It’s great to write blogs. It’s better when your posts serve as blueprints for life-improving hacks. I’ve worked on hacking my ego in 2013 i.e. destroying it and 'sterilising' it only to leave the positives of it. I also thought about "the hacking mind” and how to disrupt one’s own thinking constantly. Same for the Stoic Buddha. I believe it’s a state of being worth pursuing.
I have a tendency to productise things. You can sell custom T-shirts and print every single design yourself for users or you can invent a machine that gets the image by email, optimises it, prints it, packages it and sends it to the right person. To reach the above state, koans (in the form of quotes) seemed to be the simplest form and the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to reach that.
So below is a set of "Zen moments". These are personal decisions I've tried to reach using the Stoic Buddha mindset and mainly ugly mental patterns I wanted to get rid of : Money, Anger, Irritation
ZEN MOMENT #1 : A SLAVE TO FORTUNE, NO MORE
I really feel it’s immature to pursue financial wealth in life. I wanted to get over the importance of money. A very simple quote that helped was James Armstrong’s saying:
"Money can purchase the symbols but not the causes of serenity and buoyancy. In a straightforward way we must agree that money cannot buy happiness."
ZEN MOMENT #2 : ANGER IS SO 2013
Contempt is a stressor. And a useless one for that matter. So in the case of anger, a mix of a quote and an occasional exercise were very helpful:
“Anger is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die”
Exercise
Marcus Aurelius’ trick to overcome anger is the following : “Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend…or not even a legend. Think of all the examples. And how trivial the things we want so passionately are.” Marcus Aurelius is an amazing Stoic.
ZEN MOMENT #4 : EGO VACCINATION
One useful hack to overcoming snobism and ego was the "photgraphy hack". Imagine people you'd usually judge are pictures or sculptures or portraits. Build a story around them and realize how beautifully they fit into reality and how well they enrich it.
ZEN MOMENT #3 : HAPPINESS AS A HABIT
Mindfulness and a healthy convergence to a happier self can be done quite simply by setting 5 minutes aside every night to write down the 3 happy things that happened to you during the day. By creating more time to reflect on happy things, you effectively become more happy, mindful of all the great things you're living and a lot less irritable.