New agey bullshit 'live in the now' annoyances

Come on in and grab some sammiches.  The lovely love who loves me has made some wonderful french bread, fixin's are in the fridge.  Make yourself at home in the den.

So I'm all for trying to make your life better.  And I'm a huge fan of short snippets of info that make you smile.  I love those little pics that have the cool sayings on them that populate the intarwebs and effbook and such.  I do indeed like them.  Except.  Except those 'ignore the past, live for right now' ones.  Those ones really make me annoyed.

Because y'know what, you have to carry the past with you all the time, not as baggage, but instead like a weightless library, a reference point to everything going forward.  Not only that, but without considering how your actions will reverberate into the future then you're being just a wee bit irresponsible.  Well actually a whole lot irresponsible.

The problem here isn't learning how to let go of the past, instead how to learn.  Y'know I could throw a metric fucktonne of platitudes and cliches at you about this concept but instead I'm going to break it down into a simple formula.

Doing + Failing = Learning.  Learning + Repeated Attempt = Growth.  Well as long as the repeated attempt is not identical to the first attempt.  Then you didn't learn.  See, there is one tiny part of that equation I didn't put in there, and that is the fact that you have to, you know, remember past events, and how shit happened like it happened so you can learn from it.

And yes I know, the idea isn't to forget what you learned from the experience, but to let go of the negative emotions, but again, I have an issue with this.  First off, why do we deem some emotions negative?  They're all useful, they all help us contextualize our world, remember, and give structure to our own perceptions and reality.  Maybe if we stopped using labels like negative or positive emotions folks might not obsess over this shit, and that is the real problem.  When behavior that could help growth is stifled due to not wanting to experience these negative emotions.

Well folks, we evolved these emotions for a reason.  They are a part of our social matrix and are just as valid as any other means we have to interact with the world.  We need to unbunch our collective panties and stop thinking that 'feeling bad' is a bad thing.  It's just a thing.  A thing we developed to help our species survive.  It's not the thumb, or the tools, or the intelligence that makes human beings different from other animals, it's the complexity of our social interactions that does.  And even then it doesn't make us 'better' than the other critters, it just makes us different.