What If I Told You That You Were Doing Exactly What You Wanted to Be Doing?
You have a lot more choices than you think you do.
At first glance, you may think that’s crazy, but is it?
For example, I heard someone ask, “Where would you be living if you could be live anywhere in the world?” My answer is, “Here, because that’s where I’m living.” If I wanted to live somewhere else, I would MOVE there.
Granted, you might say, “You couldn’t live in Afghanistan! Look at how dangerous it is there! You couldn’t live in Beverly Hills because you couldn’t afford it!” But aren’t those just excuses?
First of all, I probably could live in Afghanistan. Granted, the American embassy is closed there, there is no formal VISA process and I think the State Department travel status on it is something like, “If you go to Afghanistan, there’s an 80% chance you will get kidnapped, they’ll rip off your fingers with pliers and leave you to die at the bottom of a cave,” but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t fly to Karachi, bribe someone, and get a VISA into Afghanistan. Would I be stupid to do that? Oh yeah, but I could. Similarly, if there theoretically was some zip code it seems like you couldn’t afford to live in, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t move into a nearby zip and drive through there every day, or you could get a job as a live-in butler or maid. You might say, “I make decent money for where I live now, and I don’t like cleaning, so I wouldn’t do that,” but YOU COULD. You just choose not to do it.
You might say, “Okay, smart guy, I want to live on the moon! What’s your answer now?” Well, it’s true that you can’t live on the moon, but you can’t change your sex either. Yet there are millions of mentally ill people who pretend to be members of the opposite sex, and many of them go so far as to mutilate themselves surgically to do it. Would I recommend that? Absolutely not, but they do. Similarly, you could try to build a cramped little moon cottage for yourself, put chunks of meteorite and autographed astronaut photos in it, and never come out of it because you want to pretend Earth doesn’t have an atmosphere, just like the moon. Again, would I recommend that? No, but you can do it.
Granted, there are things that can limit your options, primarily being that you can’t go back in time and that you can only control yourself, not other people. In other words, you can’t roll your life back like a movie clip and not get old, not smoke for the last 40 years, or tell your cousin that it would be a mistake to go hang out with that nice Jeffrey Dahmer guy he met at the bar. You also can’t make your girlfriend love you again, you can’t make your husband stop drinking, and you can’t make George Soros give you a billion dollars because you’re such a nice guy. Granted, you can TRY all sorts of things with other people, some advisable, some not so much, but ultimately, they get to make their own choices, not you.
Beyond that, pretty much everything you want to do in life, you can do it or do something fairly similar.
You might not be able to play in the NBA, but you could probably play in a rec league. If you can’t play in a rec league because you’re a fat, old guy over 50, you could be the one to start a fat, old guy over-50 league at the local YMCA.
Granted, the longer you wait, the fewer options you have on this front.
Once, I heard someone say that Ann Coulter had fully stocked places to stay in multiple cities where she worked or liked to visit. I liked that idea so much that I decided to do it. I got an apartment in Raleigh, and for a few years, I would spend a few weeks in Raleigh, come back to Myrtle Beach for a week or two, and then go back to Raleigh. That didn’t last forever, but it did occur to me that I might want to do it again. However, this time I have a bonkers Catahoula Leopard dog who loves having a backyard, doesn’t particularly like long car rides, and is used to going in and out via a doggie door. I’m not so sure she’d do great splitting time between here and Raleigh, so I haven’t even seriously considered it. However, that is a choice. I could get around that by giving her away, paying someone to take care of her when I’m in Raleigh, or by putting her in a “you can like it or lump it” situation and just taking her. Maybe she would do okay? Who knows?
What I do know is that people use seeming limitations like this to explain why they have “no choice” all the time.
“Oh, I can’t because I’m married.” Setting aside the fact that you don’t have to stay married, aren’t there other married people doing what you want to do? “Oh, I can’t because of my kids.” Setting aside the fact that you could put your kids up for adoption, aren’t there other people with kids doing what you want to do? “Oh, I don’t have enough money.” Maybe you don’t have enough in your bank account, but could you get a loan? Could you sell your house? Would you have enough if you worked a 2nd job for a year? What if you sold your car and got a beater instead? “I couldn’t do that because I’d have to go back to school for two years.” But you could quit your job, find a cheap school, and work your way through, couldn’t you? Aren’t there lots of online universities now? Maybe there’s even a shorter or more intense course you could take to get it done faster.
Incidentally, we don’t even know what specific thing we’re talking about here, do we? So, I’m not saying you should DO any of these things. I’m saying YOU DO have a choice.
You can choose where to live, who to associate with, what to spend your money on, and what mental habits you engage in. I would even make the argument that many people disagree with, that you can MOSTLY choose how you feel. That’s not to say that people don’t have habits, tendencies, and SOMETIMES (mental wiring issues) that play a role in how they behave, but I absolutely don’t think that’s the case most of the time.
For example, the vast majority of people who tell you, “I’m depressed because there’s something wrong with my brain,” focus on negative things all day long, immerse themselves in negative messages, and habitually highlight the negative things that happen to them while shrugging off the positive things. It’s not “brain chemistry” making those people depressed; it’s how they think.
The same goes for many of the people with “anxiety.” My dog used to be terrified by a vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t love it now, but it also doesn’t freak her out. Know why? I grabbed my sweet little dog by the collar and held her near the vacuum cleaner until she realized she wasn’t going to die. Show me an anxious person who becomes committed to doing the things that they fear, and the vast majority of them are going to get their anxiety under control in the very near future.
The point of all this is that most people fall into a way of living and tell themselves, “I don’t have any other choice,” when that’s not even remotely true. They actually have an enormous number of choices, but they CHOOSE to limit their options.
Those choices MAY BE rational.
For example, it’s true that I don’t know how to sew, but could I learn even if my day was crammed full of other things? Absolutely. For example, I could get up 30 minutes early every day and work on it until I get competent at sewing. Do I want to do that? No. Because I don’t really need to know how to sew as long as I can pay people to do it for me.
Maybe you have a bad day sometimes, where you don’t have a “choice” in how things go, or you just “choose” not to do certain things for certain reasons. That’s perfectly acceptable. But also understand that your life is mostly the way it is because of the things you choose to think about and do.
This is simultaneously one of the most liberating and terrifying concepts you can ever learn.
Why?
Well, it’s liberating because it means YOU ARE IN CONTROL of your life. If you don’t like how it’s playing out, it means YOU have the ability to do something about it. That’s pretty amazing, right?
However, it’s also terrifying because it means YOU ARE IN CONTROL of your life. If you don’t like how it’s playing out, it means it won’t get fixed unless YOU do something about it. That’s pretty scary, right?
Ultimately, all I can do is give you a message: You have a LOT OF CHOICES. It’s up to you to examine your life, consider what needs to be done, and make them.
This was the key to improving my life. I do carry a mutation that is the underlying cause of my depression, heart issue, and migraine headaches. Before this was found, I was diagnosed with chronic depression. My psychiatrist said I still had control, I just had to learn to live with the depression. We worked on that for some time, one step at a time.
I still get depressive episodes. The difference now is I make a choice to ignore the feelings of depression and focus on what I need to do. I get out of bed and go to work. I focus on the positive things or what I have to get done and I forget about being depressed. I also use humor. What I do not do is dwell on the feelings of depression. Later, I realize that I am feeling better. I prefer that to wallowing in the pit of depression.
It does have a downside. I cannot stand to be around most depressed people. Most that I have encountered act as if they are helpless and use it as an excuse for why their life is so bad and will never get better. When I am around them, I feel like I am being pulled back into the deep pit of depression and I will not go back.
For a few years, I was in a support group for depression. I learned from a few how to better deal with depression. I noticed that those that were improving would eventually leave. Then there were the long time members who really did not want to improve. They wanted others to feel sorry for them and use depression as the excuse for why their lives sucked and will never get better. I did leave when it got to the point I was not being helped but feeling I was started to be pulled back in.
Today, when depression hits, people around me would not suspect how bad I feel. I remind myself of all the positives in my life, focus on things I need to do now.
Now I have the best distraction possible, a young grandson. I retire in 2 months and we are moving to be near our grandson. I am apprehensive about what all that needs to get done in order to move. We are currently buying a home 1000 miles away from where we currently live. Then we will have to do the actual move followed by getting our current house ready to sell. We will have to take on a mortgage payment for a few months until we sell and can use that money to pay off the mortgage. I will need to find a new job because it gives me a purpose to get up every morning and I can earn some money to use for the grandson and then next grandchild when it comes. My son and his wife want another. Besides, my grandfather and my father-in-law both worked until they were 85 and it kept them active and healthy.
It would be easy to not go through the process because we paid off our current house last year and are comfortable where we live, except for the fact that it is in CA.
I've long liked the idea of having multiple residences.
I'd have a house in suburban northeast Ohio and a 60th-floor condo in Chicago overlooking Millennium Park - this fantasy is a few years old, admittedly - and I say fantasy because it's dependent on my having Fuck You Money, which by some accounting glitch of the universe hasn't happened yet.
The nice cars would be registered to the Ohio property and the condo would have a couple of thousand-dollar hoopties because fuck the Chicago Department of Revenue and because Tyvequious and Ja'Mon'Trell would get laughed out of the projects wasting their time messing with them.
Go figure that one out. I'm the most retrograde of conservatives, and yet I genuinely love Chicago. It's the only place in America I CHOSE to live - everywhere else in the ten states I've spent parts of my life in, I was there because I was born there, or we moved there because my dad got a new job or for some next stage in my own abusive relationship with the CONCEPT of employment.
40 acres and a mule, way the hell out in East Fuckington County, holds precisely zero appeal for me.
The way I see it, what's the point of being able to shoot guns off my back porch and keep a hundred project cars behind the barn if I have to drive an hour to get sushi and they roll up the streets at 10 o'clock?
Trees are overrated, unless you're staring out a cabin window at them under a ten-foot-thick layer of snow in central Idaho.
But being able to gaze out floor-to-ceiling windows, at a galaxy of lighted buildings that spans the horizon, from a darkened luxury condo at 2 AM, knowing I don't have to be anywhere the next day and answer to no one but my own sense of initiative and desire to build, write or draw something...that's paradise to me.