Human beings have this need to be right you know. If you’re an American – complain about the Republican party. European, talk about how Greece should ditch the Euro. Then, sit back and watch the fireworks go off.

You could even just say “everyone’s purpose in life is to be right!” and get the same effect of people trying to prove their point which in turn proves your point. Funny how that works out.

Why do people view being wrong as life threatening? Why is is difficult to apologize – or to let go of false ideas when proven otherwise? The will to survive I think is most at play here. Maybe thousands of years ago as a marauding band of nomads looking to butcher some giant animal being wrong  meant being dead. But today? I think it just ruins our relationships.

But the little one would not relent.

Her father is sick and old and needs her home for it is getting late. What is she to do? After much pleading  one of the monks gives in and carries the little girl accorss (much to the discontent of the other monk).

Afterwards the two monks journied on their way with one monk frustrated to no end at the event that just occured. As they walked his frustration built and built till he could not take it anymore:

“WHY DID YOU BREAK OUR VOWS! WHY DID YOU CARRY THAT GIRL WHEN YOU KNOW BETTER!”

He asked quite angrily.

The other monk calmly replied, I only carried her accross the river, YOU’VE been carrying her all day.

HOW TO BE RESPONSIBLE

What is the reward for carrying around frustration and anger about events of the past? What pain do you still hold from the past?

If you can not be at peace with what has happened to you then you have yet to take responsibility for the events themselves and your reactionairy response to them. You are not being responsible because any lingering resentment is really just a desire to lay blame on yourself or someone else.

Life is friction

You are going to get hurt, but you need scars for they are the marks of a life properly lived. Forgetting the past is not always an option. Not if you’ve sufferd real cruelty – but forgiveness is a path to salvation. A salvation that will allow you to get on with things.

This is something I still sometimes wrestle with. The higher self, the better part of me seeing things in their grand scheme, and the animal side of me wanting to lash out. If finding justice for the burden you have been dealt is more important than peace and happiness, then don’t be responsible for the past. Lay blame elsewhere for it gives the illusions that you are punishing those who have hurt you.

But to really get on with things and feel better, just let go.

of feeling disconnected and cut off from other people. This type of loneliness is a loneliness from the best parts of you that no longer have any basic fundamental contact with life experience. You are lonely because you are alienated from life,

Dead end streets

Think of how you drive a car. You recognize potential dangers, potential time sucks, and potential mechanical problems as you drive so corrective action can be taken before you screw things up for yourself. Expand this to the body and how it responds to pain.

• That cut needs to hurt- otherwise you will ignore it.
• That loneliness needs to hurt – otherwise you will ignore it.
• A pattern has emerged…have you been paying attention?

“Lonely” is designed to help you achieve fulfilment and success as a human being faster and more efficiently by forcing you to address that disconnect from your best self. If life was without friction, pain and difficulty, none of us would be pushed to to grow. We would ignore that cut.

Cut off from yourself

The fix is not simply other people. You can be in a city or college or place with thousands of other people around you and still feel lonely. I was having a beer (LEO to be exact – it’s a common brew here in Thailand) with my friend Mike the other day and we were talking about how odd it is to have the sensation of loneliness in a city of millions. Mike talked about how he felt lonely and was sick of being in Bangkok with few friends during his first few months of traveling in Asia.

It was not the lack of friends you see that was the problem, he was cut off from himself.

The lonely person is alienated from himself. They do not know what brings them joy and happiness. They are lost. This makes personal contact with others unsatisfying – starting a cycle of social reclusiveness that can be difficult to break.

Going to work, coming home, going to work, coming home. Not doing anything and feeling bad about your boring lonely life. You think that you should go out by yourself, that you should socialize or try to meet other people online or whatever the hell you’re supposed to do – but it leaves you wanting and missing the better days in the past. So you don’t.

The tragedy here is that is that personal contact may feel unsatisfying, but it is the best way to finding yourself -

by that I mean to losing yourself in social activities where a person begins to take a genuine interest in other people while at the same time casting aside the shame and false pretenses that we all walk around with and show to strangers.

Socializing and finding our “thing” helps us thaw out – we become our real selves around other people. We feel that connection and commonality with someone else. We stop being lonely. We finally feel we belong somewhere.

Are you afraid of other people?

What a stupid question that might seem – how can you be afraid of other people…

Loneliness is also a form of self protection, a protection of who we think ourselves to be. Being lonely happens when communication and emotional ties are cut down to a minimum. This protects your idealized self, that “best” vision of you that you have in your head from:

1. Rejection
2. Hurt (hint – you’re going to get hurt anyways)
3. and disappointment.

Ironic the cost of self protection from pain is pain.  This happens because the lonely person is afraid of other people.

When I say “afraid” I don’t mean that the person is a damn coward suffering from a phobia. That he is literally scared shittless around other people. No, it’s the person who complains about not having enough friends and orchestrates everything in his life consciously or inadvertently to make it so other people have to make the first move and invite him somewhere.

His passivity does not contribute value or enjoyment to the lives of others – why would anyone include him?

It never occurs to this lonely person that he has a fear of other people, a fear that prevents him from going into social situations with confidence and gusto (you probably need bigger balls btw) by contributing something to a social situation. Instead his passivity makes him ignored, over looked, and alone. WTF he thinks, why do I have to do all the work.

Persist and conquer

Forcing yourself into social situations will be awkward and uncomfortable particularly if you’re naturally a quite or shy person. But much like those first few minutes after jumping into a pool you will eventually warm up and begin enjoying yourself. Once you find your thing, your group, and have some decent social skills that is. Nothing happens without your decisions.

You need to steer the ship as I like to say and choose the direction to which you head. Passivity, shyness, and indirectness are useless. They result in you hoping and waiting for life to carry you somewhere interesting when really all that happens is life passes you by. People grow and leave you lonely and cut off.

Social skills 101

I won’t insult your intelligence by acting as some sort of lame high school guidance counselor – social skills 101 for lonely people feeling the edge of loneliness: actively contribute to the lives of others in a positive and social way.

Add to the happiness of others by developing social skills like dancing, singing, playing an instrument, conversing, whatever. You know you better than I do – learn to contribute and add value. It’s the only way. No one wants to be around someone who takes and takes or is completely useless.

Do this activly and consistently over time and you will discover people to be welcoming, friendly, and accepting of who you really are. Shyness and timidness will be thrown out for the useless traits they are. You will form deeper connections with other people. You will reconnect with yourself better and loneliness will subside. The acceptance from others will enable you to accept yourself.

Loneliness is simply resistance to other people.

Do you even recognize yourself? Your life has patterns. It repeats and repeats. You feel the friction and the pain when you break a pattern. When you break away towards something unknown.

Often this isn’t so bad. It’s scary for sure, but that friction is a sign of personal growth. It’s a sign you’re actually on the right track. Otherwise you’re just coasting.

But first you need to know what the patterns are in your life

Playing it safe feels right and it’s so very easy. We often miss and mistake opportunities based on how easy they are. It’s easy to start anything, but much more difficutlt to build something of value.

• Starting a blog = easy
• Writing everyday = hard
• Getting a date = easy
• Getting a date with the person you like = hard
• Running a mile = easy
• Running a marathon = hard

All this “hard” stuff is totally within your human abilities -

but you have to want it bad enough (otherwise you would have started by now). But just because you can do something, does not mean you will.

If you have nothing better to do with your time than to spend it on Facebook, checking email, going to work, and doing the same thing on the weekends your life needs some major adjustment.

You need to shake things up yourself or life will do it for you (and it will).

Start exercising, start traveling, take a job in another country, build a website, write a book, make a movie, set an epic quest for your life (reminder = you’re already on one) just do something different!

If you don’t see the patterns in your life and how each day was like all the rest, then your whole entire life will be like this. Same.

Comfortable, predictable, boring

Fulfillment, I love that word. Becoming a “fulfilled human being” is the goal we all want, we just mistakenly forget what it really is.

No it’s not doing what everyone else is doing like having a job, or taking the same vacations to the same places as everyone else.

It’s also not simply doing the opposite of everyone either.

It’s doing what you want to do -

a successful man or woman is someone who knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and where they’re going. This is easy to write and so stupidly obvious – but we screw this up.

We major in something in college as a way to make money. We date whoever stumbles into our life. We go with the flow, hopping the currents of change will blow us into a place of wealth, happiness, and abundance…but that is never ever the reality for anyone.

Protip: You need to steer the goddamn ship yourself.

So where are you? How did you get there? Are you growing or are you coasting? With growth comes adventure, flexibility, and uneasiness. With coasting comes rigidity, predictability, boredom, death, and the feeling: “I can live better than this”. This expands to all aspects of life.

You’re body knows this too, it’s telling you, are you listening?

The easy is doable, but is is worth doing? I’m not so sure. Starting is easy, but to really do anything takes persistence, luck, knowing what the hell your doing, and a few thousand hours.

So start something -

It’s easy to do, but make it a choice of your own free will. Free and unteathered from the influences that drive decisions out of fear, desperation, or greed. Make this a way of life – keep your exposure to the unknown the norm, and your return to what is familiar comfortable but brief.

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Guides on how to do stuff better

If you have the expectations your parents had it most certainly does.

I read the Huffington Post regularly, it’s one of the few places I can connect to while traveling abroad to keep in touch with what is going on back home in the US. It pains me to have to watch videos like this…

Graduating from college, being tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and working at Walmart…nice effective use of resources. What kind of future are we going to have with an entire generation of people who can’t make enough money to take care of themselves? An entire generation who bought into ideas of the TV?

My heart goes out to those in their 40′s and 50′s and 60′s who have been rocked by the new emerging geo-independent economy, but not so much for 20 year olds. You should know better.

Reminder: Your parents are delusional about the new economy

I’m just going to say it, your parents are stupid, and so are mine. When I decided to quit my job and make my income online from my Internet marketing projects (this site being one of them), while taking up and enduring stupid jobs to support myself while living in the state of Connecticut at the time, my mom thought I was an utter fool. She would say things like:

• Well so and so got a job here
• Well I had raised two kids as a single mom before I married your father
• People work, those who want to work can work

Sure, if you want to work at Mcdonalds they’re always hiring…but my guess is that’s not what you had in mind. Besides, my mother worked in a world during the 1970′s where the lowly bank teller had a pension. That’s right, a bank teller in the USA USED TO have a pension. Now-a-days you would be lucky to make $10 an hour with free coffee let alone a pension.

Things have changed, let go of the past and embrace the future

There is a decision everyone has to make at a certain point in their lives. After toiling away towards this past idea of job security with an employeer and retirement in the form of a large pile of cash from obediently doing as told, they wake up to this modern myth realizing they have no pile of cash and an employeer that wants to replace them with a robot.

The decision we make is simple

Boldly go where your heart tells you to, strike out on your own and do great work that matters for your right people; ignoring those idiots who say it’s too hard, you will fail, you can’t make…(reminder: they have already made their choice)

OR

give up, seek security where none is to be found, settle for a mediocre job that dosent care about you and won’t pay you enough to live.

How to get rich

Most of us walk around with the ability in us to make an impact, to do amazing work that moves other people (that’s what art is), to risk failure but potentially make a difference. Being told “you have a lot of potential” is a nice compliment but don’t mistake it for action. You may be talented, you may be smart, you may be creative…so what. It dosent fucking matter. Only what you do matters.

I know, trust me I KNOW the world is not fair

…you are in fact luckier to be born in a western democracy than anywhere else. Most people don’t get the opportunities they deserve, and even more squander the opportunities they already have but are too blinded to see. Yes, there are and always will be barriers based on bullshit like age, race, education, and social standing, and yes these must fall…but it still changes nothing. You have a lot of potential. You can be amazing at something. The opportunity to risk failure now has never been more minimal.

Too late

In the words of Martin Luther King Junior:

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”

Your parents are delusional, don’t listen to them. Instead, do something crazy, wear something wild, tell someone the truth. Risk being poor and risk failing. Get used to it, it’s the hits you got to take on your way to the top. Sucess is up to you so stop waiting around for the cavalry to come save you.

-David

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