What’s Your Life Software?

We humans need stories to make sense of life and find meaning. We need a guide for survival and happiness.

Our minds cannot operate in a vacuum - the fate of having a consciousness?

Back in the days, we were indoctrinated with religious beliefs and stories, but today, we have a choice.

We can choose what software we want to install and run. We can choose what stories to believe in and base our lives on.

For one, our Western cultures allow for more liberties and independence in that way. Most of us don't get forced into adopting or staying with a religious club anymore - I cancelled my membership in the Catholic church when I was 26.

Also, the Internet and globalization made knowledge more widely available and so we have access to a wider variety of teachings. We can jump on a plane, fly to India and study with a Yogi guru. We can move to Thailand and live in a Buddhist monastery. We can hop over to Peru and sit with a shaman in a plant medicine ceremony. Alternatively, we can order a copy of the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius on Amazon and dive into self-study while sipping on some Chai tea.

If you look closely at modern Western personal development teachings, you can see that most of them originate from some ancient philosophy or another. Nothing is particularly new, it's just packaged differently and put in new verbal outfits to make it more accessible and seem like it's new.

Plus, many ancient practices like meditation and breathwork are going through a season of revival, with scientific research validating their effectiveness.

We still rely on wisdom that is Thousands of years old. As if there is a universal collective software that just works for our human hardware.

Think of dreams, symbols, archetypes and the collective unconscious. We carry knowledge in our psyche that seems to be rooted in the soul of humanity at large.

As for my infinitely curious mind, all this is good news.

I get to study and research and create my own world of stories.

I get to optimize and upgrade my software as I move through life.

(This is atomic essay #7, which is part of 30 Days of Writing #Ship30for30)