I recently watched a documentary about that reaffirmed many changes I made last few years to my mental outlook (I read a LOT of brain books the last few years). Brains are hallucination engines. If the story is the world is shit, everything is fucked, our brains reframes every interaction. It sucks up all the evidence that aligns with this hallucination and discards the rest.
This sifting of information impacts our behavior. Think the world is shit long enough, and your behavior changes to suit.
Why do anything at all, if everything you do is useless against a tide of shit?
The feedback loop short circuits us. We shut down.
I was on a slow slide after 2016, but 2020 I fell off the cliff. Humans are hard wired to pay more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. This is what helps us avoid bad things from happening. It helps keep us alive. The media platforms we ingest have taken advantage of this, and ensured maximum curation of shit. Shit only. Shit all the way down.
There are plenty of actual great things happening in the world all the time (see the only news channel I watch with any regularity anymore, here).
By end of 2020, being constantly online following the wild and uncertain tide that was the pandemic, my mental map of life had become: “what the fuck is the point?” and “none of this matters.”
And that outlook bled into my behavior. As accurate (or not) as it may have been at time, my brain reacted appropriately.
My world shut down.
While I was pulling out by early ’23, after my spouse had a catastrophic cardiac event, I made found myself also making a conscious choice during worst days of my last day job in 2024 to tell a different story.
Sure that place was fucked. We were imploding. The LLM machines were coming for us. It was a matter of time before my job as I knew it ceased to exist and had to become something else. But I still had to operate there. So what small changes could I make? What could I control?
I was tired of hating every day. Tired of dread.
So I told myself a different story.
Instead of, “This place is fucked and I have no control over anything,” I said, “Every day, I’m going to look at one small thing about this job or processes here that drive me crazy, and address that. I’ll stop telling a snarky depressing story of how fucked we are during team meetings. We all know we’re fucked. Talking about how fucked we are changes nothing.”
And, that, there: “talking about how fucked we are changes nothing about how fucked we” that I took into the other parts of my life.
I was tired of pointing out how fucked we are. It FEELS like action, but it’s not.
By end of 2024, I had nothing left to say. I’d been telling people what was coming for years.
It was time to LIVE.
Because watching the geopolitical shift right now was like watching my last day job implode. We knew it was fucked. But we had to survive.
So how do we live in it? How do we focus day by day on what we can control? On small changes we can make?
Turns out actual actions that work toward something are more satisfying than sitting around in the floor in state of despair
When we have the feeling that we can do nothing, that we are under the control of others… that’s good old “learned helplessness.”
And that’s what wrecks people. That’s the dog in the cage getting electric shocks who never moves to the other side of the cage, even when someone opens the door to let them out.
It’s the monkeys who get electric shocks when they try going for the banana, the ones who teach all the new monkeys not to go for those bananas, even when nobody gets shocked anymore. Beat down people enough, and most of them stay down.
Most of them.
Repeating a “we’re fucked” narrative is the fastest way to learned helplessness. I know this intimately, having sat in the cage myself for two years. But while we don’t have control over our stressors, we have control over our *reactions* to the stressors. Our thoughts, emotions… THAT, we can control
It all sounded very woo-woo to me. But the science backs it up: if you think you won’t succeed, you never even try. Your brain is building a hallucination of your world all the time. If you REALLY want to focus on something you can control, the stories you tell about the world and experiences are it.
Because it’s absolutely true: if there’s no point in doing anything at all, why would you do it? It’s humans who make meaning. The events are just events. We make them mean something. What that is is entirely up to us.
Story is uniquely human. Story is our one superpower.
So, what story are we telling ourselves today?
