Social Aspirin

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is social aspirin? What is it for and what do we avoid by “accepting” it? In this article I will try to answer this question.

Recently I went to a bookstore and in the section "Psychology" on the shelves, dozens, hundreds of books on personal development were crowded and crowded. How easy is it to be successful? How to raise children without wasting extra effort? How to change your life with the help of positive thinking? How to start a family without problems? How easy is it to get married? How to deal with stress in 30 minutes? Each book that I took in my hands and leafed through, and those others who stood and waited for their turn, promised, offered, seduced into easy options for solving ALL human problems. There was not a single problem that could not be solved, the authors of the books gave answers to all questions. And people bought such books, believing that the investment of money would justify their hopes of overcoming difficult, confusing, difficult situations and problems.

What is behind this desire for an "easy" way to solve problems? Shifting responsibility. What is in the language of an adult to be responsible? It's about making small promises to yourself and keeping them. Daily, hourly. Take responsibility for yourself and your actions. Know about your values and principles, build your behavior based on them, and not based on the situation, and not succumbing to the mood of others. Being responsible means relying on your values to achieve your goals, namely your own, and not imposed by anyone. Carry your "weather" within yourself, define it for yourself, and not succumb to the weather outside the window, or the "weather" of other people and situations. It's hard to do.

We, hurrying for false goals, achieving all kinds of success, climbing a career or other ladder in the middle of life, understand with bewilderment and resentment that it turns out to be against the wrong wall. And all our efforts were in vain, and did not bring much happiness. It is the "social aspirin" that helps to correct the frustration. It allows us to shift responsibility for what happened to us on any conditions, people, circumstances. "Social aspirin" allows us to amuse ourselves with the hope that time will pass, and everything will be resolved by itself, there will be easy ways to solve difficulties, that you just have to wait, and somewhere it will stop hurting, somewhere it will fall off, it will become invisible, etc. We take a sweet pill called "social aspirin", which allows us to buy time in front of ourselves, putting off until later what we must do now, take responsibility, willpower, wisdom, and those principles that help us in our hands. We take "social aspirin" and stop realizing that the reason for not doing something is our unwillingness. Sometimes we resist the changes that need to happen in our lives. And we do not ask ourselves the question: “Why should this be resolved by itself, work out, if now it doesn’t work? What is stopping us now from doing something / calling / going / agreeing / buying / indicating / saying?”. In fact, there is no reason to think that everything will succeed, will be done, without your participation. This is your life and only you can take the initiative and responsibility into your own hands and begin to influence the situations that occur in your life.

The so-called "social aspirin" is the seemingly simple "medicine" to make life easier, to give responsibility for what is important to you in life and brings happiness. It allows, among other things, to develop a bad habit of not analyzing the consequences of their actions, which further exacerbates the problem and alienates the person from himself. We swallow tons of information from different sources, which allows us at the right time to find our powerlessness, inaction, laziness and inability to justify our actions. We turn to other people and situations so that if something does not help, does not work, we would find a reason why it does not work and shift the responsibility onto others.

Let's go back to the books I wrote about at the beginning. They usually describe special quick-acting techniques, that is, "social aspirin", or "patch", which are proposed to solve the most pressing problems. Thanks to this "medicine", some problems lose their acuteness, but deeper situations are making themselves felt more and more often. Let me give you an example. A person does not have a personal life. He reads a book on positive thinking, or even goes to a communication training to correct this situation. Fueled by ideas, thoughts about how to "live", he tries to change something in his life and he succeeds for a while. But then everything starts all over again … Why? Because a person, instead of understanding himself, the true reasons for his failures in relationships with people, sticks a "plaster" on a sore spot in order to try to solve the problem at a superficial level. Therefore, this does not bring any results. And if it does, it won't be for long.

No one is left indifferent by examples of the success of strong families, large and well-functioning organizations, or individuals. Other people, looking at all this, say: “How did you manage it?”, “Teach me too!”. We translate: "Give me a recipe, thanks to which I can achieve and achieve everything that you have achieved!", "Give me this magic recipe, thanks to which I can quickly solve my problem." And there will be such people, in whose arsenal there will be just those methods and techniques that under them carry a short-term result. The more people concentrate on the external manifestations of problems, the more they do not notice that the true reasons for solving these problems (and sometimes causing problems) are in themselves.

This pain with a look at the external factors of one's problems and situations in life is of a chronic nature. And the more we "stick" on ourselves "plasters", the more we eat "aspirin pills", the more we switch our attention from symptoms to the problem itself. As a result, we succeed in driving our root causes of problems even deeper.

Touching upon the topic of "social aspirin", I could not ignore the topic of emotions and their influence on the human body. Have you ever wondered why you have a headache? No? In fact, it looks like this: the head itself hurts itself solely with its thoughts. More precisely, the person who wears this head on his shoulders. Or here's an example: you can suffer for a long time from feelings of guilt in front of a person, harass yourself, and you can even punish yourself for your misdeeds. But if you do not take responsibility for your behavior and do not try to fix the situation, this will all be an empty excuse (to yourself) of why you are doing this, and it will not bring any results. It is in your right not only to choose the reaction to events, but also to manage these events. Do not use ineffective "medicines" in your life (they may turn out to be fake and of low quality), be responsible for your emotions, actions, situations in your life, be effective, rely on your principles and you are guaranteed happiness!