Eradicate the Negativity That Blankets Your Reality
And infuse it with positivity
It pervades.
In everything, you see it.
In moments, you catch it, sitting there, smiling, fully well aware of its grasp.
You crank up the volume, in hopes it will flee.
But it remains unbothered, though you think it’s dispersed; your senses are merely subdued by the noise.
Still there, in some crevice of your being, it lurks, patiently, persistently, waiting for you to be quiet.
You don’t know what it is, and you refuse to do anything about it because it only occupies your attention in moments.
You don’t think it’s a problem.
Because you refuse to do anything significant about it—only repressing its symptoms—you don’t know it grows.
Your treatment, like pain medication, conceals but does not eradicate.
On some days, it’s everywhere you look.
On others, it seems to have released you from its subjection.
And then, you wake up on a Sunday, with nothing to do, and there it sits, right there in your room, waiting, ready to remind you:
you’re empty.
For many years, this demon held me in the palm of its hand, toying with and extracting my essence.
But it did not know that I would not break.
It did not know that I was slowly, steadily concocting a plan to destroy it.
It did not know that by spending so much time with me, it empowered me.
It did not know that I saw it, always, and was watching it, just as it was watching me.
And though I cranked the volume, the noise was never loud enough.
I could not subdue my awareness.
I could only conquer.
The origin of negativity
The world today is far different from the world that once was.
You see, while forward movement is more possible than ever before (A.K.A., opportunity abundance), so many feel incapable.
In other words, though there are more opportunities today than in times past, most people feel unable to capitalize on (or are completely unaware of) them and are therefore rendered overwhelmed and hopeless.
Why?
Ever-present comparison
We have nearly unlimited access to other people’s lives (due to the rise of social media), especially those who have achieved “success.”
Our minds have become comparison-oriented because we’re constantly exposed to people who are much further in their journey than we are in ours.
Because the gap is so expansive, we become overwhelmed, believing we’ll never “make it.”
We overlook our process—which makes us successful—because our minds are so focused on other people’s products.
Motivation-saturation
Because there are more opportunities than ever before, we become overwhelmed by the scope of what we could do.
Instead of picking one or two things we are interested in from a pool of 20 options, we are presented with 1,000.
We think we must choose the perfect route, and end up analyzing to a point of paralysis.
We become addicted to imagining how cool each possibility would be instead of becoming addicted to the process of working towards one.
Over time, we become frustrated with ourselves because we spend so much time trying to figure it out instead of taking action, thereby making no true progress.
And because we make no progress from all our perceived effort (because we feel like we’re doing work when we’re analyzing), we believe we’ll never progress in any domain.
Incongruent education
The world (and therefore, the free market) has evolved exponentially throughout the past four decades.
But education has failed to keep up because it has no incentive to rapidly update its curriculum.
Why?
Because its income (tax dollars) has no correlation to its outcome (effectiveness in teaching).
Our schools are literally operating on a curriculum created more than a century ago.
As a result, students (many of whom think they are valuable because they earn good grades) enter the marketplace VASTLY underskilled.
Not only, then, are they incapable of creating real change, but they end up pursuing dead-end outlets (outlets that don’t yield increasingly greater outcomes with increasingly greater efforts).
Students suffer when they enter the market because they became super skilled in a domain (getting good grades)—mistakenly believing they’re automatically valuable—that does not generate real-world value (I’m speaking generally here).
And because they’ve been taught that failure is bad (via the grading system), they don’t brandish a standard operating procedure for overcoming challenges.
They are not taught that failure only implies they either need more practice or more information.
They are taught, instead, that they must simply work harder, and that failure is ultimate, definitive, and foretelling.
And while the creator economy provides plenty of affordable resources to overcome this skill gap, most young people think these educational tools are scams (for various reasons).
So not only are they incapable of overcoming challenges, but they never invest in the personal education they need to overcome them, consequently never developing the necessary skills to thrive in today’s economy.
Since they don’t know how to create real-world value, they don’t believe they’re capable of manifesting their dreams.
As a result, they become hopeless about the future.
You see, in this world, a negativity, characterized by hopelessness, pervades.
Like a virus infecting a weak host, this hopelessness finds entrance to our being in obscurity (lack of clarity).
When we can’t see—when a path forward is unclear (because either [1] the path seems too long, [2] we have too many paths to choose from, or [3] we don’t think we are capable of navigating the path)—hopelessness sets upon us, and with it, like a gloomy fog, comes negativity, blanketing our every perception.
Everything we look at, everything we feel, becomes stained.
We come to see only through this lens, not knowing we can swap it out for a positive one.
Though good lies right before us, we cannot percieve it.
Crafting an antidote
So what is the antidote to this sickness?
How may we reinstill a hope?
How can we regain clarity and see potential in our future?
We must look to the cause.
We must uproot the sickness at its core.
We lose hope when we lose outlook.
Outlook is our sense of potential for prosperity in the future.
Positive outlook fortifies our mental immune system.
Without something to look forward to, or aim at, our consciousness weakens, and we become vulnerable to infection.
And so, once infected, like most Western medicine practices, we prescribe temporary solutions.
Distractions.
Noise.
We want merely to no longer feel the sickness’s presence.
We don’t want to change, for squirming free of its grasp is too painful.
And so we remain, shriveling as each day passes.
To reinstill this outlook, we must create a future worth working towards.
The first step to creating something is envisioning it.
So, we must craft a vision.
This vision becomes our hopeful outlook.
So long as we don’t lose sight of it, hopelessness will have no place in our hearts.
It will knock, and may even enter, but it will not remain.
The strength of our hope is dictated by the clarity of our outlook.
The more fog that sets upon our path forward, the harder it is to attach our actions (and suffering) to a meaningful future.
If we know that what we want lies on the other side of a painful experience, we will persist through that experience.
But if we lose sight of what we want, either forgetting altogether or believing it’s no longer possible to achieve, it becomes difficult to persist through pain because we can’t attach our efforts and suffering to something meaningful.
If we don’t have a good enough reason to persist through pain, it’s far more reasonable, in our eyes, to simply quit, relinquishing hope altogether, and turning to temporary pleasure (noise) in order to suppress the symptoms of our sickness.
This pleasure drains us.
Our energy becomes spent, not invested.
And in moments of quiet, when what’s within makes its way out into our awareness, we realize:
we are empty.
Think about the word fulfillment.
When we are fulfilled, we are full.
When we are full, our immunity is fortified immunity against this empty hopelessness that we experience after being drained by pleasure.
To become fulfilled, we must invest, rather than spend our energy.
When we are fulfilled, hopelessness has no place.
Not only do we have something to look forward to, but a greatness burns within.
And the longer it burns, the stronger, and less extinguishable it becomes.
So how do we become fulfilled?
How do we invest our energy?
We must find something to invest it into.
We do this by crafting a vision—our antidote.