Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I’ve been thinking about life a lot lately.  Duh.

Anyways, here is what I realized a little better and I thought I would share.  It’s what we have been discussing, but has crystallized more and more as I have continued thinking about it – and read a few books that brought out some of these ideas.

We are born with certain instincts.  Much like salmons who know how to swim upstream to their home, or whatever other animal instinct that you are familiar with.  Perhaps one of these instincts for us is to seek companionship or to prepare for the future.

For some reason, society doesn’t honor our true instincts, rather whatever society deems best for itself at any given time, based on whatever method society figures that out by.

The issue is that we look to society to tell us what is “normal” and when we look out and then in and see the incongruity, we get confused.

No one ever really thinks to tell us that what society says is normal, may not be normal at all, because, really, no one really gets that.  Sure our role models might chime in that society is overly sexual or too Protestant, but on the more basic (and more important) areas of life, they never think to examine that there might be a difference between societal norms and their own – so they don’t point that out to us either.

So here is the issue for us, who are trying to be happy.  Because there is a natural tendency (perhaps even instinctual) to look to society to establish our own norms, when societal norms are not in line with our own personal instincts we get “out of alignment”.  Of course, if we are out of alignment, there is no way we can achieve self-acceptance since, we ourselves know intuitively, that we are not ourselves!

So self-alignment becomes the first step in the process of self-acceptance.  This involves figuring out who you are, and comparing it to society, and seeing where you are DIFFERENT from society.  Instinctively you probably already know this.  However, you have probably gone around all your life saying to yourself that society is right and you are wrong.  But remember, it is your world, so really, you are right, and society is wrong.  (Assuming you have done your due diligence and you know that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you…)

These differences, are actually what makes you special and unique and while you intuitively probably knew that, you need to celebrate this fact, and clearly state it to yourself.  In doing this, you are able to clearly separate yourself from society and self-align and become ready to move on to self-acceptance.

Life is often a dance.  A balancing act.  Too much to one extreme or the other, and we fall on our faces.

One of the primary balancing acts in marriage seems to be connectivity vs. autonomy.

Intimacy in its very act is connectiveness between two people.  The physical manifestation mirrors the emotional – one being becoming enmeshed in the other.

The problem is that as we have discussed the only way to be happy seems to come from a personal ability to individualize – that is, to truly stand alone in the world without external depenence.

So the question becomes, how can we achieve both mutual independence and connectivity at the same time, since they truly are two contradictory goals.

The typical psychologist answer seems to be that you need to find balance, and that you are looking for two individuals to come together and connect but not lose yourself in the connection.   That is how they would solve the conundrum, I think.

However, it doesn’t really sit well with me.  Rather, I feel that it is similar to what we saw with self-acceptance being dependent upon others acceptance of your own true behavior.  That there are times when the individual does have to look beyond themselves to find their own completion, in some manner. This belief nods its head to the fact that man is truly a social creature, and that we can’t escape this reality.

Of course, this is not a very popular view, I don’t think, in our world which only believes in truly autonomous individuals.  However, I believe it to be closer to the truth.

What is the meaning of my life?

I spent the last 20 (or so) years of my life looking for an answer to this question, and came up blank.  I tried religion, giving to others, watching what gave others meaning.  All to no avail.  I still felt like my life was missing meaning at a deeper level.

It was rather frustrating.

What really bothered me the most was that I found that all versions of meaning that I found was totally arbitrary, and dependent upon each individual’s self defined belief system, which meant that in the end, there really was no TRUE meaning to life. Which I found rather glum, and very hard to accept.

So I kept looking for meaning.  And kept not finding it.  Until a few weeks ago.

When I was finally able to see my inner self, I quickly became aware that the question itself was false.

When we ask what is the meaning of our life, what we are really asking is what is the reason or purpose of our existence, but in this question is one very large assumption.  That we need a reason to exist.  That for some reason we can’t deserve to exist.  Or on a more neutral basis that we just exist.

Specifically, when you come in touch with your own human essence, which is arrived through true self-acceptance, you can no longer ask the question of why you exist, you just DO, and you realize it at such a base level that any question of what is the meaning of life is moot.

So like most of the things I have found so far, it was inside me the whole time, but I just hadn’t realized it yet.

So if you want to find meaning in life, look no further, than within.

P.S. Another way of coming to the same conclusion is to hypothesize watching a very bad person die.   When they die, with them dies an essence, that we can’t quite touch, and it is this essence that is inside each of us, and can be reached through reaching your inner self.  You why would you own be any different?!? [I put this after the post since to me this idea has spiritual implications, and my thoughts are still to infantile to propose anything in this area right now.]

I took psych 101 in college and learned about projection, and was intrigued by the idea, and thought I knew when I was doing it, but it was only recently that I realized that I had no idea at all.

What was amazing for me to realize recently is that basically, we live our lives through our eyes.  Now while this might seem like a rather obvious statement, for me it was quite eye opening because, until recently, I really thought that we are all the same.

However, what I really didn’t realized was that the nuance was that while we are all the same, our tolerance for different things, is different.

I’ll explain.  Someone told me a lie.  So I called them out on their lie, and they said, “oh that’s not a lie, I didn’t want to hurt you.”  Well, in my book, it was a lie.  So we have different definitions of what a lie is.

The issue is that in our daily interactions with people, they tell us that they are X, Y, and Z, and then we project our own definition of these things on them.  However, what we really need to do is allow them to self-define.  Which means, we need to watch their words and actions and learn how they themselves define X, Y, and Z.  That way, we can see if they are in sync with our own definition or if they are out of sync.

Of course, this is sometimes hard to accomplish since, different situations result in different actions, however, in life, we can only try our best, and for us that is probably to at least start to notice when we are projecting in the first place!

 

 

Things don’t just happen.  There is a process and if you can get in tune with the process, before you begin, you can save yourself valuable time and headaches.

You would think this is obvious, but for many of us, it seems that we ignore it and jump right in.  Then we fail, and give up saying “we tried our best” when really we just tried wrong.

The reason why we act this way is that there is no point that we are more motivated to act than at the beginning.  In fact, as you know, typically, change doesn’t happen until the pain in not changing is greater than the pain in staying the same.  So at that point when you are looking to “do something” typically you are rather motivated, and want to jump right in and “get ‘er done.”

This lesson is true in so many ways.  How many painful divorces could have been saved, if the couples read books on why people divorced before they got married and self selected out?  How much angst could have been saved if you called the DMV to learn how to set up a new title before you went in and had to go back and forth four times?  How much money could have been saved if you had simply read the fine print carefully BEFORE you signed the contract?

You get the idea.  The lesson is simple to remember, but hard to implement.  So start taking a little to learn how things work before you start and see how much smoother your life goes!