i worked hard to be able to be honest with myself even when it doesn't feed my sense of vanity... And it was really hard at first, accepting that if I say the things I say publicly people will think badly of me... I so much want the good will of others even now I guess lol... but I also think having it in any big way wouldn't do me any good either.
a lot of my own problem is I get lost in interacting with my thoughts 'about' things... as opposed to interacting with the actual things.. it took me a long time to distance myself from that even a little bit... flashes of insight would be one of the 'natural' things that kicks one out of it for a moment...
yeah i eventually concluded it is much better to just attend to my own life and fix the things that are obviously wrong with me... kinda like not attending to splinters in other's eyes but rather the mote in my own... I also got more compassion for others this way once I started thinking along the lines that everything I'm attracting is just what I put out in other times/places...
and yeah you've hit the nail on the head I think, this is about choice. The natural order of things right now seems to be that we continually limit our own freedom of choice and that of others until there is nothing interesting we will allow ourselves to choose any more and it is time to die... which I think also is why a lot of 'bad' things can happen to us if we just wanna play karmic games, forces us to make choices we wouldn't ordinarily decide to make...
anyway from my reading the powers that govern us don't approve of that way of life and didn't approve of it even before we chose it and even asked us not to choose it. But once we chose it there was really no direct way to tell us what they think that wouldn't just lead to more of the same only in a different direction. so it just a matter of arranging our reality so that we can't take this to the extreme and maybe there is also a long term plan for how to jog us out of this i dunno...
well at least that is the way I feel, I wonder sometimes if I'm just sick and everyone else is fine and I'm just spinning my own wheels anyway?
but thank you for the compliment!