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How to Handle the Beast
The Beast in our lives
The Beast has many forms. The Doom-Anxiety Beast. The Regret Beast, or the Despair Beast.
The Beast has specific characteristics. It erodes your feeling of control and eats away at your ability to function when you least expect it. But it can never entirely take away that last bit of agency. This bit of agency can be used to control the Beast.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
The Fragility of Ordinary Life
Our modern lives are only made stable by a surprisingly fragile configuration of routines. When one or more parts is broken, problems appear everywhere. And even the most bland adjustment could thr...
When You Don't Know What's Wrong
Solving a problem is very difficult when its cause is hard to trace. You can’t isolate the trouble the same way you would dunk a leaky inner tube into a bathtub to see where the bubbles come out, for example.
What you can do is try to focus on better inputs: i.e, if you're struggling because of the pandemic and its social and health consequences, try pouring more vegetables, books, and exercise into the front end of the system, while reducing the intake of sugar, Netflix, and news.
Feel-good activities
There are 2 types of feel-better activities:
- Those that immediately improve your mood, but often at the expense of overall well-being. Easy to start doing, and often hard to stop, they tend not to have long-term rewards.
- Those are activities that improve your well-being, and your mood too, but usually not right away. You never regret these activities and they take effort.
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Key Ideas
Productivity is a deeply personal thing
Action has momentum
Work as a linear function
We assume that the amount of productive output we create is directly proportional to the number of hours we input. But the truth is that most thoughtful, brain-intensive work does not unfold like this. The only work that is linear is really basic, repetitive stuff.
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Key Ideas
Our inner 'demons'
Our inner Demons, or inner voices, make us do irrational, stupid and selfish things, based out of fear.
We hide and distract ourselves from our inner voice, which is nothing but our fear and ...
Our common negative parts
Some of our common 'demons' are:
- Procrastination
- Laziness
- Self-loathing
- Comparing yourself with your peers, leading to envy
- Loser mentality.
The downward spiral
Our inner demons lead us to negatively judge ourselves, further leading to avoiding that judgment, and eventually starting the internal self-destruction, if the negative downward spiral is left unchecked.