Creates anxiety. The more choice we have, the bigger the number of alternatives, the higher the anxiety. People hate choice because it disempowers them. When they are confronted with choice, people feel helpless. They feel impotent. They feel stupid and ignorant. They feel disoriented and dislocated.
People detest choice. It doesn't empower.
Love and time are risks, not opportunities, not promises, but risks. So why should we take them? Why not, for example, avoid love? And why avoid time by, for example, committing suicide?
Well, because they do come with their own awards. Love enriches us. It's about us, not about the other person. Love enriches us. Time opens vistas of opportunities for growth and personal development. We are here to evolve. The very process of evolution is rewarding, and it's wonderful.
And so these are two engines. Time and its losses, love and its pains. These are the twin engines of becoming. If you are goal-oriented in the process of self-improvement or self-change, this is an orientation which will guarantee failure.
The only reason to improve yourself is yourself. Nothing external, not money, not work, not other people, not your mates, not your children, not your nation, none of it. Only you. You cannot approach the same situation or recreate the same situation and expect a different outcome because you have gained some knowledge before.
In other words, knowledge and learning will not change the outcome of identical situations.
However, you can work on yourself rather than work on other people.
Self-gaslighting is whenever people defend the status quo, whenever they don't want to exit their comfort zone, whenever they have developed laboriously with a lot of investment, a lot of thought, a lot of dedication, a worldview, an opinion, a judgment. And then they would take information and data and falsify them and transmogrify them and transform them and ignore them and deny them and repress them and combine them wrongly with other pieces of data and information and do anything in their power to preserve the equilibrium, the homeostasis.
This is self-gaslighting.