Category: Josh Feingold Blog

Friday sucked.  Really sucked.  Saturday was a little better.  Sunday (which is right now) is pretty cool, but there is still an underlying feeling of suckyness.  So what’s going on, you ask?  I’m not getting what I want – and I’m acting like a baby.

It’s interesting having a blog, even one that not many people read, because I get to really examine myself in an innocent way and kind of be honest.  So let’s start honestly.  The real bad stuff – ain’t no way I would ever publish publicly.  Is there really bad stuff.  Guess you’ll never know.

OK, onward.  I’ve never really had such a feeling of frustration before due to not getting what I want.  What I want is something that is very important to me, and something that is out of my control to a large extent.

So Friday, I forgot that I might be at the center of my world, but I sure ain’t at the center of anyone else’s.   And not just that, but the one person that I really needed to help me out had no desire to help me – and there was nothing I could do about it.

I was stuck.  I wasn’t getting what I wanted and no matter how hard I (figuratively) yelled, or made a fool of myself, could I get my desires filled.

I guess part of the problem for me, is that it is very seldom that I REALLY want something.  I’m a pretty flexible person and am pretty happy to blow with the wind. One interesting lesson is that I can now put myself in the position of the rigid personality type.  That must really suck, to get all frustrated when things don’t go like you want them to all the time.  No thanks.

Back to the point.  When we are young and immature, we think that things just come to us – that we deserve certain treatment.  However, as we grow up, we learn that, in fact, the world owes us nothing, and that in fact, we are lucky to have the opportunity to be alive!  And not only that, but we can’t change other people, or often our situation.

The problem is that every once in a while, we forget those truths we hold dear, and fall back into our old selfish ways – and have to ruin a few life for a little until we relearn what we already knew.

Personally, I found that life became rather boring at some point in time.  Repetitive to be specific.  Nothing new ever seemed to happen.

In fact, it is only just now that I am realizing that the reason that nothing new ever seemed to happen was due to the fact that most likely nothing new ever WAS happening.

Now, if you know me and are reading this, you are saying to yourself, but Josh, you do new stuff all the time.   You did this, you did that.  But here is the secret, they might be new, but nothing was outside my areas of comfort.  Nothing involved any RISK so everything just felt familiar and safe.

In fact, I think I picked up on this about a year ago, but didn’t know I was doing anything about it.

1) I had the opportunity to take a stand up comedy class which involved doing a 3 minute routine with no notes in front of 200 people.   Now, there is nothing that makes me more nervous than making a fool of myself in front of 200 people, so of course, I had to say yes… and I did it.  And if you ask me, I did pretty good.

2) I followed that up with a improv class that involved touching absolute strangers a little too intimately if you ask me, but well, that was the class, and I did okay.  And I might take the next level class in the future.

3) Then just last week, I went to a park, and sang at the top of my lungs, with a cardboard box collecting money – just for the experience.  And it was an experience.  (By the way, I was there for a full hour, and not one person gave me a cent.)

So figure out what you are not willing to do because you are too scared to try – or too scared to take a chance, or a risk – and learn to live!

As I write this post, I am about to take a shopping break.

Honestly, I’m not sure what is going to happen, but here are the terms.

I am not going to buy anything for a month.

OK, here’s what that means.

Food is cool.  Entertainment is cool.  Trips, cool.

But that’s it.  If it doesn’t fit into one of the above categories, ain’t gonna buy it.

So why am I doing this, you ask?

Well, I have this general feeling that we try to give ourselves more of a sense of self by extending ourselves.  This can be by connecting with others through relationships, though defining ourselves through a devotion to a cause or work, or through buying things.

That’s why when we are depressed we like to shop ourselves out of it.  For some people they like to eat their way out of bad moods, since they actually get to ingest that thing which helps them get beyond themselves, think about that for a second.

So I am going to do the opposite.  I am not going to buy anything for a month.  No shopping.  No antiquing.  No Amazon.

Honestly, I am kind of dreading this experiment.

I’ll try to remember and tell you how it goes, but I think the main take away for yourself is that we view our stuff as an extension of ourselves (which is why it is so hard to throw out!) but really, the goal is to be self-sufficient, and ultimately, our stuff gets in the way of that goal.

So take a shopping break and see what it does for you!

…

OK, Josh here.  It’s now been one month since I wrote the content above.  So how did I do, you ask?

I lasted two weeks.

Here are a few lessons:

• It is a relief not to be able to shop and just “pick up a few items.”  A burden is lifted.
• You save money.
• You sound very pretentious when you tell your friends you aren’t buying things.
• It’s really hard.

I really didn’t realize how much shopping for me was one of my main forms of entertainment.  I love antiquing, and the colors and feeling of clothes, and really just browsing at the potential of all the stuff I could acquire – even if I don’t buy anything.  I think it is my version of going out on “the hunt.” So after a few weeks, I broke down.  And shopped.  However, it was a great exercise, and I do think I’ll try it again in the near future.  This time, I just won’t tell my friends.  🙂

 

A friend of mine once told me that they were honest.

And I believed them.  Until one day, they lied to me, and I confronted them about it.  And they told me, yeah, they are honest – I just didn’t understand what they meant by being honest.

Similarly, once someone asked me if I was honest about something, and I said, “no I lied” and I got myself in a bunch of trouble.

Until I realized that according to their definition of honesty, I was in fact totally honest, and that there had been no reason for me to get myself in trouble, except for the fact that my moral compass was so far to towards being honest.

The point is that when it comes to a person’s attributes, definitions are totally arbitrary and therefore have to be judged by our own standards when we are judging someone else, or if someone is judging us, we need to understand their standards.

Just a thought.

We all talk to ourselves, some are just better about not talking about it out loud than others.

Do you pay attention to what your inner voices are saying?

There is a constant conversation going on inside your head.  It tells you what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do.  It puts you down, and it tries to pick you up, but typically, it just puts you down.

Tangent… Want to quiet the voice?  Buy a beer.  Seriously.  That’s why alcohol is so popular.  It’s the shortcut to the hard work which really needs to get done and we’ll talk about next.  It’s a bad shortcut, though, for reasons we won’t go into now.

Take some time and learn about the inner conversations that are going on inside your head.  I found my conversations typically take the path of emotion vs. intellect or child vs. adult and that by listening in on the conversation, and the assumptions I am making, I am better able to figure out the inner workings of my psyche.

One interesting thing to keep in mind is that this inner conversation provides constant reinforcement of your fears and beliefs, which is why it is so hard to change anything.  So by getting in touch, and then in control of your inner voice, you can then really get in control of yourself.  And that’s the whole goal of this exercise, isn’t it?