I’ve talked a lot about good habits and bad habits, and trying to do less bad things and more good things.
But really, there’s nothing that in itself is automatically a good habit or a bad habit.
It’s all about how it serves the larger picture.
The actions, the little things that we do every day, they can be judged based on how they contribute to the bigger picture.
For ourselves, and we can also judge them based on how they affect others.
So if you have an ambition to do more good and less bad, it ultimately becomes- by itself it is something hollow to just who want to do good things for the sake of doing good things.
They’re good because they connect to a bigger good, something that is more significant.
It’s their connection to the bigger thing that makes good actions good.
And it’s because they take away from the good bigger picture that bad actions are bad.
So this is something that I am reminding myself now, because in the last couple days, ever since I had this wonderful musical weekend where I was really feeling the moment and experiencing the music, now I’m going back to work, going into a new week of work, and it started off feeling a bit routine, feeling like I’m going through the motions, and I’m trying to build up something, but then I sometimes wonder what’s ultimately the point.
Because we can get into the momentum of making good changes.
Self-development has its own momentum.
It’s like a game in and of itself.
We can start self-development because we have good reasons.
We want to make our overall life better, more meaningful.
But then you get into it, and it can sometimes- it just becomes a fun game by itself.
How much can I improve myself? How much- it’s so satisfying to see myself take control of my life and be able to do better things, but then sometimes, I just look at it and think, well, what really is the point? Because ultimately, having good habits does not, in and of itself, make a good life.
Just as having bad habits does not, in itself, make a good life impossible or take away from a good life.
So we have to always be plugging things back into our bigger picture.
And I can speak for myself: this is something that I have to do.
There’s the enjoyment, there’s the game of improvement, but if it’s not connected to something bigger, then it’s ultimately pointless to just make yourself into this self-improvement machine that just gets better and better and then you die.
And especially if it means always bending towards more work, work, work and not having fun.
Because that’s really, I mean, for- I think in many cases, I mean, that’s really how we get into bad habits, is that they’re fun.
Most bad habits are fun.
And they begin as fun, but then they become something that becomes sort of automatic and something that we lean on to fill what’s missing, fill the meaning that’s missing in our lives.
But these these habits, in and of themselves, are not bad.
And just as it’s easy to forget that, it’s also easy to forget that all of the good habits of working hard every day, discipline, improvement: these things are also not necessarily good.
It’s all about the bigger picture.
So usually, things that are bad take away from our bigger picture, take away from the bigger things we want to do in life.
Like if we’re going to fall into escapism, then we cannot achieve better things in the real world.
If we’re going to do physically bad things like drugs and poor eating habits, lack of exercise, laziness: these things lead to a lesser overall life energy and ability to live good life.
And that’s why that they’re bad.
And on the other side, things like discipline and hard work and improvement: they’re good because they make it possible for us to become stronger and therefore live better lives.
But I’m at the moment- at the moment I’m in the state of needing to remind myself, once again, of why I’m doing it, and what is- I’m asking myself what is the bigger picture of the life that I want? And then all these little details feed into that.