"Thinking is the root cause of all suffering"
A book just changed my life. Not slowly over time. In one sitting.
I’ve spent months studying behavioral psychology, Stoic philosophy, Buddhist concepts, handwriting frameworks in notebooks trying to understand why people and myself suffer and how to stop.
Yesterday I read “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” by Joseph Nguyen and something cracked.
The distinction that hit me, there’s a difference between a thought and thinking. A thought is neutral. It appears and passes like a cloud. Thinking is what we do to that thought, we grab it, build a story around it, attach meaning, project a future, relive a past. That’s where suffering begins and ends. Not in what happens to us. In what we think about what happens to us.
After reading I went for a walk. No music. No phone. And for the first time I actually SAW my city. A father playing with his daughter. The white and pink of a flower bush I’ve walked past a hundred times. The breeze on my face. Skyscrapers against the sky. All of it was always there. My mind was just too loud to let it in. Joseph calls this the “non-thinking state.” Think about when you were a child before the world got to you. You were naturally joyful, curious, present. We don’t need to become something new. We need to get back to what we already were.
This book didn’t change my life by itself. It was the capstone on months of learning that standard education never taught me. But if you’re out there struggling and you don’t know why start here.
Have an amazing day.