Ask those who know me and many would say I am a positive, joyful human.
I wasn’t (and am not) always this way.
I was the dark kid in school, with my black hoodie and silent demeanor.
Back then, in the age of MySpace, I was the type of kid you poked fun at. I was (and am) a sensitive sort.
I walked around with a dark cloud hanging over my head.
I think it infected many others who were in my vicinity. I don’t fault them for reacting the way that they did.
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When I went to college, I got a job as a Peer Mentor & Peer Tutor. It was at this time that I started to recognize the impact that just your presence could have on other people.
I watched other tutors walk around with their dark clouds and spread their storm to their tutees. I watched it impact their moods, grades, relationships…
It dawned on me then that I should proactively work to change myself so that I was no longer clouding up the room, but rather lighting it up.
It’s Okay
Life is hard. It’s so very hard. Just being alive is amazing.
I identify with many things, which may be a consequence of my chameleon nature, but that’s a story for another time.
At the top of that list is the idea of humanism.
Humanism is an outlook that places all of the importance on humans rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. - Oxford Dictionary.
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while now, you should’ve been able to see fragments of this belief system influence my perspective.
I Believe
Here are some of the things I believe:
It is important to have the highest expectations (but also the lowest levels of entitlement). It is even more important to support those of whom you expect so much. It makes little sense to demand something of someone if you have not created an environment that fosters them in ways that make your desires achievable.
Everyone is a genius, but most live their lives as fish climbing trees. There are few among us who have realized that we are fish, attempting the impossible. Fewer still have then leapt off of the tree and into the river…
It is the imperfection, and our unquenchable thirst for improvement, that makes us perfect. The inherent human trait to endure. The forever burning drive to overcome the burdens and hurdles that are thrust in front of us in order to make life better for ourselves and our kin.
Through problems, come solutions (and more problems that can also be solutions too). We make an improvement, we discover a new flaw, we refine our creation, and a new flaw emerges… This is such a wonderful gift that we have. I am saddened that humans as of late have forgotten the meaning of progress.
Goals become expectations once achieved. In 2019, I didn’t have consistent access to the internet. That didn’t happen until 2020. Now I’ll likely never live my life without it.
Addition resulting in subtraction is highly underrated. Add more friction (hurdles) to the bad things in your life and you will more often default to the better (and easier) things that have fewer hurdles.
The fear of “robots taking our jobs” is a generational one. Automation and modernization have always given humans (the species) more things to do rather than less. It’s the transition periods that are very damaging as we go from one type of work to a completely different work style. Those are the people who need our help.
Modernity has gotten everyone to nitpick about the sizzle, but it’s all about the fucking steak (you can’t eat sizzle, somehow people have forgotten that).
All humans should strive for the default mental state of internal judgment and external forgiveness.
There is a disconnect between the information we know and the information we can act on. For most of humanity’s existence, the things we knew the most about were the things we’d actually have the power to influence. Now we learn about things that we have no power over and it makes us feel like these events have power over us. Or worse still, we grow numb to it all.
When humans feel powerless, they tend to react in a selfish way as their senses get overwhelmed and their survival instincts kick in. Our brains then go through a bunch of processes to simplify the complex world in which we all live so that they can simply determine “are you a friend, or are you a foe?”
Evil men have learned that humans are the easiest to manipulate when they are in survival mode.
One Final Thing
Bonus points if you recognize some of the things I believe. I’ve shared many of them over the past couple of years on this platform and on LinkedIn.