We all want to live in an ideal world

I recall an interview of the late 2Pac, who was an social activist in his own right. In that interview, where he was talking about police brutality and the crime rate in his neighborhood, he mentioned something very pertinent. He said the police had sophisticated gear and weapons to fight against the prevalent crime, meanwhile the innocent people are left on their own with the same criminals just a block away from them and they are defenseless. They have nothing to protect themselves with.

His overall point was that, they were stuck in a cycle. One in which good people had to become bad in order to survive and yet again they will be demonized meanwhile that was their only means of survival. This is unfortunately a cycle which is difficult to break from.

I remembered this recently, and it got me thinking how we got here, where did all go wrong, and is an ideal world not the same thing for everybody?

What I noticed in this story was how the environment they lived in ended up shaping their reality against their own will. Not everybody in that neighborhood wanted to end up a hardened criminal who is part of a gang. I am sure not everybody wanted to have to own a gun and move everyday looking above their shoulder for their own security, but the environment they found themselves imposed that reality on them against their own will.

What is the ideal world to you?

In an ideal world (I think) we would all like to be safe, to thrive in all the things we do and to not feel negative emotions. To be able to have a happy life with little sad moments, to have a thriving community in which we feel comfortable to socialize, to have a successful career and a happy marriage which last forever. I can only make this inference based on the premise that we are all striving for happiness. So at the very least I think happiness is having good emotions and avoiding bad ones, so now the way it translates to real life is subjective. In a few words, I think this is what an ideal world might look like, but this isn’t the world we live in and maybe this isn’t the ideal world for everybody when you think about it.

For some people maybe the ideal world is one in which everybody else suffers, and they are the ruler, yet again for others it might be a world where they are all alone with nobody else. Humans have an inherent desire for dominance, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that we might not feed into the collective mindset. While some might think that an ideal world is one of collective success, others feel like an ideal world is one where they thrive and others suffer. When you think about it this way you start seeing how it translates to real life and justifies things like egoism, arrogance, malice, pride etc. Obviously this isn’t the only version of an ideal world people might have in their mind, the question you should have now is how do most people translate this in to reality?

How reality changed us

With a version of an ideal world in their mind, this often translates into action in the real world. For example: people who feel superior and believe the world should center around them tend to have arrogant tendencies and seek to shape their reality around them. Others who believe in the collective success tend to be leaders who want to get everyone working together, I think you get the point.

The mistake I made was to think that everybody had the same version of an ideal world in their mind, and to neglect what people’s version of that ideal world looks like. The reason its important to consider other people’s version of an ideal world is because they also contribute to shape our reality in one way or the other. We are a product of our environment much more than we are a product of our imagination. This means we end up being shaped by our environment and the versions of an ideal world from others much more than ours, especially when we don’t pay attention.

Practically speaking this means that when you are around selfish people you could end up selfish even if that's not your version of an ideal world. If you live long enough around evil people, you might end up evil, even when all you wanted was the contrary. This is because they have a stronger influence on reality than you do, and this ends up influencing us whether we like it or not.

Another good example of this are all the billionaires who shape our daily lives, whatever they think reality should be becomes just that and the rest of us just have to live in their version of an ideal world.

Conclusion

An example of people who aren’t influenced by billionaire and their version of reality, at least to a certain extent, are people who seclude themselves into the forest away from modern civilization. This isn’t a criticism on billionaire, but rather a way of showing you how you get to avoid the version of an ideal world you don’t agree with.

You have to make an intentional decision to move away from its influence, whether it's selfish, evil or arrogant people, if you don’t want that to translate into your reality, you must move away from its sphere of influence. Our environment has a great impact on our reality, take control of your environment to control your reality.