It is not what God is, but what he ought to be that is the problem.

Religious believers when asked what does your religion say about a certain topic, they almost always try to come up with an answer that has nothing to do with what the religion they believe in or follow actually says, but an answer that explains what they think their religion should say about the matter in question or the thing being discussed, based upon the assumption that since their religion is something that has definitely come from God, and God is omniscient and perfect in every way there is, the answer can’t be something other than what they think such God definitely should’ve said, with disregard to what is actually written in religious scripture. The answer is almost always something that has nothing to do with what their religion actually says, but what they think God should’ve said about the thing being discussed. In essence, the understanding of every religious believer of their religion isn’t predicated upon what that religion is, but what that religion ought to be. It is all because religious belief begins with believing that God is perfect, and God has made a certain religion. What do you think that religion would be like? What would such religion say? Exactly, this is what you should think your religion says, without ever bothering or attempting to read any religious text whatsoever. This is a problem because you think you are talking to a religious believer who actually believes in their own religion they’re defending, but in reality, they are only defending a made up version of their religion that has nothing to do with the actual reality or truth about their religion. And that’s why you might find a hard time winning the argument, because they’re not trying to defend their religion. They’re trying to defend their made up version of what God is, or what they think what God ought to have said or be like.

This is why I always find it a very important distinction to be lacking a belief in any God whatsoever due to certainty about the non-existence of any God, as opposed to just being not religious or agnostic, because the latter implies that you don’t believe in religion only, which, after the above demonstration, should be clear to you that it is a position held by both religious believers and non-believers alike, because religious believers have no idea what their religion actually says, which means they also aren’t religious believers, because you can’t believe in something without knowing what it is in the first place.

Prove to yourself that you’re not trying to improve because you think you suck.

When you focus on developing yourself for quite some time, you might end up developing a considerable amount of self-loathing, because trying to improve yourself might be interpreted by your mind as a sign of dissatisfaction with your current state, which might imply that you hate yourself or your current state on some level, and that’s why you need to change, or that’s why you’re trying to change.

One of the things that can lead to making things worse in this scenario is the fact that you never thought of testing yourself to see how far you’ve come, because you’re so focused on getting better and getting ahead, you have no idea how much improvement you’ve reached insofar.

So you have no idea whether or not you are currently good enough at whatever aspect of yourself that you’re trying to improve, and you think on a certain level that you are only trying so hard to improve because you currently are horrible.

As you can see, despite having good intentions, despite doing everything right, you ended up with more self-loathing than that which you’ve had before attempting to go hard or all in on improving yourself.

In this case, it makes sense to assume that attempting to use what you currently have without the intention of improving, or without trying to improve or get any better while doing so, will alleviate whatever sense of self-loathing that presumably developed due to any amount of exclusive focus on improving only during any certain prolonged amount or period of time.

You might find it hard to improve much if you’re already great, which might get you frustrated a little bit, because you feel like you’re not getting any results despite putting in all that amount of work and effort into the process of improving or the continuous betterment of yourself. And lack of awareness of how far you’ve come or how great you currently are might increase that amount of frustration.

Sometimes you’re really that good. You’re just not aware of it.

What can improve you, can differ greatly from what shows you how good you currently are without further improvement.

Test yourself. Show yourself that you have no reason to not feel good about yourself.

I’m not telling you to hold on to being a perfectionist because it is a bad part of you that you need to work and get along with anyway, but because it is one of the best things about you. It’s actually what’s right with you.

You cannot remain passionate about attaining a certain outcome unless you take action towards the attainment of such outcome before it’s too late. No one who has delayed taking action concerning what they were passionate about being or doing for years has managed to get there eventually. In fact, they ended up being advocates for why it’s a waste of time to even try to do or become those things. They find pleasure talking people out of similar dreams all the time, like they’re so noble and virtuous and trying to make the world a better place by stopping other people from ruining their lives by being or doing something that is too ambitious. They take pride in holding other people back, and they call this being rational and realistic. They discourage people from pursuing their dreams, goals, aspirations, desires, ambition, passion, and the betterment of their own lives for a living, and they never feel guilty about it. They think they’re doing the right thing. It’s like a law of nature. You either do it, or end up pushing yourself and other people away from doing it, because you must think you were right about the disastrous decision of giving up on your dreams for the rest of your life, or else you’d regret it for eternity. You’d rather betray your most authentic self, than go through regret, because for some reason you prefer the absence of taking action to putting in the work. You don’t want to be wise. You want to just sound wise. You are afraid of change not because you don’t want to lose your authentic self, but because you have a phobia of getting better. You hate to improve, because you think you’re perfect the way you are from the start. There’s a difference between having a mother that says meh toward whatever achievement you make, no matter how great it is, which makes you think you’re not enough as a human being no matter what you do, and thinking that you are perfect in every way imaginable from the start without even trying anyway, just because this kind of parenting is criminal. She is wrong for having denied you all encouraging emotions. Including the emotion of being impressed by how amazing you are, even if you really weren’t that special back then. It wasn’t the truth, but it was still essential for your growth and development. Still, that doesn’t make you perfect the way you are from the start without even trying. I can’t grant you that, no matter how profound the trauma of the withholding of emotions that you’ve been through is and will always be. I’m not minimizing your trauma, and I’m not victim blaming you. I’m not invalidating your trauma or feelings. I’m not trying to tell you to snap out of it, or that it’s not that big of a deal. I’m not telling you that you are wrong to be or feel hurt this way or to that extent. I will never do any of that. Ever. Narcissistic abuse is arguably the single most horrible and severest form of torture and abuse there is a human being could ever go through, no matter what. What I’m having trouble with is the issue of wanting to heal and find your own true self, while simultaneously demonizing an essential part of your own nature and who you really are; you being a perfectionist. You think you should destroy any perfectionistic tendencies you harbor within you in order to unlock your full potential and maximize your progress, when the desire or attempt to do so only serves as a tool to maximize your self-loathing and imposter syndrome, without positively impacting your success, productivity, creativity, progress, or potential in any way, shape, or form. You want to embrace your true self and nature, except when it comes to your perfectionism or perfectionistic tendencies. I wonder where you guys get your reward from. Will you ever reach true fulfillment at some point, or are you just going to settle for talking about fulfillment only instead for the rest of your lives without ever bothering to try to taste it for yourself at least once? Have you ever tried to pursue being a full-blown perfectionist to the fullest and see where does that lead you? Have you ever felt a proclivity toward correcting mistakes indefinitely with no end in sight just for the love of it, because you are not doing any effort to bypass or suppress the perpetual desire of wanting everything to be divinely perfect? Are you sure that the only outcome of embracing being a perfectionist is to end up being concerned about nothing but avoidance of making mistakes and avoidance of any form of risk taking? Did you find yourself focusing more on the annihilation of mistakes instead of improving the quality of your content, writing, work, or whatever that which you’re creating? Or did you realize that your reluctance or fear of trying to do anything well enough or perfectly is because you don’t believe in yourself, your potential, and your capacity for doing great things enough?

Suppressing your perfectionistic tendencies won’t do you any good. It will just force you to always have no option but to settle for mediocrity.

It’s part of you. It’s part of your nature. It gives you reason to keep going when all else fails. It provides you with endless intrinsic motivation. It makes you aspire for the best. It makes taking care of the quality of your work a no-brainer. It makes whatever that you achieve infinitely more rewarding. It ensures you are always striving for improving yourself and getting better at whatever that you’re doing. It makes you embrace constant and never ending improvement. It means you’ll always be raising your standards and try to make the quality of your life and work better to the best of your ability. It gives you endless energy and makes everything meaningful and worth the struggle. It helps with celebration. It leads to more fulfillment and being whole. It is essential for facilitating the process of radical acceptance of yourself. It is who you are, your true self. Why is that bad? Why are you “struggling” with being a perfectionist? Why is being a perfectionist a trait, characteristic, or part of you that you need to totally reject or disown? Think again.

They did it to themselves. Why wouldn’t they do it to you? That would then be unfair. Since you can’t fully accept yourself because of your shortcomings, why would you fully accept somebody else who has any? Doing so will further lower your self worth and self-esteem, because it would then be proof that you think others are more important than you, and that’s why they deserve from you that which you don’t deserve to give yourself.

If you can’t or don’t love yourself, you can’t and won’t be able to love anybody else. You might have heard that one before, but wondered why. It is supposed to make you capable of loving somebody else more, because you don’t love yourself first, and you don’t want to love yourself more than anyone else. This would only make you love others more than someone who insists upon never loving somebody else more than they love themselves, right? No, it won’t, and here’s why.

You think that you have some sort of maximum love that you can deploy toward a certain candidate or individual, so in case you choose yourself, you won’t ever give that special place, that maximum love, to anybody else, so someone who is willing to give that kind or amount of love to other people instead of themselves, will definitely be someone who loves or is capable of loving other people more than the one who chose to love themselves more than anybody else. As if it’s a matter of quantity.

But you haven’t asked yourself why would someone not love themselves at all.

Think of it in terms of acceptance. If you don’t accept yourself, you won’t accept other people. You think that because you have certain characteristics, you shouldn’t accept yourself. What makes you think you’d accept other people when they display any characteristics that count as grounds for rejection according to your own standards? That would be unfair. You reject yourself for similar reasons. If it were you who was like that or displayed such behavior, harbored such traits, or exhibited such characteristics, you’d disown yourself. You will never accept these things or facts about yourself, and consequently, you’d never love yourself. You will never accept or tolerate these things from anyone, even you. Why would you reject or disown yourself because you were a certain way and not the other, but when others have characteristics or parts of them that are worthy of rejection, or being disowned, you would remain indifferent towards that? You will not just criticize them like your life depends upon it, but you will also think that they should criticize themselves on their own like there’s no tomorrow as well. At least you’d remain incapable of loving them, no matter what they do, because they have some aspects of them that are unlovable, unacceptable, bad, or wrong. And because of that you reject them as beings. You disown them. Because it is all conditional, and it has to be earned. They have to qualify for your love and acceptance.

You might argue that there are things that are unacceptable in this life that if someone insisted upon doing, you’d leave. That I cannot tolerate. And if we just loved everybody on the face of the earth unconditionally, it would dilute the meaning of genuine and true deep unconditional love. You can’t love everybody, except if it’s just a general stance that you take, and in this case it might be safe to assume that you don’t really love anybody in particular. You can also say by trying to love everybody, you’ll end up loving nobody truly.

It’s okay to have standards. I’m not here to tell you to let go of them for the sake of love. It wouldn’t be genuine love. You don’t have to accept anything you don’t authentically like, love, accept, or want. That would be fake love and acceptance. We don’t want that either.

It’s not a matter of accepting stuff that you hate about other people. Even in the name of love. You don’t have to settle. You don’t have to agree about what you would normally disagree on just to keep the peace. You don’t have to think of everybody on the face of the earth as being infinitely likeable.

But pointing out to them why they suck isn’t the purpose of your life. You can see stuff that you hate in other people, without having to waste time or energy on explaining to them why they have a ton of shortcomings, flaws, and stuff that is objectively bad and unacceptable. You don’t get rewarded by doing this. Your entire existence and self-esteem aren’t predicated solely on pointing out to other people anything that they have that could be considered not so perfect or ideal from a certain point of view. In short, who cares?

But if you did this to yourself, if you criticized yourself like there’s no tomorrow for some reason, why wouldn’t you do that with other people? It would be unfair to let people get away with things of the same type or nature of things that you couldn’t stop criticizing yourself because of when you realized you were that bad, had those traits or characteristics, or did something unspeakable or too shameful. If you don’t go easy on yourself in these scenarios, why would you let anyone else off the hook? Ever? Why would you let anyone else get away with it?

But it doesn’t end there. Again, it’s not about considering some traits, characteristics, behaviors, flaws, or shortcomings as unacceptable no matter what, or no matter who displays them. It’s about what type of things you think it’s impossible for you to accept someone because of. You might say, if my partner cheats on me, even once, it’s a dead end. I won’t ever accept them back. No justification will make it okay for you. In fact, trying to explain why you did it will only make it worse. Leave, it’s over. What you’re about to say, I don’t want to know.

I’m not against any of that. But what if you reject and disown people because they don’t like the same type of icecream that you do? What if you reject them because they made a mistake that doesn’t make any negative difference or lead to any negative consequences whatsoever, not now, not later, not ever? What if you criticize everything that doesn’t matter, has no weight or significance, doesn’t lead to anything, just because you’re not allowed to make mistakes, with disregard to what happens as a result of those mistakes? And since you do this to yourself, you are mind blown that other people don’t do this to themselves. So you keep rejecting and disowning every single individual who made an inconsequential mistake. Anyone who’s not perfect, from a certain point of view. You did this? Yeah, but you didn’t do that. Anything that could be considered from a weak perspective to fall under the category of flaws, mistakes, imperfections, defects, lacks, shortcomings, or anything that could be criticized if you tried hard to find something bad about it, won’t get left behind, and will be grounds for ultimate rejection. It will be eternally unacceptable. You will be disowned because of just that.

It’s hard to please someone like this, isn’t it? Which means the chances that you’ve got to earn the love and acceptance of someone like this are slim to say the least. But who wants love or even acceptance from someone like that? Only someone who doesn’t love themselves enough.

If you can imagine someone who rejects anyone for the most trivial or unimportant of reasons, then you will not be surprised to find out that this person also hates almost everybody, without discrimination, because it’s so easy to get rejected by this person, because everything you say or do can and will be used against you as grounds for ultimate rejection. You will be rejected or disowned just for having an opinion or for having made something that doesn’t matter that they just happened to disagree with and think it’s an abomination. It’s so hard to believe that this type of person loves anybody, because it is so easy for anybody to lose the love or acceptance of this type of person, simply by just existing.

But it doesn’t end here. You said can’t love, not just don’t love anybody else.

Two things, how easy it is for them to judge or consider something as grounds for ultimate rejection, or as totally unacceptable. And the other is the fact that they’re willing to exercise rejection upon themselves, if they ever demonstrate or exhibit evidence of the existence of any thought or behavior that can be considered unacceptable by or according to their own excessively strict standards. And they already did that. They already rejected the entirety of their whole being long ago.

So it’s so easy for them to reject you. They can do it for the most superficial, trivial, insignificant, simple, or unimportant of reasons. They also did it to themselves, they rejected their whole being because of the inevitable existence of parts of them that they don’t think are perfect or ideal. Why on earth would they hesitate to do the same when it comes to you or rejecting you as a whole because of some part or aspect of you that is not so perfect or ideal? It’s not fair, and you are not better than them. You do not deserve special treatment that they are not allowed to ever get, no matter what they do.

In other words, they don’t love themselves, and for the simplest and most ridiculous of reasons it’s almost made up. To understand this, think of love as total acceptance of every fiber of your loved one’s being as they are. Since they can never find no reason not to hate, reject, or disown themselves, how are they going to love somebody else? They don’t love themselves, because they don’t fully accept themselves. Why would they ever accept somebody else fully? In other words, why would they truly ever love somebody else?

Don’t aim for ending whatever sense of fatigue you have at the moment. Aim for ending the state of being unable to do what you want.

Look for regaining of ability. If you’re trying to rest because you’re tired only, you will not rest frequently or long enough. You’ve learned to push yourself through fatigue anyway at some point in your adult life. Being tired is not reason enough for you to rest anymore. You need bigger motivation than that. Aim at regaining your ability to do anything instead. You might have noticed that you are no longer able to do some things as good as you know you’re normally capable of. That is a sign that shouldn’t be ignored. Why are you struggling with decision-making or executive functioning for example. Why can’t you think about any of your problems, not just trying to find a solution to any of them, but the problems themselves, you can’t even mention them to yourself. You can’t think about anything. You cannot visualize, imagine, or desire anything. You can’t control yourself or regulate your negative emotions. You can’t read. You can’t learn. You can’t get yourself to concentrate or focus on anything. You cannot sustain yourself. You’re not getting any creative ideas and you can’t get yourself to create anything or work on anything that requires creativity. These are just examples of what it means to be unable to do things that you are normally capable of doing, but now you’re too tired to do or even think of doing anything, whether what you can’t do currently because of fatigue is mental or physical. It makes sense in this case to organize rest around moments of that kind of loss of ability, including anything that could be described as one of your abilities, whatever it is. Because if you said I’ll only rest when I feel tired, good luck with that, it will never happen. You will think that the problem is with feeling tired, and then you’d just stop feeling tired or allowing yourself to feel tired, because it’s stopping you from living. If the problem is with a feeling, then you can always short-circuit the solution by attacking the feeling itself instead of attacking its causes. And what are you going to do to attack the causes of getting tired? Stop doing anything that can get you tired? You’ll stop doing countless things that you want or love to do because of that, and life will be incredibly boring and unmotivating because of that. You’ll stop doing anything mentally or physically challenging or difficult for the rest of your life just to avoid getting tired ever again? Doubtful. Which means settling for getting rid of feeling tired would be the easier solution for you. Which means you’ll keep pushing yourself to do anything or to keep going anyway despite feeling incredibly tired. Also you sleep at the end of the day anyway because of fatigue, so why would you stop yourself from doing anything during your waking hours for the same reason? It would seem like a colossal waste of time in this case. And you have nothing to say against fatigue or feeling tired being just an obstacle, just an unpleasant and an unnecessary feeling that is slowing you down from enjoying your life to the fullest unchecked, so you need to no longer succumb to it or what it entails. You have nothing against that argument. Also you’re getting stronger, so who says you are allowed to get or feel tired at all in the first place. But loss of ability? I’m sure all your current problems and struggles are because of that. If you could get yourself to do what you know you’re normally capable of, you’d overcome whatever problems or struggles you currently have, easily.

Organize your rest around loss of ability. It’s far easier, better, and more practical than Organizing it around fatigue or exhaustion. You know what abilities you’re currently missing because of exhaustion. You’ll be able to convince yourself that it is time to rest more in this case. You want your ability back.

There’s nothing wrong with pleasure.

Throughout the majority of human history, people were obsessed with demonizing all pleasure seeking behavior. They did everything in their power to subjugate the masses and keep them under control, but for some reason we still believe that this was some sort of ancient wisdom. We are giving value to stuff that people who lived through it laughed at it at best, but because it is ancient, we are supposed to assume it has some truth to it that we are in no place to ever dare question it. Things are true because they make sense, with disregard to when those things have been said. They gave you every reason to abandon using what you already have access to; your mind, because God says so, your parents says so, the government says so, the elites, your ancestors, society, others, especially others who lived before you or just happened to have been born before you, because they are the only ones who are allowed to think. They dictate what you are supposed to think and how you’re supposed to think. They tell you what’s wisdom and what’s not. They tell you what you should believe, or else.

And who do you think you are to question them.

And they have to keep you under control, by telling you that your feelings are invalid, you are bad for getting angry. There’s something wrong with you, because you’re resisting abuse. They tell you all pleasure seeking behavior is forbidden, because they want to keep you running in survival mode all your life, be passive and indifferent towards everything, be submissive and obedient, have no free will or desire of your own, and have no identity, self, or need for freedom. They don’t want you to awaken or realize the truth or how much power you have. Many of what they do revolves around starving you from being able to have your own thoughts, have control over yourself, have the energy to fight back, or have the power to fix your life, solve your problems, and be of value to society at large. It has nothing to do with wisdom, enlightenment, or actualization. It is all control.