😇 TREE 408: Who is your misery helping?

One.

Working a terrible job.
Maintaining a dysfunctional relationship.
Living with self-destructive behaviours.

Sometimes people in miserable situations like these say, I’m doing this to help my kids/partner/friends/future self.

You love helps.
Your kindness helps.
Your hard work helps.
Your generosity helps.

But how does your misery help?

Could you be more helpful if you were less miserable?

Yes.

Your misery doesn’t help anyone.

Find a different job.
Make the relationship functional. If that’s not possible, leave it.
Get the help you need.

(I wrote the last three sentences like those are easy things to do. You and I both know that most of the time they are not.)

Becoming unmiserable can feel selfish, especially if the culture that formed you taught that misery is noble, that happiness is deceitful, that having a self is suspicious.

Being a whole entire human is beautiful. A life that includes lots of happiness is wonderful. There’s nothing noble about staying miserable.

You can help people so much more when you are unmiserable. My wish for you today is wholeness and happiness. But if you are miserable, I wish for you to take a real tangible step today to reduce the misery in your life.

Two.

I’m still working on FFOREST FFRENZY Chapter 2: The Most Important Mealworm of the Day. For now, I’m farming out the artwork to an AI. The prompt for this one was: a sad man sitting on a plate of spaghetti. There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of the word “on”.

Three.

This was another song I first heard on Need for Speed on my phone.

I loved Detra’s story of escaping misery (from Humans of New York).

Grow slowly
Jeff