Summary

The article discusses the struggle of balancing the pursuit of success with the emotional toll of life's challenges, advocating for self-reflection and learning from both successes and failures.

Abstract

The text delves into the universal experience of striving for success while facing the pressures of daily life, often leading to stress and burnout. It emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and learning from both positive and negative experiences, suggesting that introspection is crucial for personal growth. The author argues against ignoring problems or repeating past mistakes, instead encouraging readers to confront their issues head-on and make necessary changes to improve their lives. The article concludes with a call to action for individuals to examine their own "train wrecks" to avoid future pitfalls and find a more balanced approach to success.

Opinions

The author believes that the societal pressure to succeed starts from childhood and can lead to a damaging cycle of self-criticism and mental exhaustion.
There is a shared frustration among people when faced with the advice to simply not let life's challenges bother them, which is seen as insensitive and unhelpful.
The article suggests that self-beratement for failures is counterproductive and that individuals should instead focus on understanding the root causes of their setbacks.
The author posits that while it is natural for humans to repeat errors, a conscious effort to learn from past mistakes is essential for breaking harmful patterns.
The text conveys that while it is uncomfortable, examining one's failures and the resulting negative emotions is a necessary step towards personal development and achieving success.
The author implies that some individuals might unconsciously perpetuate chaos in their lives, possibly due to a familiarity with or preference for disorder over calm.
The article advocates for the practice of regular self-reflection to identify and correct behaviors that lead to undesirable outcomes, ultimately guiding individuals towards a more fulfilling life.

Living

Are We Programmed To Succeed

The Commonality Of Living

Whether it’s “working for the man” or a life of self-employment we often spend our days stressing out to make enough to exist. If we were to stop and think about it, because we rarely ever do, most of us spend the majority of our lives slaving away for the meager stipends we receive.

It’s a commonality of living life we all share. And it follows, that most of us get worn to a nub and grow exhausted at times.

As writers, we’ve spent years watching our hard work and effort go from delightfully good (we thought at the time) to impossibly bad (it’s not) to terribly ugly (beauty’s still in the eye of the beholder), and sometimes we just don’t know what direction to take anymore.

The problem is we often try to work through the depression and the brain exhaustion to produce even when we don’t feel like producing. And when we pull up to a screeching halt or a complete melt-down, we beat the crap out of ourselves for not producing.

Talk about a vicious cycle.

We’ve put ourselves through h*ll and worked our a*ses off to eke out a little slice of heaven. A slice of heaven we’ve been taught to seek out because we’ve been programmed to succeed since we were itty bitty.

Since we were children, we’ve been taught to continuously go for that d*mned gold ring, the ultimate prize. Many of us spend our entire lives attempting to grasp that gold ring without success.

An important aspect when you stop to consider life is a series of small wins and massive losses, and we all hate to lose.

Because losing’s for losers, right?

So when we do lose, when we suddenly realize what we’re trying to do with our life is starting to take a nosedive, we often get a little crazy. We need to lash out at something to ease the pain and frustration we’re experiencing.

And since most of us have no intention of beating down other people (well some do, and they’re all sh*theads), we focus on a much easier target to work on and destroy.

Ourselves.

It’s so easy to berate and chastise ourselves for our failures. So d*mned easy to rip our psyches to shreds for our perceived terrible attempts. And when we start down the path, it’s often so very hard to get back to where we need to be.

Frazzled and confused, we sometimes reach out to others for help, because everything we try to do on our own has just made things worse. That’s when we hear the age-old adage, which is probably the most insensitive, maddeningly flippant things any of us want to hear.

Try not to let it bother you.

Really? F*cking really? We should just try not to let it bother us? That’s almost as bad as telling us to simply walk off a compound leg fracture. News flash. The s*it is bothering us. It’s driving us bat-s*it crazy, and the only thing keeping us from falling hard is a tiny little knot we tied at the end of our rope.

And even that sucker is starting to loosen.

So what in the h*ll do we do? We’ve managed to berate ourselves until we’re standing in a corner experiencing fight or flight emotional panic and we’ve just about lost control of rational thoughts in our head.

Well, for starters, we need to breathe.

We need to take as many calming, cleansing breaths as we need, to center our thoughts. Then we need to focus on all the reasons we started down the path we did in the first place. We need to remember when it was delightfully good for us. Think about those moments, the things we did that made us happy.

No, this isn’t a — think happy thoughts, and everything will be okay — kind of thing.

Remembering all the good things, the good decisions, the wonderful things which happened in your life, is a way of putting the breaks on our emotionally f*cked-up train wreck.

We need to first, stop ourselves from making it to disaster station, before we can try and turn things around. Then, and this is the hard part, we need to concentrate on the times when things were impossibly bad and terribly ugly.

We need to examine them.

Not necessarily to relive the experience and make ourselves feel like sh*t all over again, even though sometimes that happens. We need to slap those suckers under a microscope and study them hard.

Study them to discover precisely what caused all those downhill slides, the pivotal things, or moments that caused us so much turmoil and pain.

And then, and at the risk of oversimplification, we need to never do that s*it again.

Oh, so much easier said than done, right?

As members of the Human population, our errors, our faulty decision-making processes, frequently fail us. They fail us to the point we end up making the same mistakes again and again.

Think about this. We make the same errors a lot of times because we’re in some kind of a hurry to move forward. We never stop to review the outcomes of our actions.

We waffle from a state of contentedness to feeling absolutely gross about ourselves and our accomplishments. Each time, taking the hit, trying to shrug off the pain and carry on. And when it’s over and we finally forget the pain, we slide back into a state of contentedness.

Why do we do that to ourselves?

Because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. Because of this, we often end up in sh*t up to our necks without a clue of how we got there.

As painful as the process is, we need to stop focusing only on the right things happening in our lives. We need to take a look at the bad and ugly things which have happened or are happening.

And yes, sometimes we have to take a rather macabre introspection at the dead bodies and bloodshed of some of our more tragic accidents. We need to inspect those twisted hunks of our life’s train wrecks to understand just how bad things could be if we continue doing things the way we are.

And then, we need to make the mental adjustments necessary and take off down the road again.

Not easy to accomplish by any means but certainly doable.

All we have to do is try. Each time we do, it gets a little easier. But be forewarned it may take a while to grow accustomed to this constant introspective examination.

Examining the delightfully good is easy, but the impossibly bad and terribly ugly happens to be just that. Bad and ugly. And nobody wants to examine bad and ugly all day.

Or, we could choose to ignore the problems and continue making the same mistakes all over again. The choice is, of course, ours to make. Maybe some of us thrive on all the chaos going on in our lives. Maybe a lot of us enjoy being mushrooms; in the dark, and in sh*t up to our necks.

Still, I suggest we all need to at least examine our own train wrecks from time to time. This kind of introspection will teach us how we got into some of these messy situations and most likely reveal ways to correct them going forward.

Thank You So Much For Reading

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