Author: Anthony

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Mental clutter: Useless thoughts

There are many areas in ones life that one can use some minimizing, but the one that is often overlooked is our thoughts. It’s too bad to, because this it the one most closely linked to happiness. Well actually, there are two types of “mental clutter”: Useless knowledge (I often refer to as “empty calorie entertainment” for the mind), and useless thoughts and emotions. For this post I am discussing useless thoughts and emotions; I have discussed useless knowledge in previous posts.

Useless thoughts/emotions are ones that keep us from being happy, keep us from being motivated, keep us from seeing life how we want to see it. They also keep us from appreciating what we have. These useless thoughts and emotions are:

  • Judgment – Judgement of others to be specific. Judgement of others only becomes important if it directly effects our lives. In deciding how close we want to keep certain people, and how far to trust them; but it’s not very often that we have to make these judgments. The majority of judgments people make, is just fuel for gossip. I.E. useless and unproductive. Not only that, but more often times than not, we don’t have enough info to make a sound judgment. In fact, unless we live with someone and have known them for many years, we can’t make an informed judgment of them. It is far more productive for us to judge ourselves, as this can be motivation for growth. I once heard a phrase that applies here: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Eleanor Roosevelt. This applies to our thoughts just the same as our conversation.
  • Jealousy – Again ….. why are we thinking of people in unproductive ways? The same logic for judgment applies here. It is healthy to want what others may have, as we can use them as a guide to acquire these things. That is more of a mentor/protege relationship; a productive positive “looking up to” situation. Jealousy instead, carries resentment.
  • Anxiety over things we can’t control – These may be the most difficult set of thoughts and emotions to shake off. Especially when we have invested so much time into whatever is failing us. But the truth is, dwelling on it and losing sleep is just gonna add to the problem. We have to let that which we cannot control, go. Leave it in God’s hands.
  • Dwelling in the past – For starters, regret is a wasted emotion. What happened, happened, and we can not change that. Second, frequent contemplation about a time when “things were better” anchors us from moving ahead in our lives. We are different people than we were back then; at least if we are living life properly we are.
  • Hate (Not anger) – Hate is stress and baggage. Self destructive. Anger on the other hand can be motivation for change, for positive action. It’s just important that we manage our anger, direct it, control it, so that it doesn’t become hate.
  • Ego – All this does is put a wall between us and everyone around us. By doing this we won’t listen as attentively, we won’t be as open minded, and therefore ultimately we won’t grow as people. When we put ourselves on a pedestal we can’t hear what is going on down below, so we’ll miss out.

Lets make a conscience effort to purge ourselves of the above thoughts and emotions. They cause us to lose focus. I personally guarantee that we will be more happy, overnight.

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The Selfish Factor

I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine (lets just call him Ziggy), Where Ziggy and I were trying to come up with the most selfish act a person can do ……. and has done. His best submission was awesome.

He recalled that in ancient Egypt it was standard practice that when a pharaoh died, all his subjects and material possessions would be buried with him. All the subjects would be killed of course. The idea was that the pharaoh would attain these possessions, and the subjects would continue to serve him in the afterlife. Wooooow, that is evil selfish. The number of subjects a pharaoh had was uncountable, and those people would be murdered just so the one guy could have the same abundance in an alleged afterlife.

This was tough to top, but I believe I did “one up” Ziggy. And what is more, is that my submission was more common and even simpler than his. It is my belief that the most selfish action (or actually inaction) a person can do is to not elect to have their body donated to science, to medicine when they die. …… That’s it.

Ziggy was a bit confused, just as you may be now, as to why that is anymore selfish than the whole pharaoh situation. He said “A pharaoh’s slaves are guaranteed to be killed Anthony! The worst that can happen in the donor situation is that one little kid doesn’t get his liver in time, and dies because you wouldn’t part with your liver. Potentially one kid vs a guaranteed 100 minimum killed.”

I clarified by telling him that the he is rating the selfishness factor incorrectly because he is only looking at the potential loss/gain of all the second party, and not focusing also on the first party (the alleged selfish person). I went on to say that the Selfish Factor should be an equation or ratio expressed as follows:

 

SELFISH FACTOR = (MAXIMUM POTENTIAL GAIN OF 2ND PARTY SHOULD HE CHOOSE NOT TO DO THE SELFISH ACT)/(MAXIMUM POTENTIAL GAIN OF 1ST PARTY SHOULD HE CHOOSE TO DO THE SELFISH ACT)

 

So lets rate “potential gain” on a scale from 0 to 10.

Personally, for my scale, both 1 life saved and 100 lives saved rate at 10 …… but for the sake of argument lets rate little Timmy and his new liver at 5. We will obviously rate the 100+ subjects lives being saved at 10.

Being that the belief in Egypt at the time was that there IS an afterlife and ALL the things pharaoh is buried with follow with him there, the pharaoh stands to have a serious gain. Not a life saving gain …… but a gain certainly of wealth. Lets rate this at a 1 (I am going low to play devils advocate here).

Now here is the kicker. A person who chooses not to have their body donated to medicine stands to gain ……… nothing …….. because they’re dead. I can only imagine that the reason they are choosing not to donate is for some satisfaction of their ego right now of knowing that their rotting corpse is whole in the dirt somewhere (idk). But that still doesn’t matter because by the time they cross that bridge in life ….. they have no life ….. and therefore no ego. Unfortunately the way math works we can not plug a “0” into the denominator of the equation because that would make it undefined. So lets just say “approaching 0” or:      (–>0).

 

So:

Pharaoh selfish factor = 10/1= 10 (seemingly the max possible selfish score)

but

Body donation selfish factor = 5/(–>0)= (–> INFINITE)

So basically what I am saying is that the most selfish of the selfish, are people who won’t donate their bodies to medicine when they die. In fact, we should use this as a guide for determining peoples characters when deciding who we choose to surround ourselves with. Getting to know somebody, ask them if they elected to have their body donated to science when they die. If they purposefully decided not to, you kinda already know all you need to know about them. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, but I don’t see this going anywhere.”

 

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Motivation for Minimalism: Connection

Recently I was inspired to ask myself a very important question. A question I should have asked myself a long long time ago. A question that should be the basis from which everyone designs their life. The question is:

 

“What do I want to get out of life?”

 

Right off, the knee jerk reaction is to answer the question with details of the individual things I desire. This would be a mistake because I believe the question is much broader than that. It demands that we reach right down into our soul to determine what it is in life that fills us up, gives us purpose. It must be simple. It must be one sentence or less.

It took me a day or so, but I finally found the definitive answer. It is not an easy question, it requires some thought. And if one is able to answer the question immediately, it’s usually because they are answering according to their immediate desire at that time. Either that, or they have been asked the question before. The reason why I am sharing this in a post is because my answer to the question is one that I believe to be true for all individuals who see the beauty in living a minimalist life.

 

The answer is: Connection

(one word. How’s that for simple?)

 

I want to be connected to people. All people. I want to have a huge variety of many different type of connections. A romantic connection, friend connections, family connections, fan connections, community connections, and a connection with God/nature. Truth is, I have always known the answer to this question; years before I even asked it. Creating a strong positive connection is the very reason why I have this website in the first place. I have a desire to make a difference in peoples lives, and I desire letting them make a difference in mine.

Is not connection the real fruit that life has to offer? I believe that it is only through minimalism that one can free themselves to have the time, energy, and clarity to establish strong positive connections of all the types mentioned above.

Don’t we all deep down inside really just want to be connected to each other?