The Right Route

  In his book, The Happiness Advantage happiness researcher Shawn Achor discusses how he wanted to make practicing guitar a daily habit, h owever, he encountered a problem that plagues everyone: He couldn’t motivate himself to do it ...  No matter how much he tried, his guitar remained in the case. Achor’s problem is a common one: If you want to change a habit in the long-term, in the beginning, you have to rely on willpower . But willpower is a finite resource and can’t be relied on. In other words, the more decisions you make on a daily basis – the more likely you are to experience what psychologists call decision fatigue. Once you experience decision fatigue, improving habits – especially at the end of a stressful day – becomes less of a priority. Habitual, negative behaviors, like watching television instead of going to the gym, become routine. Given a choice, we almost always go with the disempowering habits instead of the habits that are good for us. They offer us a path...

You just want to step out of it to step out of the whole race, the whole business, the monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you. If you have depression if you have anxiety, if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, if you have any kind of mental health condition, this is not something to ignore. Depression, frustration, anxiety, pain disillusion, it's just natural parts of the process of becoming a stronger version of yourself. The thing that keeps one living is a sense of the future. That there will be a tomorrow and tomorrow I've got to do this and then the day after I've got to do that. Get started  and I'm gonna tell you right now, it won't be easy. It will be hard because life is hard. That's what life is. With depression, one of the most important things you can realize is that you're not alone. I have been places and someone has said well you lost an arm and a leg so you have a right to be depressed and I stopped and I was like depression is real. ...

In The Joyous Science , Nietzsche writes, “Whom do you call bad?  Those who always want to put others to shame.  What is most humane?  To spare someone shame.  What is the seal of liberation?  To no longer be ashamed of oneself.” So according to Nietzsche, someone who’s truly free is free of shame, and he thinks  someone who shames others is bad. Why is it important to be free of shame, and why is it bad to shame others?  That’s what I wanna explore in this essay, and I wanna start with a question: what does  it mean to be free? In The Joyous Science , Nietzsche says, “What does your conscience say?  You shall become who you are.’” Let me explain. This is an important idea in Nietzsche’s work, and not only is it one that I agree  with, but it’s the starting point for this essay: everyone has a true self which they  must become, and it’s possible for us to fail to become our true selves. Think of yourself as the seed of an oak tree....

Part of why it is so hard to understand ourselves  is that people are constantly doing things  to us that defy the common sense of view of  how human beings might plausibly behave around  people they claim to care about. We expect that those who might carry the title  of mum or dad or husband or wife would unless  they had very clear reasons to do otherwise,  show us kindness. And yet the brutal reality (which we must  take on board for our own sanity) is that  humans are frequently beset by feelings that  are so intolerable and difficult, they develop  urges to pass them on to others in a version  of emotional pass the parcel. Put another way, humans can end up being cruel,  not for money or territory, but in the hope  of alleviating their own sufferings by making  someone near them suffer in their stead. Cruelty is at heart an attempt to make ourselves  feel better by doing to someone else a version  ...