People who make me feel like crap or worse off then when I encountered them consistently are written off and out of my life
Doesn’t matter if its family, nobody is entitled to your attention and suffering and it does nobody any real good for you to succumb to the inevitable dysfunction it creates in your life and relationships and also material conditions.
The entire world is batlting against you, trying to convince you to open your wallet for them. Don’t let them win.
Stay curious. No one is over educated to the point that they can’t learn.
The other side of this is that anyone, no matter their background, can teach you something.
Never admire an entire person, only the aspects of the person you find admirable.
I printed this quote by Sister Chan Khong and carry it in my wallet:
If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering.
So I try to spread a little joy and remove a little sadness.
Don’t make excuses. If you fucked up admit it and make a plan to prevent it from happening in the future. Excuses themselves do nothing to help a situation.
/me grabs soapboxI’ll focus on people. I avoid people who consistent or egregiously:
- are assumptive, gullible, or fallacious.
- expect me to be assumptive, gullible, or fallacious.
- are eager to violate the others’ autonomy; for example, the “I never take a «no» for an answer” ones.
- defend their actions based on intentions (instead of responsibility, outcome, or info at hand).
- expect me to apologise for things they know I have no blame for.
- claim that fighting back makes me as bad as my enemies, i.e. who expect me to become a punching bag.
Note: “consistent or egregiously” is key here. A brainfart or a derp is fine; but some things happen too often, or are too strong, to be considered simply brainfarts.
[Self-replying to avoid editing the above.]
Or perhaps a better first rule would be “judging and acting only come after understanding”.
These are both good rulesets
Try to live a happy life while impinging on others as little as possible. Pretty much the exact opposite of right-wingers.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough
Be nice. But not at any cost.
Chill the fuck out
“Disregard principles”
If you don’t know what you want, make a choice instead of just waiting. If it’s not the right one, change your mind. It’s always ok to change your mind. Sitting in stasis means the ice cream shop closes before you ordered and now you don’t get any.
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Not taking risk is one of the main reasons most people never get to truly experience life before it’s over. However, there are situations where taking risk can actually destroy your life, especially when it involves physical danger. Proceed with caution.
Fair. This one usually pertains to lower risk decisions tbh. Stuff like what to have for dinner or how to spend the day off. And specifically when you otherwise wouldn’t have a preference. But quite often doing nothing is the greater risk in high stakes situations too. In any case, better to have your ice cream even if it’s not your favorite flavor, than none at all. That is, as long as you’re actually going to eat it.
Be excellent to each other
And even without reprimanded - I can damn well guarantee that person will EVER make that same mistake.
Not everything requires a paper-trail.
When I was a teenager, I encountered a bunch of different perspectives that contradicted the beliefs and ideas that I was raised with, and I realized that if you had wrong ideas about reality and tried to be a good person based on those ideas, you could easily wind up doing more harm than good. So I made a vow to myself to always pursue the truth - to learn about the world, to examine myself and my biases, to seek out and understand different perspectives, to ground my beliefs on evidence, and to reject peer pressure and comforting lies and to face reality even when it disturbed me.
