Category: Philosophy

  • Success at what cost?

    Success at what cost?

    The core of being human is the need to be significant to others, especially with significant others.

    Our efforts to be successful feel empty and unfulfilling if we have no reason to believe that it positively impacts the lives of those around us.

    So, we set out to be successful so that we can be valued, so that we can feel fulfilled or at least have reason to believe that we’re making a meaningful contribution towards the good around us.

    But, what happens when we have an unhealthy self-esteem?

    Our focus shifts from wanting to be of benefit, to being afraid of not being good enough.

    To compensate for the fear of not being good enough, we focus on equipping ourselves as best we can to avoid failure.

    Ethics and integrity become optional when what feels like survival overtakes our better judgement.

    And in this way, our low self-worth becomes the basis on which we raise our children, convincing them about the importance of education, while setting loose boundaries for integrity.

    Thus, by not understanding the state of their self-worth, we raise what appears to be narcissists while believing we’re raising responsible adults.

    All because we exaggerated the importance of education compared to the emphasis that we placed on self-esteem and integrity.

    No one intentionally or deliberately raises children with a low self-worth, but we cannot give what we don’t have.

    That’s why, when we’re lacking in self-worth as adults, we compensae for it by focusing on equipping our children to fit into the world around them, rather than to define that world.

    That’s how we place education and success above honesty and integrity, or sound character, while only intending good for our children. Or for ourselves.

    This is yet another reason why the best gift you can give your child is not a good education, it’s a healthy self-esteem.

    The rest will take care of itself.



  • Escaping addiction

    Escaping addiction

    It’s not drugs that steal our children from us. Like us, they also need to feel significant.

    Taking drugs is not just a bad habit. It’s a means to escape what we don’t want to deal with in the world around us.

    Is it a bad decision? Absolutely. Because escaping something never resolves it, it only defers it to a later time.

    But we all indulge in escapism of some kind, that’s why we have little to no communication in homes that centre around technology or social media, leaving the young ones struggling to find a space in which they belong, physically and emotionally.

    The emotional connection that they then forge with fellow escapees is what makes drugs the escape of choice.

    If we treat them as addicts, they will behave like addicts. If we deny what is lacking in their emotional make up, we’ll deny ourselves the opportunity to address it.

    Addressing it doesn’t only benefit them, it also benefits us because the only reason that they would feel emotionally isolated is because we’re not emotionally accessible.

    That means that we’re also denying ourselves the sweetness of life because if we’re emotionally unavailable, then we’re convinced that what is important to us is not important to anyone else.

    That’s why we lose ourselves to duty and dismiss any demands to be emotionally available for those around us.

    That’s how we create the environment that makes substance abuse or gambling, or other escapes attractive as a coping mechanism.

    Break the cycle.

    It always starts with you.

  • Respond with poetry

    Respond with poetry

    Responding in kind to the trials of life only gives those trials more power.

    Instead, be the eternal romantic.

    Look for the starry sky in the darkness, or the glow of the sunshine behind those grey clouds.

    Romance is not about sharing a moment with another.

    Romance is about embracing a moment for yourself despite the ugly around you.

    Be romantic without waiting for permission.

    Let your response to life be the poetry that uplifts the world.

    There are enough prose writers out there.

    We need more poetry…

    More beauty…

    More sincerity…

    More authenticity…

    Prose is our need to be heard, to be validated, and to be seen.

    Poetry is our gift of everything that is beautiful and gratifying about life.

    If you have the ability to create goodness and peace, that is your ability to write poetry on the timeline of your life.

    Be poetic. Be romantic. Be you.

    Own Your Life.

  • Dehumanising the human

    Dehumanising the human

    Don’t become so fixated on labelling yours, or the behaviour of others, that you lose sight of the human struggle behind that behaviour.

    Labels make it easier for us to deal with stuff.

    The moment we give it a name, we can manage our expectations around it.

    This is fine when it comes to abstract stuff and tasks or problems that we deal with as part of a regular day.

    But it becomes detrimental when we start labelling behaviour and then responding to that label, rather than recognising the legitimacy of the human experience behind that label.

    Popular labels include depression, bipolar, narcissism, and egotists, to name only a few.

    It’s one thing describing what we’re observing as our experience of someone’s behaviour, but the moment we reduce the human to that label, we become part of the struggle that they’re already grappling with.

    We must learn to connect with the human struggle long before we label it as an illness or a deficiency.

    For example, we don’t suffer from depression, but we do have good reason to feel depressed because we’ve lost hope in something important working out the way we need it to.

    And so it is with all other so-called mental illnesses.

    We lose compassion and empathy, and thus disconnect from our own humanness, when we define the entirety of a being by a single label of unacceptable or unpleasant behaviour.

    Reclaim your humanness, so that you may be able to honour the humanness of those around you.

    Start by avoiding self-diagnosis of the emotional state of others.

  • The harm of wishful thinking

    The harm of wishful thinking

    Whenever I hear things like the universe is waiting to give you everything that you want, or manifest what you desire in your life through positive thinking, or put it out there and the universe will answer, I wonder if the proponents of such philosophies would like to tell that to the toddler that was raped, the innocent boy child that was sodomised, or the ones grieving the loss of a loved one in a senseless act of violence. And the list goes on.

    The approach to life that is embodied in this philosophy causes more harm than good because it denies the rights of those around us as we wait to have our needs fulfilled, while diminishing our accountability in fulfilling their rights over us because…well…they shouldn’t expect it from us, they should wait for the universe to answer, not so?

    Before you think I’m being whimsical or disrespectful about such beliefs, consider this.

    At the heart of such a belief system is wishful thinking. Quite literally.

    In the absence of gratitude for what we have, we’ll wish for things that we don’t have.

    In the absence of gratitude for who we are, we’ll wait for others (a.k.a. the universe) to make us feel worthy or significant.

    Without exception, through almost 3 decades of working with people, every single time that I encountered this philosophy, the individual was avoiding the reality of a painful experience or memory that they didn’t know how to process, or found too difficult to even contemplate.

    While we have compassion for the victim of such experiences, we must also consider the victims of such victims.

    Life happens, often in terrible ways, to all of us. Measuring who has it better or worse is a futile exercise, because relative to the context of each person’s life, their experiences carry with it whatever impact it carries.

    So we don’t dismiss that impact. But we also don’t create space for such events to define our quality of life or our contribution towards the lives of others long after the event has passed, because that diminishes the value of what we have, in favour of what we once lost.

  • Do you appreciate you?

    Do you appreciate you?

    When we surrender to what we believe was preordained for us, we give up our ability to influence its outcomes.

    That giving up creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by allowing things to progress in its current path without any effort to disrupt it, convincing us that we were right about it being preordained.

    For this reason, we sometimes allow relationships to degrade to a point of no return because we were convinced that our input or contribution would not change what appeared to be inevitable.

    Gratitude is critical in this process.

    Not gratitude for what we have when we’re faced with loss, but gratitude for what we are capable of when faced with challenges.

    Sometimes, when you take yourself for granted during your moments of ease, you’ll find yourself forced to dig deep and connect with who you are in moments of strife.

    That period of taking yourself for granted is what contributed in some meaningful way towards the strife that followed.

    While we will never know with certainty what to expect from others, we must connect with mindfulness to what the consequences of our choices are, or will be.

    This mindfulness is only possible when we acknowledge the value of who we are.

    That acknowledgement is the root of gratitude, or ingratitude, depending on whether we appreciate who we are, or judge ourselves harshly for supposedly not being good enough.

    You cannot nurture, maintain, or grow something if you don’t connect with the value that it offers.

    Thus, when you lack gratitude for who you are and what positive attributes and traits you possess, you will be incapable of contributing meaningfully towards the upliftment of your life and the lives of those around you.

    That is how the victim mindset slowly sets in, leaving us to believe that our struggle is a definition of our strength and perseverance, while not realising how much of it is in fact self-imposed because of ingratitude.

    It always starts with you.

  • The fallacy of what was meant to be…

    The fallacy of what was meant to be…

    On the surface, this seems like a really positive perspective on life, right?

    But let’s unpack it very quickly.

    Being thankful for the experiences that we’ve had has merit because there is nothing so bad that there is no good in it.

    What we take from our experiences is what gives us the opportunity to grow and to experience greater depths of emotions – both good and bad.

    It’s only in experiencing the bad that we are able to appreciate the good, or else we’d take it for granted.

    However, it’s the last part of this that I believe is a dangerously false notion to adopt.

    Where you’re meant to be by whom? By what?

    When we believe this to be true, we have less reason to question our uninformed or poor decisions that got us to this point because, you know, this is where we’re MEANT to be. Right?

    It’s the last part that is false. It carries with it a fatalistic view of the outcomes of our lives because it implies that no matter what we did, we’d still be at this point because it was meant to be.

    How does this kind of thinking affect someone who is tired of finding their efforts being taken for granted? Or no matter how hard they’ve tried, they keep finding themselves struggling to find peace or healthy relationships, or fulfilment, or success?

    Is it because they were meant to be in such straitened circumstances by some force that g they have no control over?

    Before you whip out the arguments about taqdeer, fate, destiny, and all that, consider what the point would be of our power of choice and reason if everything that happens to us was simply prewritten regardless of our effort to be better or achieve better than that.

    If that understanding of destiny was true, what would be the point of applying ourselves towards any goal at all? Wouldn’t everything happen regardless of our efforts since it was ‘meant to be’?

    It’s more accurate to say that the outcomes of the choices that we made was unavoidable because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. But that’s why we made bad choices, or naive decisions.

    Not because it was meant to be, but because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

    Own Your Life.

  • Positive thinking fallacies

    Positive thinking fallacies

    Important reminder from the archives…

    There is much harm in this widespread acceptance of the so-called power cf positive thinking.

    Most importantly, it suggests that our thoughts inspire the actions of others.

    That is patently incorrect.

    It also suggests that if we focus on positivity, we’re guaranteed to attract positivity.

    That is dangerously incorrect.

    We all wear masks of some kind.

    When someone offers us an opportunity to fill the gaps in our lives that those masks are intended to hide, we are attracted to them, and vice versa.

    A healing spirit will attract a hurt soul, and hurt souls often attract the generosity of a healing spirit.

    But that doesn’t mean that the one that is hurt will choose to be healed.

    Many find comfort in the affection and care that their hurt attracts.

    When that comfort defines their self worth, they will respond aggressively when expected to rise above it, or encouraged to heal from it.

    That’s when the masks fail them and the relationship breaks down.

    This law of attraction thinking is a fallacy that will harm more than it will heal.

    It’s not accurate to say that what we’re focused on is what we will notice.

    If you’re looking for what’s right in your life, you’ll connect with it and nurture it. And if you’re looking for what’s wrong, you’ll see all of it and grow despondent from it.

    Be careful of what philosophy you buy into.