"Why your life feels fake"

Reading / taking notes on this article: https://letters.thedankoe.com/p/why-your-life-feels-fake-an-antidote
(found via Makoism coffee post)

• "You wake up. and rather than hiding from the day by pressing snooze, you can’t wait to get up."
  • Unfortunately I definitely do not wake up excited for my day most of the time. There is usually a vague sense of not really wanting to start working for the day. There was one morning which was particularly memorable in that I woke up with a big smile on my face and I noted to myself in that moment that it doesn't happen that often: this was the day after I signed my lease on my new apartment (which I've been living in for almost a year now) after a frustrating apartment hunt.
• "whichever area of your life feels most off right now."
  • Is there an area of my life that feels off right now?
    • generally i progress steadily on things even if there are ebbs and flows. eg fitness, food, hobbies
    • usually I am feeling like i don't put enough time into creative pursuits
    • sometimes I question aspects of my social life and where I put my time and energy
    • similarly, sometimes question habits related to pursuit of a romantic relationship
    • Work -
      • generally I've been content with the 9-5 job, though there are moments (especially during vacations) when I see through it and get an urge to escape it. Ofc a vague plan is to someday have my own app/business so I don't have to be in a corporate environment (though having my own app wouldn't mean I don't have to work. if anything, it could mean having to work harder.)
      • I worry sometimes that I work too hard or stress myself out; other times, worry that I don't work hard enough and should be doing more.
    • Sometimes I feel like I'm making a mistake by spending my money on an expensive cost-of-living city/apartment
    • Sometimes I feel like I'm not dedicating enough time to hobbies that deeply interest me
    • Haven't been working out (climbing/calisthenics) consistently for a while. Well I'm consistent at like once or twice a week but i want it to get back to twice or three and it hasn't been there for a while and it's also been a while since I made any effort at all on adding in calisthenics on the side.
  • (I have a feeling most of this, except for the 9-5 stuff), isn't really what this article would be getting at.
• "We move toward what we believe will make us whole... nobody stops to ask where those beliefs came from. / "the hit wears off in weeks ... wondering why the thing didn’t do what it was supposed to do."
  • we move toward what we believe will make us whole, nobody stops to ask where those beliefs came from. I feel this applies for me to pursuit of romance. It feels like the right thing for me to do, but I rarely stop to think why I believe that. But, I have recently thought about it, and how media from my whole life has shown me what relationships and pursuit should look like, and how you should feel when you pursue/gain it.
• "Between the ages of roughly two and seven, your brain runs in a state called theta wave dominance. It’s the same brain state adults pay hypnotherapists to access."
  • hypnosis reference :)
• "Instead, he’s been running a script his parents wrote in 1998, and somewhere around his late twenties he accumulated enough contradictory evidence to finally question it." ... "Your job (if you want your life to feel like yours) is to write [a new script]."
  • The thing is, ---- ok what i was going to say is: the thing is, I like my life, im happy with it, I dont think I was programmed in a bad way ----. But also -- the 9-5 thing. If I was really pursuing the life I deeply want to live, I wouldn't be doing a 9-5 corporate job. But like, am I sure? I don't have an actual alternate plan, and the current one is pretty good, and I'm starting to build in some exploration toward the alternative (by working on app ideas).
• "you can’t deny the fact that the culture and ability... largely shaped those beliefs... That should bother you. It bothers me."
  • Should it bother me? There's always going to be subconscious programming. Whenever there is input, it affects how you think about things. Well I guess this is talking about input during the vulnerable developmental years when you didn't have much control, so there's something there. I guess I have a feeling that I have already done the work of seeing past traditional ways... whatever that means... So is there really more to unveil? Well, sure. There always is.
  • What's nagging at my head at this point is, yes, still the 9-5 thing, in that it's such an accepted thing, oh -- or at least, I was taught that it was (at that vulnerable development age). But most ppl in the world also are. But still, it's always a good reminder to question things.
• "waking up inside someone else’s goals is the cause, rather than age."
  • basically I've always felt like I've been following my own goals. pretty confident on that
• "Questioning the script while you’re still young enough to write a different one."
  • so far it feels like I don't really need to write much of a new script. But I'm curious to see where this article goes. And, again, always a good reminder to question things and open my eyes to new potential paths or way of seeing things.
• "It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. - Krishnamurti"
• "Chosen beliefs - ... They change when experience demands."
• "This is why most people feel unfulfilled. Their stated values and their actual values are different values, and they don’t know it."
  • I think this is the crux of my dissonance with this piece. I have already spent my time evaluating my values and basing my goals off them.
  • At the same time, I can/should look at the dissatisfactions I mentioned above and reflect on whether my inherited beliefs are affecting my outlook on them.
    • "Sometimes I feel like I'm making a mistake by spending my money on an expensive cost-of-living apartment" --> well I definitely inherited a belief that money should be saved as much as possible. It's a learning process to be okay with spending money.
    • im kind of confused, e.g. for 9-5 corporate life, is the inherited belief that this is the normal thing to do, or is the inherited belief that I should question it? Is the goal here to reject 9-5 or is the goal to quench any dissatisfaction I feel about it by re-evaluating and changing my beliefs that it's bad? (I think I am falling into the silly thing of going backwards with this thing of questioning beliefs. I already have questioned things. Don't need to re-question them into the opposite direction.)
• "“I need to finish learning before I start.”" -> definitely a belief that has held me back with hypnosis.
• "“I should have figured this out by now.”" --> definitely affects me with things like relationships. when comparing myself to ppl in my life who are in long term relationships, feels like I'm behind.
• "Now look at your current goal (the one you’re grinding toward right now) and ask, without flinching, whether there is any evidence at all that this one will be different." I am getting confused and kind of annoyed at this article. It's making an assumption that the reader probably has a phony goal that they are only pursuing because someone else / society / inherited beliefs told them to. The confusing part is that it's not distinguishing between those phony goals (I admit they can exist) and what may already be genuine goals truly aligned with one's values. So a sentence like this implies that your goal will never give you any real satisfaction.... But surely it's not implying that no goals can give you satisfaction. It's making an argument that you should get better goals that are more true to yourself. But the writing is not quite hitting this point correctly in some of these paragraphs (because it's failing to caveat on whether it's talking about the phony/re-evaluated goal).
• My conclusion: (SEE CAVEAT NEXT BULLET POINT) This article did not resonate with me. I don't think I'm the target audience.
  • At the same time, I think it could resonate with me in the future, if I realize I am holding onto non-good beliefs or if I'm feeling stuck about something. Or maybe I do now just need to analyze myself more deeply (and I'm sure these ideas will be floating through my head for a while). But seriously, things are going well for me, and there's not much glaring that I feel I need to dive deeply into.
  • It feels like this article is kind of trying to replace therapy in a way for someone. Or like teaching them how to replace a therapist and think through deep-rooted beliefs. I'm actually a fan of getting ppl to think through their stuff (while also encouraging ppl to see a therapist when they can't handle this on their own). Though, it's also kind of presumptuous for the article to portray every reader as equally having things to work through that are controlling their life and that if they just get down to their root beliefs and counteract them then their life will be transformed. Bugs me a little. (Also acknowledging that I'm being presumptuous in claiming that I have nothing to work on. That's not what I'm claiming. But I do not feel that my general quality of life and day to day activities/goals/pursuits are being negatively affected by inherited beliefs that I "did not give consent to", which is the article's main point.)
• One day later:
  • I feel like "this does not resonate with me" was a little too harsh of a statement from me. I think there is some good advice here. yes I have some problems with the way it was presented. But there are important concepts here. It is definitely good to question your beliefs. And I definitely do have PLENTY of room to question (though I think I am doing pretty satisfactory in many areas). But my life is not 100% perfect obviously. And there are smaller things in life that can cause friction and strain and obstacles towards getting to where I want to be and being my best self. And questioning beliefs and reevaluating behavior is a super valid way to overcome those things and be better.
  • Still, I don't feel inspired to literally write down a list and work through my beliefs in a direct way. However, I can tell that this article is getting to me in the back of my head, so I think it's going to have more of a passive impact. I imagine I'll notice some pattern or behavior or "offness", then contemplate what (maybe inherited) beliefs might be guiding that, and then evaluate if there needs to be a change there.