This is a brilliant article… except one thing: I see this same thing across the board, across all ages. 20 to 70…
So this article is probably written about you, accurately, if you are not happy when you are not happy.
Why Generation Y Yuppies, and you! Are Unhappy ((By Tim Urban))
Say hi to Lucy.
Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.
I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.
This is paraphrasing the famous Leo Tolstoy quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the Anna Karenina principle… As all principles do, it applies to many, maybe even all areas of life. A principle is the same as a distinction… I say.
But truth is, if you know distinctions, if you know patterns, there are only about 50 different ways to get stuck… and your way is just one or two of those.
The story. Your story. It is either inspiring or it is depressing… either way it’s the context of your life
Your story can be your personal story. Telling what happened from your personal point of view. No creativity is required: it’s already applied generously.
Why? How? Anything that happened is turned into words… and words, whenever applied, create a story, a story line, an interpretation. Filters added creatively… Skewed.
Your story can be the story of your heritage. No matter how you tell this story: it is filtered through opinions, beliefs, and other filters.
There is not much in common. It is not talent. It is not ethnicity. Not personality. Not schooling. Not religious affiliation.
The one common characteristic I have found is books. People who become worth a damn are readers.
Even more importantly than being a reader: the most important commonality is when they started to read.
I just read in Wikipedia about Howard Zinn:
Both parents were factory workers with limited education when they met and married, and there were no books or magazines in the series of apartments where they raised their children. Zinn’s parents introduced him to literature by sending ten cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens’ collect
People who can’t tolerate negative, unpleasant, ambivalent feelings try to resist them, which is the surest way to make them permanent, or at least last.
What you resist persist… Carl Jung (1875-1961) says, and it is true. ((Psychologically speaking, resistance and resolution are at opposite poles. For resistance has fundamentally to do with not being able, or willing, to deal with the negative experiences in your life. And ultimately your happiness depends a lot more on handling—then letting go of—such adversities than it does, self-protectively, denying them, or fighting against them. In addition, so does (unwittingly) holding onto their associated feelings of hurt, sorrow, anxiety, or anger.
Jung was talking about his research into what he ca
I completed the third round of the 67 steps, and my intrinsic Self told me: it is time for another kind of practice.
So I have been curiously waiting for the “thing” to show up, and today it did.
Actually it started two days ago, but I noticed it today.
I need to get on the chiropractic table periodically to adjust my hip, or it goes out of shape to the degree that my thigh bone jumps out of its socket. That is very painful.
So I got on the table today… and it’s a long process… and somehow I was looking into what started my hip pain, whe
I read a lot of books. About 100 books a year. Cover to cover. I don’t subscribe to Tai’s reading method…
I left a 2000 book library when I left Hungary. that was 34 years ago.
Every book is an opportunity to shatter my view of the world. And many do. Sometimes not directly… sometimes through the effect the book has on other people.
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