Book: The fine art of apathy. A paradoxical way to live happily

Self-knowledge is like the bulb. There are a lot of layers, and the more they clean, the more likely it is that cry.

Freud said, "One day in retrospect the years of struggle, you will find the most beautiful".

That's why the problems return, they are inevitable.
the person you marry is the person with whom you are arguing. The house you buy is the house you're renovating. The job of your dreams - the source of your stress. Every time you have to sacrifice that from which we feel good, and that is that it will feel bad.

However, decisions based solely on emotional intuition, not on reason, is almost always incorrect. Know who builds all his life on emotions? Three-year-olds. And dogs. And you know what else do three-year-olds and dogs? Shit on the carpet.

The truth is far more transparent. And here it is: I was just thinking, if I want something. And actually not wanted. End of story.
I wanted the rewards and not the struggle. I wanted results, not process. I loved not struggle, and victory.
But in life so does not happen.
Who you are depends on what you are ready to go. The only people who like the odds of the sports hall, run a triathlon, have press "cubes" and lying press a weight with a small house. The only people who like to work all day and follow the policy of the corporate ladder, climb to its top. The only people who like to endure the hardships and stresses of life are hungry to become masters of painting.
I'm not talking about willpower and not about vydrica. And this is not another morality on the subject of" a rolling stone gathers no moss". This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.

So people sit idly by. Sit and dream : "what if..." And so the years go by. In the end, the idea was"not to try something else?"It ends with lawyers and a check for child support in your Inbox. And what here it prospects. And everything could be different if twenty years ago did not lower the bar of standards and expectations. Because happiness requires struggle. It grows out of the problem. It does not appear suddenly out of the ground like daisies and rainbows.

- Don't hope for life without problems, said Panda. - It does not exist. Hope for a better life, full of good problems.

There is a premise that underlies many of our ideas and beliefs. It is that happiness can algorithmization, to find work, to earn, like to go to law school or to assemble a complicated design of Lego. If I achieve X, I'll be happy. If I look like Y, I'll be happy. If I'm with Z, I'll be happy.
But this premise is the main problem. Because happiness is not a mathematical equation that can be solved.

When we consider that everything always has to be right, we subconsciously begin to feel guilty about. We think that we are wrong. And starts, failures: people buy forty pairs of shoes, pour Xanax vodka on Tuesday night or shot a school bus with children.

I heard one artist said that when a person has no problems, his mind invents them.

Wherever you go, you are waiting for a huge pile of shit. And this is the norm. And the challenge is not to run away from shit. It is to find shit that you like to deal with.

Must be able to - to know how to care. It may sound funny, but I feel like a jerk, but in reality it is this: you should learn not to waste and to concentrate the mind on the Essentials. We must learn to understand that you personally value the most, and then make the brutal screening. It's incredibly difficult. It may take years of trying and effort. And a lot of failure. But perhaps more important efforts does not exist. And somehow all this comes down.

Try to avoid pain, so to give it too much importance.

Attempt to avoid suffering is a form of suffering.