If you’re on Facebook looking at your friends’ food pictures or vacation photos, that will shape your reality. If you’re on porn sites, that’s what your reality is. If you follow people on Twitter who complain all the time, that affects your life in a major way.

There’s a part of today’s consumerist world that drives us to want more, buy more, act on our impulses, hoard, spend to solve our problems, create comfort through shopping, seek thrills through travel, do more, be more. What would happen if we broke from our addiction to wanting and buying more?

You can read entire books on productivity, dozens of blog posts, and implement half a dozen different productivity systems. But at the end of the day, you’d have gotten nothing important done. The truth is, productivity is fairly simple, in theory.

We think we need to improve ourselves and our current situation, because we’re dissatisfied (at least a little bit) with how things are. So we strive for change — exercise more, eat better, read more, be more mindful, do more meaningful work, be more disciplined. And yet, we struggle with change. Why is that?

When we feel difficult emotions in real life, we can stop believing in the story, and start to see the reality of what’s happening: there’s just physical objects around us, moving. There are atoms and molecules, living organisms, people who can talk and create.

We feel the moment isn’t enough unless we talk about it, share it, somehow solidify it. The moment is ephemeral, and we want solidity and permanence. This kind of groundlessness can scare us.

Pretty much all of us experience frustration on a daily (or even hourly) basis. We get frustrated by other people, by ourselves, by technology, by work situations, by small crises that come up all the time. How can we calm ourselves and let go of our frustrations, so we’re not so irritated and angry throughout the day?

Think about how busy our lives have become. Think about how distracted we’ve become. Think about how many things needlessly pull on our attention, our time, our money, our sanity. The point isn’t to opt out of life. It’s to see that life is much more than we dare to believe it can be.

The basic nature of life is that it is everchanging, uncontrollable. When we think we have stability in life, something comes up to remind us that no, we don’t. There is no stability, no matter how much we’d like it. And this kinda freaks us out.

Everyone is trying to look good in the eyes of others. Everyone stresses out about how they look, how they’re perceived, whether people think they’re awesome or good people. It’s why Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and mirrors exist.