Recently, I’ve been browsing Medium before going to bed some nights. If you don’t know, Medium is a publishing platform with just about any topic being talked about in-depth by various members of the site. There are dozens of posts about just about anything you could imagine wanting to read about at the tip of your fingers, and for free if you go about reading the “member only” posts in a roundabout way. For that reason, I’ve come to enjoy browsing the thousands of articles at my disposal; finding out about things I would not have thought about researching about on my own. Did you know that back in 2013, scientists found what they hypothesized to be exoplanets that could contain life only to find out that they could not contain life by any chance in 2019? Now you get to be sad over this with me. One thing that has caught my attention since I’ve started browsing the site though, is that there seems to be an overwhelming amount of posts chasing after this one concept that bleeds into multiple topics on the site such as philosophy, psychology, and life among others. Everyone is chasing after an ideal reality that they will not reach, regardless of how many articles that give them the supposed “essential 5 tips to bettering your life” they consume.
Yes Hitting Rock Bottom Is the Best Thing Happening To You Right Now! 5 Heathy lifestyle hacks college won’t teach you. 6 Lessons People Learn Too Late In Life. All of these are genuine titles taken from Medium. I completely understand the pull that these types of articles have; these are all articles I have saved to my reading list. The target audience for these types of posts is extremely broad, and for that exact reason, there are so many articles being pumped out continuously to fit every self-help niche that might be sought after. Something that I do wonder as I read these types of articles, trying to get myself to take all the concepts to heart so that I hopefully learn 6 life lessons while I’m still young, is: are the people that write these articles content with their own lives? If I think too much about that question, I start to wonder if the reason that they put out these articles is so that they can try and convince themselves that they are at a point where they should feel fulfilled. I know for a fact that I write positively for that reason sometimes because giving yourself positive affirmations is genuinely one of the steps to feeling more content with yourself and your life. Telling yourself these things can only go so far though, unfortunately. That is why these articles are then searched for; to fill the void that chronically festers within all of us. None of us are willing to put in the effort to try and understand what it is that we need to feel content, so it becomes easier for us to allow someone else to do the thinking for us.
Being unhappy and unfulfilled with your life is not a new concept by any means. If the collective consciousness is real, this concept has been existing within all of us since any of us can remember and will continue for as long as we can. If there was a simple 5-step process to get anyone’s life in order, everyone would have done it already, and as soon as they had finished there would be another 10-step process created to help the new feelings of emptiness that form after the first process is completed. Feeling dissatisfied is something that almost feels like it has been ingrained in all of us since the day we were born. Even since we are children, existing among each other is even a competition. There is always a need to be better than someone else; no one is fine just as they are and they must always strive to be better. While being motivated to better yourself is without a doubt one of the most important things for anyone, where that motivation comes from is where a line has to be drawn. If you are genuinely working towards a goal that you have set out for yourself because you want to do it, then you are on the correct path towards fulfillment. On the other hand though, if you are working towards something out of fear of someone else being better than you, then you will never feel accomplished and the pit in your chest will only grow as you work towards this idealistic future that does not exist. Unfortunately, that is something I always have, and most likely always will struggle with.
I wish that there was an easy solution to this feeling of despair that creeps up on all of us, but that is exactly the reason why these self-help articles are so readily accessible. Mental instability is one of the easiest things to capitalize on and you see proof of this in every type of media possible. Yesterday, I went to a thrift store and found an entire section containing books going years back on this topic. As I flipped through the possible titles at my disposal, they promised a worry-free future—simply follow this 3-month plan written for you by someone who has no clue about your life. The point is, that after seeing this constant beratement of self-help strategies, I’ve come to realize that this way of thinking that letting someone else take the reigns of your life to get you back on track is something that humans as a species will never be able to overcome. Helping yourself is one of the most daunting things to make the first steps toward which is why people tend to avoid it; on the other hand, asking someone else for help is just as terrifying. I recently came across a video of someone that brought up an interesting point that has stuck with me since, which was the idea that all animals are brought into this world with their most primal instincts to immediately help with their survival. As humans, the very first thing we do when we are brought into the world is literally cry for help. The most important part of being a human is experiencing your life with each other, so why not reach out for a helping hand once and a while? As we go through life, we are taught that it is pitiful and embarrassing to ask for help because it shows that we are weak. I disagree completely with that idea, as the ability to be able to reach out for help is one of the strongest things a person can do. Understanding that you cannot do this on your own and allowing someone else to enter your life to help is extremely difficult in comparison to simply convincing yourself that by reading these self-help articles you are suddenly going to see more color in life.
While I have talked badly about self-help media during this post, I don’t believe that it is completely a waste of time to consume, it just depends on what actions you take after. If you read a 10-step process and then try and subconsciously work that process into your everyday life then nothing will change, but if you make a conscious effort to change the way that you live then you will begin to see progress. One of the things that we need to keep in mind when possibly heading down this route of self-help is that the progress that we might see is frustratingly slow. This is not something that by putting effort into we will see immediate results, which is what may deter most people from doing this. Instant gratification is honestly a plague on our civilization and it has reached incredible levels of disappointment in more recent years, but that’s a topic for another post. Real change takes time and effort and learning to become patient with yourself is one of the most valuable skills in existence. I’ve noticed in my own experiences, that I will allow myself a certain amount of time for something to happen and if what I’m expected doesn’t happen, I find myself spiraling into despair. I have tried to become more patient with myself and reach out to those that might help me more recently, but I don’t think I’ll reach a point of satisfaction for a while now, but that is no reason to give up. Moving forward continuously to reach a future that I want for me is all that I can do and I have to remind myself that there is no correct way to live life.
My mind is an extremely difficult thing to be able to put into words so trying to find the correct words to relay what is bouncing between my ears is a tedious task. I am not at a point where I personally believe a majority of the things that I write about on my blog, but I do recognize that to me these are the objective truths of my reality that I am working towards fully accepting for myself one day. My mental struggles heavily influence this dissonance between my thoughts relating to myself subjectively and objectively. So even though I do not believe these things to be true when relating them to myself, I know that they are true for every person and I will continue to work on myself and on my life until I do believe that they’re true specifically when relating to myself. I have been taking steps to better my life in ways that are possible now, and while the release from the feeling of disappointment in myself is only temporary, I will continue to do whatever I believe that I can do to feel more content in my life and myself. I’m not sure if anything that I’ve said in this paragraph makes any amount of sense, but it is the best that I can do to attempt to get my horribly contradicting thought process about myself and the world that I experience.
Self-help media is helpful to an extent, but the only person who understands your life is yourself. I do believe that taking general tips from various self-help articles or videos you might consume such as go exercise, call your family, tell people you love them, and so forth are helpful to get you out of an emotional pit you might find yourself in, but that is only the first step in a long journey. Beginning to understand yourself, what you need and what will help you get to the future you desire, is what will actually help to elevate your life. The strangers that wrote up these articles about how to live your life to the fullest extent possible have no idea what it is like to be you, me, or anyone but themselves. This lack of aligning life experience is typically why most of the self-help media leans more on the vague side when telling you how to fix your life. I can’t even count how many times I have found myself completely disappointed after desperately searching for words from someone else that will fix my life and only finding a stranger telling me to put more vegetables in my diet. While it can be extremely isolating to realize that the only person who has your back completely is yourself, as you get to know the person staring back at you in the mirror this feeling will fade. As you show yourself more love and patience, you will get a different perspective of yourself and your own reality. Even without making any major changes to your life, I believe that this separate perspective will increase the beauty in your experience with your life far greater than any 10-step self-help article on medium ever can.
I have wanted to share my photography for some time, but I don’t honestly want to write a separate post about it just yet. I have an idea in my head that I am currently bringing to life through a series of photographs and whenever I complete it I’m sure I will share it through a post then. I’ve always taken pictures of things that I believe to be beautiful to me on my phone, but recently I began taking pictures of beautiful things on an old camera of mine. Taking photographs with that camera is one of the first steps on my journey to a future of pure fulfillment and honestly, I would say this blog is another one of them. Finding a way to capture how I feel about the world and create things to bring into it is exactly one of the things that I’ve wanted to do for myself for as long as I can remember. My legacy is important to me. I want to touch as many lives as I can and possibly get my view of the world across to them and understand their view as well. As I’ve said many times before, life is to be experienced alongside others, and intertwining your life with them is a key component of the human experience. Art is one of the most beautiful forms of communication, as it can hold the artist’s message as well as the viewer’s. I’m extremely passionate about this, so to catch myself before I ramble on too long, I will show a few photographs that I am proud to have taken. In the post before this, I believe I discussed that when I take photographs, I rarely consider the actual composition of what I’m capturing but rather I prioritize capturing the world as I see it to show others. Knowing that, please look at these pictures of my reality and feel yourself intertwine with me as you see the world through my eyes.
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