Lessons from 30 years of living

Switch on the news and you see it firsthand. Global food shortages, millions will starve this year. We are running out of computer chips, soon we won’t have enough to make cars or computers or washing machines. The lakes are drying up, the fish are all gone. The bees are disappearing. Water shortages and droughts affect the world. The financial sector is collapsing, there’s no more money! There’s no energy left either; we have used it all up! Employees can’t find jobs and employers can’t find any staff. It doesn’t matter anyway, there aren’t any houses left to live in. The ozone is disappearing, soon we won’t even have an atmosphere to protect us from the sun’s harmful radiation. Tornados, tsunamis, and volcanos are all happening at an alarming rate whilst forest fires scorch the earth. It’s so hot even the roads are melting!

How anyone gets anything done around here with all this going on is a wonder to me. We live in a time of superfast communication and endless information. By themselves, these things aren’t bad but paired with our hunter-gatherer’s brains we often mislead and confuse ourselves about what is going on in the world around us. The media we watch and the themes that are ever present are built in a specific way to keep us interested and entertained, we are survivalists after all and for some reason, our brains value negative information more than positive information. This is most likely due to the many reasons in the past in which we were able to die, such as eating poisonous berries or accidentally wandering into a bear’s den.

You can imagine, for obvious reasons, that information that allowed us to avoid death and suffering would be of greater importance than information that increased our level of pleasure or wellbeing. This appears to be hardwired into our brains, so much so that it spreads like a disease around the globe. I am not attempting to placate the genuine issues we have in the world, people will starve to death this year, catastrophic weather events will change the lives of many, and there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed. However, the way that we communicate these issues is ideologically fragile.

Instead of opening up conversations about these things and attempting to solve the problems, we go on and on about how bad things are and how worse they will become. We often create problems where there are none, or where there are solutions that no one wants to try. For example, I have heard about a lack of jobs my entire life but I have never for one second seen this to be true. Go to any job board and there will be an endless list of jobs available so if that is not the problem, what is? Maybe there are not enough people to work the jobs? I have heard of that as well, but on my last check there are enough people out there, so maybe it’s actually that all the jobs that are available suck and people are finally fed up with wasting their time and lives working for peas for causes they do not care about.

We have a management problem disguised as a food shortage problem and a community problem disguised as a mental health problem. We have a comfort problem disguised as a health issue and fake problems pretending to be real problems. Maybe if so many people didn’t build their permanent homes on the coast or in areas prone to massive wildfires then maybe we wouldn’t have such a large climate problem. Maybe if we cut down some of those trees and used them as carbon material to build minerals in overused soil, we wouldn’t have such a huge wildfire issue. Maybe if we didn’t waste nearly half of our available food sources, we wouldn’t have people starving to death each year. Maybe if we didn’t expect a life of luxurious comfort, people wouldn’t be so mentally fragile.

I’m not saying these problems do not exist, obviously there are legitimate issues at hand and I am sure they affect millions each day but does knowing about the California wildfires help you in any way if you live in Venice, Italy? It does not. What helps you is knowing about the issues that are present in your community so that you can do something to help out if you choose to do so.

This is not a call to be ignorant and indifferent to the issues around the world, it is instead a call to be rational and logical with what impact you can have on those issues. If you are a millionaire philanthropist and intend on building an NGO to help communities around the world then great, do that, certain places and people can be assisted by the help of people with the ability to do so. But for most of us, what affects the world around us is not going to impact our daily lives other than to instill a sense of dread and worry or maybe at a stretch to increase the costs of gas and groceries. This is why we have to be careful of buying into every negative event from far-flung countries and the assumption that worrying about what is going on 10,000km away is going to help anyone.

We were designed to help people that we can see and feel and touch, that is how we move out of this mentality of scarcity and avoid catastrophic ideologies, by helping the community around us, one day at a time, and attempting to make the world a better place for the people we can have an impact on.

We have to stop relying on the mainstream media to inform us of what is reality and what is not, we have to learn to think for ourselves. The solution is moving to an Abundance mentality and avoiding the catastrophic news cycles that are present in our daily lives. To do this we have to approach problems with solutions and we have to give up the grip of negative information because deep down, there are solutions to these problems and there is positive news out there, it’s just harder to find, more difficult to remind yourself of and naturally of less importance to our hunter-gatherer minds.

That’s okay though, we know this, and in the end, that knowledge can help us to make the right decisions about what to focus on and how to view the world.