1. The sun takes no breaks. No matter how hard I work, sunburn will always suck.
2. The faster I move about, the slower things seem to grow. Nature has its own schedule.
3. We don’t control the weather. So, why bother stressing it?
Category: Jakob’s Journal
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“The next Great Depression“,
“Another Great Recession“,
“It’s actually a Great Compression“,
The market, at large, is out of our individual control.
What is in our control, however, is whether or not we commit our attitude to making the best of this life.
If we do it right, we won’t deteriorate the things closest in proximity to us because of an internationally cumbersome issue — family, joy, passions, skills, will to work, will to master your craft, friends, laughter, and more.
Ironically, if more people adopted a positive mindset and busted their ass to seize the opportunities before them, the market, at large, would turn out for the better.
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Any thing, over time, will deteriorate. That is, after all, the natural course of things. Soil and foliage, micro-organisms and mycelium, they break down and decay whatever they’re in contact with.
Everything rots.
As humans (for better or for worse, nobody knows) we reject the natural course. We attempt to preserve, and sustain, and build, and grow.
It takes immense effort to sustain, though.
No building lasts forever.
No business runs itself.Full autonomy is an illusion.
Nothing can sustain, over any amount of time, without care and attention from someone, somewhere.Our brains can decay, too.
Books don’t read themselves.
Deciding to improve something isn’t ‘extra credit’, it’s a necessary step if we care about preservation, success, longevity, and sustainability.
Cleaning up the mess is part of the project.
Getting an oil change is part of driving.If we ever find ourselves bored or struggling to keep engaged, just remember: everything around us will rot if we don’t tend to it.
If there’s nothing better to do, pick a thing, any thing, and improve it.
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If you type “words” into Google and search it, the first result is for a Words with Friends game cheat website.
In fact, the top 5 results are for ways to cheat on word games/apps.
I have two thoughts on this:
- If we polled all of our friends that we (used-to) play Words with Friends against, I’m willing to bet that most would say they do not or never did cheat. Google results, ranked based on usage and hits, might tell a different story. Odds are, some of our friends are liars.
- Words hold immense power, and our most common ‘research’ via google is related to cheating and winning phone games using words. So, we’re bad at using them, and even when we cheat, we do it for purposeless game-winning. Wow.
Big data… Google results are fascinating, however, they don’t dictate what each of us, as individuals, will decide to do first thing tomorrow morning.
Some of us will open our phones and go (quite easily) to a word finder website for cheaters in order to win a phone game. Others will open a book and learn several new words and concepts.
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Right now, there’s nothing to ‘miss out on’.
There’s nothing happening.
The FOMO victims appear to have it even worse than they did before, though. What gives?
FOMO — for those who live under a rock, it means: “fear of missing out“, and it’s used in conversation as if it’s an illness. Here’s an example: “I decided not to go to Billy’s big party, and I wound up having FOMO all night. It sucked.”). Where does that insecurity come from? After all, even if we weren’t missing out on ‘that thing’, there’d be a trillion other things that we could’ve been doing, and we obviously can’t do them all.
This “fear of missing out” is how folks like to frame it, but that’s not the issue.
Right now, we are all at home, either alone or with family.
No events. No parties. No gatherings.
Just… us. At home. Tucked into the bed we’ve made for ourselves. — I hope you’ve been washing your sheets!FOMO was never the problem.
The real fear is that what we ARE doing and what we DO have are precisely what we deserve.
Accusing “FOMO” of our anxiety is just avoiding the uglier truth. We’re jealous.
When we don’t like the life we’ve designed for ourselves (usually because we refuse to change it), any amount of perceived joy we witness elsewhere feels drastically more desirable than what we’ve got, here, in this shitty house.
Well, we built this house! Or worse, we just moved in blind; no fixes, no new paint, no remodel—we just moved in because it was ‘a home’, and we never had the courage to make it ‘our home’.
On the contrary, once we start taking steps toward the life we want, we realize that the fear, the FOMO, is just a mirage.
There never really has been anything important happening, elsewhere, has there? Even before the COVID Crisis.
It has always been about digging deeper, planting roots, lifting up our eyes, building a home, designing a life to be proud of. All of that can happen right where we are, right now, no matter what else is going on outside.
Go ahead, Mt. Botl awaits.
Take that first step.
JAKOB'S JOURNAL 