Unnecessary pressure

Life - Expectations = Happiness

When we expect nothing from others and minimize our desires, life is so much happier. I'm all for individualism and may be a small but healthy dose of competition to get people to achieve. However, I see so many unhappy people because they constantly striving to get something for whatever reasons.

There's this myth in the whole self-help / improvement about declaring one's goals to his/her peers. This, of course, would set most of these pledgers to fail. There are very few people who rise up to the occasion; in reality, most people buckle under pressure, especially social pressure. I had a similar discussion with a friend about how most so-called seduction gurus, most guys will be disappointed with the fact that most girls who got with these self-proclaimed gurus are fugly! I would even venture to guess that most self-help gurus are not as enlightened and successful as they claimed in their marketing.

There are also some miracle stories about people achieving their dreams that they set out on their vision board (as presented in The Secret). There are also anecdotal testimonies from very few individuals that they have found their perfect partners, as they have written down in the love list, as shown on Oprah. Most people would accept those "miracles" as something that happens regularly, and they don't realize that those are exceptions. Exceptions prove the rule; which means for the usual participant, they would rarely if ever achieve result on par with those "miracles." Let's also not forget that most of those miracle stories are just marketing ploys.

Even if we assume those testimonies as real and true, most of those "winners" have very selective memories. They would recall only incidences or results that coincide with what they set out... or they would only remember what they want to remember. This is why for myself, I see the world for what it is, and I often contradict what many of these self-help / improvement and seduction gurus claimed.

Putting all the probabilistic evidence of success, let's examine what happens when people set unnecessary pressure on achievement. For every pair of parents who has high expectation for their kids, I will show you how disappointed they will be when their kids failed to get into the top-notch college or get arrested for DUI. For every guy who sets out to be the major player, I will show you a hundred more who go home alone to jerk off. Worst yet, they probably don't have any girl, or even guys as friends! Because of their public declarations, imagine how much pressure they experience in performing their miracles in real life and the embarrassment when these guys fail.

So instead of setting pressure for oneself to achieve... something monumental. Set realistic goals, and make sure there is a road map to reach those goals. Sometimes, the problem is the actual goals themselves. Instead of aiming for something external, people should find something that fulfills what's inside. They can search all they want, fuck as many as their so-called "hotbabes" they want, they will never achieve that inner peace. It's always easy to find blame on people or what goes on outside, search for a replacement, it's much more difficult to turn inward, find motivation from within, fill that void inside, and fix what is wrong internally.