What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
David C reminds us of the fallacy of worrying when overwhelmed, using a simple analogy:
One maddening tendency of any small electronic device is that whenever the battery is low, it wastes most of its remaining power beeping and flashing to tell you that battery is low.
Read his six simple reminders to cope.
Leo Babauta illustrates why we aren’t content with our lives, & why it is a wasted exercise trying to compare yourself to others:
It’s not a comparison that makes sense. You can’t compare apples to apples when you compare yourself to anyone else. Which means it’s a dumb comparison — why would you compare how tangy an orange is compared to a beach? They’re not similar things.
A problem I often grapple with is what activity should I be doing at any given point in time. I know I am not alone, but Leo Babauta articulates it much better than I could, and also shares his simple steps to handle this challenge. And what do you have to look forward to at the end of those steps?
And if you do these steps, you’ll get your task done, and then breathe. And smile. Because you came a long way, and you might have a long way to go, but you’re here. You’ve arrived. And it’s a lovely place to be.
I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it…Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake.
One of the stranger patterns that I’ve noticed ever since reaching adulthood, is the tendency of humans to zoom in on increasingly irrelevant details as their material wealth increases. Despite their advantaged position, people seem to become unaware of the wide variety of conditions in the world and their own ability as a human to deal with them. The results are both tragic and amusing.