5.18 Life is tragic  (Page 9/15)

Rating activity

In the last section we started to rate certain activities we did in order to find out if those activities were boring or hard or whatnot. In life you can either be doing something mental, something physical, or some combination of the two. A mental activity can be hard to a certain degree based on how much effort you're putting into it. You can rate any mental activity you do on a scale of 1-10 for mental hardness, something like putting a towel on a rack would be say a 1, and putting 5 towels on a rack in order of smallest to largest might be a 3. The purpose of rating everything you do is that you will realize that since nothing requires 0 work, everything there is to do in life sucks, because for all of it you have to work. Unless you do so much work that it overloads your body like if you got exhausted physically or mentally you might get some kind of ecstasy or high or something, in that case you've done well, but that feeling usually only lasts a short period of time, and you had to do a lot of work to get there (like exercise hard or something). You can also rate any physical activity or a combination of physical and mental activities. Once again everything in life involves work, or effort. The feelings resulting from the work and effort in life are rarely satisfying, because in order to get a feeling powerful enough to make you feel good you have to do a lot of work making the end result not worth it. Even something like watching TV involves work, just ask yourself (in order to figure out how much work you're doing) what are you thinking about while you're watching the television. Even having feelings counts as work, if you see something violent and get a bad or violent feeling, then how much does that feeling disrupt you and how much work do you have to do to get back to how you were before you had that feeling? For each activity that you do and rated their is a corresponding feeling for, when you do work, it makes you feel bad, so really everything in life makes you feel bad because its going to be a change from how you normally are, and you have to "work" to get back to feeling normal again. Your mind has to adjust to each new feeling and that feeling of adjustment you can identify in your own mind as work, or effort. If we look closer at putting the towel on the towel rack example, the reason just putting one towel up is easier is because it involves less mental and physical work, when you're only putting up one towel you just have to think "ok put this towel on the towel rack" but when you're organizing then by size you need to say "hmmm which towel is smallest, then you need to do more physical activities to get each towel up on the rack, which have corresponding mental thoughts, put this on the rack this way and that way, slide it right a little or whatnot". So just as everything thought has a corresponding feeling, every feeling has a corresponding thought, you can't really feel anything without being able to put words to it if you try hard enough, and everything you think causes you to feel something as well. Like doing anything physical causes physical feelings, and the words you'd put to those feelings would be to describe what you did physically to cause the feeling. You have to "think" each time you do a physical action even though you don't say the words in your head of what you are doing each time. This proves that all feelings actually take mental effort, and therefore are bad for you. Thankfully most of the time you're just breathing and not thinking or feeling, which requires little effort. It also means you're a robot, however (we've been over that a little). Whenever you get a new feeling your mind does work to make room for that new feeling. Like with the watching violence on TV example, when you see that violence you get a huge feeling of repulsion or interest or whatnot, and you can tell that your body had to work to feel that. That's because you are thinking about the violence, in order to stop that work (of thinking about the violence, that takes work the thinking about the violence) just stop thinking about it. Your unconscious thoughts are what’s causing the feelings about violence. You can use that tool to analyze any feeling you get and try to change how it is making you feel, just ask, "what am I thinking about when I get that feeling". Or you could ask "what other feelings does that feeling bring up". And figure out your entire structure of feelings and thoughts. Of course things happen in life that cause feelings that you can't change or do anything about - one more reason life sucks. But you don’t want to shut down completely; I mean you could view everything as just work or you could ignore that.