You don't have to go far in your ancestry to find tough men and women who contended with nature and adversity. Whether it was in war, wilderness, or want, hard men and women created the abundance of modernity. While every generation has claimed that the one following it had it made, only recently have a majority of people been allowed to flip the game of life to the EASY setting.
For years, I was getting high out of my mind on the feeling of becoming a more well-rounded human, without actually doing anything differently or making any significant changes in my life. It wasn't until I noticed the enormous amount of overlap from book to book that I began to question whether I was really willing to buckle down and get to work on the things I was reading about, or if I preferred to just nod in approval to myself at inspirational quotes.
I'm always skeptical when someone tells me about themselves. It isn't that I think they're lying. It's that one's self-appraisal is more often than not a representation of how they want to see themselves as opposed to an honest assessment.
Just like any currency, the value of our Time can only be realized once we know what we can buy with it. Rephrased within the scope of this series, Time's value can only be understood once we know what other resources we can leverage it for.
Resources have been dealt to each and every one of us unequally. Whether it be in type/degree of intelligence, economic resources, social resources, familial resources, we all drew a different lot. But the beauty of the situation is that we can all manipulate what we have to get what we don't have depending on our goals.
We are not animals. We are conscious, and we live through beauty, literature and art. We are inspired by concepts bigger than ourselves and we strive for ideals.
Quit taking daily gym selfies. Quit posting shameless topless photos of yourself in your bathroom. Quit helping the girl at the gym that obviously doesn't want or need your help. Quit leering at her too. Quit training like an insecure frat boy.
I get it. Sometimes you gotta make ends meet. Sometimes you have to do what has to be done to put the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos on the table. But maybe, just maybe, you've woken up from what felt like a living nightmare with a cold sweat like blood and asked yourself "How did I get here?" Maybe you had a realization, that the life you were living was suffocating you.
No person believes that if they pray enough, God will stop bullets in the air. And no person believes that thoughts and prayers will bring their loved one back from the dead or prevent evil from rearing its ugly head.
THYMOS 