Shelly

“I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. There’s a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that’s going to crash, or that your project idea is the stupid one everyone is going to laugh at, or that you’re the one everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you’re implicitly telling yourself, “I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe. My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out the other side so much better.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Now that I had a salary, I decided to stay a little longer. But because everyone was still traumatized after the 2008 crisis, I kept hearing how lucky I was to have a job, and I suppose we were all afraid to quit and pursue our dreams and, in my case, the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“I don’t know where they get all that rage, that competitiveness, that way of seeing and dividing the world into winners and losers. I find it strange how some men use war and sports terminology when they’ve never been in a war and haven’t kicked a ball since high school. Preparing for battle, winning the war, destroying the enemy. How can they see themselves as soldiers and warriors when they’re inside apartments filled with gray IKEA furniture with greasy paper bags from Just Eat piling up in their dirty kitchens? How are they capable of dissociating between the little men they are and the great men they were promised they would become? I think about whether they’re loved by someone, who that could be, and in what way. Who would be the woman—because they’re always women—to make herself smaller so that a man can continue seeing himself as big? Big like Alexander the Great, like Julius Caesar, like Christopher Columbus. Big like all those glorious epics they’ve been imbibing since their earliest infancy. I think about how those men are capable of fooling themselves, but, most of all, how they manage to get the world to sustain that deception. I think about whether at night, right before going to sleep, they feel like impostors or if they’ve swallowed their own lie and sleep like babies. No one talks back to them, no one contradicts them, no one tells them to shut up. No one says that “step up or step aside” is a total crock of shit. And so, it’s almost normal that those men think of themselves as warriors, because by molding the world to their delusions of grandeur, they’ve already won their own battle.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“When “real traumatic shit” like this happens in our lives, we begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that we’re incapable of ever solving. And this assumed inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless. But it also causes something else to happen. If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we’re either uniquely special or uniquely defective in some way. That we’re somehow unlike everyone else and that the rules must be different for us.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life