Every streak comes to an end. The streak isn’t the point unless you’re trying to get into the Guinness World Records. The fact is that streaks create another layer of showing up today. They enforce our behavior. Once we decide to do something, the streak reinforces it. Results follow process.
“Getting by” is awful. Humans are unique because we want more than to survive. We want to thrive. We want to grow. And we want to live (by experiencing life).
Sometimes we need to put our head down to “get by” the day. But we miss all the lessons that awful stretch can teach us.
You will always find opposition anytime you push an agenda through. Even building a park has its critics. How much will it cost? Who is paying for this? Where? Will this attract vagrants? Will someone get hurt? And on and on.
And we spend a lot of time trying to make the citizens happy when they never will. It doesn’t mean we don’t consider the critic’s perspective. But we don’t need to cater to someone who refuses to be happy, either.
Building something always has a cost. And rarely do we consider the emotional toll.
Comfort comes with practice. When we are afraid, dancing with that fear can make us more comfortable in these vulnerable positions.
Comfort can also make us complacent. In many ways, we get used to where we live, the jobs we have, the wrath of a bad boss, and so on.
Comfort is indeed a double-edged sword in what we choose to endure. Comfort that leads to complacency kills the human spirit.
The temperature is surprisingly cooler…
The noise is much quieter…
When we put our phones down.
Because politics are a human invention. And so is debt.
Nature didn’t create these things, we did.
It seems that nature doesn’t really care about what we think.
At least not on their own.
People do.
Act accordingly.
Being incessantly inundated with images and messages over time can change our wants, desires, and dreams. The shift is evident as a millennial. You didn’t grow up wanting to be a sellout. To become a millionaire. And over time, when we glamorize this, it becomes the next generation’s desires. Not everyone, of course. But enough to see the impact of a world of constant marketing. Feeling sad? Here’s a pill and a Louis Vuitton purse to get you through. After all, you deserve it. What I’m trying to point out here is that when we are free from this kind of disruption and distraction, we can actually think freely with our own thoughts and explore who it is we really are. Between smartphones, constant internet access, WiFi, billboards, and advertisements, there is no quiet. And quiet is how we turn down the noise. The culture—collectively—could use some quiet time to figure out who we are and what it is we want to become.
They are very similar but with key differences.
Rules are shared. They are agreed on how we will play the game (in a relationship).
Boundaries guide our own behavior.
Expectations are how we wish others would treat us.
We often conflate these terms. The biggest problem is that we play by different rules than the person we are in conflict with, and then expect others to play by our rules to protect invisible boundaries that we haven’t announced to the world.
No matter how many times we are knocked down, we have to get up at least once more.
If we are knocked down seven times, we need to get up eight.
Competition is one way to organize. And it is encoded in the culture’s DNA. The bias of money, debt, corporations, government…It’s all survival of the fittest, as they like to say. And we see how far competition has taken us. Some would argue quite far and point to numbers like GDP as evidence. But these are false proxies for measuring a species’s well-being. Since the advent of capitalism, a million plant and animal species have gone extinct.
Perhaps we can ask ourselves then, is this the best way to organize ourselves? What would happen if competition became co-operation? What if we picked a different number to measure progress?
Josh Allred's Blog 