I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant here.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are solved by third-party libraries. Your tech is a liability and eventually someone with better tech will be smart enough to study your customers, or the students who will eventually replace your inevitably-retiring customers on the front lines and push adoption going forward.
And this is okay. The advantage corporations have over government institutions is that they can be created and destroyed with much less friction.
If you're lucky, your growth curve looks like double-sigmoid table-top. Probably it looks like an asymmetric Gaussian. What it doesn't look like is an exponential. Understand where your product is in its life-cycle, and maximize ROI.
I find that emotional compartmentalization is a critical skill.
A couple years ago, I faced a very tough time in my life. My business was collapsing, my family's finances were in jeopardy, and there was a serious health issue going on.
The emotional stress was incapacitating. I couldn't sleep, let alone focus enough to fix my problems. It was the downward spiral nightmare scenario.
If I didn't have dependents (wife + 3 kids), I might have withdrawn into depression. Instead I was forced to fix my emotional state...
I constructed a personal prayer...
I am the man in the dark room.
In here, I am my loves, my principles, and my ideas.
Who I am cannot be changed by circumstances outside this room,
My loves are my legs which carry me to life outside this room.
My principles are my shield from the burdens the world assaults me with.
My ideas are the sword with which I shape my life.
When I return to myself in this room, the world remains outside, and I evolve to be better prepared tomorrow.
I found that even just stopping to say "I am the man in the dark room" was often enough remind myself that I wasn't defined by my circumstances.
To sleep, I found I could play the audio from old familiar TV shows to drown out the worries to fall (and stay) asleep - it was a surprising turn-around.
These two things changed my life. Hope this helps someone else.
Thank you for sharing this powerful prayer/mantra.
I too had to go through a time like this, for different reasons, but I lost and fell into depression. I didn't have dependents unfortunately and my self-esteem was completely shattered.
I recovered and became productive again since a while now. But I'm still haunted by anxiety sometimes.
I'm in a state of extreme productivity and self-confidence right now, but part of it is feeling chased by my failing in the past, as if I have to (or could) catch up.
At the same time I know that patience, focus and time are key to do the right thing(s). This is also being addressed in the linked article.
My strategy is to talk, be open about my feelings (which I had to learn the hard way) and to take time to meditate and appreciate silence, deep focus, my loved ones and the beauty of nature.
Mantras and prayers are like magic tricks: You condition yourself to focus on a positive, powerful thought and with time you can activate that state with little effort as you described.
Ill be contemplating some of the thoughts in your prayer. Some of the phrases are very powerful, tangible metaphors.
It's pretty useful for most day-to-day things, but (1) who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances - see TBIs and other long-lasting traumas, and (2) there are medical illnesses where you can be mostly robbed of your ideas - which by this mantra leaves you powerless to change your world.
I'm not saying that to take away anything from the well-being brought by this interesting personal prayer, because it holds some insights about resilience. Only adding some context for the people out there whose depressive disorders, schizophrenia, or brain injuries, could leave them on the curb when it comes to these thoughts. Those people might need surgeries, medical treatment, or external support, before being able to strengthen themselves with this sort of thought.
>who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances
Yes, but that's focusing on the very unlikely external circumstances and defeating the point. 99.99% of the daily stuff that seems important actually is not and it's healthier to live a model assuming it's not important rather than worrying that everything could be that devastating brain tumor or IED taking out your bus.
In the US alone, for TBI alone, there were almost 3 million TBI-related emergency department visits in 2014[0]. One in 4,000 babies born in the US have hypothyroidism[1]. At the lower bound, there is 0.25% of the US population subject to schizophrenia[2].
If we go and look at things like Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 2.7% of US adults have had it in the past year, 32% of which had serious impairments associated with it[3].
I would invite you to seriously challenge the formulation of your idea: it's not that 99.9% of stuff "seems important and it's not", it's that not 99.9% of people have the ability to deal with it through just the one therapeutic aspect of self-talk. Moreover, there is a propensity to share these words because they are inspirational, yet there is very little put forward for the people who do need more than that - and who, in turn, tend to suffer from ailments which in many cases could be alleviated if as a society they were more acknowledged.
If you re-read my message, I hope you do see that I am appreciating the original words, and simply highlighting additional options to people out there who need more than that. That's all.
I believe you and hear you. Not all events are under our control, and not everyone is able to lead a pain-free life. The general audience here may have some skewed (and perhaps limited) experiences.
Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to improve our circumstances should be glad for those opportunities, not take them for granted, and try to extend them to others.
> Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to [...]
And it's not easy to see from the outside if that's the case for another person -- I think often they'd want to hide things like anxiety and depression. Or me, when I had those anxiety and sadness problems -- I spent most time at home alone
Among women, about 5% have hypothyreosis, and depression/sadness and anxiety are some of the consequences (varies from person to person). And 2% of the men.
But it's not just 1 - 99.99% = 0.01% that needs medication and other help than "just" meditation. Looking only at hypothyreosis, it's more like 2% or 5%.
@cmehdy it seems to me that you 1) work with health care, or 2) you have something like hypothyreosis or GAD yourself or people you know? or 3) you're a researcher? or 4) TBI happened to someone you know? (If it's too private then obviously no need to reply : ) And best wishes with your work)
Without getting into the details: kind of a combination of things, indeed :)
I just think it's time we as a society accept and understand that having support and medication for things that relate to our mental health is fully part of the toolbox of healing, and not a fringe thing that remains on the sidelines for an insignificant proportion of people.
Most people will spend some amount of time in a hospital or clinic in their lives, for a broken bone, a disease, or some functional change to their teeth, or whatever else. It's all pretty accepted, nobody thinks that it's a fringe thing.
We should accept that the way we look at psychiatry or targeted support for mental illnesses should be similar to surgery for broken bones: if you have a sprain just take good care of things at home with basic knowledge, but if there's a chance you have a fracture you won't make your bones heal well by praying or by finding a blog post, you need professionals for however long that situation lasts. And there are way more mental fractures out there than people like to admit to themselves and each others.
> who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances
I believe the point of the last sentence is exactly that your experiences in the external world can change you. But the difference is that you should decide how it changes you. You should decide how you can bring smarter nuance to you principles to avoid the exhausting emotional drama in the world, and you should decide how to alter your ideas/strategy (the sword) to better shape your life to meet your life's goals and serve the people you love.
This is the ideal - it is often not a reflection of our very human reality. ...but it is, through years of practice, something that can be closely attained. The prayer is the acceptance that we are flawed emotional humans - and it is just a simple tactic to remember to aspire to being in control of our emotional state - rather than letting it control us.
We can identify our self-worth according to who we are inside (our principles, thing love we have, and the goals we have), rather than passively allow the world to beat us what it finds useful.
Mental illness falls outside the scope of this prayer. If someone has mental illness, then this (or any) prayer isn't going to solve their problems and they should seek professional help.
You're right about that. I was in such a situation: I had strong feelings of anxiety, sadness, low self esteem. I went to a psychologist & psychiatrist and got a bit anti depressive medication, many books to read, meditation exercises, mindfulness. All these things were good and helpful, and I guess in most cases it's what's needed.
But nothing of all that totally helped; I still had this sadness and anxiety and lack/absence of self confidence.
Then many years later turns out I have an illness, hypothyreosis, that causes this. And medication (levothyroxine) made all this go away, and I'm a different person nowadays.
> who you are can absolutely be changed by [...] circumstances [...] illnesses
That's very correct. I've been two different personalities — one sad, anxious, withdrawn, another happy and social. It's weird what hormone levels can do to the brain and who one ... who one is? one's personality.
Anyway, if someone has depression and anxiety feelings, and meditation and self help books won't make that go away — then, a blood sample test, it's just 5 minutes. (Well, plus bus / subway / something to the health clinic.)
Awesome mantra. Been through similar circumstances and came up with a similar (though not as explicitly stated) coping mechanism. You come through such trials so much more emotionally resilient. Salute.
“If there is no solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it.”
-- The Dalai Lama
I've spent a lot of my career working to correct projects that have been in a terrible state and had the privilege to mentor and help pull people out of bad situations.
One of the big things I try to do is to get people to think about what they care about and how much they care. Good people do a lot of harm to themselves by caring about the wrong things: they want to be the hero in their story, but forget that six months from now nobody will remember the sacrifices they made.
One part of this is to accept the amount of work that needs to be done is only impacted in a small way by the work you've done today. If you work 8 hours or 16 hours there's still going to be too much work tomorrow.
Working longer hours generally does nothing than hide structural issues. By encouraging teams to cut their workload from 60+ hour weeks to 40, you are forcing these issues into the open.
For those that are ever in a bad situation I'm happy to listen (my contact details are in my profile), sometimes you just need somebody with an external perspective.
I also appreciate this quote, because it sets up a mature way of looking at things, categorising, and dealing with them.
However, I'm less of a fan of the opening words; it's not so much that this should be magically granted on to us with a wishing wand, it's something we need to consciously work on, from within. Somehow that slogging, gritty aspect is less represented.
That is not what praying is about. A healthy prayer is a form of meditation, like "meditate on how you want your future to look like". It is a reconnection with the higher self. It is already an attempt to access something from within. It is a technique to understand thing about oneself, to build up internal structure and organize inner spiritual work.
But if you base your conception of prayer on a sketch from Monty Python or maybe a mentally ill person on the street who uses some christian terms for progressing their own insanity, then in that conception maybe prayer is a way to "magically grant with a wishing wand". But this is not what healthy use of the term is about. I assume the original poster who used this word is not insane and looks at the implicit meaning of the quote, which if looked at in that light, makes a lot of sense.
Whether it's intentional or not, saying something like, "That is not what praying is about," is inviting an ecumenical squabble.
Prayer's about a lot of things to a lot of people. Regardless of whether you think a way that other people do it is correct or not, it still exists and is a thing. And offering strangers uninvited, prescriptive advice on how a religious practice should be done is a form of proselytization.
I think, in this case, it's more useful to recognize and observe the context. For example, I am inclined to agree that the "God grant me the..." at the start of that particular prayer is typically understood, at least in the community where I grew up, as more of an idiom than an actual request of God. Very much like how neutronicus put it in a sibling comment. Even atheists will use it that way without any sense of dissonance. But there are also plenty of Christians who understand God as being a lot more hands-on about things, and that would support a different understanding of the prayer's connotations, which is every bit as valid.
It was probably an ill-constructed phrase, yes. I was trying to convey something like "there exists, shared by a large number of people (although not all), a definition of the word "prayer", such that it is functional, objectively meaningful
, deep, well-understood and consensus-based, which is deeper than the previously suggested definition, and which makes more sense in the context in which it was used". I don't know how to put that into clean words without inviting a squabble.
A prayer is not a meditation. A prayer is a conversation. Meditation is either focusing on something or nothing. A conversation with your higher self is probably more like a prayer.
1. There's Christian cultural context regarding the phrase "God grant..." that is necessary to understand the prayer
2. To wit, when Christians use this phrase, it is both an exhortation to self-reliance and an honest admission of personal flaws that may sabotage the pursuit of self-reliance.
3. There is of course also the implication that the Christian theological tradition is the best way to achieve self-reliance in spite of character flaws.
My glib aside was meant to assert that 2. is in fact mostly orthogonal to 3.
That is an exercise left up to the user. It could be the air if that's what they decide is the granter. The point is that it isn't you. For some reason that flip works for a lot of folks.
This is a surprisingly difficult question that I would have (5-10 years ago) totally brushed away to the side as irrelevant and meaningless, thinking that there is only rational physical stuff and that is all we are supposed to think about.
Now, I still don't believe in anything literally supernatural. I don't think any quantum woo or mysterious psychic connection or literal sky daddies exist.
The point is, our mind at its core operates in terms that can be best spoken to in such metaphor. Just like we don't "see" wavelengths or spectra, we see color. If I told you that red is high frequency and blue is lower frequency light, you'd probably believe it, if you hadn't learned the opposite in physics class.
We see color and not light frequency, we see objects, we see tools, we see potential paths to walk on, we see handles to grab, we use tools as extensions of the body (with the brain actually mapping out some tools as if they were limbs).
In the same way much of what we experience in terms of emotional/spiritual life (if you don't suppress it and are mature enough) is very religious sounding old-fashioned terms like good and evil, temptation, redemption, salvation, revenge, punishment and forgiveness, wisdom and contemplation, sin and penance, suffering and attainment, grace and humbleness.
10 years ago all the above words meant jack shit to me, just some mumbo jumbo that bigoted old people use to condemn the youthful because they are too old and impotent and envious of the youth.
The thing is, the more you look into philosophy with a more open mind, you see that it actually has content behind it. To put it in more rational terms, you become aware of and able to discuss things that happen in the more animalistic part of the brain, that makes you excited, anxious, sad, joyful. It's easy to believe that all this is just straightforward "bad events -> sadness", "good events -> joy".
If you meditate, if you wind down in the evening and are mature and have some life stories of both success and disappointment, you will see that a lot of that stuff is best processed in spiritual terms and by relating it to archetypal stories. I've been reading Jordan Peterson on this matter, and while I don't agree with his conclusions in many cases, I do find it to be a good bridge between the rational scientific endeavor (you need to know the frequency of blue light to create lcd screens etc.), and the personal/spiritual manifestation of it (the blue handle of a hammer that I'm already preparing to grab in my mind).
It's not that the magic sky daddy gives us the stuff we ask for in prayer, like a vending machine. But for one reason or another, pretending to act out a sacrifice story or "asking god" why something happened can be useful.
You can substitute other words if you have an aversion to Christian terminology, you can say you're connecting to yourself, your higher self, the consciousness of the universe.
The thing is, ideas and insight doesn't come from forcing. Just like you don't pull on a plant forcefully to make it grow, you nourish it from below and with sunlight and air.
Nobody can make themselves have a great idea. In our experience, ideas just present themselves. Obviously they are not magically handed to us, but it looks "as if". Of course it's a complex brain process that involves long term memory, hormones, interactions of various brain parts, etc. Knowing the details of this can be beneficial, but just because you understand the brain chemistry of alcohol intoxication doesn't mean you won't get black out drunk if you drink a lot. Similarly somehow it is deeply ingrained in us to see things in terms of agents and purposeful patterns. One way to deal with this is to label this as a thinking error, an erroneous heuristic making too many false positives, a mistaken overdrive of the empathic part of the brain, something to eradicate. That's how I used to think.
Once you understand all this, you can be capable of discussing, untangling and managing your emotions and the archetypal/spiritual language can be a way to formulate this.
However when things get intense, I like to freshen it all up a bit with reading Zen koans. Zen koans are somewhat like "serious jokes" and confront your overly analytical mind with freezing shocks. They are playful, non-literal, but sometimes literal, or hanging in the air in between.
OP didn’t say he was afraid, but that it was unnecessary which is objectively true - I don’t personally have a belief in gods, you have a belief in a particular god but we can both get value out of acceptance and serenity.
You get value out of peace and serenity, yes? So do I. I take you at your word that you believe in a particular god, I would assume you take me at my word that I don’t believe in any gods.
If both of those things are true, then gods are not required to take value out of the idea of serenity. The only way that this could not be true as if one of us are lying.
I've always loved that (also, sans theological content). It's good advice for anyone. It's strong statement because in one sentence it can give someone something that a lot of people may not have - self awareness in the face of anxiety.
I love it too, but let's be honest, the devil is in the details, I think most people agonize because they dont really know if their problem can or cannot be solved with more action from them. I for sure accept the things I really know I cannot change, and work in those I clearly know are under my control. The anxiety comes from those things I am lost in the sense I dont know if I should push more or I should give up.
My next tattoo is representing "the devil is in the details".
I've had so many discussions with people over the years where someone will say "why doesn't X company/government just do Y". Well, because it's very rarely that easy. Just use black magic, that'll solve all our problems right?
On the other hand people "just do Z" every day. People make decisions and do stuff without infinitely agonizing over it.
As a mundane example: "Why don't I just stand up and go to pee? My bladder is exploding." "Well, because you're kind of stupid, you should indeed go to pee." "But if it was that easy, I would have already done it 5 minutes ago!"
Things are never settled and fully in balance. There are constantly surfacing opportunities to do something positive, ranging from straightforward to counter-intuitive.
It's not good to shut down all thinking with "nope, surely can't be done; if it could be, people would have done it already".
Thinking about why a company won't just do X or trying to put yourself in their shoes and come up with ideas is good mental exercise. Not everything is in a perfectly balanced out equilibrium. Otherwise there would be no profit made in this world.
Why bother doing research? If something is easy to discover, why haven't people already discovered it?
Of course I get the sentiment, you should think deeply before trying to revolutionize the strategy of a company. But ultimately the people who do decide on the strategy also don't precisely know what will be best. Nobody knows how one or another decision will actually pan out, in interaction with the real world with all the other things going on etc.
At some point you have to say, I've got enough details now, I'll make a choice. It will never feel completely satisfying. Either way it pans out, there will be a bunch of people who will say "they told you so", even just by pure chance.
The opposite of the "shit's easy" attitude, the "nothing can ever be done" is also bad. In the end, many countries and US states have answered all those questions and fleshed out the legislation to legalize marijuana.
Just look around you, and you see tons of stuff that was done, despite the difficulty.
I have mixed feelings about the quote, at least as far as I understand it or have heard it interpreted.
Specifically when it comes to systematic change, be that in a code base, a companies organisation or a countries political system. The mindsets of people go trough the spectrum of such systems being as easy to change as snipping a finger (and that doing so is a good idea) to it being impossible or dangerous so you should not even try.
From my perspective, pretty much anything can be changed in any direction. But it might take enormous effort to do so, way more than one could do alone and I might not even be around anymore when the change "finishes". While I could think of a hundred things that I would like to change or actually resist change, I only have the time and energy to focus on one or two at a time.
So for me, having overworked myself in the past, it boils down to consciously think of what I should and can burden myself with, when I should give up something and what the realistic outcomes are to find a good mix between ambition, effectiveness and health.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are solved by third-party libraries. Your tech is a liability and eventually someone with better tech will be smart enough to study your customers, or the students who will eventually replace your inevitably-retiring customers on the front lines and push adoption going forward.
And this is okay. The advantage corporations have over government institutions is that they can be created and destroyed with much less friction.
If you're lucky, your growth curve looks like double-sigmoid table-top. Probably it looks like an asymmetric Gaussian. What it doesn't look like is an exponential. Understand where your product is in its life-cycle, and maximize ROI.