“Beauty is overrated.”
There are things that money can’t buy. — But only when you have the money will you know what they are.
One of them is happiness, understood as a state of peace of mind and not of euphoria, a form of serene joy, which in your twenties would seem boring to you, but when you are forty, you will think it is paradise.
Throughout my life, I have come face to face with despair, face to face with a black voice inside my mind that only wanted one thing: to finish me off.
And that is my main reason for writing, so you don’t have to face that voice.
To that end, I want to give you three invaluable pieces of advice that, if I had known in my 20s, would have saved me so much pain and suffering that my life would be infinitely better today.
1. People should be looked at from the inside, not the outside.
Beauty is overrated.
If you become obsessed with chasing supermodels, what will you do when time melts all that beauty like a candle?
I’ll tell you: you’ll look for a replacement.
And that makes you use others like Kleenex (throwaway).
The funniest thing about this is that you want compassion and your partner to like you and love you for your personality and inner world, not just your physique. And you will be offended to find out they are with you for materialistic reasons.
If you remain superficial, you will not be able to look with love and desire at the person you have grown old within a few years. Reread it.
And that’s the whole point of the midlife crisis.
It’s not about wanting to recapture lost youth or seeing death as accurate; it’s about not accepting yourself as you are and rejecting others.
The midlife crisis is about wanting to look the other way and not seeing reality. It is about wanting to belong to an age that no longer belongs to you. It’s about not having learned to accept facts and the passing of the years.
That’s why many guys buy Lambo’s and go chasing young girls.
Those of us in our forties today are children of the advertising of the nineties, where the ideal of beauty was the supermodel, both male (Lucky Vanous, the worker in the Diet Coke ad) and female (Claudia Schiffer advertising orange Fanta with Mikie Mouse).
But we cannot give what we demand.
No matter how healthy you are, you will have wrinkles, gray hair, and a little defect that can no longer be hidden with makeup.
If you cannot love a person on the inside to desire them on the outside, no matter how they look, your quality of life will be limited.
It’s not that others exclude you; it’s you who exclude yourself, chasing after people with canonical ideals of beauty who indeed show no interest in you, and if they do, they do so for material rather than emotional reasons.
And let me tell you something: getting your heart broken at forty still hurts.
So do yourself a favor and start looking at people more on the inside than on the outside because you, too, will have a pot belly at forty, crow’s feet, you’ll probably snore at night, and your sweat won’t exactly smell like roses.
2. Between black and white, there are many intermediate shades.
When you’re 20, it’s all or nothing, black or white, but life has a lot of in-between shades of gray that you learn to appreciate over the years.
So do yourself a favor, stop taking everything so hard. And stop living from one extreme to the other as if your life were a Newton pendulum.
As you age, discover your limits, what you can and can’t do, and how to dose your energy.
The worst thing you can continue to do is to live every day as if you were going to die on that hill.
The war is won battle by battle, but it is lost in one day. One day, when you have no strength, the enemy finishes you off. Don’t forget that.
Quick tips so it doesn’t happen to you.
- If you can’t handle something, ask for help.
- If something is hurting you too much, let it go.
- Admit your limitations because only then will you be able to grow.
We live in a can-do culture, but it’s not true.
At least not in an instantaneous way.
Things are achieved day by day. So stop living in an all-or-nothing mode.
You can’t go from eating junk food daily to the strict artichoke diet.
You can’t go from spending your life playing Fortnite or watching Netflix on the couch to working out 4 hours at the Gym every day.
You can’t because you burn out, and the changes won’t hold.
You have to go from white (the bad life) to black (your best version), going through all the shades of gray in between.
Doing it any other way is like trying to pass the exam by studying the night before; it won’t work.
You can’t try to stop being Hommer Simpson and become Captain America overnight.
3. Your brain is a fertile garden that will make everything you plant flourish.
And this can be a blessing or a curse, for whatever you water will flourish, whether it is abundance or precarity.
Your thoughts are the seeds of the garden of your mind. Reread it.
As hippy-dippy as it sounds, believe me, it’s true.
In the bible, Blind men beg Jesus to restore their sight, and Jesus asks them, “Do you believe I can do it?” the blind men say yes, and then Jesus says, “Let it be done unto you according to your faith”.
Moral: if you believe it, you create it.
You’re probably asking yourself, “How do I know if I’m planting seeds of abundance or poison?”
It’s not always that obvious, is it?
Zoom in, Zoom out your future.
All thoughts end up becoming emotions and actions.
So, occasionally, analyze the things that repeat themselves the most in your day and ask yourself, “Where will this take me if I keep doing it for years to come?”
“By their fruits, ye shall know them,” don’t forget.
What is the fruit of eating carbohydrates every night for ten years?
Well, probably the fruit of that is called diabetes.
And if you zoom in 10 more years, maybe it’s called a heart attack.
The same applies to relationships.
Where will having so many sporadic relationships take me in ten years?
That fruit can be called loneliness because you have become accustomed to settling for no one.
So, with everything in your life.
This way, you will be able to reverse engineer from the future fruits that you will probably obtain to the seed thought that you are watering day by day, and you will be able to modify it if necessary 🙂
A virtual hug
AG
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