Back when I was making music and active on Instagram, I’d spam the line: “life is beautiful”. I kept posting it everywhere, on my stories, captions, over DMs. It was the 16-year-old me’s naïve mantra. It hasn’t been so easy to repeat this statement after crossing adulthood. Life includes war, misery, hate, not so beautiful things. But I realize now, refusing to see the beauty in life hasn’t helped me solve any of these issues. My life has lost its beauty while the world remains unchanged.
So, what was the purpose of losing this sentiment?
For the last few months, I’ve been lost in seeking virtuousness. It might actually have been out of spite for people living their best lives, creating what they want, things that I’ve been unable to do in the army. This made me lose my passion, the spark that brought all the good things in my life. The weirdness, the eccentricity, the boldness to do things that would get judged, hated, then eventually followed. Same shit happened when I made music. I got clowned by the entire school, then other people started to make music in my high school and asked me to collaborate. Everything sucks at the start, everything is easy to hate on until it works.
Hating is so easy, it’s so easy to hate on people that love what they’re doing, they seem out of touch with reality. But taking the easy route is the go-to solution for ruining your life. Do things that make you nervous, that make you gag and want to throw up, try being hated for once, stop trying so hard to fit in. I realized that life is beautiful by being hated, and now that I’m accepted, I’ve lost that sentiment. When you feel like everyone around you likes you, even people you meet for the first time, you should be afraid. Alarms in your head should go off. Stay that way for a couple of months and you will lose passion.
A few months ago I wrote that we have too many startups and that the startup scene is ugly right now. It’s true, I still think that chaos and greed has taken over many smart young people. But they will learn, people change. It’s a good thing that more people have agency now. Yes, Cluely isn’t the most morally attractive sensation, but the hate it’s getting hides a deeper truth. Logically, there are much much worse things to hate on. People hate because they see unconventional success, success that does not fit their world model, success they couldn’t achieve because they didn’t know it was possible to do it that way. Young people are lost. The world has shifted too far from convention and this is the messy, chaotic way the youth is learning to find freedom and beauty in post-modernity.
We have an all time high count of young people paving their path to live the life they want - that is beautiful. More people are becoming like the 13 year old me when I asked my parents for a PayPal account to make money on Instagram. More people are becoming passionate in life. Is this stable for the future? We don’t have a clue. But by the time the “experts” build all the models they can to predict if this is net positive or net negative, they will be too late; the people that took a risk will laugh at these experts who will announce their GROUNDBREAKING results into nothingness. There will always be people saying what you’re doing is stupid, bad, useless. But in order to make a dent in the world, you need to trust your gut.
What is the difference between a successful startup and an unsuccessful one? There are too many factors to count - funding, timing, people, idea, health, so on and so forth. What is the difference between a successful entrepreneur and an unsuccessful one? It’s much simpler: grit and conviction. Behind a successful startup, there are countless failed dropshipping stores, countless awkward VC meetings, countless stupid ideas.
I use startups as an example because it’s my territory. The same thing applies for any risky project. You can always hate on someone for what they’re doing now, but if they’re relentless they will win. Eventually they will win. It takes one win. If you can fail a thousand times without dying you will win. It’s like saving your game before a boss fight and fighting it until you win. All it really takes is patience, conviction, and grit. Those David Goggins motivational videos are true, not because they sound attractive, but because the game is logically built that way. It’s just communicated in those motivational quotes to be easily digested by normies.
If you’re too ignorant to believe that people can grow and that environments can change for the better, life is not beautiful, life sucks, everything everyone else does suck. It’s statistically safe to never believe in change, never invest in anything new because most new things fail. But if you’re too scared to be wrong, you will never realize that life is beautiful, because you will never win, because there was never even an OPPORTUNITY for you to win.
So take a fucking risk and be prepared to lose a lot. Then life will become beautiful.