02. You’re a maladaptive daydreamer. Maladaptive daydreaming is when you imagine extensive fantasies to replace human interaction or general function. Many people experience it while listening to music or doing some kind of rocking motion (walking, pacing, swinging, etc.). Rather than cope with issues in life, you just daydream about grandiose alternatives that give you a “high” to eliminate the uncomfortable feeling.
03. Your purpose in life is abstract. You know that you want to help people, or teach, or give a voice to the voiceless, but you don’t know how to do it, and you certainly don’t focus on embodying it in your present life, in the situations you’re already in, with people you come across in day-to-day interactions.
04. The solution to most of your problems would just be to make some small change but you absolutely refuse to. This is the classic sign that you’re using overthinking as a means of deflection. It’s easy to do, as picking apart a problem is a noble-seeming distraction, but it’s only useful until you have the answer—then you actually have to act on it.
05. You’re always busy, yet never productive enough. Your work never seems to be done, you lose hours and don’t know where they’ve gone, you’re always stressed and frizzling-out your brain, as though you’re perpetually in the middle of a high-intensity task that never sees completion.
06. You tend to resist what you want the most. Rather than putting forth genuine effort, opening up to it bit-by-bit, you’ve convinced yourself that you’re not worth it, or that it’s impossible, or that to have what you want means you could also lose what you want (so better not to have it ever than have it for a little bit).
07. You’re one of those people who only bonds over what you hate. All this really means is that you: a) aren’t doing enough to have something else/more interesting to talk about, or b) are so deeply insecure you thrive off of recognizing that someone else is on your level (judgment = a need to be superior, which = feeling incredibly inferior).
08. Most of your problems come back down to a fear of judgment, or exclusion. If this fear is present in your life to any significant degree it’s usually because you’ve already constructed a lot of what you think you like or do based on what other people think. It’s for this reason that you don’t naturally take action—you think about it, change what you want to do in some way, and then (maybe) act (still fearful) that people will not like the façade, either.
09. If you stopped and thought about it, you could come up with 10
things you are grateful for. Your “problems” aren’t so much “not having” as they are not recognizing what you do have. Gratitude incites more doing, more reciprocation. Positive feelings never leave you stagnating and over-thinking them.
10. You want to change something about your life, but your focus is on dismantling the old rather than building something new that renders it obsolete. In other words, you’re one of those people who tries to find comfort in overanalyzing old things to make more sense of them, when in reality, complexity is a product of insecurity, and insecurity a product of being unable to accept the simple reality of the situation.
11. You look for quick solutions more than you focus on restructuring the questions. When you try and fail at something, you spend too long focusing on why you failed, rather than learning what you need to then moving on and trying something new. You keep yourself stuck between knowing what’s not right and not being willing to figure out what might be.
12. You’re always imagining what you want to do, yet never really doing it. You’ve convinced yourself that life begins when all the pieces are in place, but in reality, life is the act of doing just that.
40
WHY LOGICAL
PEOPLE LEAD
BETTER LIVES
(in a generation where
“passion” is at a premium)
Our generation believes that passion is the answer—the solution to a life joyously, successfully, happily lived. We were the kids who were told, “You can be anything” and heard “You can succeed at everything.” There are a lot of people much smarter than me who have argued this beautifully.
It’s not about following passion; it’s about following purpose passionately.
Passion is a manner of traveling, not a means to determine a destination.
Passion is the spark that lights the fire; purpose is the kindling that keeps it burning all night. (I’ve said this before.) This is to say: The opposite of passion isn’t settling for a lukewarm life, it’s marrying it to logic that will actually get you where you want to go.
The ability to objectively look at our lives and interpret emotions and events and decisions with a grounded frame of mind is not only positive, it's essential to functioning. The head and heart must be separate entities that you figure out how to merge together. Here’s why:
01. Passion tells you that you should go after what you most want in life, but it’s never about “what you want,” it’s about what you want most. It’s about which of your (often conflicting) desires you let win.
The only reason people don’t do what they claim to want most is because there is something else they want a little bit more. They ultimately don’t get what they want done because they’re trying to follow their most intense desire rather than prioritizing them.
I’d like to have another day off but I’d also like to work on my retirement fund and build my business some more. Right now, I’m
choosing the latter so it can facilitate the former later on down the road. See that? Choosing which desire I let win.
When people try to build their lives solely on emotions, they’re incapable of choosing which desire they’re going to follow, so they choose the one that elicits the most extreme high, which is fallible because it’s impermanent and it can come at the cost of innumerable consequences that are ultimately counterproductive to what they had intended in the first place.
02. Passion bases relationships on the high; logic bases relationships on the purpose.
The “purpose” being love (not attachment or not wanting to be alone or money or ego, as some people unfortunately do). We’re usually taught that love is just a “good feeling” or a “verb.” But there are a lot of “good feelings” you can have that are not rooted in love and things you can do out of what you perceive to be love when you’re with someone important to you.
It’s the commitment to ground your relationship in something more than just a transitory feeling that will ultimately make it work.
When you believe that passion is love—no more, no less—you’ll want to end a relationship as soon as you’re not getting that hormonal high from your partner; or worse, you’ll blame them for it and seek out what they’re lacking and why.
The way this usually manifests is in people being very indecisive and uncertain about “whether or not they love someone,” whether or not they should let go or try harder or wait it out or accept that love isn’t always a fever dream.
I have personally have spent years trying to figure out whether or not I really loved different people, and about half that time flip-flopping in and out of relationship(s), only to eventually figure out that I confused passion for love (and they aren’t the same thing).
03. Logic allows you to see objectively; passion is subjective and consuming.
The thing about the things people are most passionate about is that it’s a scream that takes all their might and echoes out into the void.
There’s no practice or reason, it’s just a flush of emotion and when
it collides (or contradicts) someone else’s, it can feel like a personal affront.
No matter how fierce your feeling or belief, it exists next to a variety of others, not all of which will overlap or align. This does not mean you or anybody else is wrong, just that passion does not allow you to acknowledge coexisting truths: It is singular, and it is destructive when it can’t be placed in reality.
04. Logic helps you make decisions for the person you hope to be; passion helps you make decisions for the person you are or were.