Irza Fidah's Key Ideas from 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think
by Brianna Wiest

It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim.

Manners are cultural social intelligence.

They (socially intelligent person) do not try to inform people of their ignorance.

Imagine it outside of you. You would not look at your heart and think: “This is me.” You think: “That is my heart.”

The only thing that changes you and your life is the awareness of the parts that are not “I.” It is the whole, it is where you end up, it is where you began, it is the one thing, the only thing, that shifts, and raises, and facilitates the spark of awareness that made you question the elements of its vessel.

Creative people are depressed for a reason. The expression and experience of negative emotions are correlated with activation in the right frontal cortex (as well as in other structures such as the amygdala) or in other words, the same areas that are activated when consistently being creative and putting abstract meaning to the concrete reality of whatever your current experience is.

Learn to differentiate what’s actually happening from what you’re currently thinking about. Realize that thoughts are illusions, but powerful ones. Stop pretending you know what other people are thinking. Stop pretending you know what the future holds, indefinitely.

The solution to most of your problems is just changing the way you think about them.

You generally spend more time thinking about your life than you do actually living it. You've replaced "reflection" with "experience" and wonder why you feel unfulfilled.

You don’t want what you want; you want what you’ve known. We are literally incapable of predicting an outcome that is out of the realm of what we’ve known previously.

Self-esteem is not how much confidence you have in how well people perceive you, but how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life.

Logic allows you to see objectively; passion is subjective and consuming.

As C. G. Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When it comes to building the lives we want to lead, we’re taught to start constructing from how we imagine we want things to look.

Half-truths have to be made sense of. The genuine things, the best things, the "most right" things, truly just are. If it's in your life, there's something to be learned from it. The process of unlearning the reasons to justify the illusions is how you reacquaint yourself with the voice that doesn't use words. 

It's ultimately why you choose to get lost in the first place.

Be your worst enemy so nobody else can be. Assume the worst so nobody can surprise you with it. Call it being realistic.

Note to self, "I don’t owe anybody an apology for disagreeing with them."

Suffering teaches us that trying to change the external world to be happy is like trying to change the projection on the screen rather than the projector that’s playing it.

A capacity to feel joy must be balanced by a capacity to know pain. Our world is born of, and exists because of, duality.

Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy–it’s acceptance.

Here a few reasons why we reject positivity:

1. We see it as naive.

2. We're constantly reinforcing our subconscious belief in the negative.

3. We are more inherently fascinated by the negative in the world because we do not understand it.

Because we do not understand the purpose or reason for pain and negativity, we find it unknown and mysterious, therefore, more crucial to attend to. We’re fascinated by the intensity of something we don’t understand, so we end up fueling it more and more simply by paying attention to it.

Your concept of self is an illusion (and construct) as well.

Chasing happiness is trying to keep ourselves sustained by “positive” life events, rather than adjusting the baseline as a whole. Motivating ourselves with the hope of achieving a sustained feeling of “good” is not only unhealthy, it’s impossible.

You don’t need to have every answer, nor will you ever have every answer.