Do you ever feel like no matter what you do, it’s always wrong? Like you’ll never be successful? Do you watch your friends or classmates on social media and think, How did they do it? Do you read articles about depression, anxiety, or being bullied and think, Yeah, that fits me, but why? Do you wonder if you can stop it?
Today’s world revolves around the internet, social media, and cell phones. What is seen on the internet is personalized from information collected about you. Just about everything encountered impacts who we are. You decide if something has a big impact, little impact, or no impact, and how.
Are you looking for a way to break from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and chasing that social media status? Do you want to get out of the rut and stop being told by the internet and social media who you are?
Inner Peace will help you remember what you wanted to be versus where you are now. The important thing to remember is that you’re going to be the one looking at you, the one deciding in the end, and the one pursuing the goal. This is all for you.
Do you ever feel like no matter what you do, it’s always wrong? Like you’ll never be successful? Do you watch your friends or classmates on social media and think, How did they do it? Do you read articles about depression, anxiety, or being bullied and think, Yeah, that fits me, but why? Do you wonder if you can stop it?
Today’s world revolves around the internet, social media, and cell phones. What is seen on the internet is personalized from information collected about you. Just about everything encountered impacts who we are. You decide if something has a big impact, little impact, or no impact, and how.
Are you looking for a way to break from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and chasing that social media status? Do you want to get out of the rut and stop being told by the internet and social media who you are?
Inner Peace will help you remember what you wanted to be versus where you are now. The important thing to remember is that you’re going to be the one looking at you, the one deciding in the end, and the one pursuing the goal. This is all for you.
You may not need all the content in this book; you may just need reassurance or a couple of pointers. The goal is for you to achieve something for yourself with some facts and a few directions. The purpose is to give to others what I have found to be helpful and share that information. Throughout this book, you will see interesting examples, and I’ve added some humor to keep the content fun and easy to remember. A boring read is hard to pursue, let alone remember, but laughter and real-time examples do wonders for understanding and relating. Therefore, the plan is to share some stories with you with the hope that you will relate to them and not feel alone in these circumstances.
What is inner peace, and how do you get it? There really isn’t any one final definition. It is the individualized mental and spiritual peace that each person has within themselves. It enhances the ability to be strong in times of stress and to not become anxious and overwhelmed. With inner peace comes the benefits of happiness, serenity, calmness, and freedom.
And how do you learn about yourself? It’s common to think that you know yourself because you know the types of food you like, the style of clothes you like to wear, and what your dreams are for the future, but do you know what you missed as a child? Have you enjoyed the different types of love? When you think back to what you wanted as a child, do you have it now? If not, do you still want it? Why did you change your mind? There are no wrong answers for any of the questions about these thoughts or changes, but consider, would you want to do it again? Do you know why you changed your mind?
Do I love myself? Some of you I’m sure already do and may find it hard to believe that some people don’t. It may be because of the life you have lived; it may be because of the way you were brought up; it may just be a belief that was “understood.” For some people, even just the word “love” is difficult to say. However, to those of us who have to learn to love ourselves or do not even know if we do, here is your chance. Yes, I said “to us.” I had to learn by myself.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you how you should answer any of those questions. Just like I mentioned, there is no right or wrong answer, and there are definitely no universal answers because there are no two perspectives that are the same. By the end of this book, you will be able to answer the questions for yourself. I’ll give you some examples that worked for me to instigate some thoughts for you, but you will find your own answers.
Many of today’s lifestyles and day-to-day encounters can cause distress, anger, confusion, and much more. Each of us has a past that can cause different reactions, thus making us handle situations differently and, of course, giving us different results. These results then impact the future, and if the decision has a negative impact, it can feel like a downward spiral with nothing but a negative future and a feeling of failing yourself.
That feeling of failing yourself leads to different results in individuals. Those results, of course, have different effects for each of us, and if they are not handled properly, results can start that negative spiral. Stopping what feels like a downward spiral requires making a change in the direction of your thoughts. But the question is how do we change our embedded thought process?
We will look at some interesting people that have shared their experiences. These experiences will be relevant to each chapter’s topic and explain how they overcame or stopped the downward spiral, then we will look at other examples or simple facts about how to overcome our own spirals.
We are going to look at ourselves and what it is that makes us do what we do and what we need to do to better handle any of the negatives that will eventually happen. The first example of this is Albert Einstein:
Albert Einstein felt like he didn’t belong in the Prussian education system and “one teacher even told him that he would never amount to anything.” Shortly after that, he ran away from a boardinghouse to find his parents who thought with Albert dropping out of school dropout and hiding from being drafted into the military made his future bleak. However, due to his youth interests, math and physics grades, fascinations, and Zurich schooling he became a success. He is known for the: Quantum Theory of Light, General and Special Theory of Relativity, and much more. (Britannica.com)
The point is, that he was insulted by his teacher and basically deserted by his parents, who believed he had a bleak future ahead of him, but that’s not what he wanted, so he defied all of them and became a successful, admired physicist.
We will look at why the spiral started for you and how you can take charge the same way Einstein did, by looking at what you can change, how to make that change, what you need to change to stop the spiral, and how is that different from what you are doing now. Maybe you can try to change how you think about things or maybe change where you are. If any of these, all of these, or just some of these are the changes for you, when?
The main point is for you to get to know the current you and learn about your positives and strengths and how to enhance them, but we will also look at the other side of you. We will learn about what your weaknesses are, why they are there, and what you can do for them. Everyone has them, just don’t let them hold you back and make you unhappy.
Write a list of goals you have for yourself currently and consider the different types of goals you have had over the years.
· What did you want to be when you grew up?
· Did it change when you got to junior high school?
· Did it change again in high school?
· If it did change, why? (Include any reason, even if it was a friend or family member who did or said something that caused a change in your goals.)
· What kinds of things influence your goals today? (Include any source of data or information you access, such as something you read about on social media or learned in school that impacted your lifestyle or goal.)
Make out this list and have it ready. We will look at it throughout this book, and we may add, edit, and even delete some things from it. You may even think of brand-new goals throughout the reading and add them to these goals.
One of the things you will learn about yourself is that these main points, both good and bad, have origin points. You may want to take some time to explore who or what those sources are and enhance your relationship with the source of the good. Then look at any weaknesses or bad things you may see about yourself and try to understand how to make them better or, depending on your new perspective, cut ties with those sources. But remember, in the end, our goal is to help you be what you want to be. Not what you were last year or what you are told to be, directed to be, or expected to be. We are going to help you learn about yourself and be what you want to be.
If that scares you, that’s great. It means you have the ability and potential to move forward. We will see how to use your fear, any feelings of failure, your past thoughts, and your lack of self-respect to introduce you to the new you!
When I saw this book on the list of works open for review, I was excited—I've read a lot of books on the topic recently and couldn't wait to hear a fresh perspective on how to find peace for myself despite everything going on in the world (and my life) right now.
Instead, I've just read a whole book about how people are jealous, media is evil, and life circumstances don't matter.
Let's start with the circumstances. Even though the author does mention that different people have different life circumstances (they even dedicate a whole chapter to saying that people are shaped by what's happened to them in life), they seem to completely forget this fact in other chapters. They advise the readers to "just do the thing that you want to do without caring what others think", while not acknowledging AT ALL that there are many people who just aren't that lucky in life. A single mother of four living on food stamps can't just decide to go hiking and leave her children at home without supervision, and a 20-year-old first generation immigrant can't "just get a degree in what they want" without getting into some serious debt and/or having to get another job to sustain their studies.
These are just some examples of the absolute tone deafness that's so prevalent in this book. "The only thing stopping you from achieving your goals is you" is just not a reality to so many people, and to believe it's that easy to change someone's life is, frankly, insulting. Saying, "If you're not happy with a relationship, you can just leave" is easy to say when leaving that relationship doesn't leave you unhoused or bankrupt. Unfortunately, this author doesn't show much awareness in that regard, and I have truly felt so disregarded while reading this book.
Now, the media thing. I'm dreading even starting this part of the review because it infuriates me to no end to think about what I'm going to say now.
Long story short, the thesis statement of this entire book is: media is bad bad bad bad bad, but you can use it for good (which is very limited because media is bad and will definitely make you depressed).
Somehow, most of this book, which is supposed to help the reader find peace in this very chaotic world, just keeps coming back to the fact that the internet is an awful place and it's the number one thing responsible for people's pain in the world. This is a strongly biased, unbalanced take, that doesn't do justice to the very serious topic of internet (mostly social media) use.
Are there harms associated with internet use? Absolutely. But to say that it's all universally bad, unless someone is specifically using it to learn or read, is overly reducing the complexity of this issue and mostly accomplishes just shaming people for the way they use internet. The author assumes that, if the internet is not used productively, then it's the worst possible enemy and should be avoided.
But doesn't it make more sense that, instead of completely dismissing the entirety of the internet (especially the social internet), we can work on developing a healthy habit of using the phone for whatever makes sense for ourselves? If watching Netflix will help me sit on a stationary bike for an hour, then you bet I'm putting that baking show on and not blaming myself for "falling prey to the evil internet". Again, I find that this book contains an overly simplistic view on this topic and doesn't allow for nuance and diversity of minds.
Lastly, and perhaps most disappointingly, the author seems to have a profound mistrust in humans. I kept being surprised by the number of iterations of "people are jealous and might mock you" or "everyone has an agenda to push on you", advising people to just disregard external influences completely and focus only on what they want. And while it's certainly sometimes useful to not listen to people when they're being harmful or just making you do things that don't really matter to you, that doesn't mean everything people share with you is inherently malicious and meant to distract you from what really matters.
I'll wrap up by mentioning the thing that shook me the most about this: the idea that people Google words they don't know just because there's a social pressure for them to know that word, and not because they're just curious and want to expand their vocabulary. I have no words for this. I've been thinking about this part so much and I still can't understand it.
As you can see, unfortunately, this book isn't really what it says on the tin. I don't really know what it suggests for finding inner peace (except "delete all apps that the author doesn't deem good" and "don't pay attention to what the people around you are telling you"), and I truly wish it were different. There were good bits here and there, but I was, sadly, overwhelmed by the venom.