KinderLogik

https://www.facebook.com/100064635884223/posts/730074939157029/

Have you ever thought about this?

In 100 years like in 2123 we will all be buried with our relatives and friends.

Strangers will live in our homes we fought so hard to build, and they will own everything we have today. All our possessions will be unknown and unborn, including the car we spent a fortune on, and will probably be scrap, preferably in the hands of an unknown collector.

Our descendants will hardly or hardly know who we were, nor will they remember us. How many of us know our grandfather's father?
After we die, we will be remembered for a few more years, then we are just a portrait on someone's bookshelf, and a few years later, our history, photos and deeds disappear in history's oblivion. We won't even be memories.

If we paused one day to analyse these questions, perhaps we would understand how ignorant and weak the dream to achieve it all was.

If we could only think about this, surely our approaches, our thoughts would change, we would be different people.

Always having more, no time for what's really valuable in this life.
I'd change all this to live and enjoy the walks I've never taken, these hugs I didn't give, these kisses for our children and our loved ones, these jokes we didn't have time for.

Those would certainly be the most beautiful moments to remember, after all they would fill our lives with joy.

And we waste it day after day with greed, greed and intolerance.

40 times people used the funniest names to save contacts in their phones (link in the comments)

Our Secret Longing to Be Good - The School Of Life We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Our Secret Longing to Be Good — Read now

THREE KINDS OF PARENTAL LOVE

The moment babies are born, their minds are dominated by a powerful implicit question: What do I need to do in order to be loved?

We have to remember that babies are entirely at the mercy of the prevailing environment, and therefore, knowing what exactly the people in this environment want from them in exchange for keeping them alive is central to their very survival. Furthermore, how the question is answered will shape their entire personality and sense of adult priorities; who we are is predominantly the result of what we needed to do to capture and sustain the interest of the people who put us on the earth.

There are broadly three answers to the baby’s question. Let’s go through them in turn:

1. Nothing very much

A certain sort of parent immediately makes it clear: the baby doesn’t need to do anything to deserve to exist. They are allowed to be; they don’t need to do.

Their own needs come first, who they are and what they want is the priority in those early fragile months and years.

From such a base, a child can grow up liking themselves, being in touch with their needs and adjusting to the needs of others without too great a loss of creativity or individuality. They don’t have to do anything extraordinary to feel they are OK; and if they happen to do it anyway, it will simply be out of a sense of inherent curiosity and appetite.

This is, needless to say, the love we should all want - and have had.

Then comes another kind of answer.

2. To earn love, you must succeed.

For a certain kind of parent, the baby’s existence is premised on an enormous requirement. The child has to help the parent to feel much better about themselves, they have to help them to paper over their own inadequacies, compromises and insecurities.

For example, to ward off any risk the parent might be thought stupid, the child has to demonstrate extreme intelligence. To compensate for the parent’s lack of stellar career, the child has to shine globally. To appease the parent’s fear of ugliness, the child has to be blatantly pretty. To ward off fears of dullness and the pull of depression, the child needs to be a cheerful comic. The child is a compensatory object at the behest of the parent’s disguised vulnerabilities. They are not allowed to be shy, hesitant, confused, quiet or unimpressive to strangers - for all this would devastate and madden an already precariously balanced parent.

From such an upbringing, the child will be constantly be left wondering what they can do next to generate applause and acclaim. They will exhaust themselves in the pursuit of a love that should have been theirs from the first.

Then there is a third kind of answer to the baby’s question.

3. To earn love, you must fail

Some children have to succeed in order to be loved; some - even more darkly - are commanded to fail.

There are parents who will only tolerate children who don’t threaten their place in the world. They are not allowed to be any happier, more beautiful or more successful - and if they come anywhere close to being so, a vengeful aggression will make itself felt.

The child understands well enough the rule they have been placed under. They can be expected to grow up with advanced tendencies to self-sabotage and underperformance. If they promise to be beautiful, they’ll be sure not to take any pleasure in their physical appearance; if they are on track to do well at school, they’ll ensure they manage always to fail the final exam. If they end up with a good career, they’ll do their utmost to show their rivalrous parent that it isn’t any fun really - perhaps by developing a psychological disorder that guarantees a demonstrable misery.

Sometimes - even more perplexingly - more than one message emanates from a single parent. The parent swings between wanting a child to shore them up and fearing that they are threatening them. The child will be under pressure to both succeed and fail. There will be nowhere for the benighted soul to turn.

What we can be sure is that anything other than the first message will be sure to leave us with a highly complex and unfortunate legacy. We need to be extremely compassionate towards ourselves and the babies we once were who heard such a puzzling and devastating answer to that powerless urgent first question: What do I need to do to be allowed to live?

passenger trains in US vs Europe

The longer we live among humans, the more we are liable to conclude that the greatest share of misery and discord tearing our world apart stems from one egregious dynamic above others: pride.

When someone hears every piece of feedback as an insult, when they refuse to change course whatever the facts suggest, when apologies are due but never come, when we sulk rather than laugh, when we chase our tails but can’t admit we’re lost, when it always has to be someone else’s fault - then we can be sure that the cockerel of pride has won the upper hand.

The origins of pride lie in an unfortunate relationship to our own blindness, idiocy and folly. The proud person is not - at base - any more flawed than anyone at else, but what distinguishes them is how they view the possibility that they might be so. It is the strict inability to countenance that they might - at points - be profoundly mistaken, confused, cruel or at sea that renders them so taxing to be around. And conversely, we know that we are well on the way to maximal maturity and intelligence when we can, without too much loss of face, accept that we are generally babies and blockheads.

The proud person has no sense of the legitimate place of stupidity and insanity in a good life. They cling with dispiriting and fruitless ferocity to narratives of their own blamelessness. To say, with a modest clenching of the lips, ‘Well then perhaps I was wrong’ is an unbearable eventuality.

Of course, poignantly, the proud have, in their hearts, none of the confidence that their rigid and haughty manner would intimate. A person has to feel very fragile indeed to need always to be right, to have such difficulty surrendering, to be so attached to being admirable.

The difficulty is how unpleasant they are. It takes a truly noble soul to be able to handle the self-justifications, righteous tantrums and indignations of the proud and still see such antics for what they really are: manifestations of fear and insecurity of an infant marionette inside an adult form. It is generally so much easier to call them di*****ds - and move on.

The way to unwind pride is to reassure its sufferers that messing up is no personal affliction or punishment, rather a universal proclivity of which they would need never to be overly ashamed or furtive.

In the workplace, where pride has an especially tenacious grip, gigantic posters might be put up in corridors and kitchens: ‘We are all idiots here’ - in case anyone was tempted to insist too hard that they were very clever and their plans were invariably correct. It would help too if the CEO regularly danced to a silly song and brought in their teddy bear to staff meetings; just to make sure that the entire team got the point.

The planet will be in safer hands when we can finally accept that we’re 8 billion idiots spinning to an uncertain destiny on a precarious piece of molten rock - and have an acute responsibility to keep saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’m so sorry’.

Dolphin

The 1960 Corvair dash baby cradle. A safe, comfortable way to carry your baby before car seats were even a concept... Warmest place in the car, it has a rear engine, and the engine vibrations lulls the baby.

Der Sonntagscartoon von Ari Plikat

Nature will reclaim us in one way or another.

🇬🇧 Freefalling into space in a ray of light: both simple and tricky at the same time. Simple because all you have to do is allow yourself to fall. Tricky because: you have to allow yourself to fall. It’s a disconcerting, disorienting and mind blowing experience.

🇩🇪 Im freien Fall in einem Lichtstrahl in die Tiefe sinken ist einfach und schwer zu gleich. Einfach, denn man muss nichts tun, ausser sich fallen zu lassen. Schwer, denn man muss sich einfach fallen lassen. Es ist merkwürdig, desorientierend und unfassbar.

📷 Daan Verhoeven

Carl Jung