Tag: love

Inside Out: The Discipline of Feeling

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Daily writing prompt
When are you most happy?
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Pixar’s Inside Out is often praised for making emotions legible, by color-coding them, naming them, and placing them neatly at their respective spots at a control panel. While it may be easy to watch the movie and believe its message is the value of emotional mastery, this surface clarity reveals a more unsettling argument. Inside Out attempts instead to reveal the value of emotional tolerance. Its deepest claim is not that happiness comes from managing feelings well, but that constant contradiction of emotion is necessary to create identity.

I. Continuity

Joy begins the film as the keeper of continuity. She treats Riley’s inner life as something to be curated, and protected from contamination. Sadness, in her view, corrodes life. If sadness touches a memory, the memory changes, so Joy fears this potential narrative fracture. However, this fear is prevalent in modern culture. We believe happiness to be stability; we believe it to be a consistent mood, a smooth trajectory. Self-help language also reinforces this fantasy by encouraging us to “protect our peace” as though peace were a fragile artifact rather than a dynamic process. At the beginning of the movie, Joy embodies this impulse, believing that if the right emotions remain in charge, the self will remain intact.

II. Sadness

But Inside Out dismantles this belief. When Sadness touches Riley’s memories, they don’t crack or fracture; rather, they deepen. Riley’s joyful recollections of childhood play become tinged with grief, but not because the joy was false; that grief comes from the memories belonging to a time that cannot be recovered, something we have all experienced. The memory gains depth and complexity, and with that comes narrative truth. What Joy interprets as damage is really just maturation.

The film suggests that unpleasant emotions like sadness are necessary to complete meaning. Only through sadness can experience remain emotionally legible over time. Without it, memories become artifacts, forever frozen, incapable of accommodating change. Riley’s crisis emerges when her emotional system can no longer pretend that continuity is possible. Moving cities disrupt her internal story. Her old sources of meaning, her friends, routines, and landscapes, shift apart. And the attempt to remain cheerful under these conditions produces emotional turmoil.

III. Growing

The ultimate resolution to this crisis is not the restoration of Joy’s authority, but a deeper understanding of the emotional hierarchy. When Sadness is allowed to speak, Riley’s pain becomes shareable. The problem isn’t solved, but her parents can help because the problem has been named.

In this sense, Inside Out offers a corrective view to a culture obsessed with emotional optimization. It suggests that unlike popular belief, psychological health is not achieved by minimizing negative states, but by allowing them to rise up to construct meaning. The film implies that identity is a dynamic system that must remain open to revision.

IV. Conclusion

The film ends with memories that shimmer with multiple emotional hues, refusing closure. Riley’s inner life becomes more difficult to map out, but it becomes more real. Every emotion evolves together. If Inside Out has a lesson, it is not that sadness is good, or that joy is naive. The lesson lies in the fact that a self that insists on feeling only one thing at a time will eventually lose the ability to feel anything honestly at all. Emotional maturity, like narrative truth, requires the courage to let experiences change us. Even if it’s hard. Even if it disrupts the story we carry of ourselves. Because to live is to keep becoming, again and again.

Why I Never Make Wishes

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I want my experience to guide me, not undeserved freebies.

Daily writing prompt
What is one thing you would change about yourself?
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I never make wishes. Not because I lack desire, or because I am practical in a boring sense, but because I want the arc of my life to emerge from my choices and mistakes, not from a free handout from the universe. A wish, by its nature, is a shortcut. An attempt to acquire a future without traversing the path that shapes the self along the way. I am more interested in that shaping than in the outcome itself.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience gives a strange kind of validation to this intuition. The brain learns most deeply through effort through what researchers call prediction error, the moment when expectation meets reality and the system adapts. Dopamine spikes which respond to effortful achievement serve to reinforce connections in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, helping us encode both skill and memory. If wishes were real, they would bypass that process. In a sense, it deprives the nervous system of experience, its most potent teacher.

Consider the subtle difference between a student who struggles for months to master a piece of music and one who magically acquires the ability with a single wish. Both may be able to play the notes, but only the first has undergone the kind of plasticity that transforms the mind. The hippocampus consolidates memories, the motor cortex refines its output, and the brain’s error-monitoring circuits, especially in the anterior cingulate cortex, learn to adapt. The journey, not the shortcut, builds agency. The wish, however tempting, is neurologically inert. Sorry, Aladdin. It asks nothing and returns nothing of value beyond the superficial.

Philosophy

Philosophically, my aversion to wishing aligns with existentialist thought. Kierkegaard wrote about authentic existence as reliant on decision, risk, and reflection. To hand over the authorship of your future, even symbolically, to some external wish is to abdicate the very process that makes life meaningful. Wishing collapses experience into instant gratification; it divorces outcome from effort, action from responsibility. And the self, stripped of its formative trials, becomes lighter, but also emptier.

Stories like Aladdin illustrate a subtle truth about wishing and effort. Aladdin becomes wealthy, meets the princess, and transforms his life, but only because the narrative allows him access to opportunity. In real life, outcomes are far less generous. Contemporary philosophy and social thought remind us that effort alone does not guarantee escape from suffering. Structural barriers, resources, and circumstance shape who can act on their potential and who remains constrained, no matter how hard they try. Refusing shortcuts or wishes is therefore a personal ethical choice because it shapes the kind of person you become, but it cannot erase the imbalances of reality. What we gain from experience is valuable, but it is never distributed evenly.

Therefore, this is not to romanticize suffering or struggle. I am not advocating for unnecessary pain or the glorification of difficulty. But I do believe that real growth requires living inside the friction of consequence and choice.

Ethics

There is also a subtle ethical dimension. When we wish for unearned advantages, we are implicitly saying that we value our own gain above the discipline of learning or merit. By refusing to wish, I am also, in a small way, refusing to outsource my development to luck. I am committing to a life where reward is proportional to engagement, where consequence is respected, and where experience remains my guide.

The Reality

Sometimes life is harder, slower, and less immediately satisfying than it would be if wishes were real. I miss opportunities that might have arrived on a whim. I watch others take shortcuts and sometimes envy their efficiency.

And yet, I want my story written in synapses that were built in response to challenge, not circumstantial fortune. I want my character shaped by choices that left a mark both on my mind and on my life. The wish tempts me with speed, but I choose depth. I choose learning. I choose experience.

Because in the end, it is experience, not magic, that teaches us who we are.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.

Everything is Nothing. And Nothing is Everything.

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Daily writing prompt
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
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A Moment of Silence — Retreat, Reflect, Renew

A Personal Meditation on the Overlooked

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, how we’re always doing something. Scrolling, replying, running errands, checking notifications, planning the next step in our lives. There are no breaks in the modern way of life. Sometimes even when we try to slow down, our minds are still running at the same speed.

The weird part? Most of the time, I don’t even know what I’m chasing. This feeling is probably universal, right? (unless you’re totally unhinged, in which case… congrats?) Like you’re ticking off boxes, but you’re not sure where that list came from in the first place?

The other night I sat on my porch just for a few minutes with no phone, no agenda. Just sitting. I noticed the wind in the trees, a neighbor’s dog barking, the way the air felt a little cooler than usual. It wasn’t dramatic. No thunderbolt revelations. But I felt present in a such a way that it was almost a miracle.

Moments like those have made me realize that we were never built to be machines.

Yes, working hard has it’s place. But not all the time.

And definitely not at the cost of being alive to your own life.

I’ve made an effort to treat slower days and slower moments as the essential times they are. The little things, those things that give life its flavor (like smiling at someone in the morning, or the way your tea smells, or the color of the sky) are just as much a part of life as the big things we constantly chase.

The slow moments are where you digest the rest of your life.

So next time you’re wondering what to do, consider:

There’s nothing harmful in slowing down.

The answer isn’t always to do more.

Maybe it’s ok to pause.

To breathe.

To do “nothing.”

Because maybe that’s where everything is.

if i am with you

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days fold inward upon each other,

imploding yet exploding; incomplete and fragmented.

seen but not felt;

whirling,

raging,

but – if i am with you,

sunlight slips through the trees

and leads the dance of silhouettes across the soil.

it is golden –

like you

and your voice

uprooting doubt,

silencing the muttering leaves above.

the soul speaks

a thousand words –

yet the voice captures so little

while the rest are lost

to infinity.

even so,

i feel you;

your ebb and flow.

but when the wind dies

and the trees are still,

the last echoes of eden fade

to shadow.

the sun sets

ever so softly;

rainbow ink

spilling upward into the heavens.

cue the obsidian drapes falling over the canvas,

as lofty ideals

subside to cold repose

but the light has not left yet.

with you,

the soft pinholes in the sky open up

and the stars sigh.

It’s that simple.

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
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I can start with the biggest lie I’ve ever been told.

“It’s not that simple.”

I believed it. Whenever I told my peers I wanted to start something new – do better in class, start writing poetry, pick up boxing, start learning guitar – the one phrase that always cut through was:

“It’s not that simple.”

But today, I want to tell you something different.

The best piece of advice I have ever received is this:

It’s always that simple.

I love to overcomplicate things. I bet you do, too. We create mental barriers as excuses to validate our inability to accomplish our goals. We tell ourselves that it’s complicated, our timing’s off, or we’re not ready. But in reality, they’re excuses disguised as logic. Sometimes, we even adapt to our inability to adapt, and in doing so, we stay stuck in places we don’t want to be.

But being stuck is not a failure. It’s a starting point. And you can choose where you want to go from there.

Because it really is that simple.

Yes, doing things you’re not used to is scary. Heck, it scares me, and it probably scares everyone.

The consistent discipline it takes to accomplish your greatest desires, to ascend, to have the authority to dream big – that’s difficult. But when it comes down to knowing what needs to be done, your brain will always know.

The first step, the next step, the final step – it’s all one, and it’s always within you.

You don’t need a hundred tutorials. You don’t need motivational videos on loop. You don’t need anyone to give you permission.

Everything you need is already there.

Yes, it’s going to be hard, and you’ll have to give more than you’ve ever given before.

But just remember:

It’s still that simple.

And that’s what makes it possible.