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When I was in college, I was a doodlebob. I used to sit in a circle with my roommates and take turns drawing a picture. They’d draw a face and I’d draw the eyes and then the mouth. My roommates and I would draw different faces and we’d draw different features and we’d talk about what we liked and what we didn’t like.
I’m glad you picked that one. But it is my belief that a lot of our most meaningful relationships are more about looking at other people than seeing them ourselves.
That’s a good example of how looking at others, even in a self-centered way, can affect our relationships. I’m not saying that I have a bad habit of looking at people in a narcissistic way. I’m just saying that looking at other people can help us recognize how we feel about them. It can also help us figure out what we want to do with our lives.
You gotta look at the people around you. A lot of relationships are more about people than people. If you see a person that doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, then you tend to look for another person that does. Because our brains are designed to identify the good from the bad, and if you don’t feel good about yourself, you’re probably going to focus on the people that make you feel good about yourself.
The thing is, we don’t always want to feel good about ourselves. If we feel good about ourselves, we are usually going to want our friends to look good. We tend to need that validation to feel good about ourselves.
Now that our brains have developed the ability to filter out the bad ones, we still need people to validate us when we are in need. And that is exactly our point. We often feel good about ourselves when we are experiencing a positive social situation, or we feel good about ourselves when we are having a negative social situation. We need that validation, to feel good about ourselves, we need people to validate us, and we are just not wired to do it well.
We all know we need to be validated in the face of life’s problems, but it doesn’t mean that we will always need to be validated. Even if we don’t feel like we need to be validated, we should still feel good about ourselves, and we should not feel bad about ourselves. This is what the doodlebob lifestyle is all about. It’s not about feeling good about yourself. It’s about feeling good about being you, and not feeling bad about yourself.
The doodlebob lifestyle concept goes beyond being validated. Its about being validated by others. We need to be validated by the people we love, and we need to validate ourselves by the people we trust. So as I grow old, I take care of my parents, and they take care of me. I don’t feel bad about it because it’s their job. I feel bad about it because it’s not my job.
We have a saying up in Vermont, “The doodlebob lifestyle is what makes us happy.” What we need to decide is, “What makes us happy, and what makes us miserable.
I’m going to go ahead and say this now, I have a lot of friends and family that are in a similar situation. They are young, they are busy, they are successful, they have a great job, but they are not happy. The thing is, every time I talk to them, they feel bad about it, and they want to know why.
