Things You Have to Forget in Order to Live

[daley]

I watched this thoughtful video from a channel called School of Life, which is both helpful and depressing.
It says something that is pretty obvious to most of us, that we need to adopt illusions in order to live, and forget the truth.
So it is depressing, but taking this seriously might help. I am certainly have been trying to do some of these things
before I saw the video (e.g., "We have to keep being excited about buying new things.... We have to keep going travelling...").

I know some will say this is stupid, but as long as we are alive, I believe we should strive to be as happy as possible,
and I don't see how it is possible without forgetting such truths.

 

[executioner1983]

I like to call it mental gymnastics

 

[etherealgoddess]

I watched this thoughtful video from a channel called School of Life, which is both helpful and depressing.
It says something that is pretty obvious to most of us, that we need to adopt illusions in order to live, and forget the truth.
So it is depressing, but taking this seriously might help. I am certainly have been trying to do some of these things
before I saw the video (e.g., "We have to keep being excited about buying new things.... We have to keep going travelling...").

I know some will say this is stupid, but as long as we are alive, I believe we should strive to be as happy as possible,
and I don't see how it is possible without forgetting such truths.

I don't think it's about forgetting the negative. I think it is about focusing on the positive.

The way I see it is that our bandwidth is really finite. Think about all the things on this Earrh we can be happy and unhappy about. That's a whole ton of shit. Imagine that's a gigantic line full of positive and negative experiences—let's be honest, this line is gigantic. However, our human bandwidth is tiny as hell. We only can think one thing at a time. Imagine how tiny of a fraction that is of the entire gigantic line I asked you to imagine earlier. You'd never be able to finish the line either. The point of me saying this is: you'll never be able to see the truth because the truth is so fucking huge to process. The reality is life is always a generalization because you can't think about everything all the time.

If you have a finite bandwidth, you might as well try to look at more positive than negative things and fight against our instincts, of which we are heavily wired to love negativity. Sad monkey was an alive monkey—that's why we're alive the way we are. There's so much I can't say in one post. I just will say that there is a path to contentment. I do not use the word happiness because that is a fleeting emotion. I mean contentment.