Life's What You Make It - Pt 2

[fela fan]

Yes and no ...



Being a nice person ultimately gets you nowhere

Yes and no???? How high is your fence?!

And if being a nice person means being nice to oneself first and foremost, then it gets you exactly where you want to be in life. What others do will have negligible impact coz one thing is you will have very low expectations, and you will have a very high acceptance.

To my mind being a nice person is the ultimate place to arrive at, but so long as you started with yourself before moving onto others.

 

[Purdie]

And i reckon life is a series of todays, forever the present if you like. ..we have the choice to choose, should we so choose to...

And the past shapes how we tackle the tommorrows too. Even if that means we deny tommorrow's existence ...
We have the choice to live for a new day, or we can relish in ... can't think of the word and it's too late .... should we choose to do so

 

[Purdie]

but humans were born with choices, and however hard they may be, we have the choice to choose, should we so choose to...

It all depends how much shit you got on your plate before you were old enough to make your own choices. Humans are NOT born with choices. Have you ever given a 18-month old the choice between a green or pink dummy? They will take both. My little girl is 26 1/2 months now and she is just learning about choosing ...

And if being a nice person means being nice to oneself first and foremost, then it gets you exactly where you want to be in life. ... one thing is you will have very low expectations, and you will have a very high acceptance.

Again, if you tell any child for long enough they are ugly and stupid they will go into their teens believing themselves to be ugly and stupid. They will have very low expectations and a very high acceptance too since it will deflect from the fact they (see themselves as) are ugly and stupid.

If we had a shitty upbringing, abuse, whatever, then okay granted, i need to think about that more. The mind and the soul have infinite capacity that we merely need to tap into.

Think about that? Maybe you should define in your own mind what would have been shitty had it been you and then compare how much shittier it could have been. That would be a good start.

Now it is personal ... You want to know about my fence? It goes up and down. Tends to balance out around the full moon. For the better.

For me personally it needed a move out of my country into a new culture and society, one where i no longer felt the unspoken demands to conform to society, to say the right thing, to do the right thing. I know the choices i make now, the freedoms i have, did not exist for me before this move. Maybe it was the move, maybe just getting older.

I did like you a long time ago.
Society is about conforming. No more, no less.

 

[fela fan]

Society is about conforming. No more, no less.

Well we can fully agree on that.

You talk a lot about how what happens in childhood will influence your life. I agree too.

But i'm being rather more concerned about the thread title and the general ability of folk to achieve this, rather than individual circumstances.

When i say humans are born with choices, what i mean is that once they're no longer puppies, then they will find they have choices. How many and how easy they might be will indeed be beholden to their particular past.

But anyone CAN get over their past, anyone CAN forge a new life for themselves.

I'm just accepting that the premise of the thread is correct, and i'm stating that i agree with it. If you're imprisoned by a shitty past, then you will still find that life is what you make it, coz you're doing your own life and it's reflecting that.

Kids have no choice.

Adults do, even those who had a bad time as kids. They just have a harder starting point. But they can escape their past. Plenty have done, one on this website that i know of.

Life is what you make of it. Totally agreed. Whether you take control or not is up to you.

 

[Purdie]

But anyone CAN get over their past, anyone CAN forge a new life for themselves.

Not everyone can get over their past. Some people manage to top themselves before they manage to get over their past. Some people top themselves because everytime they turn a corner there is some prick there throwing all their previous failures back in their face.

You are contradicting yourselves. On the one hand you tell us humans are born with choices, on the other you agree that kids have no choice. Actually kids do have choice much more so then the humans that are new born.

Originally Posted by fela fan
And i reckon life is a series of todays, forever the present if you like. ..we have the choice to choose, should we so choose to...

If life is what you make it ... and you prefer this life as a series of todays ... the only choice you have made is to be stuck in what is comfortable ... which is today ...

"Life is Life" (said laibach in 1980-something) Seems an obvious thing to say but yet the obvious is overlooked, so people tend to search for something deeply profound when asked to define it. We'll all wonder about the question now and then, and when we get tired of thinking about it, we'll just give up and resume living it.

 

[D]

I selected option one, but not because I think each individual has complete control (or anywhere close to it) of their lives. Shit happens to you and you have the capacity, hopefully, to reflect on it (hence the bit about perceptions in option two) *and* make choices in response to your perceptions.

It's not *all* action or *all* thought/feeling. I guess I should have selected both; but it seems to me that #1 done effectively implies #2.

 

[D]

Oh, and, of course, you cannot change your past...it's not about trying to exert some kind of absolute autonomy over all events, people, and emotions you encounter/experience in your time on earth.

Maybe I should I have selected facile bollocks.