Optimism at the End of the World 2: You Fucking Matter

With every action, every word, every thought, a change in the direction of the entire universe.....

This is my second post in this series, an attempt to bring the attention away from all the negative crap that's happening in the world and back onto you, the individual, and what you can do to make the best experience possible. There are so many topics I want to explore here but let's get this essential one out of the way first.

You Matter. You. Fucking. Matter. Your existence affects people. It affects the environment. It rings in or out of harmony with its surroundings and reverberates far beyond what you could ever imagine. There is no escaping it, only denying it, and by denying it you are forfeiting the gift of life itself, your role as an active participant, a conscious creator.

Why you feel stuck

Structure

The world is big. It would take a long time to walk around it. There are a lot of people, way more than you could ever get to know. It seems like it would be a complicated task to manage such a vast space and massive population. So we put our faith in power structures to make sure everything runs smoothly. There is a lot to be said about power structures and how their very existence, as well as our positions within them shape us as individuals but we can go into that another time. Most of us are born into some kind of "regular" family. Our parents spend their time and energy on maintaining relative comfort, or rather, avoiding discomfort. It seems pretty challenging at times. If just maintaining the stability of a single family takes so much effort, how are we to even begin understanding the complexities of the world at large?

Education

For the better part of two decades, we go through the education system. We can save debates about education for another time, let's just look at how it relates to a feeling of being stuck. For almost twenty years you are expected to listen to rules set by parents teachers and society with little room for personal exploration or experimentation. The world is essentially off limits to you and you are only allowed to experience it through books or with the permission of your elders. Talk about being dis-empowered. This feeling of dis-empowerment stays with us and is only reinforced by our job prospects. Most of our employment choices closely resemble school, a rigid structure with little personal freedom, just doing what you are "supposed to do". It hardly feels like you can change a damn thing.

Bad things Happen

All the time, right? All those “bad” things that happen all over the world, and sometimes in our own life do a number on our psyche. It's almost unavoidable that we experience some unpleasantness, sometimes to a very extreme degree and we perceive these experiences as as negative and so they easily lead to equally negative thoughts or even a victim complex. From a victim complex it's very easy to forget that our actions influence the world around us.

No matter how it feels right now, you still matter...

Look inward: Life is exactly what you make it

If you happen to have fallen into a victim complex, it's easy to feel depression, confusion, laziness, hopelessness or a loss of direction. Thoughts and emotions that you perceive as negative will lead to experiences which you perceive as negative. So the trick is to get rid of the thoughts and emotions you don't want. That might sound absolutely impossible to some people but it's more than possible, with practice it's easy. Focus on your focus! If it's too hard to stop being sad, that's ok, be sad. But bring your focus away from the thing that makes you feel the way you don't want to feel. That doesn't mean you are avoiding your emotions, it means you are turning away from them long enough to realize that they aren't you, they are is just something you are focusing on.

At times, you cannot control what happens to you, but you can always control how you react to what happens to you. Remember that. When something unpleasant happens, find a way to turn it into something positive. At the very least, everything has the potential to be a learning experience.

I find it helpful to create a counter-habit against any habit I want to get rid of, including negative thinking. So for example, I read or listen to something that inspires me 10-20 minutes once or twice a day just to keep positivity close to my mind and then train myself to think back to that feeling of inspiration whenever I start to feel negative. I close my eyes and forget about everything around me, just for a second. In that moment, I feel connected to everything around me and can distance myself from the thoughts I want to get rid of. Some people take deep breaths and count to 10, whatever works for you, as long as it stops the downward spiral of negative thoughts, that is all you need.

Look outward : Connect and Create

Once you start to get your shit together, you find it much easier to deal with problems around you. You start to see that every action or thought will have a reaction. You start thinking about which thoughts and actions will lead to the best results and make more intelligent choices. And if you look far enough you start to really see all the possibilities. You can move worlds!

When you run into a problem, you see it as a learning experience so you find yourself in those situations less and less frequently. You take every opportunity to make a positive change in your own life and in the lives of others. If you don't know yet, you set our to search for what it is you really love to do and once you do, you do everything in your power to live it.

All the possibilities

A thought in your head could change the course of your entire day. That day could change the course of your entire life. Your life could change the course of someone else's life. The butterfly effect is a bit of a cliche, but try to apply it to dig into your own experiences and you'll see that it holds true. Don't overthink. Don't get lost in regrets. Focus on now. Focus on your focus. Are you giving energy to your worries or are you giving energy to your passion?

Even if you can't perceive that you could ever possibly change the world, maybe you will have kids that do. Maybe you will say just the right thing at just the right moment to change someones life, maybe even by accident. Maybe you will inspire someone else in the steemit community to say something that inspires someone else in the steemit community to do or create something that really does change the course of human history.

Through a random act of kindness, you could restore someones faith in humanity. Through a simple book or song recommendation you could spark something in someone. By saying just the right thing at just the right moment, you could potentially create a strong bond of trust and friendship. Some experiences will lead you to became a new, better version of yourself that will make you feel like a completely different person. I've experienced all of these and I know many others who have as well.

One last thing. The more you focus on a particular outcome, the more likely you are to feel disappointed. Allow the universe to reply in the way that it does and take anything unfavorable as an invitation to dig deeper inside yourself for truth.

You are by no means small, you are connected to everything.

Share your experiences, ask questions, and come find me in the steemit chat if you need help with anything. I love resteems and upvotes and they make it easier for me to spend more time on writng, music and building community, so if you like what you see, you know what to do.

I am entering this post into the Minnow Support Project by @aggroed . Please check it out and upvote my comment over there to help me grow up into a whale as quickly as possible :-D

If you like this post check out my previous entry in the "Optimism at the End of the World" series. It's about empathy.

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