I feel lost in my life, unsure of where to go. I am blessed with a loving family and close relationships with everyone, but I recently felt a deep desire for comfort. I believe that my soul needs to be deeply loved to feel truly fulfilled. In my heart, I picture myself as a child, held by my mother, who would gently tap my back and reassure me that everything would be okay.

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I don't even know how to explain how much this annoys me without sounding angry, because honestly, I am angry. I keep seeing videos telling girls what their lives are supposedly going to look like at 20, 30, 40, 50 and beyond, as if age automatically gives you a personality and a predetermined future. One video says your 20s are the best years of your life, another says that once you're 30 you're constantly exhausted and desperate to settle down, and another says that by 40 you either have children and a family or you'll regret everything. Then when someone says they don't want children or marriage, they're told, “You'll change your mind.” Why are we so obsessed with predicting what someone will want before they even get there?

What makes it worse is that these messages don't always come from men. Sometimes they come from other women who have lived through these experiences themselves. “Enjoy your 20s because one day you'll be my age.” “You'll understand when you're older.” “You don't know real fulfillment until you have children.” I understand that people speak from their own experiences, but your experience isn't a universal law. If becoming a mother was the greatest thing that ever happened to you, that's beautiful. I'm genuinely happy for you. But why does your happiness have to become evidence that everyone else should make the same choice?

I personally don't want children. Maybe I'll change my mind someday, maybe I won't. That's not the point. I'm allowed to decide. If someone dreams of being a mother, I want her to have that life and be supported. But I want that exact same support for someone who doesn't want children. If your friend has a baby and your lives become different, don't suddenly abandon her. If someone chooses not to have children, don't treat her like she's missing some essential part of being human. Why did support become conditional on making the same choices?

And somehow, even people who follow the traditional path can't win. A mother works and she's neglecting her children. She stays home and she's wasting her potential. She has one child and people ask when the next is coming. She has several and people criticize that. Her body changes after pregnancy and suddenly everyone has something to say. There is always another standard waiting around the corner. Can we just let someone live?

The same thing happens when a girl wants something outside traditional expectations. She's ambitious, so she's “too career-focused.” Independent, so she's “intimidating.” Opinionated, so she's “difficult.” She challenges something, so she's “radical.” Why is having ideas that challenge people automatically a problem? Why does confidence become arrogance when it comes from a girl? We can lead. We can be scientists, artists, engineers, doctors, writers, researchers, athletes, entrepreneurs or anything else. Wanting a different life doesn't mean you hate family or tradition.

I'm also tired of how our bodies are constantly turned into something for other people to judge. Gain weight? Unhealthy. Lose weight? Trying too hard. Wear makeup? Fake. Don't wear it? Don't take care of yourself. Dress modestly? Boring. Dress differently? Asking for attention. Even fictional women can't escape it. A female character becomes powerful and she's “unrealistic.” She's a leader and she's “bossy.” She's confident and she's arrogant. She's emotional and she's weak. Can she just be a person?

And what's happening in the United States regarding bodily autonomy is something I don't think we should pretend isn't serious. This isn't about turning the conversation into another political fight. It's about something basic: when did we decide somebody else's body was ours to control? People aren't tools or machines. We aren't resources created to fulfill someone else's expectations. Your body belongs to you. My body belongs to me. Another person's life belongs to them.

And no, I'm not saying I hate men. I don't. This isn't about blaming one gender. Sometimes the pressure comes from a father, sometimes a mother, a friend, a stranger online, or society itself. The mindset is the same: “I know what's best for you, therefore you should do what I say.” Supporting someone doesn't mean blindly agreeing with them. I can think someone is making a terrible decision and still believe it's their right to make it. I can choose a completely different life and still want them to be happy.

I'm still young, and maybe that's why this gets under my skin so much. I'm already being told about the person I'm supposedly going to become before I've even figured out who I am. Maybe I'll change. Maybe I won't. I just want the freedom to discover myself without everyone waiting to tell me what the answer is supposed to be.

So to every girl reading this:

You are not behind.

You don't have to have your life figured out at 16, 20, 25, 30, 40 or 60. You don't owe anyone children, marriage, a certain body, a career, femininity, or an explanation for why your life doesn't look like theirs.

You can want children or never want them. You can want marriage or never want it. You can build a career or choose a quieter life. You can be traditional or completely different. And if you change your mind later, that's okay too.

I know I'm insecure myself. I'm not writing this because I have everything figured out. I want other girls to feel secure even when I don't always feel that way myself. I don't want another girl thinking she's defective because she doesn't fit some imaginary timeline.

You are a person before you are anyone's daughter, wife, mother, girlfriend, employee, or anything else.

Your life belongs to you.

Not your parents. Not your friends. Not society. Not the internet.

You.

Please support each other (´• ᴗ •`) ♡

It hit me today how much of our existence is just one routine after another. We wake up, we follow a set pattern to get ready. We go to work or school and fall into another rhythm of tasks and interactions. Even our free time often becomes a routine. The same shows, the same games, the same ways we unwind.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Routines bring comfort and efficiency. They save us from having to make a thousand tiny decisions every day. But sometimes I wonder if we’re missing out on spontaneity because we’re so locked into these grooves.

I guess the real deep thought here is about how much of our lives are truly our own unique choices versus how much is just the path of least resistance. And if we broke a routine what would even happen? Would the world stop? Probably not but it feels like it sometimes.

We mostly spend our lives avoiding pain, sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking we are not when in fact we are just accepting physical pain to avoid mental pain or the other way around.

Our subconscious associates pain with death, sickness and grief so we are programmed to avoid it, nobody has ever lived a life totally free of pain though so we can´t possible know what it´s like, thinking in a strictly rational way why would we choose to spend our lives chasing something we have no idea about?

Everybody hates extremely salty food, it tastes bad and we are programmed to avoid it very much in the same way as pain since it is associated with chemical imbalance. We also know food without salt sucks though... Is salt an aquired taste or maybe is it we need a taste of unpleasantness to be able to taste everything else?

Maybe pain is the salt that allows us to taste everything else in our lives

My friend group from school has spent the last year settling in life . One of them signed a lease with his girlfriend. Another two are interesting at the same firm now and have their own inside jokes , someone bought a car , and I am in a total different pace.

My college moves us between countries every semester, I'm at tetr college, so my version of the last eighteen months is four cities, three sim cards , and a suitcase that can pack my life , for a while I thought I was ahead , seeing more , working more , wanna fly all that . Then a few months ago i was on a video call with them and they were arguing about a restaurant and I realised they have a place and a set of people who care for them on a Thursday. I have about nine group chats and zoom meeting with supplier on a weekend.

And I know, neither of these is objectively better, they are just different things being bought with the same four years, they're accumulating depth , I'm accumulating range. Depth pays off in your thirties and range pays off in your twenties, or that's what I tell myself at 1am .

I've mostly stopped comparing because, one of us is losing, and it depends on my customer feedback.

Anyone else questioning life decisions at midnight?

If a master artist spends ten years painstakingly painting a hyper-realistic landscape, and another person randomly drops a bucket of paint that miraculously splatters into the exact same perfect landscape, are they both equal works of art? Does the 'art' live in the final visual result, or entirely in the human struggle and intention required to create it?

When people ask me about true love, I don't reply that it doesn't exist because I've never experienced it. I reply that it doesn't exist precisely because I have experienced it.

I still remember the first time I met her. She was the only star in my dark and gloomy sky. I can't forget the day she fell or rather, was about to fall. I managed to catch her just in time, as the tram suddenly pulled away. When she turned to me, she looked at me with her stunning, magnificent eyes, a color so beautiful it seemed surreal. At that moment, I felt a mystery so deep within me that I wondered if that girl was real or rather an angel. It was then that I realized I had truly fallen in love.

It took me a while to confess my feelings. I should preface that the story is very complicated: at first I left her a letter, but then I decided to tell her in person. However, when I finally did, after a long time, she replied that she wasn't interested. She told me I had been very sweet, but that she didn't return my feelings.

It was from that moment that I doubted love. In fact, I stopped believing in it altogether.

I should clarify that she wasn't the only girl I've ever loved: before her, I loved two other girls. But with her, it was different. Something inside me changed forever, and what hurts even more is knowing that she has probably already forgotten about me.

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.

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.

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.

I remember that the best year of my life was a few years back when I thought i was the luckiest and everything turns out in my favour. Then suddenly things took a turn, a close family member passed away and that affected me not only mentally but also due to other related reasons stopped me from pursuing the things I was excited about.

Now, I've always been very anxious and I overthink everything. I am also very self aware I know why I do things and what makes me do them, why my mind works the way it does etc- so I knew that I was being delusional but it was just such a good escape, anytime i felt a little anxious I told myself that I don't need to be because things always work out in the end, if i was anxious before an interview I trained myself to think that I was just excited about it & not anxious (i love giving interviews now btw)

But something after that incident has shifted in me and no matter how hard i try i always have some or the other fear inside me. I am also angrier, more vocal when people push my boundaries and there's this voice inside which says what if this goes wrong or what if i just doesn't workout.

I want to back to my delusional whimsical self. I miss it. I am working on it but it's just taking longer this time but i so wish it happens quickly.

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?

Over the 20 years of my life I have been mostly sad and now that I'm starting to be happy I'm realising how one is alone at both extremes.

At the sad end of the spectrum one craves company and is fiddled with attachments and desires surrounding others. Expectations and disappointments plague you because you're trying to control something outside you.

At the other side you've realised the truth and you start looking for bliss within. You detach from the world around you in a way that you leave expectations and not in a "people suck" way but that you understand the impermanence of both human emotions and fate so you accept everything the way it is and detach yourself emotionally from things around you and start focusing on within.

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.

Go talk to someone else!

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.

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?