导读
1.What does Charles Bukowski’s success try to prove?
His success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was.
2️.What’s wrong with the conventional life advice, which is fixating on what you lack?
It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you. And this fixation only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be.
️ 3.Can you use your own words explaining what the Feedback Loop from Hell is?
It makes many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing. For example, we feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious.
Words and expressions
1. At night, he would drink alone and sometimes hammer out poetry on his beat-up old typewriter.
beat-up: old and in bad condition
仿写: He has no extra money to repair the beat-up car.
2. But when you stop and really think about it, conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack.
fixate: to focus or concentrate one's attention obsessively
仿写: Don't fixate on things you can't do, but on things you can do.
3. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction.
chase: to quickly follow someone or something in order to catch them
仿写: The dogs saw him running and chased him.
4. There’s an insidious quirk to your brain that, if you let it, can drive you absolutely batty.
insidious: buguiling but harmful, subtle
仿写: As doubts are so insidious, how do you beat them?
quirk: oddity. a strange attitude or habit
仿写: Like every computer, this one has its little quirks.
5. It’s like this one time I tripped on acid and it felt like the more I walked toward a house, the farther away the house got from me.
trip: make a mistake；stumble
仿写: The questions on the test tripped him up.
Reflection
第一部分告诉了我们don't try，当然，作者并不是让我们不去努力，而是别把注意力放在不靠谱的未来和幻想，要积极面对自己和现实。Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
