🔼: [[⭐️ Self-Care]], [[Practices 🕯️]] #### ⭐️ Life Curation A term referring to the [[Practices 🕯️|Practice 🕯️]] of making [[🕯️ Mindfulness|🕯️ mindful]] considerations of what we give our [[⭐️ Attention]] to, what we allow ourselves to be exposed to and surrounded with day-to-day. You might call it Mindful Living or Intentional Living. [[🔑 We are what we practice]], for better or worse, and our mind is practicing all it consumes through our senses. Life Curation is a form of mental nutrition or mental hygiene and its importance is difficult to overstate because we naturally and involuntarily become more like what we consume or allow into our lives. Our mental health is the product of what enters our mind. [[The Modern World]] has mistakenly conditioned us to fragment and compartmentalize aspects of our lives and consider them individually rather than as the interconnected ecosystem they are. [[🔑 Our inner and outer worlds are not separate]] and [[🔑 everything is connected to everything else]] — any one aspect of our life is influenced by the whole and vice versa. We are not separate, our surroundings inevitably affect us. Many practices and products are marketed as having a capacity to change our brains, but the reality is [[🔑 Everything we come into contact with leaves something behind]]. Large corporations spend lavishly on [[marketing]] experts whose primary goal is to take advantage of this fact, and Life Curation instead leverages it in favor of our well-being, [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions]], [[🦮 How to Recover from Trauma|🦮 trauma recovery]], and [[⭐️ Self-Becoming]]. This is *not* a [[🛡️ Perfectionism|🛡️ perfectionistic]] micro-managerial task of staying supremely comfortable, it’s acknowledging that the things we take in through our senses are as important as what we eat — it’s being mindful of what we consume and how much, of our inner and outer [[⭐️ Needs]]. This practice turns what is usually passive activity into [[⭐️ Self-Care]] and [[🕯️ Self-Stewardship]]. While taken to an extreme it can become a [[Protector Strategies 🛡️|Protector Strategy]] of [[🛡️ Avoiding|🛡️ Avoidance]] and [[🛡️ Attachment|🛡️ Attachment]], a source of unhappiness in itself, this is nonetheless an essential practice because **continually rejecting and bracing against what we don't want to internalize takes up a significant amount of our inner-resources** which substantially contributes to our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]]. We need [[🕯️ Boundaries]]. Meanwhile to neglect it altogether and follow our [[💡 Habits|habitual]] way of living takes so much from us, including our agency, our well-being, and ultimately our happiness, leaving it up to chance and likely to large corporations looking to sell us something or manipulate or monetize our [[⭐️ Attention]]. %% Curation: we *adapt* to the environment. It's not for no reason that some of us go on meditation retreats or live in secluded monasteries. Monks give up their possessions, their attachments, and worldly ambitions for good reasons. Among them is that it makes it less likely for the various [[💡 Parts|parts of themselves]] to be provoked, it's a kind of safeguard. But most of us don’t want to be monastics. %% Life Curation is a kind of palate cleanser. It’s also only one side of the coin. We can complement Life Curation with our inner-explorations and [[Practices 🕯️]] to make us much more resilient and difficult to control or distract. The two together aid our [[⭐️ Self-Becoming]]. ...tuns out Tich Nhat Hanh felt similarly: <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/76YA4uTSq0E?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> He also recommends [[🕯️ Tending to feelings]] that arise from poor Life Curation, and to "water the good seeds" or "flowers" in others. Remind them, say or do something to touch the good in others. He talks about only "watering the good seeds," which I take to mean reinforcing something with itself (feeding fear with fear-evoking news) though on the surface it seems otherwise (because water is good for all plants). I think the real message is to greet everything with care and to reinforce our virtues. Gardening the mind. ###### The Impact of Experience Most of us already have some understanding of this, but the impact of our experiences can be near-invisible. We may not recognize it at all for years, and then suddenly look back and can point to moments in our lives when an experience so obviously influenced our thoughts and decisions without us realizing. - [[🔑 Our mind is directly influenced by our surroundings]] - [[🔑 Our mindset has a significant impact on our outcomes]] - [[🔑 Our inner and outer worlds are not separate]] - [[🔑 Psyche and Soma are not separate]] - [[🔑 We can’t do everything]] - [[🔑 Small choices are big]] - Relationship Hygiene: - [[🔑 Put great care into who you surround yourself with]] - [[🔑 Our parts influence other people]] - [[🔑 Tell and act the truth]] - "You are what you eat." - [[🔑 Tools and technologies have values built into them]] ##### Adjustments We would be wise to create an environment which supports the lifestyle we most want to live. These adjustments aren't about making value-judgments of whether something is 'good' or 'bad' but to consider their ecological impact on us and our lives. > [!FAQ] [[⭐ Questions]] > - What kind of life is my current lifestyle encouraging? [[The Modern World]] is rife with junk food and addictive poisons, and often the difference between poison and medicine is the dose. %% In today's world, when so much of our lives can be monetized, and when corporations are legally incentivized to do whatever they can to make maximum profit for their shareholders by retaining repeat customers, one of the best ways to do that is to create socially-acceptable [[🛡️ Addiction or Dependence]]. The fast food industry is a worthy example. We find sugar, salt, and fat compelling because it was quite rare that our pre-agriculture ancestors would stumble on them. Even if they were commonplace, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal because those foods also came with a wealth of other nutrients. Today fast food removes all of those nutrients and leans into the salt, sugar, and fat to create variations of addictive edible food-like substances which are void of essential nutrients. And it's because of this that it's possible to both eat too much and be undernourished. What fast food is to real food, [[Pornography]] is to [[💡 Relational Intimacy|Intimacy]], [[Video Games 🎮]], [[Social Media]], and the News are to engaging with the world and human [[⭐️ Relationships]], [[💡 Productivity|Productivity]] is leading a meaningful life. %% I find that what I remove from my life is just as important as what I add to it. Life Curation can be applied to anything, including the things we see so often that they become mundane and we barely notice them anymore. It can feel like cleaning our room or getting rid of objects which no longer add to our lives but have been sitting around for years, or realizing our appreciation for something that’s been hidden away for a long time. We can be so accustomed life-clutter and sensory smog that we don't recognize it as stifling or energy-draining until after it's gone, until after we can suddenly breathe with more clarity and ease. Here are some things I've experimented with and [[🕯️ Boundaries]] I set that have helped me at some point. They are in constant flux as I am continually checking in with how my surroundings impact various [[💡 Parts|aspects of myself]] and am mindful of the fact that Life Curation can easily become a [[Protector Strategies 🛡️|Protector Strategy 🛡️]] (which is okay, but important to notice). So, take this list with a grain of salt. This is messy, complicated, nuanced territory and an ongoing exploration. There are gaps in my understanding and I’m just allowing it to unfold as I continue to experiment and stay curious. This is not intended to be prescriptive, we cannot standardize being human and what works for me may feel stifling to others and vice versa. The idea here isn’t to come up with a list of strict rules, but to approach this with mindfulness and intentionality, to [[🔑 make aligned and compassionate decisions]] around everyday experiences within our control. Remember: [[🔑 the Guide is not gospel]]. ###### General - [[🔑 We have a right and responsibility to say No]]. ###### Home > “Love people, use things. The opposite never works.” > — Joshua Fields Millburn - [[🛠️ Conscious Spending|Minimalism]] - Using soaps and essential oils that help me relax. - Plants. Colors. Textures. Especially in my [[🛠 Sacred Space]] ###### Technology, Media, & Entertainment - Technologies are now designing us by hooking and manipulating our attention more than we're designing them. - The internet's bubble-creating algorithms (perhaps accidentally) fool us into believing that we know more than we actually do. - Algorithms do not care if you're learning anything that will help you with what you're dealing with. Algorithms only care about what keeps you consuming. Life's lessons can be learned by simply engaging with the world, but we spend much time over-preparing for what we aren't actually facing in the present moment. We can spend years of our lives in stillness having learned nothing that will actually relieve or improve our present circumstances when we could have spent perhaps a few months working on what's actually in front of us. We can become over-prepared and under-equipped. We can spend years learning without applying or actually making anything out of it, without offering our [[💡 Strengths and Weaknesses|Gifts]] to the world. It's a form of [[🛡️ Procrastinating|🛡️ Procrastination]]. It's like reading about swimming. Set a goal and learn for a purpose, learn what's necessary to complete it. Targeted learning. How will you use what you're learning today? - The internet is dangerous because no one has to know you. You don't have to be vulnerable, you don't have to be seen. What initially feels liberating can become alienating, *because* no one knows you. And the people who do try to know you start to feel like a threat. Why be vulnerable when you could get a lot of the same things from the internet anonymously? - [[🔑 Speed is a developmental block]] - Limiting screen-time - [[🔑 Screens can easily disembody us]]. If we’re already disembodied, we’re unlikely to notice. - I changed my phone lock screen and computer background to something calming or neutral. My phone's has a plain black wallpaper — sometimes with a mindfulness or self-compassion prompt or [[🕯️ Remembrances]] in white text if I want a reminder. - Mindfully choosing media sources – it's called "media *consumption*" for a reason. Our devices can do enormous harm, but it’s also what allowed me to build the Guide and learn so much in such a short time, to connect with people the world over. - [[🔑 Shared entertainment is a low form of intimacy]] - I consider, what are the worldviews, perspectives, and arguments being made and reinforced by this (film, show, album, etc.)? What are the [[💡 Burdens 🪨|Burdens]] which drive it? - [[🔑 Put great care into who you surround yourself with]]. This includes characters. - Advertising is the opposite of therapy. I block all of them because I believe it’s unethical to allow people to manipulate and hijack my attention — my attention is my most valuable non-renewable resource, and advertisers know it. - I put limitations on watching, playing, or listening to anything violent, especially when the violence is meant to be fun or entertaining. - Many media sources have violence that looks like the real thing. It modeled and normalized violence, aggression, and [[💡 Polarization|polarization]] without putting much of any consideration on the impact it has on the people who commit violence or the people who witness it. - On the other hand, some clean up or abstract violence and death to make it palatable enough for more sensitive and younger audiences to play with packaged as entertainment. Yet we are still learning to escalate [[💡 Polarization|polarize]] and form relationships through violence. - Violence is rarely taken seriously. Characters witness or participate in violence with minimal impact, heroes kill so-called “bad guys” without a second thought, thousands of identical baddies are killed for sport and depict war as something fun and exciting. In video games death is meaningless, we just respawn or try again. - It seemed to desensitize me. Stories of real-world violence had significantly less impact than they otherwise would because violence was had become mundane and non-real. The overstimulation and constant bombardment of information and terrible stories had my [[💡 Protector Parts|Protectors]] close me off from others' suffering, which meant I couldn‘t meet real suffering (even my own) with an open heart – I was less connected and less connectable. - When our attention is hijacked, it's usually pointed toward passive consumption. Passive consumption eventually turns into overstimulation and isolation. Over time, this leads to meaninglessness and spiritual emptiness. - I feel media’s approach to violence has made fighting and competition a default response or an expected dynamic with many people, especially strangers. Video games especially are designed to encourage antagonism. - [Competitive gaming communities are frequently toxic](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1531ugo/study_says_7_out_of_10_players_avoid_playing/) by design as we spend most of our time in domination style, unsportsmanlike competition. It changes our [[💡 Language|Language]] from ”I did it,” to “I beat them,” to “I killed them,” and [[🔑 part of the human brain cannot parse fact from fiction]]. - I didn’t learn to skillfully participate in [[🕯️ Generative Conflict|Conflict]] or to [[🕯️ Repair]] any ruptured [[⭐️ Relationships]]. But I did learn how to manipulate and to tell people what they wanted to hear in order to make them do, think, or feel the way I wanted them to so I could achieve a particular outcome (what I call [[Instrumental Language]]). I learned about crowd control, choke points, strategy and tactics. I learned to make split second calculations, to hone my reflexes and to come up with hurtful zingers as if I were a sarcastic stand up comic dealing with hecklers. I learned to identify firearms by their look and their sound, knew what kind of ammunition they used, knew how to load them — as a child. - The United States military uses video games to propagandize and romanticize joining the military. When my cousin joined the Marines more than a decade ago he told me one of the questionnaires he filled out asked him whether he played games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. These days I've made a hobby out of breaking games by playing them in ways they aren't designed to be played, and it's fascinating to see what happens in both single-player and multiplayer games. - Tribalism in sports can be beautiful and connective, but it also frequently turns violent. - I noticed there's a kind of energetic transference between music and listener (ie people moving to music in the grocery store without realizing it, feeling energized or wanting to break things when they hear certain songs). I noticed some songs can take hold of me and I end up rehashing emotions or in a pretty unpleasant state. I used to listen to music because I thought it was good without any consideration for whether it was actually good for me. It’s not so much that listening to certain music is an inherently bad idea (though some might be), but especially if that music is compelling, if it’s made by a talented person whose musical sensibilities do something for me, and if that music was made from a particular negatively-charged place, a song can become a kind of mantra — playing over and over again in my head and melding with my worldview, my sense of self, my beliefs, a muscle built with each repetition. The song’s appeal is like the spoonful of sugar that makes the poison go down. - It’s the equivalent of food that’s tasty but we have an allergy. Or people we're attracted to but are incompatible with us. Perhaps much of this or even all of it was somehow transformative or helpful to the artist to make, but should it have been shared? Should there be some kind of nutrition label on the album? - Art often reflects the emotional state or worldview of its creator, and when it resonates deeply, we can take those emotions or narratives on without realizing, especially when repeated, becoming a kind of emotional reinforcement. Repetition has a way of solidifying ideas or feelings just like it strengthens a muscle or hones a skill, and when paired with a compelling melody or rhythm, those ideas can bypass conscious scrutiny. Talent can mask the potential harm, making it easier to internalize narratives that might not serve our well-being. - Many of us are bouncing around from person to person, event to event, task to task with a mind trained by algorithms. They teach us to be driven by impulse, obligation, loneliness, and fear. They spread our attention so thin that it can be easily manipulated. - Sometimes listening to or watching something with a certain emotional charge helps me to connect with that feeling in an embodied way, to where the emotion is really seen and heard and moves through me — this feels like [[⭐️ Self-Care]] and [[🕯️ Tending to feelings]]. Other times it feels like evoking, provoking, instigating, or “egging on” certain feelings, or “poking the bear” — agitating and stirring up feelings without good reason, almost like when someone is deliberately trying to annoy or upset me. Or rather than bringing care to my emotions, it amplifies and intensifies them in ways that might be gratifying and energizing, but aren’t actually helping me. - Likewise, I consider my bodymind’s profoundly pleasurable response to the sound of a meditation bell, a handpan, a kalimba, or a sound healing ceremony. - So many of us spend huge amounts of time absorbing films, video games, television shows, music, books and stories – depictions and re-presentations of life rather than life itself. In exactly the same way that pornography can give us an unrealistic and fragmented conception of sex and intimacy, we can unconsciously become convinced that life is like what we see in media. Most stories are about violence, tension, social dysfunction, and we naturally emulate what we're consistently exposed to as we create a mental map informed by it. Hero Stories may give some of us an over-developed sense of responsibility. - [[The Tetris Effect]] - Technology expends our time and energy in ways that don't bring about tangible change. For example, we might have strong problem-solving parts or lonely parts whose energies are expended through video games, solving virtual problems and forming virtual emotional connections with fictional characters. We could instead move in the direction of something that actually feels meaningful to us, that has a positive impact on our lives, our [[⭐️ Relationships]], or our [[⭐️ Community]]. - It's difficult to take in, metabolize, or even desire anything of substance when we're already full of filler. [[🔑 We need Nothing]]. And without boredom, we lose our drive to explore, internally and externally. We may even forget that we have an inner voice that isn't just an echo of what media we've taken in. - The sad truth is there are many creators who are very good at what they do. They’re incredibly interesting, incredibly valuable, but there are more people out there and more content to consume than you could ever get through in a thousand lifetimes and we only have one. Prioritizing is crucial. Gardening is crucial. - [[🔑 Art can be dangerous]] - I carefully consider what I read because the ideas I take in and accept (consciously or unconsciously) organize my inner-ecosystem and orients me to others and to the world in a particular way. Actually reading and educating myself allows me to actually participate in the world and not just recite scripts various factions and ideologies hand out to the people who subscribe to them. - [[🔑 Focusing on something can increase the likelihood of the outcome]]. ###### The News and Social Media - It's possible to spend your entire life watching other people live theirs. It's possible to spend your entire life consuming superficial content and nothing else. You'll never get to the bottom of that well. - Social Media is turning life into a [[🛡️ Performing|🛡️ Performance]]. - It triggers [[🛡️ Criticizing]] parts. Dating apps especially encourage us to make snap-judgments of strangers in a split second. Even worse if there’s little filtering. - [[🔑 Multitasking fractures our Focus]] - [[🔑 Most online communities are pseudo-communities]] - Set [[🕯️ Boundaries]] around or get off Social Media. That could mean… - reducing time spent on it - unfollowing people and organizations which leave us feeling less than or bitter or icky - unfollowing people who have demonstrated that they aren’t interested in engaging with us because it reinforces parts’ fears and [[💡 Burdens 🪨|Burdens]] of unworthiness. It’s healthy to not allow people who don’t value us to have access to us, even if access is just being a spectator to our lives. We don’t owe anyone our time and attention, those are our most valuable and non-renewable resources. - Authentic[[☀️ Connection]], [[⭐️ Community]], and [[⭐️ Relationships]] are nourishing. Social media, or the way we’re encouraged to use it, is more like junk food. While actively engaging and connecting with people contributes to our well-being, passively engaging (such as scrolling through instagram, Facebook, or TikTok) as a spectator of others’ curated lives is disconnecting and takes away from our mental health. - Little known fact: the flood of irrelevant, insignificant information is how trivia games like Jeopardy and crossword puzzles came to exist — we had to invent a space where the overstimulation became somehow useful. The News and Social Media don't primarily exist to benefit us, but to extract value *from* us by provoking and leveraging [[⭐️ Emotions]] to direct, exploit, and monetize our attention through compulsive engagement and advertisements. The 24 hour news cycle is Reality TV, which is to say, entertainment. It isn’t real, and it’s exploitative. These corporations want our [[💡 Protector Parts|Protectors]] on high alert, for us to be [[💡 Blending|blended]] and clicking and searching and watching and arguing because it generates more ad revenue. It wants us to feel unsafe so that we stay engaged. **Doom is great for business**, not for actually solving problems (see: [[💡 Overwhelm#The Neuroscience of Overwhelm|The Neuroscience of Overwhelm]]). News anchors relay heartbreaking stories as if they were mundane or unreal before immediately putting advertisements in our faces. Tragedies around the world are packaged as entertainment — and the more we're exposed to something, the more common, frequent, and normal we believe it to be. Witnessing something terrible and being unable to do anything about it is the definition of [[💡 Trauma|Trauma]]. [[✍️ We live in a traumatized world]]. If we're constantly bombarded with the world's problems, and often we are, and if we aren't given enough nuanced information or told about the incredible people working tirelessly to solve them, and often we aren't, two things are likely to happen: 1. Our [[💡 Protector Parts|Protectors]] defend us against [[💡 Overwhelm|overwhelm]] through [[🛡️ Emotional Armoring]], so that we feel few if any of our [[⭐️ Emotions]] at all and are desensitized to our own suffering and the suffering of others so that it is *far* less likely to ever be resolved. 2. We get [[💡 Overwhelm|overwhelmed]] and stuck in [[💡 The Sad Gap]]. Looking at the world complexly takes more work, it's less compelling, and it doesn't make as much money. Most of what is delivered to us as news belongs on the desk of someone who can do something about it, not on the tiny computers we keep on our person at all times. %% [^1]: