The Anti-Inspirational Manifesto

Here’s the point of all this: be cynical of the cynical.

We live in a culture that demands that we be inspired. That to live an uninspired life is a sort of death. Accompanied with this unnecessary pressure is a form of “Catholic Guilt”; where we are encouraged to interpret our emotions intellectually and from a distance. Another way that we can talk to do this I threw marketed steps toward success.

A major issue with all of this, is how we have come to define success: individual happiness. That somehow once we achieve a certain tier within our expectations, all in life will be well, life will have meaning, and those around us will love us for what we have achieved. This is a particular strand American ideology that is being perpetuated throughout capitalist industry.

Although, the point of this article is not to be anti-capitalist, we have to realize that when we transform certain life experiences into a moneymaking machine, the life experiences themselves, are in reality, nowhere to be found. Meaning, it becomes less about you experiencing true inspiration and creativity, and more about the company or organization making money off of a manufactured placebo effect.

In a culture where the individual is the pinnacle barometer for success, then competition is the only way in which we can measure that success. But, when competition becomes a religious practice, it then frames are ethics, and our relationships, and overall life practices. Then it becomes less about human progress as a whole, and more about individual self-aggrandizement.

Inspiration emerges from within, it’s not a product that you need to buy, I subscription you need to continuously pay into. Or a talk that you need to hear. It’s most definitely not an article that you need to read. It comes from inside of you, and the first right of passage necessary to achieve personal inspiration, is: self-awareness.

(However, this is not one of those hokey articles that is trying to propagate one particular philosophy.)

The most important thing is to understand what it means to be: a self. The universe is always in progress, it’s always changing, always an evolution. The human mind is always in progress, always growing, always dying. If we are not embracing that as a format for growing or moving forward, then we are dead already. The self is meant to be an ongoing experience of reality, an evolutionary process is willing to change in any moment. If the self is a process, much like our riyes of passage throughout history, then it stands to reason that part of this right of passage, is to also realize that without others, we would not realize: I self.

This is a major issue within the American psyche, we are officially committed to individual progress at the risk of communal progress, not realizing that it is through the communal progress that we experience personal success.

The individual must always lead to a community of some kind. In marketing terms, the product must be about developing a positive experience for the whole audience, not just an individual.

In short, your success is tied up with the success of others.

So, the question is how do you find inspiration? The simple answer: failure, failure, failure. I personally hate the word failure, because it filters itself through a lens that says humans as perpetually flawed. I happen to believe that all humans are perpetually getting better and better. To be extremely cheesy: all humans are full of potential. We are open books and the ink is waiting to hit paper.

The first step towards embracing this anti-inspirational manifesto, is to realize that all of your expectations are worthless. This is not to say that having a dream or a passion, or even being inspired by something is bad, but without action it is simply just a dream-and youd be better off just staying asleep.

True inspiration only exists when there is an action attached to it. That is the willingness to believe in whatever inspires you to make the word flesh. True inspiration can never be done in a vacuum, get with your friends, get with a boss, get with your wife, get with a phone app and began plotting out how you are going to help them make the world a better place.

There’s neuroscience that says that we can never think in the abstract, for example: I want to reverse our carbon footprint. That’s extremely abstract and too idealistic.

You have to have a step one, how are you going to do that yourself?

Start with yourself. The next, what is the first thing you were going to do to achieve your goals? Step three get a community around it, even if that community ends up just being your neighborhood dog. Step four, and this is the big one: consistency.

This article is not just about how do I achieve success, that simply than just buys into the idea that success is all about following certain steps, and assuming that those steps will always get you from A to B. We all know this is not true, and is a lie, there is no quick fix to experiencing your own understanding and appreciation of happiness. It takes time, energy and sacrifice. We are sold a bill of lies in the American dream, that if we follow a certain pattern of attaining certain things, including money, then somehow we will have achieved human flourishing. Achieving objects, achieving things, these are not happiness at all. Finding what inspires you, finding what keeps you up late at night, that should be the barometer for your own personal eudamonia.

Also, this is key to remember: inspiration does not exist just so you can make yourself happy. It exists to make society better. If you simply are driven by a pipe dream to somehow achieve success as a personal experience, you have failed already, no matter how much money you’ve made.

Here’s another thing: your ego is part of the problem. This is not saying that being eager, passionate, or even tenacious or bad qualities to have. It is saying that if you interpret situations that happened to you, from outside of you, only as obstacles, rather than lessons to be learned, skills to be gained, or new opportunities to create, then you are not willing to learn or be taught.

So what’s the first step for self awareness? This is a loaded question, but I’m going to try to synthesize my response into a paragraph here: realize that no matter how many mantras you say, no matter how much meditation you do, no matter how much you pray, or how many practices of positivity you invest in, if there is no action present, all of your inspired energy leads to nowhere. Being inspired means believing in your idea so much that it pushes you to want to do something about it.