Wrong Road

[joreth]

Wrong Road
Notice the paths that happy and successful people take, and avoid those paths. Favor the popular paths since those will help you achieve average results at best, and average results should safely prevent undesirable feelings of fulfillment. The best roads are those that leave you feeling like you’re walking in circles till you’re too tired to walk anymore and must retire. Roads that are flat or which slope downhill are often good choices, and they tend to satisfy the popularity requirement as well. Avoid any paths that lead over hills or near mountains; the elevated views are disturbing. Head towards terrain you dislike since it’s easier to hate your life when you hate your surroundings. If you can manage to get lost as well, that’s wonderful.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/07/how-to-do-everything-wrong/

In conversations where I explain what I have done or seen done that leads to success, either in relationships, in work, in life in general, whatever, I often get the following response: "Some of us are not as enlighted as you, so we won't take your advice." And yes, people have actually used the phrase "as enlightened as you", and not because I ever made that claim myself.

Now, I get that, in some circumstances, Person A can look at Person B and see a happy, successful person, but not want to actually be like Person B. I mean, I see plenty of happy and successful Hollywood actors, but I don't want to be an actor. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about Person A wanting the same outcome as Person B, but not wanting to learn how Person B got there. Basically, Person A is reinventing the wheel, only he's making it square.

What this kind of response and attitude says is this:

I see that you are happy and successful at something that I want to be happy and successful at. But rather than trying to take the lessons you have learned and apply them to my own life, I am going to do the exact opposite in the hopes that doing exactly what you did not do, I will somehow learn the skills and lessons that you learned and end up with the same result as you, because what you did is scary and I want all the benefits without the growing pains. I want what you have, but I will not take even remotely similar paths to get what you have, and I will expect those paths to end at the same destination. Meanwhile, I will be utterly dismissive of everything you have learned about how you got where you did.

These are the people who want to learn how to be less jealous & more secure, but do things that are designed to foster, encourage, and protect insecurity. These are the people who want to protect themselves against STDs but stick their head in the sand so that they're practically inviting STDs. These are the people who want to get ahead in business, but go out of their way to burn bridges and alienate the support that all people "at the top" need to stay at the top. These are the people who want lots of money but don't want to actually *do* anything for it, like, work. These are the people who want social change but end up supporting the status quo by their actions, or inaction. These are the people who whine about how much their life sucks while opportunity after opportunity pass right by. These are the "nice guys" who can't "get a girl" who argue with women explaining to them what they're doing to turn them off. These are the people who want so desperately to be With Someone that they can't see how that desperation is exactly the thing turning people away.

To paraphrase Miss Poly Manners, there might, indeed, be no single Right Way, but there ARE plenty of Wrong Ways. This is one of them.

Comments

[maevemacaraab.livejournal.com]

I'm reading this awesome book on fear (Feel the Fear And do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers) and she points out that a lot of us actually get something out of being miserable; whether it's sympathy, or superiority, or the freedom from actually having to face our fears. Often, it's the case that the miserable person just needs to realize why they keep going for ruts before they will be more motivated to change.

[joreth]

Judging just from my pool of acquaintances, I had come to that conclusion from my own observations as well. Some people seem so insistent on making their life miserable that I could only conclude that they *liked* being miserable, since so many of the things that made them miserable were things they had control over.

There are some situations where an observer's privilege gets in the way, like someone who has always had money, even if he worked for it, wondering why a poor man stays so poor while the wealthy man has money dumped in his lap and attributes it to "hard work". There are some circumstances in the poor man's life that are beyond his control and, although it's possible, it takes different skills and is much harder to change his circumstances.

But in other cases, where it's something like a guy dating the same type of girl over and over, who is chosen based on her looks and not compatibility, I find it difficult to believe it's a matter of my "privilege" that I think the solution is obvious & he doesn't. That seems to be entirely about choice, and I have to conclude that he is getting *something* out of that kind of relationship that he wants, which is not happiness.

Fear and denial

[ewen]

I suspect some of the resistance to some of these suggestions is a denial that the (perceived) "difficult" approach is the only solution ("surely there's an easier solution, I'll wait for that") and a fear that by attempting to do something about it that one's life situation will end up worse rather than better. Often it seems there's a (perceived) local maxima (eg unhappy but getting sympathy and/or feeling "in control"), and the pain of attempting to get off that local maxima and somewhere else, combined with the risk that the next maxima "might be worse" seems to be too much.

So while as you say it's about choice, people in these situations often don't seem to perceive it that way: the things that others see as choices are so immediately ruled out to not be considered a choice. From the inside I found that merely forcing myself to acknowledge in all situations that (a) I had choices, even if all of them seemed to suck more, and (b) I was choosing to do whatever I was doing -- even if that was "grin and bear it" -- made quite a difference to my view of the world. But it appears to me many people don't come to this realisation for along time, or perhaps at all.

So it might, from the outside, look like "they like being miserable". But "like" is perhaps too strong for at least some people; it's just (perceived as) "least bad" or "the only viable option". (Reasoning with depressed people is difficult as their world view is often dramatically different.)

Ewen