A new study suggests that basic day-to-day goals, like being accepted by society, maintaining romantic relationships, or taking care of family members, help provide a sense of purpose in life.
Now that we know this, it’s all downhill from here boys.
inspiration
Who is a dreamer?
A dreamer is one whose mind is capable of operating independently, isolating specific thoughts, believing in a way around the dead ends, experimenting with fear.
Posts like these usually come with pictures of the sky, famous people, or the sea. Here’s a picture of my shorts.
Best things I’ve heard this week
“Sometimes people put a little salt in their ice cream, you know, or a little bit of ketchup in their lemonade. This is stuff that people do to enhance the different flavours.”
-Conan O’Brien
“An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress – and eventually formulate the questions correctly.”
-Lisa Randall
“Cactuses have thorns because nature doesn’t give a fuck.”
-Curiosity
If anyone wants to correct me by saying, “it’s Cacti, not cactuses”, feel free. I will send you my address. I am ready to fight you. I’ve been training. Wait, I’m sorry, I forgot. I thought this was reddit. The level of rage is so much different there.
The day the internet stood still
Have you ever had one of those days where you come back home to find there’s no internet, and you don’t know what to do? While you stand there in the darkness(2018 synonym for offline) trying not to panic and act like everything is cool, you tell yourself ,”huh!. No internet. Not a problem. I have thousands of other things to do”. You contemplate visiting the neighbours for a moment and realize you don’t even know their names. That’s when you remember an old friend called ‘book’ that you never finished reading. You wipe the dust off ‘A brief history of time’, written by Stephen Hawking, and admire the smiling face on the front cover. That’s when it hits you, “oh shit! Stephen Hawking is dead!”. Then you turn real sad.
Death of people like Mr Hawking is what you call an actual catastrophe. Do you know why? Because we do not know what we have lost. We have no idea what these people could have given mankind if they had lived longer. What if we had the technology to make a copy of his conscience? Would he allow that? Would he be wary of the consequences of doing such a thing? Who knows if it will be used for good or evil? Probably evil. But a lot of good too, I think.
I salute you Mr. Hawking, for showing us the awesome power of determination, and inspiring even the dumbest of people like myself. Although disabled, you had a pretty good run here on Earth. Cummon! Not every movie gets picked to win an Oscar, and one of them is a movie about you! I know it’s quite late to say this but, goodbye Mr. Hawking.
Where do I go from here?
Ok…I give up. I can’t do it. I can’t talk to people. I don’t do well with colleagues, neighbours and most of all, family. Hell, I don’t even know how to give a decent reply to the comments I get here on this blog. It sucks. But I’m done wasting my life, trying to live a lie. I am what I am. It is time to embrace who I am. I am 27 years old, but half that age, mentally. I have a happy maniac trapped inside me. This Sunday, I will release the Kraken.
I hope I don’t get fired.
Men’s washroom at my favourite cinema
Best things I’ve heard this week
- “My life’s mission is to, as an adult, realize all the promises that I made to myself when I was a little kid.”- Casey Neistat
- “I don’t want my poems to be taught to students in a system dominated by pitiable teaching standards and liberal valuations whose only aim is to ensure everyone gets good marks.”- Balachandran Chullikkad
- “To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.”- Ray Dolby
Hunt for the guitar hero begins
The epic quest to find the ultimate guitar god began yesterday. Over the weekend, I made a few calls to a few musician-friends to get some advice on how to go about this whole ‘starting a band’ thing. I got the best advice from a very good friend I met at a guitar-solo competition (read about it here) a while ago. He said, “if you have a clear idea of what exactly you want to do, then you don’t have to be afraid to do it by yourself. You might have to put some time, energy and money into it. But at the end you’ll know if you are on the right track. So if you can’t find people to play ‘with’ you, find people who can play ‘for’ you. Eventually, things will pan out and you’ll meet the right people along the way”. Kids, this is why you need to have friends.
So on Monday, after work, I took a bus to meet up with a friend who I met at a concert a while ago. Dude’s a videographer. I know. Not a guitarist. But I thought he could give me some tips. AND HE DID!!! This is what I learned from the long interaction I had with him. It’s one thing to have the ability to explain your idea to others and create enthusiasm and excite them (like that part in the movie Jobs, where Steve Jobs convinces the CEO of Pepsi to join his company. But it’s a whole other thing to actually show them some of your creations. And believe me when I tell you this. It creates a lasting impression on the person when you actually, physically show them what you are capable of. I realized this when the videographer showed me some of his work. I mean, he hadn’t done a lot of shoots or anything, but the clip he showed me was enough to give me an idea of what he was capable of. I understood that he’s not a big fan of the traditional music-video- camerawork(I am of the same mind-set). So an idea came up and I said, “maybe we should work together on a percussion-based project”. Boom! magic! So basically we talked and talked and talked while his girlfriend kept calling him mercilessly. At the end of the day, it went well. We spent about two hours eating the worst French fries in the world and talking about music, artists, video, cameras, dolly tracks, all that good stuff. So I can safely conclude by saying that yesterday was a success. I dunno. I feel like somewhere along the way I’ll be able to make use of this person’s skills.
winner of 2018 high definition picture award
How not to copy your influencer
Its simple. Like this:
Michael Jackson
Influences: Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, etc.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson( ‘copying’ does not apply here but other aspects of influencing does)
Influences: Carl Sagan, Isaac Newton, etc.
Iron Maiden
Influences: Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Yes, Led Zeppelin, etc.
Robin Williams
Influences: Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, etc.
Skrillex
Influences: Marilyn Manson, I don’t really care
Graham Linehan (Creator of The It Crowd)
Influences: Don’t really know. Just slipped in.
Antonio Vivaldi
Influences: I’m pretty sure he had influencers. You got my point.
What all of these people have in common is that they took specific ideas from their influencers, moulded it into their own, mixed it with their own fresh ideas and then built upon it. In other words, they picked up where their influencers left off. I think, if you are creative enough, all this will happen subconsciously. They did not try to ‘imitate’ their influencers. They did not purposefully alter their content to avoid similarities with their influencers. They did not actively try to borrow ideas and manipulate them so that people won’t notice it. The ideas for which these people are known for, were birthed within them. They only needed influencers to fuel their inner passion.
I hate it when we lose great artists. I really do. It’s because we don’t know what amazing things they would have done. A creative mind doesn’t just stop manufacturing ideas. It’s the body that fails. Not the mind. I’m a 90s kid. The type of music that I like is dying out slowly. I don’t have anything against modern day music. I enjoy it. But there’s this deep nostalgia. I can’t let it go. That’s why I love it when new, awesome artists have the balls to pickup from where great artists left off.
Greta Van Fleet
Influences: Led Zeppelin
Airbourne, Jettblack, The Treatment
Influences: AC/DC (in my opinion)
Why is it important not to have ‘role models’?
Because they are people like you and me. Which means they fuck up too. Its important to follow only select qualities of people and not people as a whole. Because some people are assholes. For example, lets say you like an artist. You follow the artist on all social media. You literally wish to “be” them. All of a sudden, you hear that the artist paints beautiful pictures for a living and fucks kids during down time. What do you do then? Every picture the artist ever painted makes you nauseous now. But what if you disregard the person and focus just on the work?
How about fictional characters for role models? I don’t see anything wrong in that. Except they are not real.
Return of the dragon
Its back. Fucking social-phobia is back in full swing. Everything was going fine. I was making friends. I was getting better at ‘small-talk’. I was mastering the art of socializing. But now, I’ve lost everything. I’ve been trying to find out what caused the sudden change. I ‘ve narrowed it down to two possible causes:
- Trip to visit family
- I got dumped
The trip back home sent me back to my comfort zone. I didn’t have to interact with strangers for one whole week. One week of harmless, friendly, familiar faces has unfortunately done a lot of damage.
And then I got dumped. In her defence, she was right about a lot of things! Anyways… it happened and I’m dealing with it. Fortunately, I now have an old guitar and a long beard to suit my current situation. To make matters worse, things are not looking good at work and my phobias have peaked. The moment I enter my apartment building, I find myself running to my apartment for fear of bumping into neighbours along the way. I had two panic attacks during the flight back from home. I couldn’t do anything else but play this track on repeat:
What I am trying to say is… life is not great at the moment but I do have my own ways of dealing with this sort of thing. Here are a few:
- I find the weirdest things to be uplifting. This animated short by the dudes at Dolby makes me happy(headphones recommended):
2. This amazing blog
http://nolightwithoutdarkness.com/2017/12/27/how-im-coping-with-social-anxiety/
3. This awesome person
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
4. This exciting place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acharya_Jagadish_Chandra_Bose_Indian_Botanic_Garden
Random Thought Beam 