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How to find yourself, according to Nietzsche.

For years I was told the answer was somewhere inside me. So I kept looking. More journaling, more quiet, more nights asking who I really am. The deeper I went, the deeper the hole got.

In 1874 Nietzsche wrote a short essay called Schopenhauer as Educator. He calls that kind of digging into yourself a troublesome and dangerous business, and he offers a gentler way. Look back at your life and ask what you have truly loved. What lifted you up, held you, made you more yourself. Set those things side by side, he says, and they show you a pattern, a ladder you’ve been climbing toward yourself the whole time.

In the film her list is small: drawing as a kid, the ocean, grandma’s kitchen, fixing broken things. On their own they look like nothing much. In a row they start to look like a direction.

“Your true self lies not deeply hidden in you, but an infinite height above you.”

What would be on your list?

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), section 1. Wording modernised from the public-domain translation (Project Gutenberg #38226).

#nietzsche #philosophy #findingyourself #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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5 days ago

10 lessons on love from the wisest teachers who ever lived.

Rumi, Rilke, Gibran, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maya Angelou, Viktor Frankl, bell hooks, the Buddha, Jesus and Mary Oliver. Every line is their own, with the source on the slide.

#love #relationships #rumi #wisdom #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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6 days ago

Feeling stuck in life? Here is how ten of the wisest people who ever lived would answer you.

I’ve always liked watching people from different centuries answer the same question.

They don’t know your life better than you do. But when you’ve been stuck in one place long enough, the problem starts to look like it has only one side.

When things don’t go your way, Lao Tzu asks whether you’re dealing with the situation or fighting the fact that it isn’t what you expected. When someone hurts you, Marcus Aurelius turns the question back to you: what they did is theirs, and how long it keeps hurting is partly yours.

Sometimes what you’re missing is another place to stand and look from.

Jung asks why the same story keeps finding you in every new job and every new relationship. Socrates won’t leave alone even the answers you’re surest of. Nietzsche takes the pain as given and asks what it will become in your life.

So I put ten thinkers from different eras and cultures side by side. Their real thought is far bigger than one slide, and I’m not trying to shrink anyone into a quote. Every line on the slides is their own, with the source. I only wanted to borrow their directions to reopen the questions all of us run into.

You may not finish with an answer. But a problem that had one road might start to show a few other doors.

#stuckinlife #philosophy #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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6 days ago

I asked Buddha, Jesus and Marcus Aurelius why I care so much what people think.

Which one moved you the most…?

#buddha #jesus #marcusaurelius #peoplepleaser #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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11 days ago

we just made Life Note simpler.

three tabs: Today, Life, Goal. one pen that opens to write, speak, or to meet your mentors.

Laozi wrote that those who seek the Way let go of a little every day. so we let go of a few things too, in the hope that would make you lighter and wiser.

Update to 1.0.112 on iOS and Android.

#journaling #journalingapp #selfgrowth #digitaljournal #digitaljournaling by @lifenote.journal

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12 days ago

Taoism’s wisdom for envying the useful ones.

Zhuangzi told a story about this, about 2,300 years ago. A master carpenter walks right past a giant old oak. Useless, he says. Make a boat of it and it sinks. A coffin, it rots. A pillar, the bugs get it.

That night the tree shows up in his dream: “I’ve spent a long time trying to be of no use. It nearly killed me. Now it’s my greatest use.”

When envying the useful ones, just think of the oak tree and enjoy your sleep : )

#zhuangzi #taoism #burnout #selfworth #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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14 days ago

why is it that we did everything on our list today, but we can still awake at 3:00am, replaying things in my whole life?

Marcus Aurelius, nearly two thousand years ago, wrote himself a note about it:

“Do not disturb yourself by thinking of the whole of your life.” (Meditations 8.36)

#marcusaurelius #stoicism #3amthoughts #feelingbehind #journaling by @lifenote.journal

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15 days ago

You hit the goal and felt almost nothing. Maslow had a name for that, and it sits one level above self-actualization.

Almost everyone learns his pyramid and stops at the top. But in 1969, two years before he died, Abraham Maslow added a sixth level above it. Self-transcendence. Most textbooks never caught up (The Farther Reaches of Human Nature).

He added it because he had stopped liking what he found. He had spent years among self-actualized people, and some of them were growing, original, entirely themselves, and entirely uninterested in anyone else. A theory that ends there is not finished.

Two more things almost nobody knows.

Maslow never drew the pyramid. There is no diagram in his 1943 paper. It was drawn by a management consultant in the 1960s, for business audiences, and the shape itself said: this is a ladder, and it has a top.

And late in life he lost interest in peak experiences. The peak is rare, loud and photogenic, and he had spent decades on it. At the end he preferred the plateau: calm, level, unspectacular, available on an ordinary Tuesday.

In 2020 the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman redrew the whole model in Transcend. Security is the hull that keeps you from sinking. Growth is the sail. No level is ever finished. You become seaworthy.

How you can tell it has started: an hour goes into something that will never carry your name. A stranger's good news arrives and moves you. Being wrong in public costs less than it did.

Which boat are you in today? 1 still bailing water, 2 safe but not moving, 3 moving and it is all about me, 4 moving and it is not. Tell me the number.

Save this for the day the thing arrives and the room is quiet.

#maslow #selfactualization #selftranscendence #hierarchyofneeds #innerwork #psychology #transcend #scottbarrykaufman #personalgrowth #selfdiscovery #spiritualgrowth #purpose #meaningoflife #selfawareness #burnout #achievement #emptiness #consciousliving #humanpotential #mindfulness #growthmindset #lifepurpose #philosophy #journaling #healingjourney by @lifenote.journal

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a month ago

A samurai asked a teacher to explain heaven and hell. The teacher insulted him. The samurai drew his sword. The teacher said, that is hell. The samurai stopped, put the sword down, and bowed. The teacher said, that is heaven.

Usually we think the samurai learned something. I do not think he learned anything. He stopped for a moment. That is all.

We think heaven is some other place, and that we must become a calmer person before we are allowed to go there. So we try very hard. But trying to become someone else is already the first gate. This is very important.

You will be angry today. Someone will say something and your body will answer before you do. It is not a mistake. It is how a body is.

When you notice, you do not have to do anything about it yet. Just notice. That is enough for now. The other gate is not far away. It is right where you are standing.

Told of Hakuin, a Zen teacher.

#innerwork #zen #anger #selfunderstanding by @lifenote.journal

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a month ago

The Buddha said we are shot twice.

The first arrow comes from outside. Someone says something. A door closes. You did not choose it, and you could not have avoided it.

The second arrow is the one we make ourselves. We go over it. We ask why it had to be us. We explain ourselves to someone who is not in the room. This can go on for years, and mostly we do not notice we are doing it.

When you do notice, you may want to stop at once. That is another arrow.

It is enough to see your own hand reaching. You do not have to do anything about it yet. Seeing it is already the practice.

Some days you will fire twenty. That is all right. Tomorrow you sit down again.

Sallatha Sutta, SN 36.6.

Keep it somewhere if it is useful tonight.

#innerwork #rumination #zen #selfunderstanding by @lifenote.journal

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a month ago

In 1986, a psychologist asked students to write for 15 minutes, four nights in a row, about the worst thing that ever happened to them. Nobody read it. Then the campus clinic records changed. 🧠

Thirty years later, here is what labs around the world keep finding about your brain on journaling. Naming a feeling turns the amygdala down (UCLA, 2007). Ten minutes of writing about your worries before an exam lifts anxious students’ scores (Chicago, 2011). Writing a stressor down frees working memory (2001). Five minutes on tomorrow’s to-do list helps you fall asleep faster (Baylor, 2018). Expressive writing is linked to stronger antibody responses and faster wound healing (Auckland, 1995; London, 2008). And handwriting lights up brain connectivity that typing does not (Trondheim, 2024).

The method fits on a napkin: 15 to 20 minutes, three to five days, the thing you keep avoiding, for no one.

What is the thing you keep almost writing about?

#journaling #expressivewriting #mentalhealth #neuroscience #anxiety by @lifenote.journal

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a month ago

why you feel anxious when everything is finally calm.

if home was never quiet, calm never meant safe. it has a name: relaxation-induced anxiety (Heide & Borkovec, 1983).

#anxiety #nervoussystemregulation #relaxationinducedanxiety #hypervigilance somatichealin by @lifenote.journal

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a month ago