unmasked

It’s now day 14 (I’ve been struggling to count the days each time I sit down to write and then I realized that day 1 was October 1. Ha ha.) I didn’t get up at 5, partly because I woke up at 3 and didn’t really get back to sleep until close to 5. Partly because I have become so annoyed with the book, to the point that I don’t even think I can read any more of it, at least not right now.

More from “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”:

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extroardinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop…This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing.

This is true facts. It’s impossible to escape these pressures fully—especially as a parent, where you really feel like you’re shortchanging your child when there are all these other parents around you don’t settle for less than the best for their kids. Even so, this knowledge helps me check myself and overall, I feel much less “damn insecure and desperate” when I remind myself of it.

5 AM Club is capitalizing on this idolization of exceptionalism, by telling us how we can be exceptional / extraordinary. This does not align with my goal, which is to live a life fueled by something other than cortisol.

I left this post here while on a business trip… posting it, and then starting a new one.