The Rudest Book Ever

by Shwetabh Gangwar

And this becomes your criteria for a future partner: that fantasy person. And just like that, you detach yourself from reality, realistic possibilities, realistic outcomes, your shot at stability, your shot at maximum personal development, and in many cases your shot at a great career, your shot at self-awareness, and your shot at evading and minimising traumatic experiences.

I mean, what the fuck is wrong with people! Everything is wrong with you. You are a delusional fool who keeps deciding to date fantasy characters. And despite the rejections or bad relationships, that does not stop. There are only two outcomes from these fantasy relationships: after a course of time, either they are going to be assholes to you, or you are going to be that way to them, precisely because relationships are a thing of reality, not fantasy.

The truth is, you don’t have real data on why you got rejected. In the absence of any data, you let your insecurities fill in all the reasons why you got rejected. What you’re supposed to do is, leave it at: you don’t have any real data. You don’t know why. Stop making it personal because you have nothing better to do. You don’t know the nature of their wants, why they want what they want, their influences, degree of intelligence, degree of experience, who they think they are, who they actually are, and if they know who they actually are. You don’t have any data. Therefore, rejection from people should mean jack-shit to you.

Have you ever rejected someone romantically? Even if it required as little effort as swiping your finger, think of how much thought and time went behind it. What were the parameters you were considering behind accepting or rejecting? How stupidly vague, impersonal, and shallow were those parameters? That’s how much thought goes behind rejecting someone. Not much. How can you take a rejection personally when it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to happen? Do you think your whole existence can be understood, judged and adequately summarised in a matter of seconds? Fuck, no!

Being rejected by someone is not a statement on you. You have no data, you cannot have that data. For you to know, you would have to be able to read their minds. There is a possibility that they have no idea what they are looking for in a relationship and from a partner; they are probably just following their instincts. Or let’s say they do know what they’re looking for: there is a possibility they have no idea whether it is good for them or not. What matters is, do you know wha...

So, the first question is, who are you? This

means who you are intellectually, sexually, emotionally and professionally. You can take all the time you want to figure out the first three, and it is up to you to do it. Nobody can do it on your behalf while you sleep. The last part is who you are professionally, which you can find out by asking these questions: What is my ambition? (What do you want to become exactly? Where do you want to reach?) What are my current goals? (Short-term and long-term goals to actualise the ambition mentioned above.) What is the routine I need to achieve my goals? (Doesn’t need explanation.) What are my dreams? (Why do you want to achieve that?) What is the nature of the line of work I have chosen? (How demanding is it? What’s the scope for relaxation? At what age and with what skillset would you have achieved credible respect in your field or workplace?)

Therefore, what you look for is: Do the choices, decisions and actions they have made in their past and are making in the present ensure the safety and support of your current purpose in life? What patterns do you notice when looking at what they have done and have been doing? Do these patterns suggest an approach of carelessness, destructiveness, impulsiveness or of seriousness, self-control and an attempt at stability?

On the contrary, you are now engaged, silently or vocally, in rejecting people whose decisions, choices and actions seem either incompatible to yours, or disagreeable to you.

Not only does this bring down the number of rejections by a lot, the impact the rejections have almost stops mattering to you. You’re not playing the game of probability anymore. You are not desperately waving your flag to be accepted by anyone you desire. No, you have put the priorities of your own life on top. If you do find such a person but are met with rejection, the reminder that rejections are normal applies very aptly in that situation, as you must not forget, People are weird. It has nothing to do with you. What you have right now is a criteria, which is much better than having no criteria, and certainly far better than chasing fantasy.

Do you wanna be intelligent? Then always remember that, whenever you like somebody, there is a thing called “approval”, and it can destroy the individual in you.’

Let’s take an example: Think of the last time you felt a deep sense of self-satisfaction from doing something. But once it was presented to the relevant authority—teacher, boss, mentor—they were not very impressed. In fact, they thought it was mediocre. Or they did not show any particular delight or excitement in your creation. And that work, to you, immediately became shitty. It slightly broke your heart, and what once made you proud quickly became something that reminded you of failure.

When such experiences happen, the following changes are made by you: You decide to not focus on the feeling of self-satisfaction anymore. There cannot be any satisfaction if it has not been approved by those you want to impress. Satisfaction now comes after their approval. What the self says doesn’t matter anymore. Only what they say matters. You stop relying on yourself and rely completely on ‘those who know better’ to tell you what you should do, how to do it, and what’s best for you. Your original ideas don’t matter until they have been approved by them. Your ‘self’ is not being developed. It is being ignored and treated as an unreliable entity. What is being fully developed is an identity that you think will be liked by those you want to impress. You start working in the direction that will make them happy and which they approve of, instead of finding out what will make you satisfied.

The result is, after a period of time, you become completely divorced from your ‘self’. What you hear from your self are whispers of what you’d like to do. Those are whispers because the voice of your self has been suppressed so strongly for a very long time. The whispered ideas have no credibility because they have never been trusted or applied. In short, for a very long period of your life, you remain confused, clueless and alwa...

You are noticing the word ‘self’ here. The ‘self’ is the individual in you. It is the person you don’t want to accept and run away from to become a different person. It is who you really are. It is who you are meant to know better, empower and develop. And since you’re not in touch with your ‘self’, our first objective would be to unite you with it. Then we will eradicate the parasitical thoughts and practices, like constantly seeking approval and acceptanc...

Feeling-based sounds something like: This makes me feel good, therefore this is good. I want it. Thinking-based sounds like: Just because something makes me feel good doesn’t mean it’s good. I will think about if I really want it.

A feeling-based person is impulsive, excitable, lacks a thoughtful process, doesn’t take the future into consideration, and is therefore easily defeated by their own feelings and easily manipulated by those who can create nice feelings in them. A thinking-based person is one who considers stability, the future, the information at hand, and the fact that feelings change all the fucking time. Feelings are unreliable as fuck.

Nobody tells us this: Life is a lot of things that have nothing to do with happiness, but if you do them right, the result is going to be happiness. In short, happiness is a by-product of life done right. And I hope this does not come as a surprise, but doing things right requires thinking, a lot of it.

2. I know I shouldn’t be with them, yet I can’t stop loving

I can’t stop chasing after them. I can’t move on from that person. You can’t because a part of you is genuinely convinced that their union with your existence brings you the ultimate happiness. You feel that way because of the happiness that you once felt with them, which according to your mind is ‘the best feeling ever’. And because your goal in life is to be happy, and you currently don’t know of any other happiness better than what you felt with them, you obsess over them even though their presence is currently brutalising you with pain. If you miss them, it’s because they made you happy once. You miss that particular happiness, not them really. You will disregard their existence the moment you find it with another person. It’s because you are a happiness-junkie, that hit of happiness is much more valuable to you than your self-respect, mental health and the overall peacefulness in your life. So you say, fuck it, and keep going after that hit.

3. I know I should be working hard, but I waste my day doing bullshit things on my phone, being lazy and useless. And because of that I am filled with regret. You don’t work, because whatever you do instead of working makes you happy. It’s as simple as that. You being lazy does not mean you are dead in those moments. You are still working towards feeling great, quite actively so, by watching some comedy, drama, commentary, news, animal rescue videos, or whatever it is that you watch. You do work a lot—except it’s in the direction of gathering information which is of no use to your real work. So, a correct way to voice your displeasure is, I was unproductive, not, I didn’t do anything, because you did plenty of things, they were all just complete shit in terms of productivity. Things that add betterment to your life aren’t about making you happy, they’re about ha...

4. I can’t say ‘no’ to people. Because of this, people often impose themselves on my wants and feelings and take advantage of my niceness. You can’t say ‘no’ because you can’t afford to make people unhappy. If they are unhappy with you, you are unhappy, and you want to be happy. You may tell others: I became unhappy because I didn’t get to do what I wanted, but the real story doesn’t stop there. What you don’t tell them is that the unhappiness vanishes the moment you see others being happy with you, despite the fact that you still didn’t get to do what you wanted. People being happy with you gives you so much pleasure that it feels like a much bigger reward than what you would feel if you stood up for yourself and said ‘no’. In short, because happiness is your priority, self-respect is ignored. And that is why, even though you complain to people about how unhappy it makes you, you keep repeating it, especially with ...

If ‘growing up’ was the problem, then you are suggesting a life without responsibilities, duties and consequences is better, and that is called escapism. As a kid, your reality was structurally designed to keep you as free as possible, therefore those wants worked. That reality was manipulated, the current one is not. Ask any person whose life growing up was a continuous battle with tragedy, troubles and struggle if they wish to go back, and you will know the difference. Your responsibilities, duties and consequences pose as a problem to you because you are a grown-person with the wants of a clueless kid—to be happy all the time.

The common link, as you can see, is seeking happiness. We keep prioritising it because we are convinced that happiness is what we want from life, and that it is the ultimate answer. In doing so, we tend to de-prioritise most things that have nothing to do with happiness. They could be your self-respect, conscience, morality, rational thinking, common sense, logic and self-betterment. I am pretty sure that, right now, you would choose the other things as they sound sensible. But, in life, it is not possible as long as you are convinced that happiness is the final goal. You have to chuck that thought out of your mind. You have to say, fuck happiness. I don’t want to be happy, I want to be satisfied in life. I want self-satisfaction.

I want you to start looking at whatever you do with an assumption: you would be fine without everything you currently believe makes you happy.

So when you assume, ‘I will be fine without everything I currently believe makes me happy’, you question the source and legitimacy of what your wants are. Are they even chosen by you? That’s the current point. Whatever your wants are, let’s divide them into two categories: the first would be wants that contribute to long-term results; the second would be wants that bring you momentary happiness. Let’s call the first category ‘value’, because they bring value to your life, and let’s call the second ‘interest’, because they deal with your actual interests in life.

From now on, any time you feel anything is making you think, it’s an indication that you need to look into it more. Don’t move on. Do not care about the responses of others if you share it with them. It speaks to you; therefore, develop it further in your mind. It could be about anything—religion, relationships, social work, dating, or human behaviour. You need to test the idea by imagining if this was a strict want or rule in your life, does it make you more in control and more secure, or not? This could lead you to discover an actual want of yours.

So, you need to ask yourself right now, how many daily wants and actions of yours are geared toward serving stability and cultivation? If ‘not many’ or ‘none’ is your answer, it’s a serious concern, my friend. Sooner or later, you will have to take hold of the steering wheel of your life, you might as well start thinking about it now.

Your wants and actions come under the category ‘interest’ only when they are controlled by you, not you by them.

So, from today, start noticing what activities and wants of yours are controlled by you, and give you satisfaction in doing them, not just a short burst of pleasure; the activities you feel positively possessive and sure about. And screw those activities you do to escape from the duties and responsibilities of your life—they are gonna fuck you over in the long run.

So, what is it that you want? Do you want to be an individual or a fucking follower? If you choose individual, then start investing in whatever draws the attention and interest of your self. That is your thing, dude. Investing in it and growing it is what separates you from everybody—that is what makes you an individual, because you are doing your own thing. Put whatever you find intellectually stimulating above what everybody else is doing. Fuck them and fuck that.

People go away, they don’t give a shit about you, people give a shit about themselves; so you better start giving a shit about yourself the right way. Time passes, people leave, and you are the one who stays with yourself. Therefore, people are not the answer, it is you who has to find the answers from within you.

Lastly, as far as friendship is concerned, a single person who truly gives a shit about you can replace thousands who claim friendship. So, you know whom to keep.