Look in the mirror.
What do you really see? Can you feel a sense of purpose for the tasks you have set up for the day or a sense of dread? Are you looking forward to something that definitely excites you, or lamenting the weight of your daily Sisyphus toils pushing the same rock up from the depths of Tartarus still trying to convince yourself that you’re going to escape the daily grind one of those days?
You don’t really have to stay in your self-made prison. You can change your life. No one is really stuck except in their mind.
Our superpower as human beings is our ability to adapt to any situation. It is also our Achilles’ heel.
We tend to believe and expect that whatever situation we find ourselves in will continue forever; good or bad. When things are going well, we feel comfortable and expect our good fortune to keep us company for perpetuity. When life is miserable for us, we expect to be mired in our misfortune for eternity. We call the sudden change in the opposite direction luck.
Luck does exist. It is the unexpected change of circumstances for reasons beyond our control, understanding, or knowledge.
When a parent, partner, or child passes away, it is such a sudden stroke of misfortune that beckons sadness and grief. Even if we know that everyone dies and we are here on Earth merely for a brief moment of consciousness in the endless passing of time.
When we lose our jobs, businesses, homes, health, or freedom, it is another stroke of the capricious deities of the universe.
We know for certain that things will eventually change for reasons beyond our control and yet, we never expect any such thing to ever happen to us.
We don’t even expect good fortune to be in our paths and we only hope it does. But hope is not a strategy.
Hope is just complacency masked as optimism. We ignore that we do have a sense of agency that is ours to command and that serves us when we have desires to fulfill and needs to placate. When you’re hungry, you do not hope that food will find its way into your open hands. What you do is go out of your way to look for it. You feel the urge to change this incessant instinct to seek food, water, shelter, and propagate with other mates.
What we actually do is adapt to any immediate change in our immediate environment and our needs.
When we feel hungry we adapt and search for food. When we feel cold, we adapt and add layers of warm clothing. When we lose a tool, we figure out how to replace it. When we lose our job we find another one. When we lose a loved one we eventually adapt to life without them in it.
We do whatever we have to do to keep on living, no matter how dire the circumstances are. It is unintentional, it is instinctive and an integral part of our human nature.
Things change, we do not expect them to, but when they do we keep on living. We adapt, and we figure it all out. This is our state of affairs in a nutshell.
Intelligent people amongst us have figured out a long time ago that we may prepare for the change in advance to stay one step ahead of the things we know may well happen.
We prepare for winter by storing food and firewood for heating. We prepare for long trips by stocking up on fuel and supplies, and planning ahead our rest stops, food and fuel stops, and our accommodations at the end of the journey. What we expect to happen in advance, we can pre-emptively stop from affecting us in a negative way. We strategize and formulate a set of solutions to help us in our times of need.
We may very well do the exact same thing for our miserable lives where we find ourselves in a situation with a poor job, a bad environment, or a hopeless existence. We may create a strategy to affect change in our life.
Everywhere I look out in the world all I see are galley prisoners chained to their oars in irons serving a life sentence for a crime they did not commit. They call it jobs.
Yes, jobs are important to our modern way of life where we each do something to help someone else provide for their needs so that they help us provide for ours. This is how society functions and succeeds. We delegate those who are doing something really well, who have trained for it to be able to do it very well, to take responsibility for filling said need all while we are occupied by ours. We trade with each other, all for one, and one for all.
But what about those who can’t fit in the molds, what about those who were shoved into theirs and can’t stand it, what about those of us who see the iron in our hands and feet and the oar we have to pull till our backs break or we die, what about those who are not asleep in the Matrix?
If you don’t like your job, just imagine that it’s disappeared and in the blink of an eye replaced by new technology powered by AI that obliterated your entire industry in the blink of an eye. What will you do then? can you do it now? If you can’t do it right now without some drastic sacrifices for those who depend on you, can you prepare for it today so that when—not if—it happens you are ready? Perhaps you will be ready long before it happens and you can buy your own freedom.
We ought to break free. We ought to plan our escape with daily compounding effort, and we ought to chart a course for freedom.
The only course of action that will give you the power to free yourself is to manufacture your own solution and mold it into a daily habit that you practice daily and let compound over the days, weeks, months, and years until it achieves your goal on autopilot.
What we need is to create systems for every problem that we have to solve in life.
What if we’re trying to achieve good health, and shed away layers of fate and excessive weight? Fat loss goals NEVER work! What you really need is a system of daily habits of eating and exercise to be able to get to where you want eventually and automatically. You simply figure out how not to succumb to food manufacturers’ advertising and false claims about the benefits of their products. Then you need to learn how to revert to basic first principles of nutrition and learn to cook your own damn food from fresh basic ingredients, the way our great grandparents had to do it. And finally, you need to figure out how you may apply your body and exert it endlessly with exercise, motion, and hard work. Most of our modern diseases are a result of too much comfort and too much pleasure.
What if you’re trying to escape the rat race and achieve financial independence so that you do not have to have fake conversations with people you do not like or sometimes even respect just to be able to get your monthly allowance. That allowance that you spend eating garbage, entertaining yourself into oblivion, and giving away for the pharmaceutical industry Shamans to alleviate the symptoms of bad health that ravage your body because of your lifestyle. Not to mention the huge portion you donate to every single marketing campaign and every new trend, gadget, and fashion.
What if you’ve woken up in the Matrix and want to unplug and find the real world? You will also need to create a system of habits that will lead you out of the abyss almost by default. You will have to shun endless addictions and escapism through unlimited Netflix entertainment and pick up books instead. Reading will be more than a thousand folds more helpful for your clarity of thinking and creativity than a hundred Game of Thrones episodes. Then you will need to create a habit about an activity, passion, or hobby, that you enjoy and feed that habit with a system of improvement, practice, and eventually mastery. You need to use every moment away from your day job, away from taking care of your loved ones, and away from fulfilling your basic needs to plan your escape and intentionally get back your freedom.
Your complacency and surrender to how things are is just out of habit as a direct result of the indoctrination we went through by our parents, culture, government, and the spirit of the times.
Your one and true source of power is to use systems, habits, the compounding function, and time. This is how people who trade the stock market and the banking system do it. This is how professional athletes do it And this is how everyone who we consider an overnight success has ever done it.
Examine your life as it is right now looking into that mirror and tell yourself what you need to change and chart a course laden with good self-serving habits to get you there.
I implore you to start by loving yourself. Everything else and anything else should start with loving yourself enough to save it and to make it useful to those whom you love and who love you back.
You owe it to yourself.
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