It has never been a worst time to be a consumer of news networks, never been a worst time to be a student in the Western education system, it has never been a worst time to be a user of TikTok or Instagram, it has never been a worst time to be a minimum wage employee in the United States, nor even a salaried employee more broadly, and it has never been a worst time to be reliant on the American pension system or Social Security.
Simultaneously, it has never been a better time to be a person of color, gay, bisexual, or transsexual. It has never been a better time to a person who’s tribe is discriminated against or persecuted, it’s never been a better time to suffer from depression or migraines, it has never been a better time to live with a physical disability or a learning disability. It has never been a better time to want a different life for yourself than the one you live because for the first time in our world’s history - you have options.
You have two options, you can choose to find your pity party, aka your support group, the people like you who agree that the cards you were dealt are unfair and should be changed, or you can choose to be better - the lone troop that overcomes.
By now, everybody has heard the quote “In order to change the world, you must first change yourself” first said by Mohandas Gandhi.
Much less remembered is the rest of the quote - “In order to have the right to see what is wrong with the world, you must first earn that right through seeing what is wrong with yourself. It is not through pulling on our better attributes and applying them on this broken world that one becomes a leader or teacher - but by performing the purging within ourselves that we wish to see take place in others.
The thing that bothers me most about Mohandas Gandhi’s quote, is that he never explained how to change yourself, he never explained how to perform this purge of our bad qualities, he never taught us how to identify them when we see them, one of the hardest skills.
I have spent 18 years trying to change myself - first through exercise, then through reading ancient religious texts, learning philosophy, studying computer science, meditation, studying productivity and memorization tactics, yoga, volunteering - you name it. But after eighteen years there has been only one method I have known to be most effective at changing ourselves that far outweighs all others, and I want to share it here.
Write a list of all the things you can think of that you don’t want to do, and pick one to do. And do that everyday.
There is no other way of changing yourself than, every single day, building a routine of doing the things you do not want to do and going through the list.
The truth is, and I learned this from my own research, is that we all know what we need to do to make our life better. All of us. And yet instead of doing it we choose to involve ourselves in causes that have nothing to do with our life because it’s easier. But that doesn’t make our pain go away, nor does it make it easier for our friends and family, who have to interact with us.
We all know what we need to do and we don’t do it because it sucks. It deeply sucks. But once you actively seek the suck, and you start to seek the pain, and you seek pushing yourself not up to injury, but through it - you unlock depths of your brain that you did not know existed. Yes, accept injury as a foregone conclusion instead of living in fear of it. It is when we choose not to break down, but to break through, that we find a new lens through which to view life, and where we start to see the beauty in the mundane.
Life is not what happens to us, it’s what we choose to focus on. If we change ourselves to develop willpower and discipline, and become fighters, and if we focus our attention not on the entire worlds’ tragedies, but on one singular cause, only then do we have half a fighting chance.
You can respond to pain via languish or humor. Your move
Disclaimer: I lied in this post. Mohandas Gandhi didn’t say the second half, it was a quote from Goodreads by “C. Joybell”. Almost nothing I wrote in this post, or honestly in any of my blog posts, is original. It is all research I took from other sources, applied in my own life over the last twenty years that I wished my loved ones knew. I am a fraud in the truest sense of the word. Lazy, hypocritical, mentally and physically out of shape, and ADHD. But if I can help at least one person through my writing, then I will continue to publish my thoughts and research. And sometimes, that one person is just me.