Below are some ways to have an average life and to not make progress.
- Make an assumption without getting enough information
- Believe that others share the same understanding of language that you do
- Do not make clear declarations of wants, expectations or boundaries
- Be afraid to be alone and be willing to put-up with almost anything to make sure it doesn’t happen
- Fall for the idea of something and enroll others to play a role in making that idea real vs. letting them be self expressed
- Be insecure
- Have a strong need to be liked
- Be a dreamer and give other people the benefit of the doubt
- Do not learn from your mistakes
- Put other peoples needs in front of your own
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood there exists a moment of time in which we exist with grounded and realistic possibilities – it’s the few weeks between wanting to be a cowboy rock-star astronaut and accepting that we need to go to school, get a good job, pay taxes, settle down and pass along our wisdom to the next generation.
It would be easy, and untrue, for me to say that you shouldn’t give a crap about anyone else because we need other people in order to amount to anything. Be it their money, their labor, their ideas, their esteem, a connection to them, or their love, other people are important. But what isn’t important are most of the reasons why we may view them as important. You do not become less worthy if someone isn’t nice to you, you do not become more worthy when you sacrifice your own needs / wants to help another person out, you do not become unlovable if you do not have a romantic partner, and your life does not have less meaning simply because something you planned and worked hard on didn’t turnout the way you had hoped it would.
We need people in our life and in society to make everything possible, what we do not need is the constant internal chatter about them and the impact they have on our lives. The moment of grounded realistic possibilities is the moment right before we began to embody the narcissistic obsession about what other people thought and allowed these thoughts to impact our feelings and actions.
If you want to make progress in life you need to accept that other people exist and serve an important function in your life. But you need to remain diligent when it comes to what this function is. Share the planet with them, but notice always the important aspects of your life and who they are impacted by your view of what other people think, feel and do.
In the end, you need to know what you want out of life and this is impossible when you are spending a lot of your time fixated on what you think other people want out of life.