DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY

Eight months ago, soon after I first discovered Steemit because @corbettreport recommended it, I did a post about worry

Recently I was looking for that post to send the link to someone and ended up re-reading it. Wow I thought, if I say so myself, that was a darn good post. In fact it’s one of the best posts I’ve ever done on Steemit. But it only earned me a whopping six votes and zero cents.

Yesterday I was reading a comment from a new Steemit user who was not very happy that the post that he spent two hours writing only made $1.40.

Last week when I made over $10,000 from gains in crypto currencies that I learned about investing in entirely from being on Steemit, I was very happy!

In the nine months I’ve been on Steemit, as well as the payouts from my posts, I’ve also learned a lot of very cool stuff, met some awesome people, and had a good time.

This photo is from Lyall Bay, Wellington, New Zealand, where we live, and where I often sit and chill out looking at the sea. Apart from adding this new introduction, the rest of this post is a copy of my original post from last September

Don’t worry, be happy - whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry or not.

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DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY

“Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry or not” - is an excellent quote from Ana Monnar

(A photo of the very zen Lake Taupo NZ I took last year)

The wisdom inherent in that saying is vast. People are endlessly addicted to worrying – from my mother to most of the mainstream media. Self help gurus like Louise Hay are constantly saying that what you think about and focus on become your reality. And Carl Jung once said “What you resist persists”. There are many variations of the basic premise that what you focus on, you get more of.

On Steemit, the whole process is accelerated, so it’s like watching life at hyper speed. I’m watching people posting about corruption, censorship, oppression, incompetence, dire future predictions, and daunting realisations. And I’ve long been drawn to that sort of stuff myself. But it’s generally all beyond my control.

Switching to the other side of the fence, on Steemit I’m also reading posts full of wisdom, hope, positive predictions, and ground breaking new ideas. I don’t think Louise Hay is on Steemit yet, but her spirit is. And one of her key messages is that "the only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed" – or as Bobby McFerrin once sang, “don’t worry, be happy”

I’m not writing this from a background of being a happy go lucky, glass half full, positive sort of guy. I’m writing it from a history of being a “conspiracy theorist” since well before 911, who has been calling “bullshit” since I first learnt the words “bull” and “shit” and grasped that it was possible to connect words together without hyphens.

Now I could go on about bullshit until the cows come home, but it won’t do either of us any good. So instead, I’ll focus on something I’d rather be dwelling on than bullshit – Steemit. I’m genuinely impressed with this platform. In 20 years of using the internet and posting stuff online (my first website, from 1998, is still online) I’ve never seen anything else that has so strongly held my interest and given me so much hope for the future. Steemit strikes me as part of a whole new future (a brave new world) and it looks like a good future too.

I’m putting that point forward because unlike in the following two points, I’m not making any effort to modify my default behaviour in saying that. I really do have a very positive view of Steemit, and it was no effort at all to say so.

Now for some subjects, to stay positive, I’ve decided I’m just going to have to jump the fence on. Firstly, America. I’m not an American, and my webpage “America” which is essentially a pretty scathing collection of facts about America, is my second most popular webpage (of more than 1000).

Yet for all its shortcomings, America is somewhere we all seem to tend to focus on quite a lot. It’s sometimes appalling and sometime really quite disgusting, but on occasion it’s also very inspiring. So right now I can choose to focus on the America of Donald Trump (maybe one small step better than the narrowly averted America of killery klinton) or the America of Steemit. Yes, that’s a pretty harsh black and white contrast, but really if we get more of what we focus on. I’d prefer to keep my eyes on the potential of Steemit.

Another big one for me is the whole “it’s the end of the world and everything is buggered” mindset. Really, it’s all a giant collection of monsters under the bed, designed to keep people in a state of fear and worry. But there is a good side to this.

As I’ve written on the odd webpage or two, there is no “global warming” or “climate change”, oil is abiotic, it’s not a fossil fuel, so is in no danger of ever running out, there are no “nuclear bombs” (this one seems to push a few buttons, so I did a post about it, and really - there is no solid evidence they exist) and mankind as a whole currently enjoys the highest overall standard of living (lifespan, education, income and all sorts of cool stuff) of any time in human history.

Maybe (just maybe at this point, because I don’t take to this idea like a duck to water just yet) the idea that we are on the brink of giant financial collapse is not fixed in stone, it’s just one of the options. Either way, worrying about it is not going to prevent any economic collapse, and nor is it going to do any of us any good.

I’m one of Jeff Berwick’s @dollarvigilante many followers and I certainly take into account what he’s saying. (Especially about crypto currencies) But let’s face it, I’m not going to flee to South America (I already live in New Zealand) and if whatever I choose to focus on makes that possible future more likely, I’d rather choose to focus on what I want rather that what @dollarvigilante fears.

So here is my thought for the day, and it’s very new one for me – what if the “coming financial meltdown" is no more real than “global warming”?

This post inspired by @dollarvigillante, my mother and @kiwideb who never worries about any of this shit, but just gets on with what she can make a difference in

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25 great quotes about worry

• “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
– Leo F. Buscaglia
• “Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.”
– Swedish Proverb
• “If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.”
– E. Joseph Cossman
• ”People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
– George Bernard Shaw
• “Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.”
– Dale Carnegie
• “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
– Elbert Hubbard
• “If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”
– George F. Burns
• “When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”
– Winston Churchill
• “Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
– Arthur Somers Roche
• “If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.”
– Dean Smith
• “When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.”
– Joseph Joubert
• “That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.”
– Chinese Proverb
• “Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.”
– Cullen Hightower
• “Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere”
– Erma Bombeck
• “There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem.”
– Harold Stephen
• “People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching a cold.”
– John Jay Chapman
• “Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.”
– Nelson DeMille
• “The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”
– Robert Frost
• “Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
• “We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”
– John Newton
• “If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.”
– Dale Carnegie
• “I never worry about action, but only about inaction.”
– Winston Churchill
• “Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff.”
– Robert Eliot
• “A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.”
– John Lubbock
• “Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.”
– Mary Hemingway

These quotes are from http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2014/07/16/worry-quotes/

And here are another 519 more worry quotes - http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/worry

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