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The Real Cause of Imposter Syndrome

The Real Cause of Imposter Syndrome

Many talented people have dealt with imposter syndrome. It’s the uneasy feeling that you’re not nearly as good as other people think, that you don’t deserve your success, that you’re a fraud who will be “found out” at any moment and your life will come crashing down around you. Imposter syndrome takes “fake it ‘til you make it” and turns it into “I’m still faking it and nobody seems to notice yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

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Find Your Surf

Find Your Surf

I’ve always been drawn to the romance of surfing. Or at least my own romanticized version of it.

I love how surfers are so dedicated to finding that perfect wave. I love how surfing is the first thing they think about when they wake up as the sun rises. I love how they use surfing as a sort of Zen meditation, a way to disconnect from the troubles of the world, become one with nature, achieve a kind of inner peace. I love how that inner peace and one-ness gives them patience as they wait for the best waves. I love the idea of living in eternal summer, never really growing up or needing to “go back to school” and fit into the restraints of society.

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How To Discover Your Personal Philosophy in Three Steps
How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown

How To Discover Your Personal Philosophy in Three Steps

It’s become a bit of a running joke in a group of my friends: hang out with me long enough, especially if you add a few beers into the mix, and I quickly become philosophical. I can’t help it, really. I’ve always been bored to tears by small talk and am often guilty of jumping straight into the deep end of a conversation without letting it properly warm up. While I realize not everyone is like that, I’m occasionally surprised at how many people seem to live their life without any philosophical context. By that I mean a lot of folks seem to be going about their daily motions without thinking too deeply or asking questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing. Will this decision advance me toward my personal goals? Does that action truly align with my values? Will that next tequila shot make me puke in my Uber? (That answer is usually "yes.")

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You’re Doing It Wrong: Happiness
Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown

You’re Doing It Wrong: Happiness

Ah, the pursuit if happiness, an American institution so beloved it’s scribbled on a little piece of our country’s history we call the Declaration of Independence. Surely a man from Philadelphia, the very town in which that historic document was signed, would never dare to criticize such a hallowed phrase.

Of course I would, because this is the Internet and I have the power to tell an adoring public my self-important opinions. I’m going to wield that power like crazy right now, because this one’s a doozy: happiness is a lie, and contentment is overrated.

 

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How To Never Be Bored and Always Have Fun
How To, Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown

How To Never Be Bored and Always Have Fun

Boredom is a part of life, you might say. You can’t have fun all the time. Sometimes things are slow and there’s nothing you can do about it. Being bored is an unfortunate but inevitable reality.

Except that isn’t exactly true. Boredom left unchecked often means we’re just not trying hard enough. In fact, I’d argue that boredom is not only good, it’s necessary.

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How to Calculate the Exact Worth of Your Time: A Handy Guide
How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown

How to Calculate the Exact Worth of Your Time: A Handy Guide

There’s an old adage that time is money, but this is America in the 21st century, so vague-ass statements like that don’t fly anymore. Everything needs to be super-specific now. You can’t just find out how many people are visiting your website, you need to know how long they spent there, what pictures they looked at and what their dog’s name is. No longer can we settle for simply equating time with money, we need to figure out exactly how much money every second of our time is worth so we can bill accordingly. The fact that I’m adding a superfluous sentence to this paragraph has probably slightly enraged someone reading it right now because it just took up a few seconds of their billable time.

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You're Doing It Wrong: Manliness
How To, Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown

You're Doing It Wrong: Manliness

I remember it like it was yesterday: The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” came on TV, I saw those ladies rocking out and said, matter-of-factly and with all the conviction a 7-year-old can have, “Girls can’t play guitar.” My mom and sister set me straight very quickly, but it’s indicative of something in men that starts in us extremely young and then gets so ingrained that it winds up feeling like an objective truth by the time we’re adults.

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Live Music is my Drug of Choice (The Eternal Pursuit of the Sweet Spot)
How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown

Live Music is my Drug of Choice (The Eternal Pursuit of the Sweet Spot)

Some things are meant to exist in a single moment, then never again. It's easy to forget that in the world of instant gratification, social oversharing and permanent documentation we live in. I'm grateful for the ability to capture memories and chronicle the stories of our lives, and I use it to my advantage daily. But that makes us readily able to forget what doesn't need to be broadcast to a bevy of followers and what should be actually, genuinely over when it's done.

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Art Defined for the Non-Pretentious, Aggressively Realistic, Grounded Human
Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown

Art Defined for the Non-Pretentious, Aggressively Realistic, Grounded Human

I talk about art a lot in this blog, but it wasn't until fairly recently that I stopped having a genuine aversion to using the word to describe anything other than paintings hung in museums. Every time I heard someone talk about art or being an artist, they just sounded pretentious to me. Stop acting high and mighty, like you're changing the world because being an artist is such an important and interesting thing, I would say to myself regularly in between writing rock songs and blog posts that obviously weren't "high art." The worst was when someone claimed they had created art when it just looked to me like they were being intentionally eccentric or opaque. I just didn't get it, and I distanced myself from the term accordingly.

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A Risky Life
Offbeat Philosophy, The Unknown Artist Evan Michael Brown Offbeat Philosophy, The Unknown Artist Evan Michael Brown

A Risky Life

I’ve had many conversations with creative friends regarding the life we have chosen to live, a life that seems unnatural compared to what is widely accepted as “normal” and which provides no shortage of discomfort, uncertainty and risk. The fact is that many people who have the artistic itch willingly and knowingly enter into a life path that causes a great deal of stress. Stress from not knowing when your next paycheck will be. Stress from sickness and injury when you have poor insurance coverage, or none at all. Stress from not feeling capable of leading the life modern society has bred most of us to believe we are supposed to live, or from not even wanting to live that life in the first place and possibly feeling slightly alienated or even ostracized from a social structure that finds that to be odd.

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You’re Doing It Wrong: Do What You Love

You’re Doing It Wrong: Do What You Love

We’ve all seen our fair share of reality singing competitions over the past ten years or so, for better or for worse. There are many different personality types on these shows, but there’s one in particular that started bothering me: the person who truly believes that the world owes it to them to make them famous, because their voice is a golden gift that everyone on Earth deserves to hear since it will change life as we know it for the better. The audition is life-or-death, because music is what they love most in the world and they couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

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Success is Bullshit
Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown Offbeat Philosophy, You're Doing It Wrong Evan Michael Brown

Success is Bullshit

That’s right, I said it. Success, as most of us define it, is total BS. Think about it: it’s a completely relative, absolutely arbitrary measure we create in our own minds to judge ourselves against. And when you set that bar high, you end up spending a good part of your life, or even your entire life, knocking your self-worth down a peg when you’re not reaching your own subjective and lofty standards. It actually doesn’t make any sense and is directly related to the innate problems of perfectionism that seem productive but are actually self-destructive. And that’s why it’s bullshit.

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Seeing Through the Eyes of a Photographer
How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown How To, Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown

Seeing Through the Eyes of a Photographer

I have always been an admirer of great photographs. Photography is one of those things that you don’t really think about until you try it and notice your shots aren’t nearly as interesting as the ones you see in magazines. For most of my life, I wasn’t particularly good at photography. To me, a great picture was a mystery, something with an intangible element that couldn’t be learned. One of the reasons I believed that was because I knew a few people who seemed like effortlessly great photographers. I could take a picture of the exact same subject matter, yet somehow their photo was vibrant and captivating while mine seemed flat and lifeless.

 

The Intangible Talent

 

There is some truth to the mystery, I think. Like any artist, some people do have an innate talent that seems to make them naturally fluent in their medium. But I was wrong to think they were “good” and I was “bad.” I simply never bothered to try learning some of the basic techniques that can make an average picture significantly better. Pretty much all of the arts have two fundamental levels: the first is learning the general skills and tips that anyone can memorize and practice. In photography it would be things like how to frame shots effectively, learning about aperture and shutter speed, etc. In music it would be basic theory on chords, scales, intervals, etc. And then there’s the second level, which is where the intangibles kick in: taking competency to artistry, transcending the rules by discovering your own.

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Comfort in the Skies
Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown Offbeat Philosophy Evan Michael Brown

Comfort in the Skies

For many years now, I have had a minor obsession with all things outer space: astrophysics, the night sky, stars, planets, nebulas, constellations, solar systems, galaxies, you name it. I am captivated by the science of astronomy and pictures of celestial bodies. They are, without a doubt, the most epic images ever captured by man. But while many of my friends probably already know of my extraterrestrial interests, they might not know exactly why I am so drawn to it… Why I savor every chance to gaze upon its grandeur and find no term too dramatic to describe it.

Well, here is why: besides being strikingly beautiful, it gives me comfort by reminding me that we are but an insignificant speck in a vast, unfathomable universe. To say that feeling inconsequential is comforting might seem a bit counterintuitive, but that sort of contradiction is exactly how life feels to me.

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