Category: Mindset

Anxiety is a pervasive unidentifiable stress

Posted on by BogusRed

A friend told me about Naval Ravikant recently so I went to check out his content.

“Anxiety is a pervasive unidentifiable stress. You’re stressed all the time but you’re not even sure why.”

This quote was particularly on point for me.

2014-2024 were full of anxiety for me that got steadily worse. It got so bad that I was breaking down into frequent meltdowns. I was in such a bad place before that I was frequently disassociating and distracting myself to relieve the stress.

Through a lot of therapy over the past several years, I was slowly able to identify what the major sources of my anxiety were.

I was wasting so much energy worrying about what other people thought of me, how I wasn’t meeting their expectations, and feeling like I had disappointed others. I was trying too hard to be something other people wanted me to be instead of accepting that I was never going to change the way others treated me and that I needed to start on a new path where I could be myself, accept myself, and grow.

I made the hard decisions needed to break bad patterns, remove people, remove behaviors from my life that were hurting me and making me anxious. It was incredibly difficult to see it when I was in it. But therapy slowly revealed it to me and I was able to remove those things from my life.

Once I answered the question of “what” is my source of anxiety and remove them, it was time to understand why.

Why did I allow these people into my life for so long?

Why did I abandon myself and who I am for so long?

I’ve done a lot of therapy, healing, reflecting, reading, and journaling to unravel why I made these poor choices so that I don’t keep repeating them.

It was programming created to protect my inner child. Those behaviors protected me then but they are sabotaging me in my adult life.

I had to people please to survive in school as a child. I had to be quiet and hide who I was to avoid being bullied. But now things are different. I can make the more healthy choice of just walking away from people who hurt me instead of trying to get them to like me. My inner child is with me and she is now protected and safe.

I’m grateful I’m in a much better place now. I’m at the point where I rarely feel anxious. I’m more present, more productive, and am way more present when with my friends and family.

I understand now what role I played that lead to my suffering and have made better choices that are for my wellbeing. I am on my phone a LOT less and have returned to my Miracle Morning routine. (Though admittedly, I’m not doing them all in the morning but no matter when I do them they still help!)

My healing journey isn’t over yet but I’m proud of myself for the progress I’ve made and for making the very necessary and very hard decisions to love myself, accept myself, and save my life.

I’m very much excited for the future ahead of me. It’s going to be awesome!

⛵

If you’re an artist and you’re discouraged by AI art, you need to hear this.

Posted on by BogusRed

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Let’s talk about how to stay motivated as an artist with some art motivation tips.

If what’s going on right now with generative AI art has demotivated you and discouraged you from creating art, you need to here this. I see so many young artists that decided to stop creating because AI art has gotten so good or they are afraid their work will be stolen.

  • Remind yourself why you started creating in the first place. It’s the actual creating that makes you feel good. And the accomplishment and confidence you feel after putting in all that time and effort. No one can take that away from you.
  • AI art is very repetitive, lacks emotion, and doesn’t have a good foundation. It’s all surface level, like a polished turd. AI art has a very limited scope of data that is put into it’s model and it can’t draw inspiration from as many sources as we can. It will eventually run out of training data, will struggle to improve beyond where it is, and it will never have the understanding of drawing and art fundamentals that real human artists have of art.
  • I like to think of the existence of AI as like the existence of many other artists out there. just because there are other artists out there that are better than me, doesn’t mean i will stop creating. I still have a unique art style and expression of my art and utility to my art that no one else has.
  • everyone is at a different point in their creative journey. all the good artists once sucked. they invested the time to get better.
  • You have to ask yourself, where do you want to be with your art in 1, 5, 10 years? Don’t stop now just because there’s a shitstorm going on. If you wait until conditions are perfect, you’ll never progress.
  • Like NFTs, AI art is likely to be yet another fad. Development of this AI technology has been very expensive and eventually the bubble will burst. The industry will find only limited usefulness from it and the investment bubble will burst.
  • I’m optimistic that the problems we see with our art being stolen is a temporary one and that regulation will eventually catch up with us and that there will be a day of reckoning for the AI companies.

If you’re looking for more inspiration and motivation with your art, checkout the PaperDemon Art Role Playing Game. Battle monsters, complete quests, and make new friends as you draw your way through the Paperverse.

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