"The only way to make sense out ofchange is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." -Alan Watts
Nothing so absurd as to sit down and wring your hands because all the good which may happen to you in twenty years has not taken place at this precise moment.
"Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human - however imperfectly - and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on." Meditations, Marcus Aurelius I needed this as I relapsed today. It's ok, I'm human.
Makes no sense ,since the best way to learn is through experience, I don't see what he is traying to say. Why is experience limited to old problems.
The statement was if you only rely on experience you'll keep repeating old solutions to new problems. If the old solutions do not work then it would only make sense to try something new, it doesn't mean the experience is going to be completely thrown out the window. You may generalize the lesson learned in terms of a principle rather than a rote do this and that approach which will allow you to adjust to the new circumstances, that's how I think of it. As an example, I think some people who try to deal with process addictions like PMO or social media use is stuck with the old model. They'll literally take the word "alcoholic" from the AA big book and just replace it with whatever addiction they are working on, even though it's not even a substance - as if context means nothing. That to me is an extreme form of what Coelho is talking about. TBH sometimes I feel like it's being a zombie, which is understandable when people are still trying to recover from their addictions but one would hope there's enough people in a given group to recognize they're just being like that Fight Club scene where people mindlessly repeat "His name is Robert Paulson.. His name is Robert Paulson..."
I agree with this, I think there is a lot of people here that watched a few yt videos on NoFap and took it to heart without trying to think deeply about it. It is in a case like a cult. I mean nofap does have benefits but it isn't the magic pill that will solve all your problems just by not PMOing for a certain amount of days. I would just say if u had reasonable expectations about nofap it would be much easier to quit.
Yeah I think with recovery groups there's this social factor that makes people more set in their ways though. With Nofap it's mostly individualistic, whether you do a themed challenge or not it implies this heroic narrative, but traditional recovery groups are collectivistic and that makes it subject to groupthink. There's some element of it with NoFap too of course but it seems to be much looser. I think it is entirely possible when people are caught up in the collective consensus to use a system (if it is even systematic) that works like at 10% capacity, or works a small amount of the time and they don't really know what makes it work when it does work, so they just say "it works" period but they end up never trying to understand or be open to further possibilities so it just ends up being a lot of extra labor and confirmation bias.
"Nearly every human being is looking for happiness, but very few know what happiness is. Nevertheless if you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness, as if it were a collar stud that has rolled under the dressing-table. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself, nor will he be seeking it among the nebulous wastes of metaphysics. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day."
