Remember To Smile!

Being happy isn't hard, letting go of the idea that you need to be happy is.

Ironically, you are happier when you accept you can't be happy all the time and it is okay to be neutral or even sad for long periods of time.

Nothing is worse than being anxious that you're wasting your life being sad, when in reality your life is being wasted on WORRYING about being sad. All emotions are pure, no feelings are wrong.

Enjoy the good times, appreciate the rest.

"How do you do, fellow alligators"

While you're right, entirely right, the thing is It shouldn't even be a 'i have to do x' in the first place. You should always get a reason for doing what it is that you are doing, otherwise dicipline will just be associated with negative feelings, and by that point it's back to square one of why we even go through the motions. The ironic exception is training dicipline itself, for which tasks that are inherently unnecessary are great.

You gotta want to do it, or failing that, at least convince yourself the task has meaning (If you're good enough at the skill of self-convincing, "getting the task done" can be meaning enough, too). Personally I just don't aknowledge the feeling of "I don't want to''. "I don't wanna go buy groceries" "Ah that's alright do it anyways"

So I guess what I really mean isn't that you can't recognise your own wish not to do something, but instead that you recognise it and just do the task instead of spending that expensive mental energy convincing yourself you HAVE to do it for your or someone elses sake.

Still, getting a free reason to want to do your tasks are a great thing, and is a boon you should cherish while you have it.

There's a reason for that, you know. When the body is near death, the brain decides that ultimately, it wants to not die, and so it goes into a special, extremely harmful state where it presses every body on the keyboard and releases as many positive chemicals it can, to try and keep itself awake. What you are doing is effectively the same as huffing gasoline. You are getting high on your body's very last survival mechanism to try and prevent a total organ shutdown. And you enjoy it.

if u starve for long enough u start feeling like ur high sometimes its my fav thing ever

I had a person track me down because I had edited a single stat on a single item in The Binding of Isaac's fandom wiki. They contacted me on Discord. They said it had been tough because I wasn't on the official Isaac discord server. They added me so that they could inform me that I had made a wrong edit, and that they had reverted it. That was it.

A strange interaction but welcome nonetheless.

Their power grows

What the meaning of life isn't.

Nobody knows what the meaning of life is, this is pretty commonly known. However, people are surprisingly good at knowing what the meaning of life isn't! For example:

If I asked you: "is the meaning of our time here on earth to drive cars?" You'll probably answer no, because intuitively, cars isn't... the meaning, yk? Obviously you can argue why with examples and reasoning, but you don't need those to know that driving cars isn't the meaning of life.

Is the meaning of life eating food, surviving and then having offspring? Some people will say yes, and it's a fair answer. Biologically, it is why we are here, after all. But most people don't find this a satisfactory answer, which is where the question takes a more spiritual turn. It's less "what is my purpose" and more "how do I feel accomplished in life". Accomplishment is a hard feeling to keep. You may have it, periodically, but it quickly slips away. This is the same with happiness.

Humans have (due to advertisements and ESPECIALLY social media) gotten used to the idea that being happy means actively experiencing happiness all the time. It doesn't. Being happy is more of a skill, something you steer towards when given the chance but otherwise don't stare longingly at when you don't have it.

On temptation

Temptation is a word that is loved to death by christians, but is actually used to describe any old impulse the body or mind may have. Temptation is wanting to eat all the time. Temptation is the desire to lay in bed on a monday morning. Temptation, temptation, temptation. The thing is, though, that temptation also has a different meaning, which is the 'actual' definition of it: Being tempted (be it by yourself or others) to do some thing. Horrible explanation, so let me use an example: If you want to stop cracking your knuckles, a christian would say that cracking your knuckles is a form of temptation. But I would say (not from stoicism in particular) that temptation was the feeling you get when you don't crack your knuckles and you then start wanting to. That's temptation. This kind of temptation is directly linked to dicipline, and it can be used to train your dicipline.

Instead of avoiding temptation, you have to expose yourself to it in a controlled amount. If you just supress your desires (which come from a natural place way most of time), you will not achieve anything and it will bounce back some way or another. But if you instead tempt yourself on purpose, imagining and telling yourself how easy it would be, you will build up your own dicipline, especially if/when your brain takes it up as a habit in itself. Train it up, see what happens!

My friend, you are not the first to ask yourself this, nor will you be the last. But it's important to understand, and believe, that it is about the journey, not the destination. So is the case for a diary, a mandala, a life full of experience and memories. A diary is meant to be written first, read second. In many cases it is not meant to be read at all. There is nothing to be sad about. Your diary does not hold any value in you, nor the pen you wrote it with. The diary is, at most, an extension of yourself, one that you have not lost, can never lose; It is right there on the paper. So what you have written down is not what you are bothered by losing (or rather, the thought of losing). Perhaps it is the growth you have done as a person through the diary? Well, that growth is not lost, not to you, or the outside world. You are a different person than you were when you started that diary, and closing it for the last time will not revoke these changes. Perhaps it is what this diary means to you, specifically. What it knows that noone else does. What it personally is worth to you, something that no other book can achieve. Perhaps it holds an extremely unique and irreplacable spot in your heart. In this case, know that the diary does not speak on behalf of itself, but rather, you do. This makes no sense lol, so let me rephrase: Whatever your diary has done for you, YOU have done for you. The irreplacable part of that diary that seperates it from any other old book is ironically not actually a part of that diary, but a part of you. So look within. Look to where your attechments lie. And deattach your gratitude from your diary, and reattach it to you. Because that's all there is. Memories may fade, diaries may burn, but your growth as a human being? That stays with you, as long as you exist. With that, I hope I have given you a new perspective on things, and I wish you the very best.

Love, Anthony.

Well, I’m almost done with my current diary… my entries are usually 5-6 pages long, so with the current amount of pages left, the next entry will probably be the last.

Anybody else get super sad? I am really attached to this one, even though it’s cringe asf. And how do you get over that and start another one? Do you take a break for a bit to get acclimated with the new diary?

And, on another note, where do you store your finished ones?