“all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear, and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
First, ignore pleasure
Pleasure is temporary.
Pleasure comes to you without your effort of seeking it out. The only thing you have to do is simply to be present.
There is pleasure in the simple fact that you are alive and breathing. There is pleasure in the world around you, from the perfect rhythm of the rain, to the mesmerizing dance of suns rays on the fresh dew that lays with mornings on unsuspecting grass.
You can safely ignore pleasure, because the more you ignore it, the better it will feel. The more you will look away, the harder it will strive to be noticed.
Pleasure needs you to assert its existence.
Beauty and visceral pleasing sensations, warm fuzzy feelings and the satisfaction of the thirst inside, all will flow right through your disinterested self.
Don’t seek pleasure. Seeking pleasure makes you numb and only conditions you to seek more pleasure.
Second, embrace pain
Pain is a mystery. We don’t understand really why must we be subject to it, and why can’t we turn it off. But times and times again it has been shown that the best antidote to it is to embrace it. To let it grow into overflow. It is a special kind of liquid, pain, a magic water that once it overflows, it entirely leaves its receptacle.
Embrace pain like you cling to the friend who opened roads and inspired your life long search. Embrace pain as your own personal knight, fighting with you against death and decay.
Pain is not disease. By all means, treat sickness and disease. Do everything you can to end pain. But the while it is with you, and when it is not with you, do not work so hard to avoid pain.
Avoiding pain is the basic ingredient of worry.
Release yourself from the chains of worry, open up to the experience of your life, expect some pain as an assuring but rough pat on the back from a knight in heavy armor.
Then, ignore hope
Hope is the worst joke played on humanity. Hope is the single biggest generator of disillusions. This is the only thing hope does right, weaving intricate and thick illusions. We hope with our entire hearts, but reality is that every single hope turns a piece of our hearts into an illusion, which, like smoke, vanishes into thin air, making our hearts smaller every time.
They say that hope dies last. It is true, but only because all humans in its companionship die before it, all stretched out with their gazes set upon the salvation that hope promised.
Ignore hope and have dignity instead of hope. Cultivate, as best as you can, open horizons, a lucid mind and clarity in knowing what happens to you. Do that and you can safely ignore hope, without the dark specter of suffering making endless threats every night before you fall asleep.
Don’t seek hope. Seeking hope is the drug of existence itself, existing only for the next fix of hope, and the hangover of crashed illusions.
Also, embrace fear
Fear is normal. Embrace fear. You are, after all, a consciousness that gets information through unreliable sensors, you live inside a severely limited attention span and focus power. You have a very limited time to work on problems. You are stuck inside boundaries, which may very well fall on you at any moment.
Fear is asking you constantly for only one thing: consideration. Consideration means assessing the worthiness of your decisions, before you act upon them.
Avoiding fear has the immediate consequence of being inconsiderate. Don’t avoid fear, embrace it, because consideration is far less expensive than being sorry.
Not last, ignore social acceptance
Hell is out there, in the other people, haven’t you heard? Ignore social acceptance, if you want to have the slightest chance at being yourself.
Social acceptance is a frame you are squeezed into. You will never get the frame to change into a new mold. Thousands die and the millennial frame doesn’t bat an eye.
Social acceptance is the most toxic reward for good behavior and it will promote the cancer of your soul, a cancer that will not kill you but turn you into some one else.
Ignore social acceptance at all costs, even if it means fighting off armies of zombies and automatons angered because your skin doesn’t burn, when the light of truth shines down upon you.
Seeking social acceptance, seeking acceptance in general, is a lifelong effort which will be forced upon you time and time again, with every single glimmering thought and bright idea your spirit will produce, from inception to deception. Just ignore it.
Finally, embrace rejection
Rejection is nothing but one failed attempt.
Rejection means one of three things: that you are not solving anyone’s problems, that you’re solving the wrong problem for the right people or that you solve the right problem for the wrong people. It is either you, them or the problem that causes rejection.
Embrace rejection as a means of learning.
Rejection is the engine of the next attempt. It is fuelled by determination and ignited by persistence.
Avoiding rejection makes you potty. Potty in unskilled hands makes bad pottery. Avoiding rejection waters down your self, or makes you copy what you don’t approve of, or, even worse, makes you copy what you don’t understand for what it really is.
Be motivated to ignore pleasure, embrace pain, ignore hope, embrace fear, ignore acceptance and embrace rejection, so that you won’t be hooked by the poisoned hook in the senseless existence of a placid waiting for death.
My 2 cents.