Sometimes work being the only thing that makes you feel good is not a bad thing, but a result of you not giving up hope, and that the very idea that you can make it someday, and have a normal life like everybody else, excites the hell out of you like no other.

When everything in your life is just not right or as it is supposed to be according to your own standards, when everything in your life is just screwed up, pleasure tends to come most from, almost exclusively from, making progress towards getting your life together or fixing your life, circumstances, and living conditions. Nothing else tends to feel good. It’s not anhedonia, necessarily. You may have it on top of your already existing problems, struggles, and challenges. But even without anhedonia, you still may struggle to feel good or ever find pleasure in any of the activities that has the potential of giving you any sort of pleasure. You may find that only working on your problems makes you feel good. And that nothing else works. So you may lose faith in even trying, if nothing ever feels good or nothing ever can make you feel good. This could be for a reason that is not about you being depressed because of your current situation. It makes sense in this case to not try to fix this problem, because there is no problem with you and pleasure in the first place. Working on fixing your mood issues or mental health struggles at the moment might not work, not because there’s no hope for you or because nothing can ever be of help to your case. It is not because there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like when you can’t force yourself to be good at multi-tasking, not because there’s something wrong with you, but because you can only truly do one thing at a time. You want to get out of the horrible circumstances or situation you’re stuck in, as soon as you can, and you can’t afford any delay when it comes to accomplishing that. Your life is being wasted right in front of your very own eyes, with each and every passing moment you live under such unspeakable and unlivable circumstances. Everybody else out there is living their best life and enjoying themselves like there’s no tomorrow, except for you. And they still have the audacity to complain and make themselves look like they’re miserable, or struggling behind the scenes, and that everything is not sunshine and rainbows as it looks like to the outside observer, contributing significantly to invalidating the real deal suffering you’re going through, and dismissing it as a struggle that everybody has in their own lives, you just don’t know it, because they don’t show it to you. And that’s why no one will ever understand, and even if they do, they’re not coming to help you, because to them, you needing that huge amount of help makes you either a burden or a loser, so you become more of a liability to them that they need to get rid of, or stay the hell away from, and now you have no one to talk to, no one to fully explain what you’re going through to, which makes you have no option but to keep dragging yourself and pushing your body forward because you have no choice. The situation is worse than it looks like to you. You don’t know what feeling good feels like anymore. You don’t know what you’re missing, because you’ve never had it. You never got a chance to have that kind of life. And what you’re missing is not much; it’s just having a normal life, like everybody else.

You are at a point in your life where nothing can make you feel good except getting closer to escaping the toxic situation you’re stuck in. Only getting out of the horrible circumstances or environment you’re trapped in for whatever reason can help in your case. It’s the only thing that can make life or anything there is make any sense. Working on your escape plan is the only thing that makes you come alive.

So you keep doing this with full focus all day long, every single day. But you have been told that this is toxic hustle culture and toxic productivity, so you feel guilty after doing the right thing, after doing the only thing that is right, because you’re not supposed to work all the time. Because you need to rest. Because you’re eventually going to burnout. And you are told that going all in and doing everything in your power and beyond to save yourself is toxic. Toxic masculinity, toxic positivity, toxic productivity, toxic whatever, and you need to slow down to speed up, and you need to fill your cup first, and you need to follow your passion, and you need to do what you love, and you need to stop being busy all the time, and relationships are the most important and most fulfilling thing in life. You just need to pull the plug. You just need to stop working. We’ll justify that somehow later on. We’ll figure something out. We’ll make it look like stopping now is the right decision. We’ll take care of it. We’ll make it look like an accident. And you listen to all that. You listen to people who managed to get everything figured out in a matter of a few months, bypassing any real chance of developing themselves enough to even know what they’re talking about. You listen to people who made it in no time, because they’re hot. And you base the whole decision of whether or not you should keep going like there’s no tomorrow, with disregard to burnout or exhaustion, upon what they think is the way to go. Based upon the words of people who have no real life experience, who never suffered or struggled a day in their whole life, who think that there are no bad people out there, and it’s all because they’re hurt. It’s all because of trauma, and personality cannot be changed, and you are not responsible for how you feel, and you have no free will whatsoever. You put the fate of your whole life in the hands of people who have no idea what they’re talking about, because they seem to be making tons of money easily. You never even pause to think about it. You are working all the time, so your entire self worth is tied to your productivity. You need to unlearn that. It didn’t occur to them that sometimes there is no other way to go about it. There is no other way to make real progress and save yourself. It didn’t occur to them that you might have no choice. It didn’t occur to them that you need to do whatever it takes to end this. You want out of this prison. You want out of this graveyard. You can’t breathe. Somebody help, please! But no one is coming. No one. No one cares. No one gives a damn. To them, you are just a source of negativity and toxic work culture. You stink and they need to get away from you. You’re not their target audience. You’re not their ideal client. You’re just an ideal victim competing in the oppression Olympics.

The only thing that is toxic is letting any of that slow you down. The only thing that is toxic is to let anything stop you from reaching a place where you’re no longer tortured non-stop every single day. The only thing that is toxic is not making it out of there alive as soon as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s okay to want to live. There’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing else to do better than trying to save yourself. There’s nothing else to do, and there’s nothing else to do. And there’s nothing else worth doing.

Move forward with full force, full speed ahead.

Ironically enough, it’s because you’re trying too hard.

You can’t be all-knowing and all-powerful simultaneously. It’s mutually exclusive. If you know what will it be, you can’t make it otherwise, or else it could be anything, and might not necessarily end up being the thing you thought it would be. You can’t know exactly how something will turn out, unless it cannot turn out any other way. And if it cannot turn out any other way, then you couldn’t have made it turn out any other way, which means you have to make it turn out this certain way or else it will not have become what you thought or knew it would become or look like in the future. You can’t have options, if you’re planning out on knowing the answer, every single time. In order to have a certain outcome and not any other, you will have to at least not use your ability to change the outcome whenever you want to, for any reason. You can get any outcome you want, but if you want to get a certain outcome, you will have to not try to get any other outcome. If you know what you want, you will have to stop trying to get anything else until you get exactly what you want. If you know the future, the future can’t be anything else that you don’t already know.

This becomes a problem when you are trying to explore something new for the very first time. If you know everything there is that could be known about something, then there really isn’t anything new for you to know about it that you still need to learn or explore. But what if you’re trying to explore something totally new to you? What if there is still much to learn about something? Then in this case, you need to not approach it from an all-knowing perspective. You need to allow your full potential to be able to move around unchecked, uninhibited, and unrestrained. You have to have the freedom to move around all you want. You have to not be so under control. You have to be totally unrepressed. You have to be totally and absolutely free. You can’t do so if you’re exercising inhibition and total control over your mind and over every move you make and every step you take. You will not be able to notice or detect what’s new that you don’t already know about what you’re trying to experience for the very first time, or what you’re still trying to explore, or learn about. Whatever that which you don’t already know, you will miss. Whatever that which you are totally unaware of its existence, you will remain totally oblivious to its existence. Whatever that which you don’t already know, you won’t be able to notice, detect, understand, comprehend, realize, feel, or learn. Whatever that which you don’t already know, you will not know, and you will never taste, or realize it exists in the first place. Whatever that which you don’t already know, you will not be able to experience it at all in the first place, even if you really wanted to. You can’t remain in control, if you’re trying to explore something new.

If you haven’t ever experienced genuine pleasure or happiness in your whole life, when you were younger, or at least when you were still under thirty, you might be blocked from tasting it even for once as a grown-up, because you haven’t tasted it or experienced it once before, or enough, previously in your life, or in the past, so you don’t know what it is like, how it feels like, or what it looks like. You don’t know what to expect. You don’t know what it is that you’re trying to feel, experience, or taste in the first place. It is not in the realm of what you know.

But when you were young, you didn’t have that kind of inhibition and control that you have over your mind now, because you were relatively underdeveloped. So it was way easier for you to realize what’s new and feel it exactly as it is. Without stopping yourself from feeling it or experiencing it like you do now as a grown-up, mostly not on purpose, just because when your inhibitory centers are online, and when you’re in total control over yourself, your mind, your thoughts, and feelings, and your behavior, you will only allow what you know exists to exist. You will only allow what you can describe as safe and familiar to take place. Only what is known to you will be allowed to exist, and the rest will be all forbidden. If it isn’t already known to you, it will not be allowed to happen, exist, or take place in the first place, and thus, you will never be able to experience, feel, or taste it fully, or exactly as it is, or as it is supposed to be or feel like.

In the past, you didn’t have to stop being in control in order to experience or feel pleasure, because you hardly had any control over yourself in the first place. You have to be in control of the nature of your experience if you want to always know what will happen next. In order to experience something that you haven’t experienced before, which means you don’t know enough or anything about it, you have to risk not totally knowing what will happen in the future, or at least in the next few moments.

When trying to experience something for the very first time, or at a level that is deeper than normal or your usual, you have to be okay with not knowing the future. That is, you have to not go about it with full control or while fully controlling yourself and the nature of your experience. You have to not go about it in a highly controlling manner with lots of inhibition, expectation, and anticipation. You literally have to decrease the inhibition, in order to feel everything. In a safe environment of course.

If you can know exactly what will happen, this means that you cannot do or feel anything else. Because what will happen will then be just one knowable thing that is definite and cannot be anything else. You have to be in control if you want to know what will happen next. In order for you to become omnipotent, you have to stop being omniscient. In order for you to experience pleasure or happiness to the fullest, you have to risk not knowing the future. You have to no longer be in control.

You have to be not so all-knowing while trying or attempting to do so. You have to no longer be all-knowing, if you want to be all-powerful.

The real reason why you have all the answers, but are experiencing non-existent difference or improvement in your own life.

You forgot why you began. It gradually became about getting to your goals through creative work, because you love it, and you’re good at it, instead of actually solving your life’s problems through what your content actually says. Instead of making your life better, or increasing the quality of your life through applying what you’ve already learned, discovered, and thoroughly and deeply explained, explored, and discussed in your content. It became about getting there through posting more, with disregard to what you’re posting, or whether or not you’re following through on what you’ve posted about or said is essential for success in one or any of your posts. You are not making any difference, making progress, or getting ahead, because you are not learning from your own work. You are posting it for them, not for yourself. The material that is found in your content is of no concern to you. You don’t read it, consume it, review it, study it, learn from it, think about it, or apply it. Even though you believe in it, in its entirety. I’m not accusing you of hypocrisy, or corruption. I’m not saying that you managed to game or take advantage of the system. I’m not claiming that you’re manipulating anybody. I’m just pointing out the fact that instead of researching and discovering what could fix your life and have a positive impact on the quality of your life and along the way or journey you are sharing your results and conclusions in depth with the rest of us, instead of all that, you are just sharing it with us now, only. Without learning from your own discoveries, results, mistakes, and conclusions, which you’ve successfully managed to post about, and without applying any of what you’ve learned or discovered so far. Without learning from your own content, or work. You know the thing, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll learn nothing from it. You’ll never use it in your own life. You will never care about taking action on it in real life. You’ll never put any of what you’ve learned or discovered into action, even though it has been extensively explained, and expanded upon in your own work.

But it doesn’t matter. Because your work here is done; it’s already posted.

Don’t listen to that voice. Guilt is rarely right. Don’t pay attention to it. Keep going like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s some form of guilt that may develop when you keep going in the same certain direction for a long period of time during any given day. That is, just for noticing that you have been doing the same thing, same type of activity, or working on the same type of project, goal, or thing, for a long time today, or for prolonged periods of time these days, or these few weeks or months, no matter what this thing is. That seems to happen as some sort of protection against wasting your time too much, by making sure you don’t end up wasting your time. If you mindlessly keep doing the same thing over and over again, or all day long every day, and you don’t know what you’re doing, where that would lead you in a few years or eventually, or you don’t care where you’ll end up in life in the future if you kept doing this thing all day long for a few years, not questioning what you’re doing in this case, or not stopping you every now and then or every once in a while to ask you whether or not you should stop now, only means you don’t care about your future. It might indicate that you are reckless, irresponsible, not having a clear plan for your future, or self-sabotaging, without wanting to stop yourself or talk about it. It might mean that you are not trustworthy with your own time, because you don’t want to even question whether or not you’re wasting your time. It might mean that you are wasting your life, and you don’t want to even realize that or notice that this is what’s happening. That happens to you, the continuous self-doubt or questioning whether or not you should keep going or doing what you’re currently doing at the moment, even if you know you should keep going. Even if you’re making progress. Even if this is the only or best way to go. Even if you’re doing the right thing. Even if you’re doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right duration or amount of time. Even if you really shouldn’t stop now. Even if you know that this is good for you long-term. Even if stopping now, even just to evaluate, or catch your breath, will be a huge mistake.

This happens anyway because you don’t want to wake up someday to find yourself having wasted your whole life or a few years of it, doing the wrong thing, or ending up nowhere. And you think the only way to stop you from ending up like this is to question what you do frequently enough, to make sure you’re on the right track. Sometimes questioning yourself too frequently or doubting whether or not you should keep going or being engaged in doing whatever you’re doing right now becomes so annoying the only way you can make that voice stop or go away is to stop or quit what you’re doing right now prematurely, even though you know that if you carried on just a little bit longer, the floodgates of meaning, reward, and motivation, will start to open.

To counter that fear, of wasting your life, that is, to avoid waking up someday realizing that your whole life you’ve been going in the wrong direction, you question yourself, every step of the way.

In order to avoid wasting your life, your mind tries to tell you that you need to stop right now, and terminate whatever that which you’re doing, and procrastinate. You decide to do it later on. You stop before finishing or completing what you’re doing, even though you’re not tired, even though you know you should keep going, even though you know you’re doing the right thing by continuing to do more of that same thing today. You stop, even if this is the only way out. You stop, even if you have no choice. You stop, even if that means you’ll remain where you’re stuck now next year, and the year after, and the year after. You stop, even if stopping now is the worst idea or suggestion ever. You stop, even if stopping now is the worst decision ever. You stop, even if stopping now is wrong. You stop, even if stopping now is indefensible, and whatever reason you try to come up with to defend such decision will not be enough to explain your behavior.

You stop, even if you don’t want to, just to appease the voice that says you shouldn’t be doing the same thing that much, that long, or that frequently. To make the voice that says you just can’t be doing the same thing every day for years, no matter what, you just can’t, stop.

Even if you’re really making progress, and you’re happy about it. Somehow you think varying things in and of itself will fix everything and solve all your problems, even after tracking your progress for a long time reveals otherwise.

It’s not how many things you do on the daily that counts. It’s how much progress you’re making in all intended areas of your life long-term. It’s about how much of a difference you’re making in whatever you’re trying to grow in. How much you’re advancing and getting ahead. How much you’re improving. How much or how fast you’re getting closer to your goals, dreams, desires, and aspirations. How close you currently are from reaching the only kind of life that can make you fulfilled. Not how much you look like you’re getting there, but in reality, aren’t.

“As fast as I can? As fast as you can.” – The Incredibles

When it comes to learning, what matters is knowing the thing, not how you’ve learned it. Most of you are focused on what type of way you learn best, what form of consumption of information suits you the most, but are totally overlooking the rate by which you are currently learning or acquiring information, with disregard to how you’re doing it. At the end of the day, it’s about how much you can learn and process. At the end of the day, it’s all about what you’ve already finished learning, not what way did the information enter your brain, or what medium was the information or learning material presented to you through. Stop focusing on what is your favorite way of learning, and start focusing on learning more, and learning faster, by any means necessary.

When and why it’s problematic to get any validation from external sources or from the outside.

The problem isn’t in getting some validation from the outside. It’s not that it has to be exclusively and entirely from the inside or else it’s criminal. It’s useless, invalid, worthless, wrong, unacceptable, or unforgivable. No, you can get some validation for your self-esteem from the outside world. The problem is bigger than just that.

Again, the only thing that can counter absolute psychosis, delusion, or psychopathy is knowing that you are not wrong about your assumptions and beliefs about yourself. Ideally, you should get all your self-esteem or validation from within or from what you say to yourself only. The most healthy way to arrive at any positive or negative conclusions about yourself, your self-esteem, self-image, self-confidence, self-efficacy, whatever that constitutes the self or yourself, identity, who you are, values, and self-concept, is from within, from the inside, and to get the entirety of your validation concerning all or any of these things from yourself or from within exclusively. The ability to know if something is true is key to this. Your ability to determine whether or not something is true, right, correct, or valid is essential to getting any or all of your validation from within. If you cannot tell whether or not something is true on your own, you will never have the capability to validate yourself from within. Any attempts at validating yourself from within in this case will lead to internal validation that is delusional and psychotic unless proved otherwise. It will be false unless proven otherwise. You cannot rely upon it unless you are yourself delusional, ignorant, psychotic, hypocritical, or lying to yourself. Because you cannot know whether or not something is true, on your own. How on earth would you trust yourself or your words about yourself or your self-esteem or any of the above mentioned things if this is the case? If you cannot tell the difference between what is true and what is false?

What happens when you get some validation from the outside is just the fact that you did something wrong or at least not ideal. Or for my perfectionistic friends over here, not so perfect. That’s it. It does not cancel what you get from within. It does not negate your opinion about yourself or what you already know about yourself. It does not mean you are wrong about the beliefs you’ve once had or held about yourself. It does not mean you cannot disagree with those people who have a negative opinion about you. It doesn’t mean anything, except the fact that you got something from the outside instead of getting it all from the inside. The fact remains, trusting the capacity of your internal systems that can generate positive validation and a positive opinion about yourself in and of itself gives the signal that you trust those parts or things within you that can do so, and that gives the green light to those parts of you and tells them that they are allowed to function, think, come alive, work, join the rest of us or the rest of yourself, and do whatever they’re capable of, adding to whatever powers you currently have significantly. Which means, you will always be more powerful, in other words, better, as long as you don’t tell those parts of you to shut up, because they will then completely shut down and stop working for good, because you don’t trust them. They will not just cease to give you internal validation, they will refuse to give you everything else that they are capable of. They will not give you anything else. They will do nothing from now on, because you seem to not need their input. You behave like you don’t care about their opinion, and you want nothing to do with them. You don’t seem to care, and you don’t seem to need them. So they will shut down and do nothing from now on, for good. It is very important to get your validation from within exclusively.

But let’s assume you got your validation once from the outside. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s okay, you’re allowed to make mistakes. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Maybe you needed a little push or a little bit of help. Anyhow, external validation in this case so far will never exceed just being a mere confirmation of what you already know to be true about yourself, because you can tell what’s true, and what’s not.

However, it’s entirely pathological if it comes from the outside in one case. Not because it’s external, not because it didn’t come from within, but because of the total absence of any capacity for or capability of generating, getting, or having any validation from within in the first place. The problem doesn’t lie in the fact that you got some validation from the outside, instead of getting it exclusively from the inside. The issue is much much bigger than just that, in case of a pathological narcissist, psychopath, or sociopath. It is in being unable to get any kind of validation from within at all, even if they wanted to. And that’s why they rely upon external sources of supply or validation that totally exist outside of themselves, because they can’t tell if something is true or not.

Why is this important? Because having understood this, there are bigger things that you need to focus on, absence of which lead to all sorts of pathological disorders. For example, Intelligence. The capacity to have an opinion and be so sure about it. What makes you evaluate stuff better and have a more reliable, accurate, and valid opinion about anything. Intelligence should be your focus. The focus should be upon maximizing Intelligence and cognitive ability, instead of being neurotic about getting validation from the outside. It’s okay to feel good because someone happened to appreciate your beauty or competence once, or every once in a while. You don’t build your whole world on it. Exclusive validation from within is the best way for having a solid unshakable foundation for your self-esteem, self-confidence, self-image, identity, or self-concept. But you’re allowed to make mistakes. And external validation can be considered less than ideal, less than perfect, or not the best way to accomplish that. In other words, not even a mistake. What makes it pathological when done by a psychopath, sociopath, antisocial person, borderline, or a narcissist, is the fact that they can’t get it from within, even if they wanted to, so whatever validation they can ever get has to always be either exclusively from the outside or totally false, that is, delusional, whether from within or from external sources or from the outside. Because they cannot know if something is true or not on their own. Cognitive deficits are a fundamental core to or issue in psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and narcissism. It’s impossible to have a psychopath, sociopath, antisocial individual, or a narcissist without cognitive, not just emotional, deficits. That is the real issue. That is what makes external validation pathological. Even if the external validation in these cases is factual, reliable, true, accurate, and trustworthy, they can never tell on their own that it is so, and thus, all sorts of external validation there is will always serve one purpose, and one purpose only, which is to enhance, confirm, expand, validate, and maximize their delusions.