The Beatles lied

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

All you need is love… turns out not to be the case most of the time, at least for me. Most people just suck. They only care about themselves. Guys just pick on you so they can be the man. Girls are flat out fickle, you make one wrong move and they’re basically done with you.

I’m really beginning to think that the most important quality you can have for yourself is to just be tough. Having a sense of humor, being friendly, kind, funny,compassionate all come in second.

Even within yourself, all your anxieties and fears won’t be conquered with love. You have to just be tough.

What do I know though, I’m just a kid. What do you think is the most important quality to have?

2

The most important quality to have is a sense of self. It doesn’t matter if it changes (as it likely will), it just matters that you are doing whatever it is you’re doing because you want to do it, not because of a perceived external pressure. It’s probably one of the most difficult things we can do as humans though.

3

Of course The Beatles lied. They were trying to get laid.

But not with this song. I agree with them. Love is it.

You say you’re young, but it sounds to me like you have your head on straight. Get your heart and your head sorted out, and you’ll be fine. At least you care.

There. Besides love, I’d say caring is most important.

4

The Beatles had all the fame, fortune, money, sex, drugs, adulation and worship that any mortal human being could possibly want. Of course all they (it’s John’s song really) needed was love.

Here in the real world love might make you feel nice, but it ain’t paying the bills or maintaining your physical or mental health. What you really need is secure income, good health, friends, family, a hobby or two, and the ability to unwind occasionally.

That really doesn’t make for a nice chorus though, so love sounds a bit better. You don’t need to be tough; you need to be compassionate and do for others what you would expect from them: hold a door open; let the other guy merge in traffic; be kind to children; thank cashiers and wait staff; call your mother occasionally and stop to smell the flowers.

Love ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Your own personal self-esteem is more important. Are you comfortable with who you are as a person?

5

Back in 1987, Derek Taylor, the Beatles publicist made a wonderful TV documentary (with accompanying book) called ‘It Was Twenty Years Ago Today’ about Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, what influenced the Beatles in making it, and the influence it had on everything else.

At the end of the program, he asked the movers and shakers of the time: ‘Is love all you need?’

Abbie Hoffman said that it’s nice to have, but what you need is justice.

Paul McCartney said, “I don’t know what you need. I’m just some feller, and I haven’t got any answers.”

Allen Ginsberg said, " Awareness is what you need, and then love proceeds from awareness."

Timothy Leary said that love is a beginning. “Love without intelligence, love without precision, love without discrimination, love without an evolutionary sense, love that doesn’t grow and change, that sort of love is the biggest addiction of all, like drugs or television or anything else – it’s a great ally but a terrible master to be enslaved to.”

Ron Thelin says that you need truth not just love: “you have to have a heart. You have to speak from the heart. You have to speak the truth.”

Paul Kantner says: “the idea is noble, and it was the idea that, I think, imbued the whole age. It Is one of the main things you need, and if you don’t have that then the rest of the stuff doesn’t really matter.”

Derek Taylor said that we need more than love. Love is very important but we need sobriety and a lot of positive energy, and we need to know where our next meal is coming from.

George Harrison quoted from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, to reply “Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and saints above; for love is heaven, and heaven is love.”

I think you need a rich mixture to get by in this world, but if I had to pick just one, then love is probably not a bad place to start.

6

A sense of perspective. Remember that today is only one day out of thirty thousand.

7

Hmm… Sorry you feel that way.

Off hand, I’d say that all you need – for now – is a more optimistic outlook. You have to realize that almost all people are just trying to get by, and are doing the best they know how. No one is out to screw you over.

I hope you see that as you get a bit older.

How old are you? If you’re still in high school, then realize that your current world is a really skewed version of reality.

8

By those criteria, the most important quality you can have is to be able to just not give a fuck. It won’t get you anywhere, but – and that’s the beauty of it! – you won’t give a fuck. :stuck_out_tongue:

Does that ever get any less true, though?

9

I’ll back up crawlspace up there a bit. Modified, though. What you need isn’t necessarily a sense of self but the idea of being comfortable in your own skin and know who you are.

Anytime you find yourself saying ‘I should be more’…the implicit fact is that you’re NOT aware of who you are.

Some of this comes with becoming an adult, though not always. It’s a balance of self-confidence and responsibility. If you know who you are, what you want, and can communicate those things like becomes more straightforward.

And, trust me, the girls dig confidence. Loads more than being tough.

10

All the more reason to need love, then: it’s important to have love in a world where most people suck, isn’t it? For yourself, so every jerk out there doesn’t jeopardize your self-esteem, and for other people, because sometimes you have to see the good in people and occasionally forgive them even if they suck.

Toughness is necessary but overrated. My experience is that people who say “I need to be tough so I don’t care” are just lying to themselves.
As far as being friendly, kind and compassionate… didn’t you just say you don’t need love? Because you just stated several loving qualities.

Nah. Most people make their anxieties and fears worse by judging themselves for having them in the first place. If you love yourself enough to deal with them without the punishment, that’s more productive.

I’m inclined to say compassion is the most important quality. But “love” isn’t a quality, it’s an act, and compassion could be called an act of love. Love isn’t the only thing you need, but it’s important to have.

11

Absolutely. The world can continue to be an odd place, but at least your peers have lives.

12

Lately I’ve been thinking the most important thing is to be open.

To have an open heart, even in the face of having been hurt. Having an open mind, even in the face of what you feel you know for sure. Being open to all the possibilities of life, we are all little more than raw material in the end. Staying open to opportunities provided by the universe and open to the lessons life insists on teaching us. Staying open to change, because life is, after all, change.

It seems to me the challenging experiences of life can either grind you down or polish you into a gem. And the difference is what attitude you bring to it all. Our willingness to be open, even when it’s difficult, changes everything. Of course, what you bring to each experience is a product of what you took away from the last challenge.

If you’d asked me last week I’d have probably answered clarity. I am thinking now, though that clarity is related to openness in someway.

13

Well put. I’d even go a tad father by saying that if you deny your negative emotions by pretending to be tough, you just feed those emotions until they grow into psychological monsters. Far better to experience them, transform them into positive emotions, and integrate them. That’s real growth.

I recently ran across an exercise for doing this. Basically you sit in a calm place with your eyes closed and experience the emotion in your body. Don’t judge it, don’t label it, just feel it. What color is it? What shape is it? In what part of your body is it? Stay with it and feel it. You’ll notice that it changes over the course of a few minutes. After a while it will just go away.

I know, it sounds totally woo woo and fruitcakey, but it really works.

14

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On the contrary, studies have shown that strong loving relationships are critical for both physical and mental health.

And while love won’t pay the bills, loving what you do for a living goes a long way toward making your life more pleasant.

Emphasis mine - when we talk about love, we often think only in terms of romantic love. However, loving relationships with friends and family are just as important.

I must admit, I do think that love is one of the most important things to have (not the only thing, mind you).

15

I hope you wrote this in a fit of despair after a breakup or something (for which you have my condolences) and it doesn’t demonstrate your every day mind set. Because I’ll be honest - if you revealed to me in person that you considered all guys to be bullies and all girls fickle and most everyone to just plain suck, my first reaction would be to be a bit insulted and my second to feel sorry for you. In either case, I probably wouldn’t continue to seek out your company.

I don’t know what the most important thing to be is, I suspect there isn’t any one thing but instead several working in balance, but a positive attitude is pretty high up there on the list. You find what you’re looking for, a lot of the time. If you expect most people to suck, you’ll probably be proven right, given that we’re all human and suck some of the time.

And if you use toughness as a shield instead of an internal support, you’ll wind up missing a lot of what is good and necessary in interacting with other people, because connecting emotionally with others requires a certain amount of vulnerability.

This is overly simplistic, but the difference between self-defeating toughness and self-supportive toughness is how you use it. Toughness in the form of bitterness and cynicism that you use to fend off other people to keep from ever being hurt versus toughness that you use to support yourself through the inevitable pain involved in caring about and needing other people while still experiencing it and allowing yourself to be vulnerable yet again afterward, is how I would distinguish the two. I can’t tell which version you espouse from reading your op, but it kind of sounds like the former.

I wrote a lot more but it falls under the realm of advice you didn’t ask for and probably don’t need, so I’ll end it here. And because this is also all commentary on what you wrote that you also didn’t ask for opinions of and is not at all an answer to your actual question, I apologize.

16

I would say that clarity is the result of being open to all the information available to you instead of denying or warping it to suit your assumptions and prejudices and being open to being wrong/having a painful reaction to what you learn. Of course, no one can accomplish that entirely, but you can at least be open to trying.

And I agree with your basic premise. “Open” was one of my first answers when thinking about the op’s question, but I hadn’t thought it out so thoroughly in my head as you have, plus I was hung up on the vague, mild insult in the op maligning my gender/people in general and the whole “tough” thing. So thank you. I feel as though I understand things a little better now for having read your post.

17

Maturity? :slight_smile: If you’re just a kid, I’m guessing the guys and girls you’re complaining about are mostly kids too. Maybe there’s hope for them.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

18

As much as I hate to say it, I agree most people SUCK. You’re right.

One thing that I noticed is when I was little we were taught by school and certainly at home, OTHER PEOPLE COUNT

You don’t see that now.

The answer is always, “if you don’t like it leave.”

That seemed to take hold in the 70s and now it’s progressed.

However the Beatles were right about one thing. You need love.

But the thing is people often confuse “Love” for physical intimacy. You need love in your life. Babies who don’t get any fail to thrive.

But it doesn’t have to be a physical love or even an emotional connection.

It can be a love of God, a love of animals, or even a love of humanity.

I’m 45 years and I’ve never been in love, I can’t get anyone to return my phone calls, even after they get the approval on my MasterCard :slight_smile:

But so what? You need love but it doesn’t have to be the snow white, happily ever after love we hope for.

19

Ok I appreciate all your responses and I think I was just a little pissed off about something. But, the fact that you all did respond actually makes me feel better and discounts some of what I’ve said.

My point though, which might have been a little misleading, is just that being tough is the most essential, base quality you need for anything. It’s not a matter of being negative or positive but just a realistic thing. You can be tough and still be friendly and confident. You can be tough and still have wonderful relationships. You can be tough and still have love. But you can’t have any of those things if you can’t be tough.

Since many of you asked, I only say I’m a kid becaue I don’t consider myself as an adult yet because I don’t pay all my bills. My parents do. I may come off as angry too, but I just have a lot of regrets and I don’t know how else to deal with them. Even worse when I think of the times I’ve screwed up, I blame it mostly on not being tough enough at the time. I find it’s easy to know what’s right and wrong, but it’s just a matter of being tough enough to follow through with your convictions. I’d like to elaborate but I think my point is pretty simple. This is a tough world and you have to be tough to live in it.

20

I think there’s a lot of truth to that.