Things that would have been advantageous to know before I lost it

Theodore Vaughn
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read
  1. Being well-liked is not necessarily indicative of success and oftentimes its opposite.
  2. Anxiety and depression are at their core unauthorized and unresolved conflicts, either in our chemicals or in our emotions. They force hands and clip choices.
  3. That weird intensity that you call your bad feeling is maybe just life’s weird intensity.
  4. Getting sober means dealing with this intensity.
  5. Sobriety is worry.
  6. Worrying and obsessing about your eroding masculine hairline is not always fun but there are worse obsessions.
  7. Obsession can be educational.
  8. A good education means learning how to learn.
  9. Understanding is better than knowledge.
  10. Knowledge of the facts without creating your own meaning of them is like wallpaper without a wall.
  11. If you wait for inspiration in order to create, you will die waiting.
  12. Suffering is the price tag for life.
  13. Suffering is an indissoluble part of the brain.
  14. Beer turns off your brain.
  15. Turning off your brain is good for brain and brain-related issues.
  16. Turning off your brain too often is bad for brain and brain-related issues.
  17. Finding out what ‘too often’ means is nebulous and difficult.
  18. Therapy only helps in the long-term.
  19. Nothing really helps all that much.
  20. It turns out, at the end of things, you’ll have to save yourself.
  21. Constantly reinventing yourself is a showcase and exertion of control over those all too few things you can control to prove to the things you can’t that you can, sometimes.
  22. It hurts. It all really fucking hurts.
  23. Cursing is still as fun as it was at 16.
  24. The bad guys think they are the good guys just like you do.
  25. Conservative Christianity is not a radical or new idea.
  26. Conservative Christianity is most obnoxious when it is hyper-unaware of its hypocrisy.
  27. Liberals are annoying when they point this out.
  28. Liberals are generally annoying in their avoidance of hypocrisy.
  29. Hypocrisy makes us human.
  30. Walt Whitman was a proud hypocrite.
  31. You are a hypocrite.
  32. Embracing hypocrisy is not as irritating to others as is your avoidance or denial of it.
  33. Waking up panicky and long every day for three years does not build character.
  34. Depression builds character. Depression also does not build character.
  35. There is such a thing as pulling yourself up by the bootstraps but it cannot be rushed or forced.
  36. Everything takes at least two hours and more likely two years.
  37. Medication helps in the short-term.
  38. To make money in America, you must hurt someone or play pretend or both.
  39. Every speech ever given to you by a businessman or -woman is erumpent bullshit.
  40. Bullshit can be smelled.
  41. Bullshit is easier to smell if you read books or if you’re old. Better both.
  42. Businessmen and -women in America are hysterically fearful of the idea that all their success is due to luck, the help of others, and right place/right time which is essentially the same thing as luck.
  43. Businessmen and -women are so fearful of the prenominated idea that they don’t even allow themselves awareness of said fear.
  44. Admitting that your business success is painfully not due to your own unique intelligence, ingenuity, and acumen would fucking castrate the pride of most businessmen and -woman.
  45. If our country were open and honest about the previous six ideas it would no longer work. If people were acutely aware of the suffering happening around them, the world would work better. Awareness is hard and good work.
  46. If reality is only of the individually perceived then at a certain point you must realize that yours could be a delusion.
  47. You can base an entire living reality on incorrect notions.
  48. These delusions can be advantageous and are generally recommended.
  49. When, never if, these delusions come toppling down one day, it will hurt in the way a bronze idol falling on the people who raised it hurts.
  50. Losing a healthy fear of death isn’t as fun as you thought it would be when you were a kid.
  51. Losing that fear is unhealthy.
  52. I am no longer afraid to die. I am afraid of everything that comes before it.
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