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If believing it make you a tiny bit more motivated…
All right, I’ve been thinking, when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man whose gonna burn your house down - with the lemons!
I wish I had enough lemons to do anything with.
Life isn’t even giving out lemons now?!?
Thank you Cave Johnson.
How does one start a fire with lemons? I’m sure there’s some chemical reaction that can be contrived, but I do not know anything about chemistry.
The next sentence in that delightful tirade is; “I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
As much as you can do and as much as you want to do are the same thing. I find this perspective to be very liberating.
No action can be performed without the motivation to initiate it.
Sometimes this relationship is very direct - I want to play video games, therefore I can play video games.
Sometimes it’s a bit more obscured. I don’t want to fold my laundry, but I do want to be able to find my clothes in my dresser. My desire to find my clothes is greater than my distaste for laundry, therefore, I can fold my laundry.
The language around saying you can’t do something is very self-defeating. If I say I can’t take care of myself it implies a certain amount of permanency. If I say I don’t want to take care of myself, that’s temporary and is open to change when I’m feeling better.
More to the point of this meme, thinking that people can help you more than they want to help you is dangerous thinking. The burden of existence sucks, but our fellow humans don’t really owe us anything just for existing. They can’t help you if they don’t want to help you, just like you can’t help yourself if you don’t want to help yourself.
I want to play video games, therefore I can play video games.
That must be nice.
There’s definitely a distinction. There are plenty of times when someone is capable of helping, but chooses not to. Their choice not to help doesn’t make them unable, it makes them unwilling. The two are not the same.
This is more my commentary. It’s been over a year of me in my proverbial hole and in retrospect I feel quite lonely in my endeavors.
Sorry to hear that, dude. IDK your age, but a lot of times life gets a lot easier when you get a little older. Loneliness is a pandemic in modern society. People feel lonelier than ever before, according to multiple surveys. I did too, after I moved across the country. What really helped was picking up outside hobbies, that eventually led to picking up like-minded acquaintances, and a few friends. The cool thing about meeting people while pursuing hobbies is that they’re active people, and it’s a lot easier to set up reoccurring plans to hang out.
To your overall point, when I was a kid my Mom would not allow me to say “I can’t”, it was a forbidden phrase in our household. If I ever said it, she forced me to figure out how I could. I disliked it back then because I was mostly just whinging, but it was a valuable life lesson that has benefitted me a lot, especially in early adulthood when things felt so impossible.
Very well said.
I would just like to add that there have been many, many times in my life when I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how, or didn’t have the means. And sometimes life just sucks, and there isn’t anything that can really help.
I hope that, in those times, the people I loved didn’t think I didn’t help simply because I didn’t want to.
It’s truly special people who actually do everything they can to help you get better, everyone else just assumes that you’re dealing with something personal and that you’ll sort it out yourself. Part of it is boundaries, like nobody really knows what another person is going through or what the root cause of their depression is, and you have to get really real with a person to find that out. Most of the time it’s your own personal labyrinth that you have to find your way out of.
I can certainly see how that would be enigmatic. In my instance I have tried to communicate this but doing so further would feel like begging and annoying in general: which I suppose my existence feels to me at a base level.
