↖ Homepage of the site 'What to do with your life?' What is difficult to overcome to succeed in life?The natural slope of easeWhat is difficult is not to give up sincerity. From childhood, we feel the pressure to be a good student, a “good” son, a “good” daughter. Later, be a “good” collaborator, a “good” collaborator, a “good” husband, a “good” wife, a “good” father, a “good” mother. Failure to respond to these injunctions exposes oneself to the risk of exclusion and social downgrading. In fact, when our natural behavior does not produce the expected result, due to lack of capacity or because our natural behavior is not aligned with social expectations, we are tempted by hyper-adaptation, which consists of no longer seeking only the maximum effect, to be able to satisfy social injunctions, at the price of accepting what seems absurd or unjust to us. This leads us to adopt a social mask, to pretend. This is the easy way out, and this is the easiest way to achieve social success. However, we are generally not aware of the counterpart linked to the cognitive dissonance that this produces between our beliefs and our behaviors. Indeed, the absence of struggle leads us, under the pressure of this cognitive dissonance, to gradually incorporate, without our own free will, the beliefs and values u200bu200bof the social environment with which we were not initially in agreement. . So that the sincere part of us finds itself gradually relegated to the depths of the unconscious, and is no longer perceived as a simple existential malaise whose origin ceases to be clear. The need to compensate and maintain this discomfort in the depths potentially results in 6 harmful consequences:
This is the Faustian pact. However, it should be noted that on the one hand the devil does not travel in person, so we are not aware of having signed, and on the other hand, the position we take in practice is generally neither an absolute yes, nor an absolute no, but an intermediate result of small successive renunciations. It is simply the economy of struggle, which we grant ourselves for ease and opportunism, which gradually translates - through the effect of cognitive dissonance - into the form of the trio dependence, mental confinement and irresponsibility. The temptation of a good self-image through small gesturesAs explained in the question 'Why are small actions for the planet dangerous?', small gestures are a powerful tool for reconciling personal interest and good self-image at a low cost. However, this leads to lying to ourselves to rule out more serious and more involving solutions that may present themselves in the course of life, and therefore powerfully encourages us to gradually slide down the slope of pretending. The only thing that can prevent us from gradually sliding is to remain dissatisfied with the weakness of our action in view of the scale of collective problems. Fight methodicallyFor those who choose to fight more intensely, to gradually get rid of diffuse discomfort, here are the difficult points that we recommend working on:
Adopt realistic modelsMany spirituality books take the Dalai Lama or Buddha as an example of an exemplary attitude. These are bad examples, just as if we took the example of some super rich as a model of money management. Indeed, the Dalai Lama or Buddha are princes, that is to say they have a guaranteed high social position, so they can simply ignore social ambition and its tool generalized nepotism, without paying the price. . In addition, the report Buddhism, the law of silence which we refer to more broadly in the question 'What is an adult?' shows that these people who seem to be models because their lives have not confronted them with the problem, are not necessarily such in absolute terms. Go deeperPoint 1. explains the alternative title envisaged for this site at the level of the introduction: small manual to no longer be fooled by rhetoricians. Regarding point 2, see questions 'Why do humans reason massively wrong?' And 'What conditions must be met to produce serious reasoning?'. Regarding point 3, see question 'What is an adult?' Regarding point 4, see question 'What is impermanence?'
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