With content regarding self-care, taking control of your life, have you ever noticed that everyone is basically telling you the same thing? Its just put in different words, different titles and presented to you over and over again. The same dish, reheated, garnished and served to you every time.
Ever thought about that ? If not, try to think about every source of information you've referred to when it comes to these 'life improvement' guides. Be it books, magazines, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, podcasts and every other source that is available out there. Is this realisation sinking in ? Have you ever wondered why ?
Let me try to put it in words here :
Over the years the human race has made immense progress with respect to science and technology and this has greatly influenced our lifestyles. We're living much faster and busier lives than we used to. We're handling many more things as compared to our forefathers. We still have the same 24 hours, mind you, but the amount of things we try to cram into those has grown multi-fold ever since. And this growth has been exponential.
But at the same time, the human brain or more importantly the human mind has not evolved at the same pace. These two paces of evolution or growth don't really match. Lifestyle evolution has outdone our adaptive evolution.
To put it quite simply : We have not yet been able to adapt to our own lifestyles.
It's not like we're not trying. We are, of course. But clearly it's a struggle. And this has its repercussions. As we try to match with the pace of our advancements, we try to devise new techniques and new methods of adaptations. In this very process, we tend to forget the existing ways of maintaining the balance in our lifestyles that keeps us in place. And this is how we end up with our backs to the basics!
And these BASICS are the things that are important to us. They are simple things:
Health tips - meditating, correct diet, walking, taking in more sun
Mental health tips - Not caring what people think about you, being confident, practising gratitude
Lifestyle tips - Being consistent to form habits, decluttering, keeping clean
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Which among these have you heard before ?
Most probably ALL. Because they're the basic crux of what they're trying to tell you. Its just that it gets closer to our brain when someone calls it 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k' (with due respect to Mark Manson, I like that book) than someone plainly telling us not to care about stuff so much.
My point here being: We've started to forget the basics of out lifestyles and that is causing us to fall apart a little. They form the base of our lives and if we want to keep the apex rising further, we've got to keep our base stable. It's only logical.
The new year is just round the corner. What better way to start acknowledging this fact and working towards our basics than with a good old new year's resolution and some newfound inspiration? I hope that this post contributes a little to that.
Basics are important, people, let's get them in place.