Failure takes persistence, too. Grit is no more the answer than wisdom is.
The real fallacy is following emotions (from movies?), which can be manipulated by time dilation or compression, attention/focusing/distraction, etc. And because there's value in what people do, systems evolve to control people, at times through emotional manipulation - not least through the enduring franchises of business opportunity, political control, religious faith, scientific mastery, and tribal belonging.
Existentialists called this the problem of "bad faith", where people allow their inner lives to be constructed socially. It's a problem because the person can't tell. So just as "God" can't be relied upon as an authority, neither can any pristine "self" -- even when it's reified as a task list or mantras or life commitments. An internal holographic universe. The ridiculous but inescapable truth of Socrates' private voice.
Yes, you can be productive, by your own measures. But by the above-mentioned principle of exploitation, your measures will also be exploited, and you'll be polishing a turd. When you realize it (as most do when they lose productivity due to age or opportunity loss), you'll have a crisis of meaning.
The problem lies in simplistic thinking driving towards hierarchical principles and valuation. Any single goal - feelings, money, goodness, control - when unchecked leads to totalitarianism.
It's just not how nature actually is, as far as we can tell.
A field theory instead incorporates all factors -- all kinds of knowledge and values. It's chaotic without some consistency, but consistency invariably induces suffering due to the incompleteness of understanding. The closest thing to a principle in a field theory is an intersection of Nietzsche's "only as aesthetic phenomena are things eternally justified" and Vonnegut's "and so it goes": you know it when you see it. As you decide, your character as the decider presents.
So if you want to get better, the main practice is something like Zen+philosophy, observing everything with love, and heartlessly pruning bullshit. Practice seeing+deciding+doing.
The great learning, attributed to Confucious, should be read ideographically, but the first four lines can be translated as something like this:
- the activity of great learning (liberal education, good person) consists of
The real fallacy is following emotions (from movies?), which can be manipulated by time dilation or compression, attention/focusing/distraction, etc. And because there's value in what people do, systems evolve to control people, at times through emotional manipulation - not least through the enduring franchises of business opportunity, political control, religious faith, scientific mastery, and tribal belonging.
Existentialists called this the problem of "bad faith", where people allow their inner lives to be constructed socially. It's a problem because the person can't tell. So just as "God" can't be relied upon as an authority, neither can any pristine "self" -- even when it's reified as a task list or mantras or life commitments. An internal holographic universe. The ridiculous but inescapable truth of Socrates' private voice.
Yes, you can be productive, by your own measures. But by the above-mentioned principle of exploitation, your measures will also be exploited, and you'll be polishing a turd. When you realize it (as most do when they lose productivity due to age or opportunity loss), you'll have a crisis of meaning.
The problem lies in simplistic thinking driving towards hierarchical principles and valuation. Any single goal - feelings, money, goodness, control - when unchecked leads to totalitarianism.
It's just not how nature actually is, as far as we can tell.
A field theory instead incorporates all factors -- all kinds of knowledge and values. It's chaotic without some consistency, but consistency invariably induces suffering due to the incompleteness of understanding. The closest thing to a principle in a field theory is an intersection of Nietzsche's "only as aesthetic phenomena are things eternally justified" and Vonnegut's "and so it goes": you know it when you see it. As you decide, your character as the decider presents.
So if you want to get better, the main practice is something like Zen+philosophy, observing everything with love, and heartlessly pruning bullshit. Practice seeing+deciding+doing.
The great learning, attributed to Confucious, should be read ideographically, but the first four lines can be translated as something like this:
- the activity of great learning (liberal education, good person) consists of
- illustrating illustrious virtue (grass-grass, sharp-sharpening self)
- watching the people grow with affection (and pruning them when necessary)
- coming to rest in perfect virtue (combining both, there's no need to do anything)
Your virtue might not earn you love or success or even happiness. But it can make you a good influence in an ocean of exploitation.