Sometimes the rabbit hole goes much deeper than you first thought.
For the past year or so I've spent a fair amount of effort towards improving mindfulness, and becoming conscious of my own thought processes. As you do this, you begin to question many things about yourself which you may have assumed were "fixed" and discover they were transitory thoughts. Some of them simply recur more often than others because they are habitual. It's a bit like those old CRT monitors, which when displaying the same image for a long time, would experience "burn-in".
One aspect of the way the (I believe) toxic culture in the west affects men is through masculinity shaming. For guys here who are "naturals", they may not be able to identify with this. It's possible that for whatever reason, their brains were just less susceptible to it. For guys like me and others who spent a long time trapped "in the matrix" so-to-speak, it can be a bit unsettling to uncover this.
I'm questioning more and more the concept of the "true self" and whether it exists. It appears to me more and more that our minds simply hold various thought patterns. Therefore the self may exist but it cannot exist within the realm of the mind/thought, as we think of it in the west. (i.e. Descartes.) This leads you to wonder: 1) Where do thoughts come from? We seems to pick them up from our interactions with others, from the culture in which we inhabit, media, etc. They are transmitted from mind-to-mind. And, 2) Whether "free will" really exists if we are so easily "programmed" by the culture in which we live.
For the past year or so I've spent a fair amount of effort towards improving mindfulness, and becoming conscious of my own thought processes. As you do this, you begin to question many things about yourself which you may have assumed were "fixed" and discover they were transitory thoughts. Some of them simply recur more often than others because they are habitual. It's a bit like those old CRT monitors, which when displaying the same image for a long time, would experience "burn-in".
One aspect of the way the (I believe) toxic culture in the west affects men is through masculinity shaming. For guys here who are "naturals", they may not be able to identify with this. It's possible that for whatever reason, their brains were just less susceptible to it. For guys like me and others who spent a long time trapped "in the matrix" so-to-speak, it can be a bit unsettling to uncover this.
I'm questioning more and more the concept of the "true self" and whether it exists. It appears to me more and more that our minds simply hold various thought patterns. Therefore the self may exist but it cannot exist within the realm of the mind/thought, as we think of it in the west. (i.e. Descartes.) This leads you to wonder: 1) Where do thoughts come from? We seems to pick them up from our interactions with others, from the culture in which we inhabit, media, etc. They are transmitted from mind-to-mind. And, 2) Whether "free will" really exists if we are so easily "programmed" by the culture in which we live.
If only you knew how bad things really are.