The hits are something anyone can sing along to because they hear them on the radio. The algorithm pushes them to get everyone to like the same thing. But albums represent where the band is at that moment. There’s nothing wrong with being a fan of the song, but it’s vastly different from being a fan of the band. If it’s been a while since you listened to an album straight through, I recommend giving it a try.
(I’ll speak toward men on this post. But it certainly can apply to anyone.)
As you get older, you will see relationships fail. One of the problems I have observed is that men haven’t decided what kind of man they want to be.
For instance, if you are someone who makes a mistake and has a relationship outside of marriage; it could be a slip up. It could of been a series of bad decisions. It could be one bad moment. But often its because they haven’t decided who it is they want to be. To go further, if you know who you want to be, you will avoid certain types of situations in the first place. This goes beyond relationships, of course. Someone with the need to conquer will look for conflict.
So either it is:
A) You are either undecided.
B) You are decided but can’t admit it to yourself—which is even a worse type of self deception.
Pleasure is a strong pull for any person. And we need to decide what kind of person we will be when we interact with it or when the opportunity arises. When the pull for pleasure conflicts with your relationship, there is an out-of-alignment that will bear a high cost. The two are not mutually exclusive, regardless of how you treat them.
One last note: It is indeed interesting how far we as humans will go to avoid confronting our truths about ourselves. And the people around us suffer until we do. This is the danger of ego working.
This is the hallmark of our world today. We have so much stress that we are constantly trying to eliminate it. But the better path is learning how to deal with it. And here’s the thing about stress we don’t acknowledge enough: if you have a lot of stress, it is a testament of how much you can endure. Not a weakness.
I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she admitted she wished she understood what was happening in politics better. But every time she tries to dive in, it feels overwhelming with what is happening in the world. This person has a master’s degree in finance and is very bright. And if she can’t understand what’s going on, I explained, that’s precisely the point of politics today. The Big Beautiful Bill is close to 1,000 pages. The 2022 Ommibus Spending Bill was 4,000 pages long. No one can read this. This is just one example.
We often think of bugs as bugs. Rarely do we think of them as features. The length, the ambiguity, the complexity…these are features for someone. Not everyone. We don’t need a complex tax code, yet we do. Bills in Washington don’t need to be thousands of pages long, but they are. Budgets are the same story.
I, too, spent many years feeling that the landscape was too complicated ever to understand. Until I realized that the feeling of shame is purposely manufactured to keep the masses disengaged. This isn’t a failure on the individual, but for the system that thrives on keeping the public uninformed.
If you feel deep inside that something is wrong with the world, it’s because there are things wrong. Even if you lack the language or feel you can’t put your arms around it, understand that you have moral clarity.
The moon landing is one of the outstanding achievements in human history. Often, people forget why it is so important, though. And the reason is that when we come together and put our minds to something, we can break boundaries about what is possible. We need reminders of what humans can accomplish. So much of our media is about the awful things that we do to each other. And when something spectacular is done, we are often left unimpressed because, deep down, we’ve seen something similar on the internet for clicks before.
So much of what we do is about perspective. And we tend to put a ton of weight on other people’s perspective of us. For instance, in a job interview, it’ll come off that you have a great perspective of yourself and the world when you can talk about the great work you are doing. That doesn’t guarantee the job, of course. Because in the end, you are talking to strangers. Those who have a unique perspective on how you’ll fit in their lives. That’s vastly different than not being qualified. Chances are, if you’re in the room, it means you are at least competent enough. Really the question is, will they like me?
With a constant stream of media, we have been trained to overreact to everything in the digital sphere. What’s different in the real world is that we get a moment to calm the amygdala before we react. In fact, more discussion and more information were needed pre-social media to decide how to respond. It’s clear to me that social media feeds into loud, out-of-the-ballpark takes way more than the quiet, calculated form. Frankly, it takes time to describe how something makes us feel.
Power has a bit of a negative connotation in our day and age. Power is often associated with bullies, geopolitics, and social media. But power isn’t just the strength to dominate another being. Power is a quiet confidence in your ability to do hard things. Everywhere we walk, everywhere we turn, our culture has a way to drain it.
These power drainages come when we move our attention away from the task at hand. We lose power when we wish we are somewhere else rather than in the state attention. We lose more power when we are avoiding the hard thing that we know that needs to be done.
Inversely, we gain power when we tackle these things rather than avoid them. One thing I think we could use more of in our culture is power for workers, or power for children, or power for parents, and so on.
It’s worth thinking about: will this gain or drain my power? Will this conversation or use of my time or this thought help or hurt it?
I took a sip of a cup of coffee from McDonald’s the other day. And to my surprise, it was hot. Really hot. And I even mentioned to my wife, “This coffee is hot!” Of course, it was on the label. Too often, we skip the instructions, ignore the warning signs, and fall into heuristic traps because of what? We are in a rush. Sometimes we need to believe better what people are trying to tell us. Slow down. And be patient. Not everything is on your timetable.
Johnathan Haidt has written an essential book on the subject, highlighting the difference between kids growing up in the real world versus the digital one. And the differences of how we interact with each other, how we solve conflicts, sit with tension, and so on—it is different from previous generations. It’s an essential book for any generation to read. While Gen Z may have borne the brunt of this, I see it across every age group, stuck on their phones.
Josh Allred's Blog 