Little victories win the war

Hope you all had a great weekend and if you still remember, on Friday last week I gave some food for your brain, something to think about. Just to remind for those who really had a great weekend and don’t remember anything about their life before the Friday evening. The main message there was that we don’t do the things, that we are obliged to do, with a great pleasure. I have mentioned that this behavior is in our human nature and has nothing to do with our personality. Even if I didn’t explicitly say that, most of you got this message behind my post. And that was the message I wanted to deliver. But today, I would like to further investigate on this topic.

You may be wondering what does my title has to do with it. Lets think of a life as a war. Wait what? War? Yes, war. Who is fighting? What are we fighting for? You are fighting and you are fighting for your better self, for your personality, for you as a human. You are fighting against your inner self, against your human nature. And every moment of your life is a battle. A battle in this war with the duration of the whole life. Let’s distinguish two fighting sides.
One side is you as a person, your intelligence, and the other side is nature. You are your personality, your character, your intelligence, something beyond your instincts, something that can carefully examine the situation and see what is bad or good for you in a long term. The nature is the nature, the fact that we are still living organisms and we have natural instincts: we see food, we tend to get it, we see danger, we fight it or run, we see something is not interesting or in other words is neither food nor danger, we start feeling sleepy. All these things are in every person alive and there is no way we can get rid of them. May be long time ago, when people didn’t come up with anything more creative than closing their caves with a huge stone, those two sides were always cooperating. Instincts and intelligence. Instincts were telling what to do and intelligence was finding the ways of how to do it better. Doesn’t matter if that was hunting, protecting your tribe or surviving the winter. Instincts and intelligence. But then comes the civilization, slowly but truly. And here were are, living the 21st century anno domini. A lot of things changed, including the alliance of human intelligence and instincts. It will be save to say that the alliance now turned to war, to a real war, with may be some truce in between. You can’t simply be in harmony with nature anymore. Nature wants one thing, but you understand you need to do the other. You can’t go sleep, just because sun did so. You can’t eat, just because you see food in front. You can’t run, just because you are afraid. This war had started early in your childhood, when you started distinguishing white from black. Waking up before the sun does so, eating only the right food in the right amounts, studying the “unnecessary for surviving” things for decades, lifting weights and putting it back down – all these doesn’t make any sense for your natural part! It doesn’t understand why you have to do that. And there begins the war. The war between nature and intelligence. Except that this is not the usual war. It never ends and the enemy will always be there. Doesn’t matter how many battles one side lost, it will still be there; weak, but still alive. Every time one side wins the battle, it becomes a bit stronger and the other side becomes weaker. Of course sometimes, truce may take a place. Two sides don’t fight all the time. But let’s focus on the battles. Your strength of will depends on how strong your spirit is. Every time you have to do something, but don’t want to, there is a battle happening inside. If there is no direct signs of danger and there is no obvious prize that you will get after you do that thing, it’s natural not wanting to do that thing. But your brains (spirit, intelligence, I don’t know what would be the correct term for it) understand that you need to do that for some obvious or not so obvious reasons. As there is a winner in every war, you either do that thing or not. But that was more than a battle, that was more than just one decision which you make and it can be forgotten. It does a contribution to your personality, your character. In other words one of the fighting sides becomes stronger and the other weaker. And the next time they meet, one has a vantage and has more chances to win the battle again. People with very strong self-discipline still have a war going inside and they still want to sleep 5 minutes more in the morning. But the battle inside of them, is more a suppression of a small insurrection of instincts, than a real battle. The nature just comes out with couple of soldiers, just to let know what it wants, just to show its position. The real authority is in not in their hands and they are mostly faced by a simple and strong NO. Was it always like that? Of course not. This is the result of continuous battles, where spirit of a human did a huge effort to win almost all the battles and it actually managed to do so. This is the result of continuous wins over nature. This is giving up the short term pleasures for a long term ones. Ultimately, the army of intelligence grew so big, that most of the battles are not more than just some noise in the back ground. These type of people barely tend to give up, rarely struggle getting up for another 30 minutes of exercise, easily follow the planned schedule. All they have to do, is to understand that they need to do it. That’s it. The rest is a matter of their physical capabilities.
And of course there are people who are the opposite. Their intelligence lost so many battles, that it is barely alive. There is no big difference between animals and those people. No ambitions, no life goals, no diligence, no effort to change their lives. They are just like a dead fish in the current. They fully obey their natural wills and it’s really hard for them to do anything, that they don’t want to do. Sometimes they fall lower than animals. Animals at least always take care of their children, doesn’t matter how hard it is. I guess it is unnecessary to say what led people to such a state. At some point, their nature just started taking over. They didn’t pay much attention to the lost battles and didn’t see their spirit getting weaker from day to day. Once they realize what it is happening, it was already very late. Getting up now is as hard as overthrowing the authority with some dozens of soldiers. Let’s not call those people "they", cause we might be among them now or in the future. You may disagree and say that you have your life under control, but it is important to mention, that those people as well never knew that their war will be lost. They never saw it coming. It is very easy not to notice that you are getting weaker. It all starts with small battles. As small as picking up the mote from the floor. You know it would be good, but you don’t want to. And you don’t. Done. The small battle lost and your spirit got a tiny bit weaker. You didn’t do your bed in the morning. Tic. Didn’t clean up the room. Tic. Didn’t help old man with heavy bags. Tic. Didn’t start early with your project and procrastinated until the last moment. Tic.. tic.. tic.. Weaker.. weaker.. weaker. You may think that those things are so tiny and irrelevant, that they don’t play any role in your life, when they actually do. You don’t see any consequences, life is good, when it actually isn’t . You keep losing those small battles, which keep weakening you. There comes the bigger one, but your spirit is weak and your natural human part is strong as never. You loose. You keep not noticing these small things, but your personality keeps being constructed. Now comes the big battle. You put yourself a goal. You decided to start running every morning or whatever else it could be. You don’t remember the last time when you were so determined, but what is important is that you are determined now. And you are going to win. At least that is what you think. But you don’t realize that you are going to war with skinny, coward, exhausted soldiers. You run the first day, the second, the third. Then you don’t have that confidence anymore. Your “laziness” takes over and you stop. That’s it. The big war was lost. Now you are even weaker, less self-confident. Then there comes another big war, another plan or a goal. You may be pumped with some cups of coffee, but you loose. You now lost your self-confidence. You are not able to follow the long term goals and start giving more freedom to your inner nature. You start preferring small pleasure now, over the long-term happiness. You don’t even realize that it all started long time ago and you start accepting yourself as you are now, as a dead fish.

As long as you only focus on big battles and let go other important things like daily self-improvement, you will keep loosing those big battles. No matter how important the battles are, you won’t be ready for them. You can start your diet or daily plan scheduling over and over, thousand times, they all will fail if you don’t develop yourself as a strong person. And the only way to do that, is by winning the small battles. It is not a sprint. It is a marathon. Every moment of your life, you are contributing to yourself, either in a good or bad way. And when you will face the big battle, you are strong and you know you will win. Try to make every day and every hour of your life a victory now and you will end up winning in the future, because little victories win the war.

Why do we give up?

Have you ever had the feeling that you can't finish the thing that you have started? Either it is a piano course or an intention to start a healthy life with daily plans. If you never had this feeling, write me the message telling the planet you are coming from. And everyone else understands how I feel. I have created this blogging website. I have created my own YouTube channel. I have started learning new language. And each activity was started after being carefully examined and not just after I had 2 cups of coffee. And what do we have now? All those were stopped and forgotten. I don’t even know what is older, my last blog post here or the United States Declaration of Independence.

Have you ever wondered why this happens? We haven’t started those things because someone kept the gun on our head. And if you are thinking that it is laziness, you are probably wrong. If laziness was your big problem, you wouldn’t even be able to read this post until this point. Not talking about making the plans that would change your life. Lack of discipline? May be. But that is completely different topic. The thing lies deep in our human psychology. Would your child be happy to help you cleaning the room if you ask him? Or would he be happier to do that if it is his own initiative? I would think any child, adult, dog, cat, butterfly, absolutely anyone has decrease of motivation to do something, if they are obliged to. It doesn’t matter what is that thing. It could be eating an ice-cream every day before going to bed. If you must, you want to do it less. That is why we study for the exams with less passion, than if you would have decided to learn that material yourself. That is why you are happier to do things, if no one expects you to do that. That is why, I stop writing posts and uploading videos. Because after the first posts and uploads, people expected me to keep doing so in the future. People even start asking when is the next video or blog post. That is the moment, when you start feeling that you are obliged to do so. People expect you to. And now, you don’t have the previous desire, you don’t have those sparkles in your eyes. And even if you keep going, that is because people, including you, expect you to, and not because you are burning with desire. And here comes the problem. At some point you realize that stopping this activity will bring you no bad consequences, no disaster, nothing scary. Zero. So, what does your human instinct say to you then? Screw it. Let’s go watch how puppy tries to jump off the sofa, because that seems more interesting now. And that is it. That is how all it ends. All your plans, diets, piano courses, online lectures, everyday jogs, weekly visits to your parents, blogging websites, YouTube channels, everything that you and others start expecting you to keep doing, but abandoning it brings no big consequence.

Now you know it is not your fault. Now you can blame your human nature and keep not sticking to the things you started. But this all brings me up to some interesting and more global thoughts. Does this all imply that you can’t have long lasting family after the marriage, because now you are expected to love and be together? Does this imply that you can’t have the job that you would love doing, independent of how much you used to enjoy it before getting the contract, which obligates you to do that thing 8 hours every day?? Those are very deep questions and there are by far more important than keeping your YouTube channel up. I would like you to leave these questions open and let you think about it. And if you do not expect me to, I may write another post with my opinion about this mystery “feature” of a humankind.