When was the last time anything happened exactly according to a plan? You may have the best plan possible, with every issue thought of, and contingencies prepared, but there’s always that nasty little variable that sweeps in like a wrecking ball and demolishes your damn perfect plan.
Around a decade ago, I heard (or read) this quote that says, Even the best-laid plans don’t survive the first contact with the enemy. I may be paraphrasing that, and I don’t know exactly who said that golden piece of human philosophy. But I know that the guy who said it was a legendary military commander/strategist who might have been the mastermind behind the American Pacific campaigns during World War Two and went on to command forces even in the Korean conflict. Then again, I might be wrong.
Sure, you’d say nothing can and will go according to plans. The obvious solution to this is to just improvise at the moment, right?
Of course, it is. But then, some variables are more regular at screwing up stuff than any of the constants that we can think of while planning this crap. You know what they are although you may not acknowledge it.
Unfortunately, I’m also getting shot at by these variables. We’re all responsible for our own monsters that fight us on our path. It’s our choices, our habits of falling prey to the brutally self-destructive distractions that are of our own making. Procrastination is a f#@$ed up demon that seems to enjoy terrorizing us at every moment. The brutal truth is, this damn demon is nothing but our slave as it only does our bidding.
Now, you may be angry for clicking on a click-bait headline that piqued your interest with the words – “Chaos”, “Perfection”, and of course, the F-word. I don’t want this to be an article on self-improvement and productivity stuff. We’re already being overflowed with that from everywhere. And, again, this article isn’t really about procrastination. Some or even many of you reading this article may have no problem with the procrastination demon, as you’ve managed to slay it long ago.
The previous paragraph made me realize about another demon that’s hounding us. The Instant-Gratification scumbag! The easy scapegoat for this is the internet. We can all curse the internet’s existence, to the very people we interact with due to the internet, while we are on it every day like we are high on a soul-sucking drug.
Like all great innovations, this network of networks, the world wide web, started with good intentions. Almost every silicon valley genius wanted to develop our lives as humans, to speed up the evolutionary process into an advanced sci-fi utopian society.
Plot twist, it’s already led us into an ethically bankrupt dystopia. Spoilers – it’s not new. All the factors for this, and the dystopia itself, has existed from the beginning of our species’ time on this planet.
We chase after comforts, revel in pleasures, just like an Epicurean retard. Everyone we know, including ourselves, want the easy fix, the bloody shortcut, the fast process, the painless procedure, instant results. This just makes us easy targets for legally allowed scams, i.e., marketing tactics, and also innovators.
An innovation sells and lasts in the market only when it decreases pain while increasing comforts and pleasures. F#@$ that. That’s the reason we’ve been growing weaker as a species, with every advancement we make towards the so-called evolutionary ladder. I mean, we’re getting weaker emotionally and psychologically, in mind, body, and spirit.
And yes, I do feel like a hypocrite as I’m writing this judgemental crap about us humans. I too am a victim to this chaos, as unfortunately, I’m also human. Thinking critically and introspecting on this can seem fun, or rather painful for some of you, but I do feel that this sort of self-awareness, i.e, being brutally honest with ourselves can lead to the solution, if there is one.
For any problem we face, those of us who like to view it with practically analytical thinking can instantly give perfect solutions to anything. But when do we actually execute any of these perfect solutions? Rarely. At least, I know that it’s my problem.
You may be facing some other major problems. We all have problems. Problems are a constant. The solution is to choose the problems we want to have. That might be trippy. Hold on . . . It gets weirder.
Imagine a world at the peak of human innovation. Every problem has been solved, all pain has been eliminated, there’s complete comfort for everyone, and we are all happy as $#@%.
That would be just like a bunch of pot-heads, who realize their potential of getting to smoke up the best cannabis in the universe, forever, and even getting paid to do it.
Sounds scary? Like the collapse of humanity? That’s exactly what happens when we run away from pain, and chase pleasures. But chaos is eternal. We’ll want to do something, even have the perfect practical plans set up for it, but at the moment of execution, we usually give in to some meaningless bullshit. And we even justify our damn choices.
One of the practical reasons why we don’t execute is because most of us want things to be perfect. Our work, our life, our relationships with people, and other crap. News flash! Perfection doesn’t exist. It never did and never will.
Perfection is just a mirage. A temporary illusion when we find it in others’ work. This mythical illusion of perfection can and will send us on never-ending paths of unhappiness, regrets, and misery. No matter what you do or create or have, it’ll never be really perfect. It can seem perfect in the moment, but moments don’t move on with you.
First, let’s understand perfection. Perfection is just a perspective and a temporary view. So, f#@$ it, move on and be free without ever needing anything to be truly perfect. On the bright side, when perfection is destroyed, we’ll be free to go further and beyond it to a place called reality. And despite all its flaws, reality is damn beautiful because of its flaws.
This can sound chaotic. But what isn’t chaotic? Nature, the world of people, and the world of what people have created, and the insides of our minds, are more chaotic than chaos itself.
That sounds cheesy, but I don’t care. Now, to understand all this crap, and maybe, connect the dots, let’s go back to how the internet screwed us up.
The internet, social media, and everything online, is empty. It’s filled up with what we, humans, stuff into it. Easy assess to information is should theoretically good.
We can stay updated on events around the world, learn anything and everything about any topic that fancies us, communicate constantly with like-minded people from every corner of the Earth, fight over ‘social justice’ issues, and do all sorts of fun stuff.
But we use it for peddling stupid memes, spewing hate, feeling righteous and justified with our tight beliefs, and get sucked into the bottomless abyss of numerous streaming services, social media posts, and the infinite expanse of content, most of which we may never practically use in our life.
Once again, I’m not blaming the internet. Of course, you are reading this article on the internet after I wrote it on a laptop that’s almost always connected to the internet.
The real problem is us, the damn humans. When we invented gunpowder, we didn’t stick to using it in mining and solving other problems. We used it to blow up other homo sapiens. Whenever we get access to any groundbreaking technology, we mostly use it in the dumbest ways possible.
Siggy Fraud explained how humans are irrational animals whose minds are completely controlled by primitive emotions, desires, and urges. His academic research papers go on to show how humans are a bunch of horny, mindless apes that always seem to be snorting copious amounts of crack. The really scary disaster was when Siggy Fraud’s nephew began practically applying this research to permanently f@#$ up all of humanity. But that’s too scary to dwell in this article.
If the above paragraph sounds like a sick piece of dark comedy, then let me unmask Siggy Fraud to reveal the man underneath. Of course, he’s Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry and neuroscience. He’s one of the most brilliant men to have existed, a real crazy genius, just like every other nerve-wracking intellectual.
Okay, this piece is going all around, just like the issue I’m trying to address. Humans aren’t the logical and rational beings that we all thought we are. We’re all a bunch of emotional apes, and it doesn’t really matter.
The point is, we are our own chaos, but we can ride it like the fun rocky road that we can make it be. We are our own demons and angels. We are our own gods and anti-gods. The eternal wars inside us are completely in our control.
Back in the 1960s, a young Peter Parker was told the words, With great power, comes great responsibility, by his Uncle Ben. But we all know Uncle Ben died soon after that.
What the good, old, OG Spidey still doesn’t realize is that – With great power also comes great irresponsibility. Maybe that’s why he’s still fighting the same villains, gets great stuff only to lose it all in his life, over and over again, in an endless vicious cycle.
Though we humans have the power of gods, we’ll always be irresponsibly emotional gods. Though we can theoretically control our chaos, we end up getting beaten and thrashed by our chaos. But destroying our capacity for emotions will only end up turning us into mindless, brain-dead, vegetables.
Having a connection between our remaining amounts of rational thinking and our excesses of emotional craziness can be the perfect dirt bike for riding into the tornado of chaos.
How to do it? I wouldn’t be thinking about this if I knew the perfect answer. (as perfection doesn’t really exist) Then, all we can hope is to make the right choices, put in the work regularly, and do what we must, with the intention to keep executing till we may someday get good at it. To put in constant efforts until it can seem effortless. To strive for good, rather than perfect.
This requires the willingness to endure the pain, in order to come out of the fiery crucible in good form. When comforts and pleasures are our values that guides us forward, then we’ll always be a slave to chaos.
Rather, embrace discomfort, endure the pain, learn and persevere to be good. The phrase – No pain, No gain, isn’t something that we need to say to make yourselves feel high and mighty. It’s an ideal on how to practically live our lives, as nature intended humans to do.
We all have passions which we fell in love with. But once things got hard, we couldn’t stay in love with that work but chose to dwell in bitter nostalgia and comforting lies. Our passions may be the most difficult relationships in our lives. It needs more work, perseverance, commitment, and attention than anything else.
This, like anything else, needs real honor and honesty while facing it. Comforting lies, safe spaces, entitlement, are just unproductive delusions. We’re shown those who’ve already made it, without seeing those who are making it. We’re shown solutions, without learning to practically solve problems ourselves.
Anyone who has been in the military would tell you this, or a variation of it – Embrace the suck! Of course, I respect that ideal and those tough people. That phrase does sound motivating. But motivation, like coffee and perfection, is always temporary and fleeting, as it’s not practical.
The only practical path here is self-discipline and making the right choices, sacrificing what we don’t need, in order put in our best efforts, constantly, and bettering our best consistently. Any obstacle that you feel is keeping you back, is really just an excuse that you’re using to not make the needed effort. At least, that’s the case for most of us, including myself. People with less than what we have, with more practical problems than what we’ve ever faced, have put in the effort to do the kinds of legendary stuff that we never even try.
How do we practically execute it? I’m still figuring it out, and I’m extremely lazy as I give in to comforts and distractions. I don’t know when I will put in the needed work. Until then, the right choice is to place one step in front of the other and keep making the efforts, consistently.
There is no perfect solution, no way to be perfect, as perfect is just another psychedelic hallucination. So, f@#$ that, and go ride the chaos. What’s inside this chaos? We’ll know when we learn to navigate through it.
What more do you need? Go do the work to slay your monsters and grab whatever is at the other end, or die trying. . . At least that’s what honorable heroes do . . . Let’s face it, the world we live in isn’t the censored bullshit found in children’s fairy tales. Reality is brutal. The only way to defeat our monsters is to be deadlier than the monsters we face.
Do comment below with any opinions, or if you have anything more to add to it. And please do share the link to this article on any social media platforms and messaging platforms, in order to entrap more unlucky souls into reading this. This article is intended to help anyone who needs it.
(Editor’s notes –
- For further help in solving the problems addressed in this piece, I recommend reading –
* Deep Work by Cal Newport: a productivity masterpiece written by an IT sector worker, which focuses on the digital distractions of our era and going in-depth into our work, mainly needed in knowledge-based work.
* Grit by Angela Duckworth: a psychological study that focuses on perseverance, effort, and of course, Grit. The author is has spent decades researching this field, and she’s also a professor. Lots of case studies and other stuff.
* The last two books which the legendary Mark Manson wrote. Read them in order for your own sake. They’re the greatest philosophical masterpieces of our time, attacking the readers with brutal honesty and tough realism, while still being hilarious at times with dark humor and current day slang.
If you don’t have the time or the ability to read full-length books, then Audible is the best solution. Get the audiobooks and listen while commuting, doing chores, or while working out, whatever. I’m not going to put an affiliate link to an Audible membership offer and make money from you. Get it on your own, use the Google search or the App Store/Play Store.
- I’m my own editor here. Maybe because no conventional editor would let me write such a brutally honest piece like this.
- This article can lead to more questions than answers, for those of you who dwell deep into critical thinking. I agree that I haven’t explored many necessary concepts related to this article’s theme. I’ll be exploring these fun stuff and will be happy for anyone who’s interested in this to follow along. )
Keep reading.
Be productive.
Stay classy.
And . . .
Be limitless.
-Kronos Ananthsimha