An inner dialogue in the morning:
I: “I have no reason to get up. Everything I do is meaningless. None of it makes a difference.”
G: “Nothing is failure. Not trying is failure. It’s attempts.”
I: “OK. I have tried, again and again - I still lose. I’m operating at a loss. For how long can one operate at a loss? Besides, since I’m not living for myself, the loss actually incurs on God and the future generations. In that sense, I’m a parasite.”
G: “There’s always something useful or positive you can extract from any situation. You can always gain knowledge, which is priceless.”
I: “Sure, but if I’m unable to utilize that knowledge for a good cause, then there’s no value even in that. The mind, the knowledge, is merely a precursor to action.”
G: “That’s right. But you won’t know how to utilize that knowledge until you have it. And even then, it’s not going to be easy. That’s why you need faith.”
I: “But how will I know when to stop doing the things that I do now, which seemingly no one cares about, which are generating a material loss, and try something else?”
G: “When there’s not much left to burn and learn, when the fire of curiosity has subsided, and when you have exhausted all of the possibilities.”
I: “If and when that happens, how can I identify the new path? I’ve been thinking about doing something else a lot, but I just don’t know what it is.”
G: “You will be called, you will be drawn to it. Until that happens, it’s always a good idea to train humility.” ^*

Every event, every situation, every experience is an opportunity to learn. It's all lessons. Wins and losses. Wins are actually less potent lessons because they don't necessarily teach you anything new. They signal that what you're already doing is good enough. Just keep doing it and you're likely to win again. Losses can teach us much more, if we're able to understand the lessons. Because often, it's not clear why we lost. There's a multiplicity of reasons and combinations of them as to why you could be failing.

In any case, you have a decision to make: you can let your failures be failures, and quit - or you can let your failures be lessons, and try again. Everything you experience, you experience only for the chance to understand the true nature of reality, of yourself. If you don’t take the chance you will experience these things again, perhaps in a slightly different form. This is also known as Karma and Samskaras. The concept of Heaven and Hell is also essentially the same thing.

Problems are your biggest strength. They are wealth in the form of the potential value you can create by solving them. Even if you don’t solve them all, you still get experience, which is knowledge, which is invaluable. The bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity. Not winning, but becoming a student of life who can best extract the lessons from both winning and losing, should be your goal.

The inner dialogue and the subsequent paragraph were written: 20 January 2026, Suure-Jaani, Estonia. The rest of the text is an amalgam of aphorisms from my journals written anywhere between 2022 and 2026 in various parts of the world
Photo: 27 June 2024, Viljandi, Estonia

^* The “G” character started off as David Goggins. Pretty quickly it turned into God. If that word triggers you, feel free to replace that with the Greater (Higher) Self or Grandmaster of the Universe, or whatever.