If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.
Interpretation
Desiring happiness and fulfillment is common, but these vague aspirations lack specific meaning.
Mark Manson highlights the notion that while many people express a desire for happiness, family, and a satisfying job, these aspirations are so universally shared that they often lose their significance. The statement urges individuals to dig deeper into what truly makes them happy instead of settling for generic goals that everyone has.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing meaningful goals.
Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.
I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.
Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are.
The first and perhaps most important thing to realize about being happier in life is to stop trying to be so happy in life.
Writing/reading is like visiting another person's brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.
I think humility - which I think is a very good value to adopt - is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance.
Get the most out of everything in your life; the happiness and the sadness, the success and the failure...get a good perspective of what life is all about. Let the orchestra of your life play all the notes, the high notes, the low rumblings of the difficulties and perplexities that all we all face.
That's another great thing about getting older. Your life is written on your face.
No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.
It's alright, just wait and see, your string of lights is still bright to me. Who you are is not where you've been. You're still an innocent. It's okay life is a tough crowd, 32 is still growing up now.
You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.
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