Being disabled is not something to cash in on. It’s fuzzy but... The height of my physical disability was from age 12-19, with some somewhat functional periods in between. Minorly functional. I had a lot of medicine to get better. Months of giving myself IV medicine, hyperbaric oxygen, more pills than a liver should ever get to know. Lots of alternative medicine and attempts before the cause was known.Your intentions are good.
Your cure for depression is a bit misleading. You're buying into the theory that there's a linear result from doing a, b, and c, and then having x happen. If you do exactly these things, you will get better. Not that you can get better, simply that you will.
Except this isn't true, and propagating that theory causes only harm. You'll have people who do all those things and then come out the other side the same or worse. Since the solution was so ironclad, so specific, there can be only one reason: they're personally responsible. The failure is solely their own. The cure and method is sacrosanct, so any deviation from "Mission Accomplished!" is an obvious sign that the person never really tried, or there's some fatal flaw with them that precludes them from simply following instructions. In essence, any failure to improve is directly tied to the individual. You've reduced severe mental health issues to being a matter of independent willpower and whether or not someone can follow a checklist well enough.
I'm also not sure you can cash in on the disabled angle if you've recovered from being so three times. Don't get me wrong, it is awesome that you're better now, but it feels a bit like someone who got a mass removed and is fine, preaching to a row of long-term chemo patients about how they can cure their cancer. It feels dangerously close to the people who corner me at support groups and in hospitals and then start telling me about how they had what I had and now they're healthy and great because they conquered their mind and simply willed themselves to health. (This paragraph assumes you're referring to your physical health. If you only meant that your mental health was bad enough to be disabling, feel free to ignore.)
In your analogy about weight it would be like I’m saying “if you have trouble with weight you will fail to lose weight if you don’t diet”. Your sister can have it a million times easier but if you use that as the reason to quit, you will fail. If you want to succeed, you have to not choose the path of automatic failure.I agree with @Synsensa, an I don't see that he's saying there's no hope, he seems to be saying that there's no guarantee of success. I find a lot of people have this attitude of "This thing worked for me, so it must work just the same for everyone," and that's just certainly not at all true in the slightest, right? Your solution may work for someone else, or bits of it might, but they might have totally different needs from you, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. But you also see people thinking things like "If you can't fix yourself by doing exactly what I did, then something's deeply wrong with you and you're a failure."
You see this a lot with weight too. I put on weight easily, while my sister doesn't. She can be a bit preachy and judgemental, because she thinks her ability to stay thin is completely her doing, and my failure to keep my weight down is because I'm a failure. I eat healthier than she does, I drink less, and such and such - but everyone's body works differently, and I have a tendency to store weight which she doesn't.
Well.. to my mind that kind of approach is a two-edged sword. The principle is sound. Purpose breeds effort. And consistent effort needs over-arching and hence consistent purpose. Which in the end is who you want to be and what life you want. I would say this video is a good example of a man who uses his ego-ideal to improve himself and enrich his life.My friend just sent me this link, I think its relevant to what you just said Terx
Basically to get stuff done on a high level you have to convince yourself it is important in a grander scheme. If you can't do that you won't get stuff done (or you'll do it in a sloppy way)
Without an overarching sense of purpose there is no reason to try hard. Everything you do, even boring paperwork, you need to remind yourself that its necessary, relevant and part of your big picture life plan.
It is different. Pride in your work can make you overwork yourself, no doubt. That's not the same as being forced to overwork, regardless of your pride and self-identification you have with the work.I don't know if this is similar to just taking pride in your work but I consider that different. I've always known that what I do isn't going to save the world but that hasn't stopped me from not doing a half assed job. Take pride in what you do.
Agreed. But one should be brave enough to walk the dangerous path.However, perfectionism and a need or want to be extraordinary are also strongly related to a myriad of mental health issues. To improve yourself and work on yourself is one thing. To try to compensate mental health issues with aspirations of grandeur however, while tempting, seems also very dangerous to me.
Weak and ordinary is the default, you don't have to "let yourself".Sometimes it just needs to be okay to be a bit weak and ordinary.
My takeaway from all the replies is that we all want to matter, whether to someone who loves us or to the world at large, but I guess the hardest thing for many is to matter to ourselves.
Okay, but I recommend to ask yourself why you want to "make history" and weather this truly is want to you want or need, or weather you are perhaps compensating for something and weather you are better off addressing that something directly.Agreed. But one should be brave enough to walk the dangerous path.
People with a "balance" lives and "balanced" minds don't make history.
Not true. You know studies have shown that no generation has been as confident as the millennials. Nor as narcissistic. Nor as unhappy. It is the Zeitgeist to want to be special. And while it is ok or even commendable to try to be more, to be better, indeed that growth never ends is a great rule of thumb, one should be careful weather that drive is intrinsic or extrinsic. Weather you are wanting to be better because this adds value to your life, or weather you want to be better because you don't want to truly face yourself and your life and who you are and what you actually want.Weak and ordinary is the default, you don't have to "let yourself".
Me personally I don't care about "making history" but I do want to live a great life and be able to provide a positive influence to others.Okay, but I recommend to ask yourself why you want to "make history" and weather this truly is want to you want or need, or weather you are perhaps compensating for something and weather you are better off addressing that something directly.
100% true. Average American is weak, out of shape, in credit card debt, living paycheck to paycheck. Why would I aspire to be default?Not true.
I'm 40 so not a millennial. I didn't grow up w anyone telling me I'm special, quite the reverse.You know studies have shown that no generation has been as confident as the millennials. Nor as narcissistic. Nor as unhappy. It is the Zeitgeist to want to be special. And while it is ok or even commendable to try to be more, to be better, indeed that growth never ends is a great rule of thumb, one should be careful weather that drive is intrinsic or extrinsic. Weather you are wanting to be better because this adds value to your life, or weather you want to be better because you don't want to truly face yourself and your life and who you are and what you actually want.
How would you define a "Narcissistic ideal"?And the less stable you are, as a person, the more likely high aspirations can go down that counter-productive road, IMO.
Narcissistic ideals are in deed a great way to hide from yourself, to numb heart and cloud the mind, and to needlessly torture yourselves.
It's tricky IMO and really depends on the how and who.
Man I hate the word soberity, makes me think of a bunch of boring AA meetups.There is an IMO really great concept in psychology where the human mind is differentiated into two dimensions.
Selfhood on the one end and Sobriety on the other. Both dimensions are part of any psyche, however, a lot of mental issues, basically all cases of neuroses for what I can see, are connected to a too strong weight of selfhood. That means that you aspire a or identify with a personal identity, which in some manner or the other is constantly at stake, needs to be constantly reaffirmed. Is ultimately unstable and a construct you try to replace yourself with. And the worst thing is that you may not even realize this, anymore. It is what I massively struggled with.
The antidote to that is more Sobriety. That means to see things not so much through the lens of who you want to be, through your ego and associated needs, emotions and compulsions, but for what they just are, free of judgement. It also means to see yourselves as one of many, from the birds perspective, and not that special one or something like that.
If you don’t try, you will fail to get better. General you. The weight of elements might be different for some, there might be other elements as well. It will be harder for some and easier for others.
But if you don’t try, you will fail. So don’t fight the try.
Perhaps you are saying “I don’t want to try and then fail and have you hold that against me”. Ok deal.
It could be. Or the doctors could be wrong.Or maybe you try, and fail to get better because it's a permanent disability.
Major depressive disorder is considered a lifelong illness but in reality it has no tangible existence. Its ethereal, feels very real, the deep grooves and patterns it etched in the brain are real but its ultimately the disease is a thought construct.
Yes of course I know that. I know a ton about depression having suffered from it for years & nearly lost my life to it.Uh, you do realize that there's physical differences in brain activity when you have depression?