The Sad Irony of “What will People Think”

Everyone’s been subject to this fear – many of us still are. It’s so pervasive that many of us have come to take it for granted – that this is just something you’ll have to base your life on – the fear of other people’s opinions of us.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I don’t understand where it comes from – I do. After all, we need each other for survival. It seems like this is a mechanism to ensure that we don’t stray too far away from what’s good for the collective or the tribe.

Maybe it’s an inbuilt mechanism to avoid ostracism which for most of human history meant death. But that’s historical. What about today?

Survival is organised really well today. Granted not for everyone – there are still hundreds of millions (if not more) of people out there facing unimaginable adversity, on a daily basis, just to ensure basic survival. But, what’s being addressed here is the plight of the vast majority of us who don’t have to worry about finding nourishment – a lot of us are still burdened, miserable and insufferably morose.

This has become such a widespread reality that we have almost come to equate it with normalcy – like “man that’s how life is; get used to it!”

There’s this temptation to put this down to the pitfalls of modern life – but i doubt that self-consciousness and social fears are something that just came about as a result of sedentary lifestyles or a post-industrial world.

There seems to be something more fundamental at play here – the inhibition that comes with the fear of social rejection is not something that exists by itself – it is a manifestation of fear – a much more overarching and encompassing fear.

This is a fear of death – but more interestingly, this is a fear of life itself. Life is uncertain, seamless and perhaps most importantly, finite – at least, in the physical sense. The body, no matter how well it’s taken care of, eventually dies.

We’re all deeply afraid, it would seem, of truly confronting and embracing this fact. Our minds seem to have this magical ability to forget mortality and death and the drop of a hat.

To accept life is to accept death – it’s difficult make no mistake – but from my own experience, there is no life without it. There is no fire to life – no urgency – no passion – unless the finality of death is accounted for.

When this understanding is courted and embraced, we throw caution to the find and a sense of abandon finds us – we throw ourselves headfirst into life wanting to splash about in it’s joys and mysteries with the least concern for anything or anyone.

So, what stops us from burning with life? I don’t have the answers – I’m just trying to piece together a somewhat coherent picture for myself from all the apparently incoherent dramas i’ve been through.

It seems to be a fear of the future – a fear of rejection. A fear of death. A fear of discomfort. But more than anything else, it seems to be a lack of energy. A distinct lack of “flow” – of vitality.

There’s also habit patterns that keep us locked in our heads reinforcing emotions and states of powerlessness, despair, anguish and boredom.

To throw the shackles of automated living off and embrace the frightening, frenzied excitement that comes with embracing life as a naked being stripped of misconceptions and illusory images of security is not comfortable. It’s a lot of things – vivifying, invigorating, energising, rapturous – but it’s not comfortable. It requires the relinquishing of stuporous inertia – a coming out of the comforting but death-inducing trap of habitual tendencies.

And that’s difficult for people because – well we’re going through life sedated; half-asleep. We’re sleepwalking through existence wondering if some day we’ll magically feel more alive and ecstatic – because I think essentially, that’s what we’re all seeking – to be as alive as we can – and just burn with life! burn with fury and have the limited time that we have in this mysterious and ineffable thing called life be indescribably ecstatic and rapturously thrilling!

Like I said earlier, I don’t have the answers – but I do know this – life’s passing us by and we’re choosing to sleep to our graves rather than dance our way there with our dicks hard and chests pumped!

What’s the point man? What’s the damn point of living life if it isn’t even lived properly. Why go searching for the meaning of life – when the life in question is a miserable and painfully arduous one – why bother finding the meaning of such a life? why bother coming up with or associating with philosophies, political theories and ossified intellectual positions.

When we throw caution to the wind and stare death in the face and empty out our bag of fucks till there’s no fucks left – then the rapture of life seizes us by the throat and fills us with an ecstasy that’s indescribable – Those of you that have done MDMA or fallen head over heels in love – it’s something similar – but indescribable nonetheless – it’s orders of magnitude more profound and insanely more satisfying.

I speak about this because I’ve experienced this a number of times. Fuck knows why. Maybe because I’ve spent the vast majority of my life outside the monday to friday, 9-5 grind – I never made it to most of my classes at uni and then found a job where I can spend early hours of my day writing blog posts about nebulous stuff; Maybe it’s because I had a horrible time in my 20s and woke up every day with crippling anxiety and a feeling of dense, all-consuming dread and at one point, I just found it easy to stop taking life so damn seriously – I don’t know; Maybe it’s because I’ve been, for whatever reason, able to throw caution to the wind and laugh at the face of death.

Here’s the thing though – I don’t want to be misconstrued as saying that i’ve figured out some magic trick to answer all of life’s questions – I have not. In spite of experiencing the aforementioned states of ecstasy, endless possibility and full-force vitality, I have yet to transcend my own propensity for fear, slothfulness and social rejection. I have found it possible to break free from these chains every now and then, unlocking periods of immensely liberating freedom and bliss, but i’ve not been able to sustain these states.

It’s a work in progress.

There’s strong neuro-physiological conditioning that needs to be undone. But nevertheless, my whole experience of living on this planet has been immeasurably enriched by these experiences I’ve had of Baccheiatic, Dionysian ecstasy and frenzied abandon.

In those states, I couldn’t care less what people thought of me. I would tell people exactly what I wanted, how I wanted. I would stand, sit , walk and do what i wanted. And funnily enough, that’s when I’d feel this sense of respect and attraction from people that we all seek a lot of the time – not that you crave it in that state – but it’s still an interesting observation.

But here’s the thing – it’s not that those states are altogether transient and have no impact on you long term – they do leave you changed – when you’ve experienced these states a number of times – then, you DO stop giving a shit about some stuff that you used to – you just can’t bring yourself to live up to and care about those social norms that are particularly stupid and utterly meaningless.

Ok I’m done.

Come Some Way

I feel inspired today. I’m writing this without any idea of what I’m going to write about. Just wanted to put pen to paper — or in this case, cursor to dialog box.

I feel flooded with a sense of “yes-we-can” today. Sure, these feelings are transitory and not to be trusted but it still feels good. I see a lot of opportunity around me.

I feel chuffed at the possibility of being able to express myself through writing. What an incredible miracle — using words to express stuff that goes on in thought-form in your brain box? language has never ceased to amaze me in all these years of living on this planet.

I want to write more frequently. I’ve been saying this for more than a decade now — but well, there you go. I do. I want to hone my craft and get really really good at writing. I wish to be able to create moods and share subtle inner feelings through words. I think the way to achieve this is by writing everyday and by reading a lot.

Something that I understood quite recently with life is this — when you feel bad, it’s not necessarily because of something that’s going on then — it could also be just a habit pattern of sympathetic arousal — what does that mean?

say you encounter a tiger in the woods; It’s scary as fuck and your sympathetic nervous system activates. Your body secretes adrenaline and you go into fight or flight mode. Energy is redirected to strictly necessary functions in order to ensure survival. Unpleasant stuff, subjectively speaking. now, because we have these ginormous cortices (cortex — outer layer of the brain) that can remember the past, extrapolate into the future and work in abstractions, we have the unique ability among all animals to simulate this kind of “encountering a tiger” response in us, at will, even in the absence of any large carnivores.

The brain’s immense capacity works against us unless we learn how it works and take the wheel

Memory and Imagination are amazing things but they are also the reason why so many people feel so bad so often. Their brains’ threat detection circuits are always on and people are going through their lives swimming in stress chemicals. In my own experience, there was a long history of poor decision making and extremely high levels of uncertainty. This led to a huge complex of sub-optimal coping mechanisms which each gave rise their own web of negative emotions and coping mechanisms. Before you know it, everything sucks all the time and you don’t think it can ever end. Now, you get into addictions — because something’s gotta give. it hurts too much otherwise. That just fuels the problem — you have even more difficulty making the kind of decisions that you need to make in order to get out of the morass of your life. It doesn’t seem like it can ever end. Well, it can. it takes time. But it can and today, I stand here as proof that it can. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. But that whole web of suckiness can be burned. Here’s the thing I actually wanted to talk about before I started rambling — the thing that I found out quite recently in life is this — when stressful/negative emotions come up in an intense manner, you don’t need to do anything about it. You just need to understand the mechanism of how past experiences and habits are responsible for them and let them be. they eventually go away! This might sound super obvious to a lot of people but to me it wasn’t. It was essentially a get-out-of-jail-free-card when i discovered this. All you have to do is sit and wait, and it goes away? damn. I spent years winding myself up and getting anxious about the fact that i was getting anxious. So many. thousands of hours listening to wise guys on the internet. Reading posts on how to “make it” in life. Jeez. The magic trick is to simply realise how the mind-body system works and then, making good decisions while also understanding that you won’t get positive chemical feedback for a while — until you undo all that negative emotional patterning that has now created a pervasive complex of neuro-endocrine (i.e chemical) patterning in you. To put it more simply — you’ve probably come out of the stupidity that caused you the misery in the first place but now, when you’re getting your shit together and doing the right things, you still feel bad. That’s a. discouraging as fuck and b. confusing as fuck because now you feel disoriented, demotivated and lost. You don’t feel good when you do the difficult thing, so why do it at all? Why not just watch porn, jerk off and smoke weed? That’s why this breakthrough was so big for me. All you have to do is sit and surrender to your negative emotions, without any resistance. They leave you 100% of the time, if you don’t reinforce those patterns again with your mind. Now, that’s easier said than done. Takes some experience, skill, nuance and determination. That’s why I said earlier that it doesn’t happen overnight. But it does happen and boy does it feel good!