How to Live?

Till yesterday the topic of this post have been Delebrate living. Then something happened and everything changed.

They say your company matters. I have an uncanny realisation around it. I was reading this book called Die with Zero. Where the author emphasis on the fact that most of end up spending our lives in earning and saving money which we will never really spend completely before dying. As per him optimisation of your life experience is required. One argument which I found rather sound was, there are certain experiences that you have only at a certain age in your life. Spending all your money to go on a solo trip in your 20s makes more sense than taking the same trip in your 30s or 40s. I completely agree here. I will turn 35 this year. This thought gave me major FOMO around how much I have missed in my life because first I didn't had money, then due to work and family time was crunched - I have already lost age in which I could have done certain experiences. I immediately promised myself that next five years of life I am going to splurge and collect experiences like nobody's business. I was equal part agitated and pumped with this realisation. I even started onboarding people around me on this campaign of mine.

Then yesterday, I started a new book and life took a turn. This time the book was "Autobiography of a Yogi". In first chapter itself, the author talks about how his father was an honourable and happy man. Whose source of happiness was not from material wealth or experiences but from internal satisfaction. Suddenly I felt calm, a lot of it.

The above examples are essentially two different ways to live life. None of these are wrong or right but more about your personal preference. Both of these are delibrate ways to live, a concious choice. What stuck me as super odd was my response to each of them. While I was reading the first book i was feeling very jittery and wanted to start planning things right away where as while reading second book i was very happy being where I was. This revealed to me the workings of our monkey mind. I think all our experiences are lived though in our mind. There is a reason why we need background music in movies ( or even in real life) for an emotion to finally hit - ( Chup 2022). Have you ever felt that you are not enjoying the actual travel or party as much as you enyoued the idea of it. If its true that reality would always fall short of experiences we have situmated in our head then why don't we revese it all together. ( Sounds like a dangerous pitch in support of VR or a Matrixlike universe but hear me out. )

So may be a simulation is good enough for brain. Planning for a trip might be doing the same chemical reaction in body as the actual trip itself. This can also mean killing someone in video games actives same parts of the brain as the actual killing itself - and we are letting kids do it - sounds horrifying. In case this is true though, the to live a certain kind of experience we might just need to read through it - I am not short changing having the real experience here but my logic being If I want to be spy, reading about it might give me same sense of excitement than actually being it. I had also seen a documentary a few years back where a man was shown vidoes of him running and in the process he was burning more calories, just via the process of sitting at one place and viewing a video.

Not having real experiences is not at all someone I support. All Inam suggesting is, if you want "feel" like an entrepreneur, read their stories, if you want happy thoughts, read about happy quotes - You will only get a "feel for it" but this should Consciously push you towards the kind of text you want to pick and movies you want to watch.

May be I don’t want to watch gory shows any more as they repulse me but I would still want to watch and read more about meticulous people who are after quality, as thats who I want to become. ( I sound like a teenager trying to ape Hannibal Lector here, sigh)

How to Live? by Magicthreadworks