Micromanaging vs. Fixing a problem

Micromanagement is a side-effect of desperation, when someone starts to micromanage something, does so because he has very little understanding of what is causing the problems or what it will lead to that thing that is being micromanaged to prosper.

So instead to try to understand things he starts to control everything, in the hope that like that he is going to avoid most of the potential negative consequences. However because the cause of the issue is not being addressed, the issue is going to persist despise of all the efforts.

There are two ways to self sabotage yourself, one is to be to passive and don't take any action, and the other way is to obsess about something, you are doing way too much, to the point that you are hurting yourself and your goals.

Micromanagement is a form of obsession, the only benefit that I can think about is some temporary relief for your anxiety. Not even fixing it, but just getting some temporary relief.

Anxiety is the result of ignorance, where there is a lot of knowledge there isn't a lot of fear. And if there isn't fear there are also no micro-managers.

There is one very efficient way to stay ignorant, that is arrogance, there is no better way to maintain your anxiety other than assuming that you know everything and that you can do things better than everybody. How else are you going to constantly sabotage yourself from learning and finding out the truth.

Not only it is a horrible ineffective way to solve any problems, but it is also incredibly stressful and unpleasant for the person that is doing the micromanagement as well for the people that are being micromanaged.

This is the paradox of an addict, they don't learn from their own mistakes. It is not like the alcoholic doesn't get a hangover, he actually gets a hangover everyday of his life, but as soon as it is over he just goes back in too drinking, because drinking is how he copes with stress. And being hangover is stressful.

Why you shouldn't be nice!

It is enough to search for the etymology of the word nice to realize that it is not the most healthiest attribute to embody:

nice: Middle English (in the sense ‘stupid’): from Old French, from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, from nescire ‘not know’.

This leads to an odd dilemma if being nice literally means ignorant or stupid. Should you be bad?

That it is a false dichotomy an assumption that the only two options are either nice or bad. As far as I know they are both vices, if nice people are ignorant which means to be willingly uneducated and irresponsible even when information is available to you, while bad means being corrupted, not being able to differentiate between good and evil and justify your evil actions as natural or normal unavoidable part of life.

Both are destructive and self-destructive life philosophies and behaviors, that will not only cause you a lot of sufferance but it also going to affect the people around you.

Virtue is the point between deficency and excess, we could consider being nice the vice that is going to create deficency in someones life and bad or corrupted the vice that is going to lead to excess.

The virtue between these two vices is righteousness, it is the attribute that makes one particularly preoccupied with treating other people in a fair way, and expecting that others are going to reciprocate.

Being righteous makes you a little bit more difficult to be around, because you are going to inconvenient other people whenever it is justify.

Being difficult it just means that you are hard to please, because you now have a quality standard, there is a very justify reason why we find attractive people who are willing to walk away from potential relationships or are not afraid to say no. It indicates that you are a high quality person, and that the relationship with you is going to be one of a higher quality, because you are going to maintain that standards.

There is one pitfall you can fall into whenever you are preoccupied with righteousness, that is to become self righteous. Which is the believe that you are always right and a victim, which is an express way to become corrupted.

This is why righteousness needs to be balanced by humility, which is the realization that you are not perfect and you are very susceptible to mistakes ass well. Which means that even when you make your priority to treat other people fair you are not always going to live to those expectations.    

Anxiety is the emotion of abuse

There are two very obvious symptoms that it will tell you if someone suffered long term abuse. The first one is the inability to express anger in particularly rage, and the second one is the persistent felling of anxiety.

As we are wired to respond to threats by fighting of fleeing, if there is no resolution in the fight you retreat by running away.

And for as long you can't find any resolution by fighting, by expressing your anger in a productive way you are going to retreat and the emotion associated with that is anxiety.  

In order to stop your anxiety you have to restore your capacity of self-defense. Which is very likely that it was destroyed when you were a child.

And the process through which you destroy someones capacity to protect himself is called obedience. Which in modern society is the norm when it comes to treating children.

Whenever they are trying to negotiate with you or ask you for what they need you use some form of coercion like violence or manipulation techniques like grades etc. to induce them pain. Like this they associate pain with asking for what they need and in order to avoid the pain of asking for what they need they stop doing it.

This let's the victim of abuse in a weird state of chronic anxiety, withdrawal and isolation. Often that suppressed rage comes out in all kinds of outlets like aggressive sports, aggressive music, addictions etc. but almost never is being channeled by the victim towards the abuser, so for as long as that last there is no chance of stopping the abuse.

It is not the abuse from years ago that it is causing your anxiety, the abuse that you experience years ago only damaged your deffence system, but your anxiety it is caused by the abuse you received today. All vices happen under the shadow of denial, including letting others abuse you, victims of abuse are in denial about the fact that they are being abused, they would rather blame they're anxiety on the events of the past that are now irrelevant rather than inconvenient others today.  

Self-deffence is about inconvenience, in particular inconvenient others by stopping them to use you in an unfair way. Most of the anxiety experience today by humans comes from other humans, as we eliminated most of others predators, the only effective predator that is taking advantages of humans is the human itself.

However separation will stop the abuse from one person, but it doesn't revers the negative effects of obedience, which means that you remain with a lower deffence mechanism and you are vulnerable to be attacked by others.

Predators attack the weak members of a species, and the more abuse you experience the more dysfunctional you have become, so the harder it will be to form relationships with sane people, because they are going to run away from the dysfunction. Can't really blame them for that.

The solution is to learn to inconvenience other people whenever it is justify, you don't want to be either nice or bad, I found the best way to be is difficult, if others are treating you well there is no point in creating any unnecessary drams, if they don't it is best to inconvenience them with your words and actions.   

Technology = Stress

Technology doesn't make your life easy, it makes it more complicated, and the more complex something is the more ways for it to fail and malfunction and because you don't fully understand it, the less of a chance for you to be able to fix it by yourself or maintain it.

And whit this added complexity comes a lot of stress in to your life. Everything has a cost and a benefit, and the benefit of technology is that it allows people to do things that are impossible without it, like have a pleasantly cool room in the middle of the summer, communicate over long distance, fly etc. but all this comes at the cost of making your life more complex and at the same time more stressful.  

I am far from being against technology, I actually love it it opens so many doors and can bring so much potential in to someones life, but I am also starting to understand the Amish.

Simplifying your life by using mostly low tech technology is a major way to reduce stress in to your life.  

Modern human are almost completely removed from nature, the more technology we adopted in to our life the bigger that distance become, which made us really bad animals. Not animals in the sense of uncivilized as much as weak, sick and unhappy.

We are like animals in captivity, we get all the problems that animals at the zoo get, diseases that don't exist in nature, reduced life spans, disrupted and bizarre reproductive and socialization patterns. The only difference between animals at the zoo and modern humans is that we are not hold in by electrified fences or force, we are trapped by the convenience and pleasure that technology brings.

The Pandora's box is already opened, there is no way back, technology is indispensable it would be hard to function in most places without it. But that doesn't mean that there are no ways to manage it better.

In the case of technology more is not always better, having the latest gadgets very rarely adds anything major to your life. Like for example smartphones, the only thing that my smartphone did to me is made me stay in bed longer, added a couple of work hours to my day and made me less social. Overall the negative effects that it had on me are way bigger than the positive, so I got ride of it. Which was an oddly liberating experience.         

Consciousness is the problem and the solution

Being self aware it is not necessarily a positive thing. Whenever you refer to someone as being self conscious, it means that the person you are referring to, is far to aware of herself and his surroundings, as well as all the potential dangers and risks that could happen at any points.

And that is causing that person to self censor herself unnecessarily, or avoid certain parts of life to avoid the inherent danger that you could find there. The more aware you are of yourself, the more you are of all the potential things that could go wrong, in order to control that anxiety you might find it very tenting to diminish your life.

This is where the desire of the average person comes, to escape reality and not be very concerned of what the truth really is, because the truth is often scary.

Being conscious is like trying to talk over the echo of your own voice, it makes it almost impossible to talk coherently.

Sadly we are trapped here with this mind that it is so conscious of itself, as far as I know there is no way to destroy or effectively reduce consciousnesses without major negative side effects.

If you live your life in denial you won't live to your full potential, as far as other solution humans have been trying along the history like drugs or lobotomies they have their really obvious down sides.

There is no way back since you know things you can't unknown them. The only way that is available is forward.

If consciousnesses is like noise that is preventing you from expressing freely or functioning, and it is impossible to eliminate it. The only available option left is to learn to manage it.

This is possible using consciousness itself, because you are conscious it means that you can become aware of the fact that being so conscious is causing you some problems, which can motivate you to find a solution to this problem.

Incomplete knowledge is what is causing you anxiety, knowing enough about something is what will reduce your anxiety. This is why expanding your awareness about yourself and your environment is the solution to anxiety derived from awareness.

How to set goals without stressing yourself

I don't know how you are but sometimes when I thing about all the things that I have to do in a day I can feel my heart racing.

There is the typical advice in the self-help community that you should set small and simple goals, like that it is more likely for you to do it and less of a chance to fail.

But this doesn't work that well for me because, even if I set a small goal as an intermediate for a bigger goal, I still know where the final destination is and all the potential bad things that could happen on the way there. So it is still stressful.

Most of the advice I received and reed about goals, it to either trick yourself to do more than you would normally do, or minimize the amount of failure and trial and error you are going to go through in order to accomplish your goals.

Which I think is the wrong approach, what we tend to call failure in the modern world is really just part of the normal learning process. Whenever you are attempting to accomplish something you will defiantly encounter some failure along the way.

It is the believe that you should accomplish things easy and without failure that gives you the impression that you deviated from the right path that makes you abnormally stressed.

In the deffence of everybody that is doing this, sadly this is how the education system is set up. Because you have been around people that punished mistakes whenever you were a child, you received wrong feedback for normal consequences of the process.

If you are going to set people for success in life you have to do the opposite of that, you are going to teach them how to fail. How to take small calculated risks so they don't put themselves and anybody else in any amount of serious danger that will cause permanent damage. This is why the conventional school system is criminal, it have done almost nothing good then sabotaged generation after generation.

With the things that you want to accomplish in your life is not where you should avoid failure, it is where you should fail the most. Because that will give you the necessary experience to build the skills that you need to accomplish your goals.

I have developed a game I like to play with myself, whenever I fell unsatisfied wherever I am and stressed because of it. I start counting how many time I am going to fail each day until I accomplish my goal.

It is very likely that even if you are not at the finish line tomorrow you are getting in a very subtle way better and better every day, and acknowledging that will give you the right feedback that you are on the right track and diminish your stress.              

Life is an extreme sport

Life is a dangerous sport to play, there are threats and danger waiting for you under every corner. Nobody who is playing this sport will survive, this sport is exhausting and it is killing 100% of the people who are playing it.

Think of it like this, how miserable your life would be if you would go through the effort every day to prepare yourself to skydive from a plane. You would go through the briefing, put on the gear, get on the plane feel all the anticipatory anxiety in the plane eventually reach the drop point, and than have your emotions overwhelm you and never actually jump.

On the ride back to land you are probably going to feel bad that you didn't jump, we could probably call that depression. And next day you go through the same cycle of preparation and anxiety followed by avoidance and depression. Over and over again until the end of your life.

Most people lives is like attempting to skydive without ever jumping from the plane. They are on a vicious cycle of anxiety and depression, but they lack relaxation and excitement from their life because they are never put themselves in any danger. So there is no high to it.

Sadly these three things danger, relaxation and excitement all live in the same place on the edge at the point where you are completely uncertain if you are going to succeed or fail.

Avoiding one of them, means that you are going to also avoid the other two. Leaving you with a boring and stressful life.

The ironi is that we are trapped in this skydiving tour, the decision to get on that plane doesn't belong to you, that decision was taken by your parents years ago when they decided to have you.

So the only way for you to have any excitement and calm in your life is to actually jump. Extreme sports are enjoyable because they put you in such a high amount of danger that there is nothing you can do to prevent any of the negative consequences. If you are free falling and something goes wrong with your parachute what are you going to do in mid air!? Panic is going to accomplish nothing, you actually have much bigger chances to survive and solve the problem with the parachute if you stay calm. So it forces you to surrender to your experience, because it is the best survival strategy.

Don't get me wrong I am not saying that you should start doing any extreme sports, I am using it as a metaphor for life, as a suggestion that perhaps it is better to approach life more like an extreme sport.

It is a little more subtle than this in real life as far as I noticed people adopt two avoidance strategies. One they pretend that they aren't even in the plain they become apathetic as jumping is not going to make any difference.

The other avoidance strategy is by pretending that they are jumping, by becoming obsessed, as in a way if they master certain aspects of the sport that have no danger they are going to reach such a high level of mastery that they are in a place where it is impossible to fail.

Not to confuse this with people who are trapped in dangerous environments with people who are abusive, where avoiding that environment is probably the best thing to do.