A Lost Soul

I have been at times felt like that I’m always in the wrong place, and it’s like you are living in this moment but there is always a strange feeling. There seems to be no connection between you, people, culture, and of everything around you. However hard you try to make a connection with people, it just seems like it is always doomed to fail and you always find it hard to understand anybody.

You always tend to cut yourself from people that you feel like are just a poison to your well being, that it could threaten you at any time. Sometimes, a lost soul is figured as someone who has no direction in life and can have many acquaintances but can never be too close with any people or make a real friendship. And at times can be viewed as mentally unstable and hard to deal with, especially in today’s culture and society with the ever changing life values and means of living.

A lost soul has had a tragedy, so devastating that they don’t know how to give their hearts to anyone again, and it seems impossible at all, but the thing about lost souls is they are always certain of themselves, and the world around them. They tend to make asserting words when they finally made connection with you but they can also at times become careless and dangerous to themselves and others, and can cause harmful memories.

Only a pure and patient heart can accommodate a lost soul, but of course it is ultimately the lost soul who would pull themselves back out from the dark under world and finally learn to let go. You need to respect that and their identity because the more they feel something that threatens their identity, belief or feelings, the more they will avoid keeping in touch.

The real problem is not being a lost soul or the feeling of being apart from this society because in all honesty, I believe that it is because the life values of most people in our current generation have fallen miserably to very low standard that sometimes, a wrong can be right that it almost twist what the real truth is. It affects people who still hold deep meaning to their values and those who actually act upon it.

We are always told that we are all unique, that we all have a purpose in this world that we must master to be able to do that duty. But that is is a false belief and approach that is actually making us more do harm than actually making an improvement to ourselves. Truth is we are not, we are all irrelevant to the this world, we are just a speck of dust in the universe. Our society is so twisted that it makes people think of themselves as superior with each other and capable of achieving great things only if they think and actually believing that they can do it.

It is called mind conditioning, believing something that keeps us in a mindset that is flawed, impossible without action and doesn’t actually exist. We are taught to believe something but we never make a move to be that change and do something about our lives. Lost souls do not evolve around this paradigm, they have their own set of rules, firm values and beliefs that guide them through life and that they actually put in action of everything that they believe in.

They are not the one who needs accommodating and to fit and embed to this society. You and I, we need to be that change and accept every flaws and shortcomings that we have, and that we must learn to do something about it. Nobody’s going to save us from this misery but only ourselves, not your friend, not the person you love or your family. It is ultimately you who needs to lift yourself up because you alone knows what’s best for you.

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong so if you continue believing yourself that you are the center of universe, you are wrong and just making a fool of yourself. You need to accept that the beliefs and values that you are taught to be true and superior than others actually contributes little to nothing to your actual growth as a human being.

There’s a certain comfort to everyone of us that comes with knowing how you fit or what your role in this world is. Anything that shakes up or make us realize that comfort even if it could potentially make your life better is really scary for the most of us. But keep in mind that a change can never be achieved if you are avoiding discomfort, pain and problems in the first place, because in order to move on and solve a problem, there needs to be another problem, another pain and discomfort.

Pain is inevitable, and will always be part of our growth. In order to surpass a problem, you need to endure the pain and complete the process towards healing and self realization that things in this world will never be what we always wanted it. It always applies to both good and bad things in life. There’s always suffering, there’s always a feeling that you would not fit in with this new value, that at any moment you won’t be able to make it out alive and successful but know that after the pain comes far greater happiness than you thought you could never have or experience again from where you came from.

There’s a lot of conventional or common wisdom out there telling you to always trust yourself, and just be yourself, do what your heart tells you, and all sorts of other pleasant sounding words and motivational quotes and sayings.

But perhaps the answer that will make us come into conclusion is to just trust yourself less. Because you can be wrong, and I can be wrong too by believing myself that I’m also a lost soul or with what I’m saying here but after all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable at times, maybe we should be questioning ourselves, our intentions and motivations more than anything else or other people. If we’re all wrong, all the time by believing that we are the upper hand in this society, then isn’t the doubt of truth and the unending challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical sounding truth to progress and achieving our goals by maintaining of holding on to our dear values and beliefs?

That may sound really scary and destructive but it’s actually quite the opposite to what we see it is. It is probably not the safest option of all we can think of, or probably a comforting path to journey but it is certainly liberating knowing that after all the trials and hardships that you have encountered will be welcomed with a unmeasurable joy and reward of a more peaceful and meaningful life.

At this point I am bending my own beliefs and values that I have shared. This is after realizing that I too can be a victim of false beliefs that the society has been feeding us from the beginning of our lives to this very moment.

The world keeps telling us that having more and being better at everything is the way to success, that being popular and knowledgeable is more important than empathy and love. It does nothing good by thinking that it’s the only path that we can take, that there’s nothing left out there for us to venture. It is wrong to only hold on to one belief and shut yourself from other possible models because at any moment our lives can change in many different ways when that belief is challenged or criticized. We should all be open and able to accept each other differences because staying positive at one thing is a wrong ideal for a person’s life.

People are so obsessed with being liked and praised of their achievements and act as if they’re the only one that is deserving of the attention. We all crave for attention and it is actually our psychological need, we all want to be wanted and admired but sometimes we seek it the wrong way, instead of sharing it with a few friends and family, we opt to post in the internet and then tag as many people that we know and let them be aware how awesome we are, but then when it doesn’t work what you wanted it to, you started to feel sad and depressed as if no one really even care for you.

The problem with that mentality or thinking is that you measure yourself and achievements by the number of people who likes your post and actually made a meaningful comment to what you shared. You are promoting a wrong belief that the number of likes you get is the actual number of people who care for you and is actually noticing you. It shouldn’t be that way, it is poisoning your mind by believing that you can receive the kind of attention you seek from sharing it on social media. The number of retweets, likes, comments and shares you get does not correlate with how you are valued as an individual who needs constant reaffirmation and attention that you are great for what you already are.

Your social media followers, friends or the number of connections you have, had nothing to do with your worth. As a human being, you are immeasurable, and no value of whatever metrics there is that can tell you how important you are to other people, because real relationships are built with actually making a physical connection, spending a time and sharing memories.

Social media and the internet is not the root cause of the problem, but your beliefs and thinking that getting a certain amount of likes and shares is the one that is actually making a dent to your personality. You believe in having a lot of friends and connections in social media makes you an awesome and cool person, and having as many post that you can release in a day can make people think that you are a busy person and having a good life, that sharing pictures of cats makes you a loving and pet friendly individual. You are totally corrupted if you feel and think that way.

The pleasure you can get is great, but it is a horrible value to prioritize your life around because at any moment, when people stops giving care about what you do in your life, it can create really poor outcomes for people, problems that can hardly be solved and almost impossible to understand.

Ask any drug addict you know how their pursuit of pleasure turned out for them. Ask any cheater who left their partner for their pursuit of pleasure and destroyed the person they left whether pleasure ultimately made them happy in the end. Ask any gamer how pleasure of playing helped them made a meaningful relationship with the people around them. Pleasure is a false value, it is the most superficial form of life satisfaction any individual can succumb to and also the easiest to get and the easiest to lose. And yet, pleasure is what we all seek twenty four seven. It’s what we fixate ourselves, the attention, the pleasure to seek more and more.

Let’s be real in here, I too sometimes use pleasure to numb and distract myself from what is really happening in my life, all the problems and misfortunates. I use pleasure to make myself comfortable and think as if everything is just fine when they are actually getting worse each day, and soon to be out of control. it’s like a fucking tragedy waiting to happen at any moment, a well orchestrated problem in my case. But pleasure while necessary in our life, isn’t, by itself sufficient at all. Probably in certain doses but going beyond that is suicidal.

Pleasure is not the only cause of happiness, rather it is the effect, and believing that you can only receive happiness by pleasuring yourself. If you get the other life values and metrics right, then pleasure will naturally occur as a by product. You need not to seek it anymore, it will come to you as you seek different path of achieving happiness and self worth.

Wrong values like material success, always being right, thinking you are the center of the universe, and staying positive on a situation that you will certainly end up losing does not bring any good for your growth. You are only feeding yourself with wrong values, values that eventually will die as the society ages.

Many people measure their self worth based on how much money they make or properties they own, and what kind of phone they have or whether the car they drive is better than their neighbor or friends, or if you have an insurance or savings. While it is good to be able and ready for everything, it is also wrong to assume that having all is the way everyone’s life should be, I maybe wrong by believing that but I think we are all setting ourselves into believing those things that most of us are not capable of. We are not all successful in life, I don’t have a car nor an insurance but I do have a little savings, and yet I don’t set myself to have all of those, maybe one at a time, but setting your mind that you should have all of it for people to look at you as a successful person is wrong.

No one in their right mind should think, that for you to be viewed as successful individual, you need to have more in life. The other thing about overvaluing your material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values or your needs. When people measure themselves not by their behaviours or actions, or values and beliefs but by the status symbols they’re able to collect by having more material possession than anyone else, then not only they are shallow minded, but they are probably greedy as well.

Our brains are inefficient machines and we constantly make poor assumptions about anything and misjudge probabilities, remember facts differently for what they originally are, and then when facts are all fucked up we make decisions based on our emotions. As a human beings, we’re expected to commit mistakes and wrong pretty much constantly, so if your value of life success is to be always right and intellectually better than anybody, well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing all of the bullshit to yourself. You can’t always make accurate and foolproof decisions in life that is always correct and better than the person you hate at the office because our brain is designed to be fast, but not correct all the time.

I think it is far more helpful to assume that you are ignorant at times and don’t know a whole lot because seriously those people who thinks they know a lot of things are actually those who does nothing to know a single thing. It’s all in their mind, thinking of superiority in the midst of stupidity.

Then there are those people who measure their lives, and believes by the ability to be always positive, well, pretty much about everything else that happens to them. Lost your phone? That is great, time to buy a new one or the person who found it probably need it more than I do. Girlfriend cheated on you with the new guy in their office? Well, at least you know what her real personality is and you now have the time to find yourself and improve to be a better person. Axed from work? Perfect, now you don’t have to wake up early every weekdays and brave the terrible traffic anymore.

There is certainly something great in staying positive all the time but the truth is, sometimes life sucks and the only logical and healthiest thing you should do for yourself is just admit it and move on because denying negative emotions leads much more deeper and more longer negative experience and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not looking for good things out of every bad situation. It is not a valid solution to life’s problems.

You see, we all have flaws, and false beliefs, corrupted values that we all eventually realized that we wasted so much time believing things as if they were the best for us. We are all a lost soul journeying this world, looking for a greater life experience than we already have. We never feel contented because we all seek to be best, we all seek to be understood, and wanted, and loved. We are a lost soul hoping for a better tomorrow that will be better than today.